Re: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Four: New Battleopolis!]
04-18-2012, 09:03 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Lord Paradise.
Everything was starting to fade out and become blurry, except for the tree, which only kept growing and becoming clearer. It was beautiful, really—the apotheosis of nature in green and brown and birch white, it smelled like spring and autumn all at once with an aftertaste of blood, or else Jen was just bleeding. As last sights go, it wouldn’t be so bad. Bested by a magic she would never understand, enveloped by green, headache gone, no pain, everything fading.
But of course that wasn’t going to happen. Jen caught sight of her trusty bio wyrm peeking over a dead werewolf and loosely reached down to grab her. Arkal, presuming the her to be slipping out of his grip, pulled her upwards in spite of her faintly-worded complaints. He was talking to someone, and was too busy to pay attention to her.
Arkal was, by now, used to the phenomenon of Jen dying on him, and was strangely encouraged by the heft of her clammy, semiconscious body. A reminder of what he was fighting for helped him put up with the Ovoid fragments’ rambling as he pushed his way through to the distant form of Reinhardt. ”Look to the tree, Arkal,” urged one. ”It uses the power at its disposal to consume, to destroy, to spread itself and grow roots, because it is a living thing and this is its nature. Why would you deny humanity the same ambition?”
”Shut up,” replied Arkal.
The fragment shut up, but another one appeared beside it and took its place. ”The Amalgam knows you too well to be angry, Arkal. It pities you. You can’t see things from all the angles that it can. You lack the wholeness, its perfect lack of hard edges, the divine purpose that drives it. It can help you awaken to a higher calling.”
”Shut up.”
”Your moral belief is that the world is torn between the selfish and the selfless,” claimed a third fragment, ”But the philosophy of ethics, much like spacetime, has more dimensions than you realize. It’s possible to be both self-serving and altruistic at the same time when you’re at harmony with all around you. Life is the most beautiful song in the world, and you’re only hearing one note. The Amalgam only wants to open your ears to the music!”
Arkal walked past the fragment with a brusque, “Shut up!” Jen murmured something, which he assumed to be agreement.
”Your pretense of moral high ground here is baffling. Have you forgotten that you’ve spent your entire life building weapons of war? And the girl under your arm, do you have any idea how many living things she had to kill to become queen of the vermin and the half-breeds? Ask her sometime, if she doesn’t die.”
”Shut up!” Arkal pushed this fragment aside, and it vanished, being replaced with a large, floating beige ovoid.
”It can save her,” insisted a voice from behind the blacksmith. ”Your ‘Ovoid’ can save everybody. Rotating around the multiverse has multiplied what power it had. Now it can end this battle and kill the Grandmasters and restore everything to what it’s supposed to be. We promise.”
”Shut up and get out of the way,” demanded Arkal. “I’ll deal with you later.”
”No,” said the fragment cheerily, pushing Arkal into the Ovoid. ”Now would be better.”
Jen’s oversized man-shaped crutch fell out from under her and she reeled and fell to the grass. The grass, she noticed, unsure whether this was a hallucination, was bobbing up and down, poking at her face as though searching for something. Jen plucked a piece of it out of the ground, and it flapped it roots at her sassily before shuddering and going still. This she took to be a worrying sign.
Her bio wyrm inching slowly towards her was a better sign, although Fantha looked to be almost in as bad a shape as she herself was. The grass seemed to cling to parasite and attempt to trip her up, but she had no limbs and therefore was not so easy to bind. Jen reached out her hand to her oldest friend, who was just about to curl around her wrist when the unicorn swooped in and picked her up with one long-fingered hand.
The presence of the Tender both gave Jen a renewed surge of energy and a reignited flash of pain as the tree in her brain responded to its servant. She rose to her feet and grabbed for Fantha, but Sen swatted her aside like an errant leaf, contemplating the object of its pursuit. It was a small, insignificant thing, and the arboreal gofer hadn’t the slightest idea what the Tree wanted it for. It was not only lacking in nutrients, but might well be toxic.
Taking the safety of his master over his own, Sen extended a tongue and licked the bio wyrm. Jen picked herself up again to witness gory events proceeding much as one would expect, given the prompt of anything licking a bio wyrm. The unicorn’s face, in turn, contorted in shock, was bitten into, lost an eye, split in half, went momentarily dead, sprung to life with a cunning new awareness, reformed itself, and made a half-baked effort to remold its mouth into something better suited for civilization. “Well, that didn’t go as expected,” remarked Fanthalion. “Are you alright?”
Inside the wyrm’s consciousness, which was more or less also Sen’s consciousness, the Tender’s mommy issues were uprooted and supplanted by a new and exciting form of obeisance. Still, a convenient familial bond between the world-Demeter and her Persephone remained, and Fantha immediately perceived the answer to her question as it turned Jen’s heart to bark and her blood to sap. The wyrm supposed she owed the poor something and that it wouldn’t do for the round to end and everyone to possibly cease to exist just yet, so she pushed the psychic link to slow the tree’s growth as much as she could. Of course, the fruit could only manage so much leverage of the trunk, so Fantha could only buy Jen a bit more time.
Jen at least felt good enough to walk on her own and do some critical thinking. “Someone sent this tree,” she decided. “Please tell me the merbitch isn’t back.”
”The magic signature I’m picking up from the World Tree matches Kath’s,” answered Fantha apologetically. ”If you want not to die, first you need to sever that connection. How do we do that?”
Jen tried the thinky thing again, with moderate success. “Green. Colors are power. How do we get a tree not to be green?”
”Know any magicians?” Fantha sounded more bored than engaged in saving Jen’s life, which reminded her of Xadrez. Where’d that guy gotten off to?
“Yeah, I just met one. There he is. Hey, Konka Rar!” The girl, who Rar by this point understood to be one of the true contestants of this battle, waved energetically in the lich’s direction. He sighed as she jogged over in his direction, like a contented, poorly-disciplined puppy dog. ”Sorry to interrupt the conquest, but I need a blizzard.”
”No.”
Jen groaned. “Well, fuck you, Konka Rar!” She turned to Fantha. “People used to do what I told them, you know.”
”I know, Jen.”
”Could you please move along? I have no interest in interceding in your... hmm... quest.”
”No.”
”Foolish wench!” demanded a lizard pope from space, the existence of whom Jen had been trying to ignore because it struck her as stupid. ”Your insolence before the glory of the savior Konka Rar is a capital offense!” The lizard pope (how had she known he was from space? she was sure that he was) raised his staff, presumably as prelude to some impressive-looking smiting, and was immediately struck by lightning and killed.
The human line had arrived. This particular squadron of Hoss’s minions was led by an exotic beauty with a formidable magical talent, evidenced by the fire in her eyes and the localized hurricane responding to every twitch of her upturned wrists. Konka Rar was impressed. ”In the name of the Hand of Silver,” intoned the enchantress with little passion in her voice, ”Surrender your arms or be crushed.”
Jen was getting rained on. “Hey, I’m on your side,” she offered uncertainly. “But our top priority is to do something about that tree, right?”
Cascala didn’t believe the girl for a second—her voice was instantly recognizable as the sort that lies, even when it’s telling the truth—but, looking up, she saw that the girl did have a point about the tree. Through the eye of her hurricane she could see its canopy beginning to block out the sun.
Konka sneered at the girl. “You’re pathetic,” he said. To the water-witch he said: “I’m made of harder metal than the silver that the Hand bought you with, woman. I’ll give you one chance to turn on your allies and join me, if only because you’ve murdered my last sycophant and left the position open. Following that, you have one chance to move along and feebly attempt to intimidate somebody else. That’s two chances total, which is more than I give to most who threaten me.” He smiled under his hood. “Be grateful.”
Cascala considered her options and did some simple math. “Very well,” she told the girl. “Help me to kill him first, and then we’ll take care of the gardening.”
This was not ideal. Jen looked over to Konka Rar. He looked tough; she did not. She glanced over at Fantha, who produced more defined shoulders on Sen’s body in order to shrug with. Konka Rar looked at them both and laughed. ”Any hope you harbor as to your chances, I’ll have you know I view as a personal insult. Do you really wish to take this any further, little girl?”
Jen was beginning to weaken again, as was her ability to think her way out of a situation. “Well,” she said, “If I help you kill her, do I get my blizzard?”
”No!”
”That settles it, then.” Jen instinctively motioned to grab her sword and then remembered she wasn’t wearing one. So she charged.
At the command of a parasitized Tender, an insipid World Tree root burst out of the ground and acted as a springboard, giving Jen the right leverage to send her bare foot into the conqueror’s exposed skull. Konka Rar staggered backwards and somewhat-deftly jumped over the assortment bushes grabbing at his ankles as he swung his staff blindly in the deposed regent’s direction. Jen took a ram’s head to the stomach as she ripped a branch out of the root and brandished it as a clumsy and ineffective substitute for a sword.
Konka Rar raised his arm to spare himself the minor discomfort of a stick to the face and signalled with his other hand to send a short-lived projectile chaos spirit hurtling into Sen’s misappropriated body. Before he could turn his magic on the absurdly minimal threat of the girl, an icicle punctured his ankle and sent him to his knees.
Cascala wasn’t prepared for the speed at which Rar retaliated, and only set up a watery shield in time for it to transmute into steam under the assault of the cyborg’s fireballs. Curiously enough, the World Tree reacted to the local increase in temperature and humidity by suddenly becoming tropical, sprouting large, water-gathering leaves and shooting branches upwards to grab the sunlight poking through the gaps in the sorceress’s neglected hurricane.
Jen discarded her stick, ripped a better-looking stick out of the yggdrasilus, and attempted once more to whack Rar upside the face with it. For her efforts she was thrown down by a strong gust of wind emanating from the lich’s staff. Before Rar could regain his bearings, however, Fantha ordered dozens of the World Tree’s massive, rubbery leaves to coat the surface of Rar’s face and start secreting every poison known to man.
It wasn’t enough. Rar dropped his staff and tore the leaves off of his face with a roar, at once turning his robes to stone to protect him against a barrage of icicles. A localized burst of force augmented by a few well-intoned words of power shattered his stone garment and sending shards of it flying into all his enemies and the tree besides, buying him a few moments to pick up his staff.
Cascala iced over the gash in her forehead and turned her attentions to the heavens once more, sending lightning down to do to the now-naked conqueror what she’d done to the lizard. Rar smirked, channeled the power through his staff into his arm, and began charging up what the enchantress had heard referred to as a “laser.”
Jen threw herself to the ground as the laser seared the air above her and bruised the back of her skull against an emergent branch of World Tree. Realizing that if Kath noticed her here she could be dead within seconds and that she was beginning to lose sensation in her fingertips again, she kicked at Rar’s wounded ankle, sending him to the ground. “Fantha, now!” she screeched.
Sen’s body was reeling from the large chunk of rock sticking out of its gut—the wyrm really could not afford to lose another host body—but she managed to summon forth three great stalactites of World Tree to impale Rar through the skull, the heart, and the navel. Everything went quiet except for the pitter-patter of the rain and the low rumble of the tree consuming everything in its path. Fantha ripped the rocks out of Sen, did her best to stem the damage, and turned to Cascala. “That blizzard. Please.”
Cascala had long since been indoctrinated with the teachings of the Hand of Silver, but looking at the teenage human girl dying amidst the leaves and the inhuman thing that had just killed Konka Rar, she knew to whom she owed a real debt of respect. “Are you sure you want to harm the tree?” she asked. “It is the sort of weapon that could change the tide of this war. It already has.”
”Harm the tree?” answered Fantha. “That would take a lot more than a blizzard. We know what we’re doing, trust us.”
Cascala sighed and raised her arms above her head.
High up above, surveying the growth of her tree with some pride, Kath swiftly began to see the landling logic in wearing clothes. Her perpetually-damp skin began to crystallize as the temperature dropped thirty degrees in a manner of minutes.
In the time the future queen took to cross her arms over her chest, the World Tree had already reacted. It’s myriad assortment of leaves, vines and needles turned from green, to yellow, to red, to brown and began to flake off. Kath felt something like psychic whiplash. “Shit,” she said. Xadrez looked on impassively.
Fanthalion, too, felt the chlorophyll leaking out of her host body. The psychic-pheremonal connection between her and the tree dimmed a little in absence of magical assistance, but she could still feel it pulsing away in Jen’s head. She picked up her former host and went to seek out Holly Tallbirch.
Holly, even on her best days, was conspicuous enough that she was never that hard to find. Amidst the battle she seemed to have gotten herself into a confrontation of a personal nature.
”No, I don’t know you. Why would I know a non-human?” Algernon wasn’t much of a warrior, but had agreed to tag along with Reinhardt’s army in case he could be of some use to someone.
”Well, Algernon,” mocked Holly, hands on hips, “Maybe you have a power that makes you forget things, so maybe I would know who you knew better than you knew who you knew!”
Algernon was positive there was a flaw in that logic somewhere—elves, he had been informed by Reinhardt, had adapted sharp ears and sharp tongues to better produce and receive lies—which was hot, in a weird way—in any case, he couldn’t express his complaints because a rotten, infected Tender lifted him up by the worm on his head.
”Hey, H-Bomb,” said Fantha through Sen’s mouth. “Would you believe this is Tor talking? It is, kind of. I need your help.”
”Don’t hurt him!” whimpered Holly, which struck the bio wyrm as largely out of character.
”Ow ow ow ow ow ow”
Fantha tossed Jen’s rapidly-fading body at Holly’s feet. “Jen has some bad feelings inside of her,” she said. “We need you to get them out.”
”Do what it says!” cried Algernon. “This really hurts, and anyway she doesn’t look so good!”
Jen mumbled something.
”Okay, fine. Algernon, I’ll deal with you in a minute.” Holly perceived the problem right away. “You’re feeling... tree?” she asked Jen, who only mumbled incoherently in return. “Damn. Alright, I can do this, I can save you, but this thing’s grown roots into your entire psyche. Understand?”
Mumble mumble.
”I’ll need to upturn all the soil... Gods, I’m sorry, I’m talking in metaphors. Basically what I’m saying is this is going to hurt. Physically, emotionally... it’ll bring out things that were buried. Wait, that’s soil again. Dammit.”
Mumble mumble!
Holly took a deep breath. “Alright. On three.” She put her hands up against Jen’s temples, which didn’t help, but felt better, somehow. “One. Two. Thr—“
Jen screamed.
Everything was starting to fade out and become blurry, except for the tree, which only kept growing and becoming clearer. It was beautiful, really—the apotheosis of nature in green and brown and birch white, it smelled like spring and autumn all at once with an aftertaste of blood, or else Jen was just bleeding. As last sights go, it wouldn’t be so bad. Bested by a magic she would never understand, enveloped by green, headache gone, no pain, everything fading.
But of course that wasn’t going to happen. Jen caught sight of her trusty bio wyrm peeking over a dead werewolf and loosely reached down to grab her. Arkal, presuming the her to be slipping out of his grip, pulled her upwards in spite of her faintly-worded complaints. He was talking to someone, and was too busy to pay attention to her.
Arkal was, by now, used to the phenomenon of Jen dying on him, and was strangely encouraged by the heft of her clammy, semiconscious body. A reminder of what he was fighting for helped him put up with the Ovoid fragments’ rambling as he pushed his way through to the distant form of Reinhardt. ”Look to the tree, Arkal,” urged one. ”It uses the power at its disposal to consume, to destroy, to spread itself and grow roots, because it is a living thing and this is its nature. Why would you deny humanity the same ambition?”
”Shut up,” replied Arkal.
The fragment shut up, but another one appeared beside it and took its place. ”The Amalgam knows you too well to be angry, Arkal. It pities you. You can’t see things from all the angles that it can. You lack the wholeness, its perfect lack of hard edges, the divine purpose that drives it. It can help you awaken to a higher calling.”
”Shut up.”
”Your moral belief is that the world is torn between the selfish and the selfless,” claimed a third fragment, ”But the philosophy of ethics, much like spacetime, has more dimensions than you realize. It’s possible to be both self-serving and altruistic at the same time when you’re at harmony with all around you. Life is the most beautiful song in the world, and you’re only hearing one note. The Amalgam only wants to open your ears to the music!”
Arkal walked past the fragment with a brusque, “Shut up!” Jen murmured something, which he assumed to be agreement.
”Your pretense of moral high ground here is baffling. Have you forgotten that you’ve spent your entire life building weapons of war? And the girl under your arm, do you have any idea how many living things she had to kill to become queen of the vermin and the half-breeds? Ask her sometime, if she doesn’t die.”
”Shut up!” Arkal pushed this fragment aside, and it vanished, being replaced with a large, floating beige ovoid.
”It can save her,” insisted a voice from behind the blacksmith. ”Your ‘Ovoid’ can save everybody. Rotating around the multiverse has multiplied what power it had. Now it can end this battle and kill the Grandmasters and restore everything to what it’s supposed to be. We promise.”
”Shut up and get out of the way,” demanded Arkal. “I’ll deal with you later.”
”No,” said the fragment cheerily, pushing Arkal into the Ovoid. ”Now would be better.”
Jen’s oversized man-shaped crutch fell out from under her and she reeled and fell to the grass. The grass, she noticed, unsure whether this was a hallucination, was bobbing up and down, poking at her face as though searching for something. Jen plucked a piece of it out of the ground, and it flapped it roots at her sassily before shuddering and going still. This she took to be a worrying sign.
Her bio wyrm inching slowly towards her was a better sign, although Fantha looked to be almost in as bad a shape as she herself was. The grass seemed to cling to parasite and attempt to trip her up, but she had no limbs and therefore was not so easy to bind. Jen reached out her hand to her oldest friend, who was just about to curl around her wrist when the unicorn swooped in and picked her up with one long-fingered hand.
The presence of the Tender both gave Jen a renewed surge of energy and a reignited flash of pain as the tree in her brain responded to its servant. She rose to her feet and grabbed for Fantha, but Sen swatted her aside like an errant leaf, contemplating the object of its pursuit. It was a small, insignificant thing, and the arboreal gofer hadn’t the slightest idea what the Tree wanted it for. It was not only lacking in nutrients, but might well be toxic.
Taking the safety of his master over his own, Sen extended a tongue and licked the bio wyrm. Jen picked herself up again to witness gory events proceeding much as one would expect, given the prompt of anything licking a bio wyrm. The unicorn’s face, in turn, contorted in shock, was bitten into, lost an eye, split in half, went momentarily dead, sprung to life with a cunning new awareness, reformed itself, and made a half-baked effort to remold its mouth into something better suited for civilization. “Well, that didn’t go as expected,” remarked Fanthalion. “Are you alright?”
Inside the wyrm’s consciousness, which was more or less also Sen’s consciousness, the Tender’s mommy issues were uprooted and supplanted by a new and exciting form of obeisance. Still, a convenient familial bond between the world-Demeter and her Persephone remained, and Fantha immediately perceived the answer to her question as it turned Jen’s heart to bark and her blood to sap. The wyrm supposed she owed the poor something and that it wouldn’t do for the round to end and everyone to possibly cease to exist just yet, so she pushed the psychic link to slow the tree’s growth as much as she could. Of course, the fruit could only manage so much leverage of the trunk, so Fantha could only buy Jen a bit more time.
Jen at least felt good enough to walk on her own and do some critical thinking. “Someone sent this tree,” she decided. “Please tell me the merbitch isn’t back.”
”The magic signature I’m picking up from the World Tree matches Kath’s,” answered Fantha apologetically. ”If you want not to die, first you need to sever that connection. How do we do that?”
Jen tried the thinky thing again, with moderate success. “Green. Colors are power. How do we get a tree not to be green?”
”Know any magicians?” Fantha sounded more bored than engaged in saving Jen’s life, which reminded her of Xadrez. Where’d that guy gotten off to?
“Yeah, I just met one. There he is. Hey, Konka Rar!” The girl, who Rar by this point understood to be one of the true contestants of this battle, waved energetically in the lich’s direction. He sighed as she jogged over in his direction, like a contented, poorly-disciplined puppy dog. ”Sorry to interrupt the conquest, but I need a blizzard.”
”No.”
Jen groaned. “Well, fuck you, Konka Rar!” She turned to Fantha. “People used to do what I told them, you know.”
”I know, Jen.”
”Could you please move along? I have no interest in interceding in your... hmm... quest.”
”No.”
”Foolish wench!” demanded a lizard pope from space, the existence of whom Jen had been trying to ignore because it struck her as stupid. ”Your insolence before the glory of the savior Konka Rar is a capital offense!” The lizard pope (how had she known he was from space? she was sure that he was) raised his staff, presumably as prelude to some impressive-looking smiting, and was immediately struck by lightning and killed.
The human line had arrived. This particular squadron of Hoss’s minions was led by an exotic beauty with a formidable magical talent, evidenced by the fire in her eyes and the localized hurricane responding to every twitch of her upturned wrists. Konka Rar was impressed. ”In the name of the Hand of Silver,” intoned the enchantress with little passion in her voice, ”Surrender your arms or be crushed.”
Jen was getting rained on. “Hey, I’m on your side,” she offered uncertainly. “But our top priority is to do something about that tree, right?”
Cascala didn’t believe the girl for a second—her voice was instantly recognizable as the sort that lies, even when it’s telling the truth—but, looking up, she saw that the girl did have a point about the tree. Through the eye of her hurricane she could see its canopy beginning to block out the sun.
Konka sneered at the girl. “You’re pathetic,” he said. To the water-witch he said: “I’m made of harder metal than the silver that the Hand bought you with, woman. I’ll give you one chance to turn on your allies and join me, if only because you’ve murdered my last sycophant and left the position open. Following that, you have one chance to move along and feebly attempt to intimidate somebody else. That’s two chances total, which is more than I give to most who threaten me.” He smiled under his hood. “Be grateful.”
Cascala considered her options and did some simple math. “Very well,” she told the girl. “Help me to kill him first, and then we’ll take care of the gardening.”
This was not ideal. Jen looked over to Konka Rar. He looked tough; she did not. She glanced over at Fantha, who produced more defined shoulders on Sen’s body in order to shrug with. Konka Rar looked at them both and laughed. ”Any hope you harbor as to your chances, I’ll have you know I view as a personal insult. Do you really wish to take this any further, little girl?”
Jen was beginning to weaken again, as was her ability to think her way out of a situation. “Well,” she said, “If I help you kill her, do I get my blizzard?”
”No!”
”That settles it, then.” Jen instinctively motioned to grab her sword and then remembered she wasn’t wearing one. So she charged.
At the command of a parasitized Tender, an insipid World Tree root burst out of the ground and acted as a springboard, giving Jen the right leverage to send her bare foot into the conqueror’s exposed skull. Konka Rar staggered backwards and somewhat-deftly jumped over the assortment bushes grabbing at his ankles as he swung his staff blindly in the deposed regent’s direction. Jen took a ram’s head to the stomach as she ripped a branch out of the root and brandished it as a clumsy and ineffective substitute for a sword.
Konka Rar raised his arm to spare himself the minor discomfort of a stick to the face and signalled with his other hand to send a short-lived projectile chaos spirit hurtling into Sen’s misappropriated body. Before he could turn his magic on the absurdly minimal threat of the girl, an icicle punctured his ankle and sent him to his knees.
Cascala wasn’t prepared for the speed at which Rar retaliated, and only set up a watery shield in time for it to transmute into steam under the assault of the cyborg’s fireballs. Curiously enough, the World Tree reacted to the local increase in temperature and humidity by suddenly becoming tropical, sprouting large, water-gathering leaves and shooting branches upwards to grab the sunlight poking through the gaps in the sorceress’s neglected hurricane.
Jen discarded her stick, ripped a better-looking stick out of the yggdrasilus, and attempted once more to whack Rar upside the face with it. For her efforts she was thrown down by a strong gust of wind emanating from the lich’s staff. Before Rar could regain his bearings, however, Fantha ordered dozens of the World Tree’s massive, rubbery leaves to coat the surface of Rar’s face and start secreting every poison known to man.
It wasn’t enough. Rar dropped his staff and tore the leaves off of his face with a roar, at once turning his robes to stone to protect him against a barrage of icicles. A localized burst of force augmented by a few well-intoned words of power shattered his stone garment and sending shards of it flying into all his enemies and the tree besides, buying him a few moments to pick up his staff.
Cascala iced over the gash in her forehead and turned her attentions to the heavens once more, sending lightning down to do to the now-naked conqueror what she’d done to the lizard. Rar smirked, channeled the power through his staff into his arm, and began charging up what the enchantress had heard referred to as a “laser.”
Jen threw herself to the ground as the laser seared the air above her and bruised the back of her skull against an emergent branch of World Tree. Realizing that if Kath noticed her here she could be dead within seconds and that she was beginning to lose sensation in her fingertips again, she kicked at Rar’s wounded ankle, sending him to the ground. “Fantha, now!” she screeched.
Sen’s body was reeling from the large chunk of rock sticking out of its gut—the wyrm really could not afford to lose another host body—but she managed to summon forth three great stalactites of World Tree to impale Rar through the skull, the heart, and the navel. Everything went quiet except for the pitter-patter of the rain and the low rumble of the tree consuming everything in its path. Fantha ripped the rocks out of Sen, did her best to stem the damage, and turned to Cascala. “That blizzard. Please.”
Cascala had long since been indoctrinated with the teachings of the Hand of Silver, but looking at the teenage human girl dying amidst the leaves and the inhuman thing that had just killed Konka Rar, she knew to whom she owed a real debt of respect. “Are you sure you want to harm the tree?” she asked. “It is the sort of weapon that could change the tide of this war. It already has.”
”Harm the tree?” answered Fantha. “That would take a lot more than a blizzard. We know what we’re doing, trust us.”
Cascala sighed and raised her arms above her head.
High up above, surveying the growth of her tree with some pride, Kath swiftly began to see the landling logic in wearing clothes. Her perpetually-damp skin began to crystallize as the temperature dropped thirty degrees in a manner of minutes.
In the time the future queen took to cross her arms over her chest, the World Tree had already reacted. It’s myriad assortment of leaves, vines and needles turned from green, to yellow, to red, to brown and began to flake off. Kath felt something like psychic whiplash. “Shit,” she said. Xadrez looked on impassively.
Fanthalion, too, felt the chlorophyll leaking out of her host body. The psychic-pheremonal connection between her and the tree dimmed a little in absence of magical assistance, but she could still feel it pulsing away in Jen’s head. She picked up her former host and went to seek out Holly Tallbirch.
Holly, even on her best days, was conspicuous enough that she was never that hard to find. Amidst the battle she seemed to have gotten herself into a confrontation of a personal nature.
”No, I don’t know you. Why would I know a non-human?” Algernon wasn’t much of a warrior, but had agreed to tag along with Reinhardt’s army in case he could be of some use to someone.
”Well, Algernon,” mocked Holly, hands on hips, “Maybe you have a power that makes you forget things, so maybe I would know who you knew better than you knew who you knew!”
Algernon was positive there was a flaw in that logic somewhere—elves, he had been informed by Reinhardt, had adapted sharp ears and sharp tongues to better produce and receive lies—which was hot, in a weird way—in any case, he couldn’t express his complaints because a rotten, infected Tender lifted him up by the worm on his head.
”Hey, H-Bomb,” said Fantha through Sen’s mouth. “Would you believe this is Tor talking? It is, kind of. I need your help.”
”Don’t hurt him!” whimpered Holly, which struck the bio wyrm as largely out of character.
”Ow ow ow ow ow ow”
Fantha tossed Jen’s rapidly-fading body at Holly’s feet. “Jen has some bad feelings inside of her,” she said. “We need you to get them out.”
”Do what it says!” cried Algernon. “This really hurts, and anyway she doesn’t look so good!”
Jen mumbled something.
”Okay, fine. Algernon, I’ll deal with you in a minute.” Holly perceived the problem right away. “You’re feeling... tree?” she asked Jen, who only mumbled incoherently in return. “Damn. Alright, I can do this, I can save you, but this thing’s grown roots into your entire psyche. Understand?”
Mumble mumble.
”I’ll need to upturn all the soil... Gods, I’m sorry, I’m talking in metaphors. Basically what I’m saying is this is going to hurt. Physically, emotionally... it’ll bring out things that were buried. Wait, that’s soil again. Dammit.”
Mumble mumble!
Holly took a deep breath. “Alright. On three.” She put her hands up against Jen’s temples, which didn’t help, but felt better, somehow. “One. Two. Thr—“
Jen screamed.