Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Three: Water...place!]
05-21-2011, 10:10 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.
Xadrez raised a beige fistful of dagger, the ship lurching to a halt as a salvo of cannonballs ploughed its keel upon a rut. One soared with nearly choreographed grace by Kath’s adeptly switching bottom half, much to the tactician’s disappointment. Jen was dancing haphazard circles on the chessboard, more like a moody spider’s grumpily tossed-about anchor-lines than any discernible pattern.
Her energy, it seemed - by the jitterbug scrape of jadeite upon whatever the shattering this cloth was made of - was boundless. Oh, to be young again, thought Xadrez, though perhaps in not such wistful terms. This was a skirmish. A skirmish was what Xadrez had been waiting to tease out this whole damnable “battle” – or, at least, one where Kracht had regained his rightful place as pawnsome cannon fodder. Leviathan fodder. The point was, Kracht was on a leash and the tactician couldn’t have been more grimly satisfied.
In a moment of toe-stepping interruption to the usual mechanical musings, it dawned on the spirit that Ouijen was the first of his kind he’d had to engage with in a while. Xadrez spontaneously grew a little awkward in her spectral presence while things turned to an oddly consolatory hell all around, for a reason he couldn’t quite define. He felt – though he couldn’t have articulated it - older and scarred and bitter and wrong and self-conscious about all of it in Ouijen’s presence, though she couldn’t have picked up on it either. A hateful old patriarch with a bright-eyed fresh soul gazing up at him. He felt guilty, without Jen’s accusation made explicit in the first place.
She was asking what they were going to do. Somehow, her confidence in Xadrez’ contingencies for Kath getting her murderous - presumably webbed - hands on magic was even more crushing than good, old-fashioned Jennish scepticism.
I’m thinking, replied the tactician. He tried his best to sound irked, if only so he could cover the worry. The magic was a considerable problem – still, problems were for solving. They weren’t some philosophical mental meander; they marched through the tactician’s mind with assembly-line efficiency. Acquire problem. Affix solution. Hear the spectral tide ooh and aah in admiration.
Fingers flicked through and beneath four-space, rapping on surfaces that existed on a schedule altered by perceiving it. Below, Kracht seized a cannonball in one cranelike arm and slugged it into the leviathan’s side. One gesture to the ceiling set the Ovoid in motion, a deep churning noise lightly accented with the distant screams of pain from the heads of the hydra. The noise seemed to rouse Maxwell from a halfway-working dream, a sullen stone pawn with a severed copper worm in its back staring him in the face. He took it.
Maxwell, do not speak do not attract Arkal’s attention
Sikarius, Fanthalion, you two as well
Now
Xadrez picked up Jen’s possessed chess piece with a level glare, as though he were attempting to irradiate his intentions from it.
as I understand it my aims have already been laid out for your perusal
I need the meddlesome anomaly removed while his grip is weakened
I need him dead and thus I ideally require your cooperation
How averse would the three of you be to
how to put it
simply be declared dead to this battle
Would that particularly inconvenience any of you
The ceiling cried as though the sound had taken a sanity-questioning detour through beige, as the Ovoid worked its magic or chaos or order or science into the already-coagulated mess of zoological giganatomy and adherence to the motifs of the Quest and the Place. Xadrez’ link to the tan demon was providing some manner of illuminative overlay. He did his best to ignore it.
Jen has informed me of some of the intricacies of your kind
Regrettably Maxwell you get little say in this seeing as you are currently the salvaged fragments of a memory from a dying wyrm’s mind of a tool used none-too-gently by its previous owner also currently a salvaged fragment of a memory
If I wanted your snark, you insufferable spectre, I’d have torn it out of your throat when I had your knife handy.
“I don’t get why-”
the point
is your spirit cannot leave this battle
agents conspiring; dest’nies transpiring
they are drawn to her the agents inexorable and the three of you all are entangled heinous within their machinations
you may heroically sacrifice yourself yes and yes that may rethrone Jen convert Kracht and make the Ovoid carve us a path to the Observer where we may proclaim from his citadel to the multiverse his downfall
but really
who are we so hopelessly trying to deceive save ourselves
such fanciful schemes will save no-one
Kracht will die to the beast here in Cyk’nl’s heart
the Ovoid knows it; hence why it dragged along the city when you joined us Fanthalion
I need only scheme and plan as much as I wish to, the agents know my movements
ponderous musing a sacrifice play gambits apathy cowardice valour all of it leads to the same result
which brings us back to you three
The tacitican had noticed Arkal’s attention drawn upon them, and made a subtle movement with one hand. A final noise rippled its pained way down five hydra throats, compacting in the stomachs of all those present in Cyk’nl’s heart with a kind of heavy smack.
As one, they stared upward. Bile dripped, black and sickly green, from the ravaged ceiling. Fanthalion
The red peeled away, uncoiling from its blue-black tandem; the mismatched teeth wavered like reeds as they whispered the Queen’s edict. The rungs on a ladder, clambering toward comphrenesion.
Really it is up to you
you may choose to resurrect Jen dragging yourself and Sikarius and his boy embroiled in your own code further into this battle risking true confrontation on my part and others and thus risking your demise
or you may entrust her to me and fend for yourself in this world
save Cyk’nl slain by the usurper its survival will otherwise be assured
the data it stores a valuable resource for you and your biowyrm kin, I presume
“But she said-”
She is but a little girl and I know that none but the gods themselves may truly know what lies beyond death
as I mentioned
she has charmed the agents
whether her kind find a final end on mortal expiration or some parting of the soul thereafter does not concern me
all I know
wise as she is her spirit is young
I may not be a king or a wyrm or the mortal crossroad of the agents themselves but if nothing else I am a spirit
and caring for this little one is the least I can do
That with your cooperation here I may promise I will do until she sees fit to fend for herself
Xadrez raised a beige fistful of dagger, the ship lurching to a halt as a salvo of cannonballs ploughed its keel upon a rut. One soared with nearly choreographed grace by Kath’s adeptly switching bottom half, much to the tactician’s disappointment. Jen was dancing haphazard circles on the chessboard, more like a moody spider’s grumpily tossed-about anchor-lines than any discernible pattern.
Her energy, it seemed - by the jitterbug scrape of jadeite upon whatever the shattering this cloth was made of - was boundless. Oh, to be young again, thought Xadrez, though perhaps in not such wistful terms. This was a skirmish. A skirmish was what Xadrez had been waiting to tease out this whole damnable “battle” – or, at least, one where Kracht had regained his rightful place as pawnsome cannon fodder. Leviathan fodder. The point was, Kracht was on a leash and the tactician couldn’t have been more grimly satisfied.
In a moment of toe-stepping interruption to the usual mechanical musings, it dawned on the spirit that Ouijen was the first of his kind he’d had to engage with in a while. Xadrez spontaneously grew a little awkward in her spectral presence while things turned to an oddly consolatory hell all around, for a reason he couldn’t quite define. He felt – though he couldn’t have articulated it - older and scarred and bitter and wrong and self-conscious about all of it in Ouijen’s presence, though she couldn’t have picked up on it either. A hateful old patriarch with a bright-eyed fresh soul gazing up at him. He felt guilty, without Jen’s accusation made explicit in the first place.
She was asking what they were going to do. Somehow, her confidence in Xadrez’ contingencies for Kath getting her murderous - presumably webbed - hands on magic was even more crushing than good, old-fashioned Jennish scepticism.
I’m thinking, replied the tactician. He tried his best to sound irked, if only so he could cover the worry. The magic was a considerable problem – still, problems were for solving. They weren’t some philosophical mental meander; they marched through the tactician’s mind with assembly-line efficiency. Acquire problem. Affix solution. Hear the spectral tide ooh and aah in admiration.
Fingers flicked through and beneath four-space, rapping on surfaces that existed on a schedule altered by perceiving it. Below, Kracht seized a cannonball in one cranelike arm and slugged it into the leviathan’s side. One gesture to the ceiling set the Ovoid in motion, a deep churning noise lightly accented with the distant screams of pain from the heads of the hydra. The noise seemed to rouse Maxwell from a halfway-working dream, a sullen stone pawn with a severed copper worm in its back staring him in the face. He took it.
Maxwell, do not speak do not attract Arkal’s attention
Sikarius, Fanthalion, you two as well
Now
Xadrez picked up Jen’s possessed chess piece with a level glare, as though he were attempting to irradiate his intentions from it.
as I understand it my aims have already been laid out for your perusal
I need the meddlesome anomaly removed while his grip is weakened
I need him dead and thus I ideally require your cooperation
How averse would the three of you be to
how to put it
simply be declared dead to this battle
Would that particularly inconvenience any of you
The ceiling cried as though the sound had taken a sanity-questioning detour through beige, as the Ovoid worked its magic or chaos or order or science into the already-coagulated mess of zoological giganatomy and adherence to the motifs of the Quest and the Place. Xadrez’ link to the tan demon was providing some manner of illuminative overlay. He did his best to ignore it.
Jen has informed me of some of the intricacies of your kind
Regrettably Maxwell you get little say in this seeing as you are currently the salvaged fragments of a memory from a dying wyrm’s mind of a tool used none-too-gently by its previous owner also currently a salvaged fragment of a memory
If I wanted your snark, you insufferable spectre, I’d have torn it out of your throat when I had your knife handy.
“I don’t get why-”
the point
is your spirit cannot leave this battle
agents conspiring; dest’nies transpiring
they are drawn to her the agents inexorable and the three of you all are entangled heinous within their machinations
you may heroically sacrifice yourself yes and yes that may rethrone Jen convert Kracht and make the Ovoid carve us a path to the Observer where we may proclaim from his citadel to the multiverse his downfall
but really
who are we so hopelessly trying to deceive save ourselves
such fanciful schemes will save no-one
Kracht will die to the beast here in Cyk’nl’s heart
the Ovoid knows it; hence why it dragged along the city when you joined us Fanthalion
I need only scheme and plan as much as I wish to, the agents know my movements
ponderous musing a sacrifice play gambits apathy cowardice valour all of it leads to the same result
which brings us back to you three
The tacitican had noticed Arkal’s attention drawn upon them, and made a subtle movement with one hand. A final noise rippled its pained way down five hydra throats, compacting in the stomachs of all those present in Cyk’nl’s heart with a kind of heavy smack.
As one, they stared upward. Bile dripped, black and sickly green, from the ravaged ceiling. Fanthalion
The red peeled away, uncoiling from its blue-black tandem; the mismatched teeth wavered like reeds as they whispered the Queen’s edict. The rungs on a ladder, clambering toward comphrenesion.
Really it is up to you
you may choose to resurrect Jen dragging yourself and Sikarius and his boy embroiled in your own code further into this battle risking true confrontation on my part and others and thus risking your demise
or you may entrust her to me and fend for yourself in this world
save Cyk’nl slain by the usurper its survival will otherwise be assured
the data it stores a valuable resource for you and your biowyrm kin, I presume
“But she said-”
She is but a little girl and I know that none but the gods themselves may truly know what lies beyond death
as I mentioned
she has charmed the agents
whether her kind find a final end on mortal expiration or some parting of the soul thereafter does not concern me
all I know
wise as she is her spirit is young
I may not be a king or a wyrm or the mortal crossroad of the agents themselves but if nothing else I am a spirit
and caring for this little one is the least I can do
That with your cooperation here I may promise I will do until she sees fit to fend for herself
peace to the unsung peace to the martyrs | i'm johnny rotten appleseed
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow
clouds is shaky love | broke as hell but i got a bunch of ringtones
eyes blood red bruise aubergine | Sue took something now Sue doesn't sleep | saint average, day in the life of
woke up in the noon smelling doom and death | out the house, great outdoors
staying warm in arctic blizzard | that's my battle 'til I get inanimate | still up in the same clothes living like a gameshow