RE: The Battle of the Victors (*S1/2*) - Round 1? - Pizza World?
12-02-2023, 04:28 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-02-2023, 04:29 PM by Ixcaliber.)
On the day she was taken for the Battle of the Victors Thrillseeker had been ready and waiting. The Authority begrudged her duty to collect her and once again couldn’t help but make it obvious that this was the case. She was shown to the private box reserved for her and The Recluse and then promptly ignored.
There was a couple of hours spent hanging around before the last Host, The Baker, deigned to arrive with her victor(s). In that period she went to wander the theatre, and the only people she encountered who wouldn’t immediately flee from her presence were the Sparrklechix, and even then they seemed a little nervous around her. Only Cindy actually seemed to enjoy her company, and Franchesca who she met during the impromptu intermission/smoke break.
Finally she was the last one on stage. The Authority was going on and on about how awful she was for fighting the monsters that had been put in front of her. She really hated it when boss fights started trying to chastise her for her actions. On the spur of the moment she had taken the Recluse’s soul and fed it into her arm, and it had launched out burning ropes of light that bound The Authority and killed her with the inescapability and inevitability of mortality itself. All hell had broke loose around her, but Thrillseeker had been entirely preoccupied with trying to keep the last remnants of The Recluse from overloading her arm and doing night only knows what.
Obviously she had known that the power of a Host was greater than the power of any regular soul she might feed into the arm, but feeling it for real had been a lot even still. She could feel The Recluse’s desire to drag everyone around her into their inevitable graves. She could feel The Recluse trying to slip a noose around her own heart. It was some kind of miracle that she managed to hold that pull towards the grave off as well as she had.
When The Authority was finally dead and The Recluse’s soul expended, she ran to the front of the stage, grasping at air, grasping for where the crystallized remnants of The Authority should have been. And then the serpent had happened, and then pizza world.
In Pizza World Thrillseeker found her way down into the depleted sauce thoroughfare that ran through the crust of the world, she uncovered an underground civilization of beings made from chunks of ham and defeated the Rancid Pineapple Beast that had been terrorizing them, but again its soul just seemed to dissipate into nothingness. It was very annoying.
—
Franchesca was feeling disorientated. She’d been in the middle of one of Valhart’s schemes, trying to fight her way out of an illusory world and return to her friends in Roshain, and now this. It felt real, when she plucked at her fur it hurt, but it also felt patently ridiculous. This woman, this goddess or something stronger than that seemed to be expecting her to take a lot on faith, or a combination of faith and some really intense hallucinatory trips.
The Baker had given her the basic gist of things; the overall goal of what was happening (even if the point remained a mystery), and what had happened before her mysterious death in a world made of pizza. It had taken a lot of reiterating and confirmation for her to believe that The Baker was being serious about the pizza world. She’d given her the lightning fast rundown of her competitors, too quickly for anything to really land, and she’d impressed upon her the importance of sticking with her partner Ginger who could help fill her in on anything she’d missed.
If this was real, and Fran wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that it was at the moment, then she’d told The Baker that she’d be willing to play along if, after all this was done, she could get her to the Source, the heart of her own universe, and help defend it from Valhart. The Baker had agreed in a heartbeat.
—
One by one the competitors of The Battle of the Victors were teleported. They found themselves in varying locales, some in dingy dungeons, some in empty cities, some in barren plains populated by cute little monsters.
“Welcome Victors, to your first round.” rang out the many voices of The City.
“Surely this is the second round?”
“No. The Oddball’s nonsense worlds are flat lifeless places. They have no heart, no soul. We refuse to acknowledge them as real rounds.”
“Also nobody died yet. Or, well… none of the contestants anyway.”
“Regardless of its numbering, we present to you your new round. The empty world of Crystal Mirage XIX: A Universe Unmade. It was once a very popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, many people from around the world dedicated countless hours to exploring this world, interacting with its characters, building homes within its districts.”
“Yet now it is empty, not from catastrophe. No great annihilation has befallen this world. Simple disinterest of fickle gamers. This loving crafted world and all that time invested to become part of it, abandoned just because there is something new to play.”
“We find it distasteful, and we invite you breathe life once again into this universe. Bring it new life, or at least let it end its existence with some dignity and one final hurrah.”
There was a couple of hours spent hanging around before the last Host, The Baker, deigned to arrive with her victor(s). In that period she went to wander the theatre, and the only people she encountered who wouldn’t immediately flee from her presence were the Sparrklechix, and even then they seemed a little nervous around her. Only Cindy actually seemed to enjoy her company, and Franchesca who she met during the impromptu intermission/smoke break.
Finally she was the last one on stage. The Authority was going on and on about how awful she was for fighting the monsters that had been put in front of her. She really hated it when boss fights started trying to chastise her for her actions. On the spur of the moment she had taken the Recluse’s soul and fed it into her arm, and it had launched out burning ropes of light that bound The Authority and killed her with the inescapability and inevitability of mortality itself. All hell had broke loose around her, but Thrillseeker had been entirely preoccupied with trying to keep the last remnants of The Recluse from overloading her arm and doing night only knows what.
Obviously she had known that the power of a Host was greater than the power of any regular soul she might feed into the arm, but feeling it for real had been a lot even still. She could feel The Recluse’s desire to drag everyone around her into their inevitable graves. She could feel The Recluse trying to slip a noose around her own heart. It was some kind of miracle that she managed to hold that pull towards the grave off as well as she had.
When The Authority was finally dead and The Recluse’s soul expended, she ran to the front of the stage, grasping at air, grasping for where the crystallized remnants of The Authority should have been. And then the serpent had happened, and then pizza world.
In Pizza World Thrillseeker found her way down into the depleted sauce thoroughfare that ran through the crust of the world, she uncovered an underground civilization of beings made from chunks of ham and defeated the Rancid Pineapple Beast that had been terrorizing them, but again its soul just seemed to dissipate into nothingness. It was very annoying.
—
Franchesca was feeling disorientated. She’d been in the middle of one of Valhart’s schemes, trying to fight her way out of an illusory world and return to her friends in Roshain, and now this. It felt real, when she plucked at her fur it hurt, but it also felt patently ridiculous. This woman, this goddess or something stronger than that seemed to be expecting her to take a lot on faith, or a combination of faith and some really intense hallucinatory trips.
The Baker had given her the basic gist of things; the overall goal of what was happening (even if the point remained a mystery), and what had happened before her mysterious death in a world made of pizza. It had taken a lot of reiterating and confirmation for her to believe that The Baker was being serious about the pizza world. She’d given her the lightning fast rundown of her competitors, too quickly for anything to really land, and she’d impressed upon her the importance of sticking with her partner Ginger who could help fill her in on anything she’d missed.
If this was real, and Fran wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that it was at the moment, then she’d told The Baker that she’d be willing to play along if, after all this was done, she could get her to the Source, the heart of her own universe, and help defend it from Valhart. The Baker had agreed in a heartbeat.
—
One by one the competitors of The Battle of the Victors were teleported. They found themselves in varying locales, some in dingy dungeons, some in empty cities, some in barren plains populated by cute little monsters.
“Welcome Victors, to your first round.” rang out the many voices of The City.
“Surely this is the second round?”
“No. The Oddball’s nonsense worlds are flat lifeless places. They have no heart, no soul. We refuse to acknowledge them as real rounds.”
“Also nobody died yet. Or, well… none of the contestants anyway.”
“Regardless of its numbering, we present to you your new round. The empty world of Crystal Mirage XIX: A Universe Unmade. It was once a very popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, many people from around the world dedicated countless hours to exploring this world, interacting with its characters, building homes within its districts.”
“Yet now it is empty, not from catastrophe. No great annihilation has befallen this world. Simple disinterest of fickle gamers. This loving crafted world and all that time invested to become part of it, abandoned just because there is something new to play.”
“We find it distasteful, and we invite you breathe life once again into this universe. Bring it new life, or at least let it end its existence with some dignity and one final hurrah.”