RE: The Phenomenal Fracas (GBS2G6) [Round Five: The Ambitus Phenomenon]
04-26-2018, 01:44 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-26-2018, 02:58 AM by SleepingOrange.)
Blinded, bleeding, and furious, he growled wordlessly at his attackers. His sword cane fell unheeded as he gripped invisible strands with both hands, desperately holding himself and his domain together. First had begun picking himself up, but faltered as he both felt the backlash from his link to his Grandmaster and heard the man’s voice in his mind, suffusing and distorting his own thoughts.
“If you’d wanted to die, you could have done it courteously and by yourself anytime in the last billion years,” there was a splintering groan as the mirror’s frame and the wall surrounding it began crumbling into nonexistence, “instead of making me do it for you.”
Victoria was tempted to rejoinder, perhaps sneering that only another eighth of her would be dying today, but rage and pragmatism both would have stilled her tongue even if the overwhelming pain she was inflicting on herself with every attack on him had not. Instead, she gathered her wits and her strength, every ponderous step forward an effort of will. First, too, was attempting to recover, but the Prestidigitator’s blow had left him winded in a way he hadn’t felt in the countless eons since he’d any use for his lungs. He gave up on standing and begin willing the cane towards himself as Victoria advanced.
Many things had gone and many more had changed once the eight had transcended their mortality and humanity, but fear had never really been one of them. It had been fear more than a lust for power or a thirst for knowledge that had driven the group to perform their ritual and it had been fear whispering in the back of their minds and plucking at their impotent hands as they had watched their last centuries drain away. Fear had driven them to distract themselves, to immerse themselves so in the battles that their pandimensional coterie hosted, and it was now fear that gripped all three hearts as they faced what increasingly looked like all of their demises.
---
Ripper glared blearily at the carriage she was trapped in. It was simultaneously the nicest and most disgraceful prison that had ever held her. One glance could tell her that even a normal man should have been able to break out the windows or kick down the door, to say nothing of someone powered by the core, but she simply couldn’t muster the strength anymore. She could barely lift her arms, and standing up from the plush seat she’d sunk into was unthinkable. It took all of her considerable focus to continue drawing breath, each shuddering gasp of which was agony.
Even the thought of revolution, of change, of the suffering of the people outside could no longer distract her from her failing body. She couldn’t even muster up any resentment towards the pincushion that had stopped her from her regicide, any anger at the organizers of this battle, any thought for the ones that would survive her. Her world was shrinking down around her, vision fading as much as her thoughts had, senses and emotion replaced by pain and the awareness of each increasingly shallow breath. Eventually even the pain left, leaving only the inhale. And exhale. And inhale.
Ripper closed her eyes. She would never open them again.
---
The Countess was… not having a great evening. It was hard to call it a bad one given as much wealthier as she was now than she’d been at its start, but bone gathering wasn’t particularly pleasant at the best of times and the best of times didn’t occur in an active war zone. She just kept herself focused on her long, oh very long, list of things to do and people to flay once she had the resources and leverage this job promised to bring; it was better than getting bogged down in the tedium and unpleasantness of the task itself.
Tedium actually may not have been the correct word for it, though she’d expected it to be when she’d started. There was more fighting than she had thought would be happening this far from the excitement at the palace, and more factions in play than she had thought existed. This whole evening had been full of surprises. While it was more difficult and more dangerous going than she had anticipated, and involved a lot more hiding and dodging then she’d prepared for, it was still well within her abilities. She just wished there was something a bit more interesting to it; the Countess was perhaps the only being in the entirety of this world that would have found the carnage, destruction, and mayhem surrounding her quite this dull.
The interest didn’t come until some time later, when she met back up with the strange man who had tasked with her with this retrieval. He’d taken the map from her with an air of great relief and passed it off to an associate who’d hurriedly vanished into the night; for the first time since she’d met him, Quantos smiled.
“You’ll never know exactly how many lives you saved tonight, Paige.”
That threw her for a loop. She hadn’t really intended to press beyond her payment, and didn’t really care what she’d been doing, but couldn’t see how it could conceivably save lives. Curiosity, reasoning that she needed nothing further from him anyway and could afford to let slip a bit, pushed through her aloof veneer. “What?”
“I don’t actually have time to explain, I think. If things are going how I hope they are, pretty soon I won’t have been born.”
“What?”
“Bigger things than you and me are at work tonight, and I rode their wake to help unravel some paradoxes. None of that’s too important to you, though. Nothing to do with the bones.”
“If you’re short on time for explanations, perhaps you should try being a bit less cryptic and simply say what you mean.”
“I just knew that a dangerous necromancer was going to try and take advantage of the destruction tonight and raise an army. With any luck, thanks to you he won’t have the materials to be a serious threat, and either my contacts or the authorities should be able to clean him up.”
The Countess ticked this over for a few moments, but before she could speak again she noticed that she couldn’t really look at the man in front of her; if she tried to focus on him her gaze simply slid right off. She tried to call up his name and couldn’t, and as she tried to get a look at him but succeeded only in keeping him in her peripheries he began to turn beige and blow gently away on the breeze. In seconds he was completely gone, replaced only by the brief sound of a satisfied sigh, and she could only dredge up the most tattered remnants of what she had even been doing all evening. She’d scrounged for bones, but why? She was noticeably richer, but how?
She wasn’t the only one confused. Lutherion wasn’t collected enough to be great at deductive reasoning, but he didn’t have to be to be able to tell that there absolutely should be more potential minions than he was finding. Some old anvil guy had nearly been able to get the best of him by himself, and with a s many capable warriors and serious mages as were on the prowl tonight, he knew he needed to bulk up his reinforcements before he ended up in a situation he couldn’t handle.
Lutherion didn’t like being defeated, and over his life and undeath had taken revenge on many people who had stood in his way or thwarted his plans; it might have been frustrating therefore that this time no particular person had stopped him, so no particular person could be punished for his upcoming defeat. Rather, a number of people had simply happened to do things independently of one another and without knowing what the greater consequences of their actions were that crippled his army, weakened has magic, and ultimately lead him to his fate.
It was a bit moot though; by morning he’d be in no position to take revenge on anyone in any case.
---
Eureka didn’t have time to consider the implications of the vanishing book; much more pressing were the guards she could see rapidly approaching and the difficulty of convincing them not to arrest her and her gibberish-speaking snake. She hated having to be the one doing the talking and she hated having to talk to the authorities and she hated being here and she hated so many things right now.
“Miss, I think that one way or another it would be best if you two came with me.”
Eureka didn’t like the miss, but she wouldn’t have liked ma’am either. “Why? We're just trying to get away from those… scary rebels outside.”
“I’m sure you are, I’m sure you are. It’s just that I’ve got to be careful, right? And if you’re telling the truth, it’ll all be sorted out very quickly and you can take refuge with the rest of the guests here.”
“As-lor k'vasta enbril, Eureka.”
The guard blinked and turned back to the one he could understand. “Er, right. Could you, uh, just please make this easy for everybody?”
It didn’t seem like the worst plan. Even if she did get arrested, wouldn’t that be a safer place than whatever chaos was happening right now? Arrested again, actually. And it hadn’t been too hard to escape last time either. There was no reason to believe that he was lying to her, and no reason to think she would be in any danger, but something in Eureka just wouldn’t let her cooperate. Getting arrested now was a bad idea, she knew it. For some reason. Plus it just sucked.
“I just don’t see why you have to treat us differently from the rest people here! Nobody else is getting arrested, and any one of them could be a spy.”
He’d known since the first words she’d said that it was going to go this way, but he’d hoped he was wrong. With a heavy sigh, he reached for Eureka’s wrist. He was pretty sure that she had nothing to do with anything dangerous to the king, but that didn’t really matter and he had a job to do.
Before his hand had even reached her, she had batted it away and pulled herself up and in, doing her best both to recoil and to seem in control of the situation. “The very nerve!” That sounded like the sort of thing that fancy ladies said.
“Look, I’m not arresting you, I just want you to come with me. I can arrest you if that’s what you’re going to make me do, but wouldn’t it be easier to just come?”
He was being too reasonable. It was a lie, a ploy. Probably. Everything else seems to have been for the last however long it had been since she’d been abducted. She tried to focus on her breathing again, do the calming exercises her quack therapist had told her, but her thoughts were going too quickly and her emotions where too strong and all over the place. She couldn’t get arrested. Maybe she should get arrested. She needed to go back to the future. Or maybe she should stay here. She wasn’t getting arrested in the future. Something had terrified Syvex though.
The man reached for her again and she hadn’t made up her mind and she panicked and tried to push him away and then things got away from her. She didn’t really see what happened, all she knew was that he had pre-empted her and backed away and in the air between the two of them, following roughly the arc her hands had traced, was a rapidly shrinking and fading wavering-edged portal that looked like a very sick version of the ones Syvex usually made.
“Eureka!”
There was a dreamlike, detached air of incredulity to her words. “How… did I do that?” She was staring, dazed, at her hands, especially the blacker, scalier bits.
She felt hands grabbing her, but this time she didn’t resist both because she was too distracted and because she recognized these ones. Several pairs took her by the shoulder and arms, she was aware of something purple, and the two of them once again found themselves near the forest. It was only a short drop down to the ground, Eureka sporting only a slightly sprained ankle from the height. She looked up at Syvex, speaking slowly enough and choosing her words carefully enough to prevent herself from spiraling into an all-out panic.
“I think… I think you had better work on figuring out how to speak English again as fast as possible, because there are some things I need to understand.”
All he could respond with was a cascading series of three shrugs.
---
Neither First nor the Prestidigitator were moving, Seventh’s tortuous advance the only thing happening save the gradual crumbling of the room.
“I think…” Her words were disconcertingly calm, her terror and fury belied verbally but unequivocally felt by the others as intimately linked as they were. “I think that this is my fault, really. It shouldn’t have taken my brother for me to realize what had to be done.”
The prestidigitator almost scoffed. “That’s what this is about? Petty sentimentality, the bonds of blood? You’re throwing away all your power, all your remaining years, all the favor I’ve shown you because I prolonged your life at the expense of your worthless brother’s?”
“No.” She had drawn level with him now. “It was merely the catalyst. And who knows? Perhaps with time and ingenuity I’ll be able to put him back together from the pieces I tear out of you.”
She reached for his throat, but with a blur he twisted his hands, weaving the threads of void he’d been holding together into a net he cast at Victoria; it sizzled against her flesh, livid red marks weaving their way across her face as she struggled not to be lost to the insatiable nothingness. A crosshatch of empty space spread its way across her mask, her long forgotten visage twisted equally with agony and rage, and she fell to her knees, mirrored by the Prestidigitator.
“I don’t know what you did to me, girl, but did you really think it could matter? Did you really ever think that any or all of you could challenge me?” It was, of course, bravado, but for the Prestidigitator the show had always been the thing that mattered most. “I always knew you were of… changeable humors, but I never thought you would be this foolish. Perhaps Second has been rubbing off on you.”
That actually managed to make a smirk twitch the corners of her mouth through everything else. “You have no idea.”
First threw the sword. He didn’t bother to call out, knowing she’d hear his intention as soon as he acted, and her hand slipped through enough of the bonds to catch it. Without hesitation or even a moment’s pause she turned the catching motion into a continued graceful arc. She swung—
And that was it. The soft stud of the head hitting the ground seemed like an unfitting finale to an eternity of grandiosity. Victoria lost consciousness as his death joined his net in assailing her mind and body; by the time she regained it, First had disentangled her and knotted the collapsing dimension into something temporarily stable. The cane was still in her hand, a purple glimmer dancing with the occasional pink spark at its edge; her mask was gone, the tiny remaining fragments of it in a small semi-circle around her feet. She felt naked. Naked and groggy.
“Now what?”
The fox laughed, his reserved little chuckle quickly becoming a hearty guffaw before he stifled it. “You’re asking me?”
“No, I just… I just need to think.” Her fingers traced the livid welts across her face; she
knew she'd never be able to rid herself of the scars of the void. “It’s not as though there’s anything particularly pressing at the moment in any case.”
“I actually may have to disagree with you there.” He handed her a shard of glass and she forced herself to concentrate. “Our little battle appears to be in need of a new round soon.”
“How can you. Possibly. Consider that relevant? Just let them languish, I don’t care.”
“I considered that. It was certainly my first preference as well given that we have much more important things to be focusing on, but as I think you’ll remember if you take a moment, there’s a great deal of extremely binding contractual magic at play here. It would be rather foolish to throw away everything that we just fought for because we didn’t bother to pick up the old boss’s debts.”
She sighed, but he was right. The Prestidigitator’s expression could barely be seen behind the mask and the shattered eyes, but she imagined it was rather smug watching her from the floor. With a glance at the still-clutched sword, she picked the head up by its hair. “If I’m to be you, then, I suppose I should look the part. First, gather the others; if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right, and there’s a lot of new information for them.”
---
Ripper’s eyes opened.
It was nice being able to tell what was going on around her again; the endorphic core had seriously limited her senses, and the time she was pretty sure she’d spent dead hadn’t allowed her much awareness either. And she had eyes now! She'd never seen anything before, and there was so much to take in. All these colors! She’d never
known what a color was and now there were so many!
She stood up unsteadily, unfamiliar legs giving out a few times before she worked out how to operate them. Her hands patted herself up and down, exploring her clothes and her items and her new limbs. All these bones! Everything so inflexible. Inflexible and hard, but coated in soft, fleshy… flesh. And then the flesh was coated in fabric and metal and oh what’s this?
She took the mask off. Not only did she not know what it used to look like, but she didn’t know what anything used to look like, so she wasn’t in much of a position to notice that the already frightening face had become even more threatening as its embellished teeth took on a sharper, more shark-like cast. They matched almost exactly to the ones in her mouth; she mirrored its grimace with her own Cheshire smile.
So now she was up and she knew a bit about who she was and was pretty sure she wasn’t going to fall over at any moment, so all she had to do was figure out where she was and how to get out of this box and what she should be doing. These very important tasks were almost immediately forgotten when she noticed a small silver coin on the floor of the carriage. She picked it up and licked it.
It was awful! What was wrong with the treasure here? Precious metals and other valuables always tasted great, it was how she knew loot from trash. How was she supposed to work like this?
And for that matter, even if she could figure out where some treasure was, where was she supposed to store it?
The coin joined a bent key on the seat and was promptly ignored. Not only was it not worth the time trying to figure out why the stupid thing tasted so bad, her attention was quickly becoming overwhelmed by the memories that had begun to trickle in.
Memories of greed, of piracy, a revolution. Even some memories of her from the outside, though not many of those. Is that what she looked like?
Well, not anymore.
---
The stupid little battlemage was frightened. Laguja couldn’t fully puppeteer him the way it wanted to, and had to settle for revealing himself and promising bargains of power and knowledge to the wizard just to get him to do what it wanted. It very much hoped that it would find itself in more capable hands soon. Or at least weaker-willed ones that it could gradually dominate. At least of these ones had the arcane talent to channel its magic properly.
Your bravery does you credit wizard. When the queen is restored to her rightful throne, we will remember your service.
Part of what we would be remembering would be how frustrating and craven he had been, but it kept that part to itself.
Though we’ve lost the carriage, this does not change the plan. Continue guiding Lillian and her majesty, my attention is required elsewhere.
Required was perhaps not the appropriate word, but the mystery of Riko had been bothering it for too long. It delved once more into the scientist’s mind, although it seemed that he was no more and never had been a scientist. He was and had always been a physician. Laguja strained its awareness as far as it could, looking for some inconsistency or an indication of mental tampering or altered history, but could find nothing. Were it not for the impossibility, it might have suspected that its own memories had been altered; there was a great deal of physical evidence in front of it to suggest both that this was the man it had known and that the man it had known had never existed. Even genetically identical people had unique souls. There was no way to just copy people, and—
Without warning, the god's ppawareness was shattered. It was roughly ejected from Rico’s mindscape; the brief image of the world around it it was able to see before it was a ejected from the physical world as well was of a shadowy hole tearing itself in the air, followed by wispy black hands pulling it through the gap in nothing. This had the Prestidigitator’s stink on it, but it was different, wrong. Rough and graceless. Painful.
The remaining humans all shared glances with one another. It was several seconds before any of them spoke, the queen’s voice barely audible over the continued sounds of battle.
“What… just happened?”
Her battle mage couldn't answer.
---
Eureka had continued her breathing exercises, but her stubborn refusal to return to the future no matter how calm she got was making it very hard to get calm enough to go to the future.
“You can’t make it forward either, right? It’s not just me?”
Syvex slithered forward a couple of feet, making Eureka roll her eyes so hard it hurt a little.
“I mean forward in time. Obviously. I can move forward in space, I have legs.” That made her wince a bit as she looked Syvex up and down. “For the moment.”
He shook his head. Being calm wasn’t coming easy right now, but he felt like he was collected enough that he should have made it back to the opera house by now if it were possible.
“Okay, so, it’s dangerous here and there’s fighting and wars and rebellions and stuff, and it’s safer there and we want to go there and we can’t, so we’ve just got to go somewhere safe here.” That made sense. It especially made sense when she considered that the sounds of fighting did seem to be steadily moving closer and the magic in the sky seemed to be getting considerably more apocalyptic. “But we’re stuck where it’s dangerous here because there’s only one way out and that’s where all the danger is.”
Syvex nodded; it seemed to be the most helpful thing he could do right now.
“If only one of us was some kind of crazy magic shadow snake that could teleport us somewhere better.”
It was hard to wince without eyes, but he managed it. This seemed like a bad plan. His portals weren’t working right for some reason, there were too many things they didn’t understand, and they didn’t even have a destination.
As if to punctuate his thoughts, another explosion rattled the world.
On the other set of hands, no matter how dangerous getting out of here would be, it had to be less dangerous than trying to stay.
“Who knows, maybe I’ll even learn something,” she said, trying — and failing — to produce a portal for emphasis. “Okay, seriously, how do you do that? Is it, like, the motion, or…”
With a sigh that sounded the same in Eldritch as it did in English, Syvex carved a dark hole in space and pulled the two of them through. Several more jumps in quick succession followed suit as he tried to skirt the battle and bring them to safety; the fourth, however, didn’t look right. Its darkness was too dark somehow, and the sound it made wasn’t right.
They were already falling towards it, though, too quickly for him to change direction or open another, and Eureka didn’t even seem to notice the difference until they had entered it.
---
The transition had never been like this before, and the study was clearly different than any time they’d seen it previously, but it was hard to mistake what happened when the three figures found themselves seated once more in comfortable paralytic opulence. The person in front of them wore a familiar mask, but it was neither the mask they had seen on her before nor the person that typically wore this one.
“The Prestidigitator is dead.”
The words were calm, delivered smoothly, sounded more like a weather report than a pronouncement of the death of the omnipotent tormentor that had abducted the battlers.
“This does not concern you greatly, as your battle will continue as planned until only one of you remains.”
There was a pause as though she expected a response or questions, but no one present but her could move or speak.
“Congratulations are in order for the three current survivors, and explanations as well. The pirate Ripper Blackmask is, despite appearances, dead. She suffocated, or perhaps drowned, on the mimic that managed to kill itself in her device. The mimic has subsequently taken over her body. Under ordinary circumstances, I would simply have left it behind as we moved on to the new round, but considering that one of you managed to delete half of what we were considering the contestant from existence, I am giving her to La Aguja del Dolor as a new servant. You would do well to be grateful, though I know you will not.”
Eureka’s and Syvex’s heads swiveled without their intention or consent towards Ripper and noticed the placid pincushion in her lap, then turned back to their host; she was drawing of an elegant blade from out of the cane she held and proffered it towards her immobile charges.
“Additionally, I have decided to make a small change to the competition. The winner will not only receive their freedom — and the greatest gift of all, survival — but I will be entrusting this weapon to them. The sword has slain at least two grandmasters, and I would be unsurprised to learn that there were more. Consider it an extra bit of motivation.”
Shadowy holes opened beneath each of the seats, and the contestants were once more sent hurtling through the multiverse. The gloom of the study transitioned smoothly into the gloom of the evening they found themselves in, though the study had not contained nearly as much mist, nor had the air in it put their teeth on edge and left a gentle ringing in their ears.
“You will find yourselves now in a world both dear to and reviled by myself and my… companions. It was here that we were born, that we grew up in when we still aged. This universe was the chrysalis from which we emerged.”
It was easy to believe. The city the survivors found themselves scattered through had both the opulence and the air of gentle, unmaintained decay that they associated with their apparently-now-deceased captor.
“And like a chrysalis, it is now little more than a spent, empty shell. Do with it as you please. I care little. Almost no time has passed since our departure, as we preserved it in our sentimentality. It is possible, nay likely, that artifacts of our lives and passing still exist. In fact, there’s no reason that the tools and methods of our ascension shouldn’t still exist here. Seek them out before killing one another if it pleases you. I am in no hurry.”
They could move again. None of the three beings still considered in the competition could see one another; Laguja was clutched in one of Ripper’s hands but the pair of them were alone; Eureka and Syvex had been placed away from one another.
“I would say that you are free even not to fight one another and live out the rest of your lives here, but I rather seriously doubt how much longer this reality will remain stable having lost what we took from it. You are, however, free to find out.”
Victoria seemed to be done; Eureka and Laguja certainly heard no more, but Syvex felt a small weight form in his lowermost left hand and heard a whisper too quiet identify the speaker. "Something to let you actually communicate with the others, hmm?"
When he looked down, he was holding a grey pincushion, identical to the one Ripper had held.