Re: The Phenomenal Fracas! (GBS2G6): [Round Two: Witch's Haunt]
01-24-2011, 10:06 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Wojjan.
There was no air in the train. Or at least, that's what it seemed like if you would see the scientist's hands grasping at the door's jambs and the young man staggering through and almost folding in on himself the moment he touched the station floor. A mess of oddly coloured laundry sinking either in or straight through the floor. In either case it seemed like its constant spreading meant it would just dissipate soon and apart from an odd glance no one either bothered or wanted to check if by any chance those clothes were hiding something living.
The scientist recollected himself shortly after and in the same long-winded stagger in which he exited the train he found himself, after some time, staring at the strangest of sights. Cluttered around some setup of benches near a taffy shop, some people were grouped together to peer over an edge. Come to think of it, edges aren't that common in the middle of stations.
The world is round, Riko knew, and most of them are at that. Seeing an edge at any spot that just didn't continue either further up or deeper down, was also impossible. He was starting to get annoyed by how much fallacies physics was making today.
It took Riko some time to fully recognise the darkness at the bottom of the chasm. He knew that darkness very well by now, having seen it three times linked with the most suave of voices and a casual announcement of imminent death, and it was the Prestidirigent's. He also knew it wasn't like him, to cut off a round so abruptly, this time in a spacial sense. This, the scientist figured, was the end of the battlefield. It stopped here. It just... stopped.
You could imagine the result. Riko, a young man with an intense fear of trains and everything that sped through the ground, (he had a lot of those phobias, all of which he explained as just not being right. Lenses, for instance.) was stuck in a battle to the death where two out of seven people were about to die and he knew odds weren't exactly in his favor compared to last round and he didn't think logically enough to realise those odds would be less every dang time. And to make everything worse, the setting for this grim game of wheel of fortune was, would you believe it, a train. One that sped through tunnels too. And one with a station attached to it that sounded far too much like “carcass” and seemed to offer a way out which was even labeled a way out but instead just stopped as if to say, “I got you there, didn't I!”
Oh, now he got it. This is a nightmare.
what
Nope. He knew it wasn't a nightmare. Every single feeling, real or ethereal, every tattered piece of cloth winding around what little bare skin he showed, it all felt too real. If this was a dream he should congratulate himself when he got up and give himself the award for having the most descriptive dream and making his dream self metaphysically aware. Ish.
Then again, it would make sense. He wasn't dumb, after all, and he could easily recall the feeling of wind and the feeling of cloth and... No, wait up, until now he didn't know the feeling of suffocating. And, to be fair, that was probably for the best, too.
It was all very confusing and he decided to be totally unscientific for once and pinch himself to test. No given facts, no experimental requirements or officialities to fill in or out or whatever, just a simple pinch to test something. For some reason, he was nervous about such a plebeian thing.
He woke up.
He was still on the train, he just fell asleep for a moment. Sometimes hitting your back against a heavy metal pipe does that. He checked around him to see if he wasn't just at a very bad cop-out ending of a drug-induced nightmare. He didn't see his family, so probably not. He also wondered what potion could vivid dreams be a side effect of and whether he had discovered a new condition to pair with his inventions. But most importantly, why he was thinking of such a trivial detail at this point.
Then a pirate walked in. Could this day get any more screwed up?
-
Moments prior, Ripper Blackmask stood to face another encounter with the robot guards, while most of the dining cabinet had now since fled to the back of the train as the conductors quickly beckoned. For a grand return, so far he had little money in his hands. He made sure to note that down as a memo to future him. Steal more stuff. He'd add something ominous like “if you're still around!” or “for good!” but Blackmask never was too keen on phony horror, like the childrens' horror books of his day and age. Then again he might have been biased since a story once involved ninjas and none of them centered around pirates because those were “unethical” and “murderers”. He wondered when that thing was going to make a move so he could counter, and he was pretty sure they were both thinking that.
The train stopped. Blackmask was flung to the floor, barely avoiding the rolling dining cart headed his way. He was abruptly stopped by a door. Soon after, the door opened. That was just poor timing.
The robot, of course, could force Ripper down, but he didn't even have to try and break free. Splinters of glass darted through the room, water spewed from the hole in the glass wall. The bed of the lobsters' aquarium crashed into the guard, knocking him at least three rooms beyond. It seemed to the customers that the fish tank simply broke on its own, but Ripper was by now used to sand moving on its own.
“No. That will be my kill.”
Tamerlane had used the sudden momentum of the train's stop, and with a swift jump and an opening door he found himself in a dining cart, where the pirate was being outfought by a mere drone. Pathetic.
Ripper noticed how in an incredible flair the hunter perched in the doorstep, tethered clothing draping behind and beside him. He was quite annoyed by the show.
“Dumb move, grains-for-brains! You forgot ye'r messing with a pirate! I don't do gratitude!”
“I couldn't care less. But if you want to try your luck against someone who took out that robot who was winning from you in a single blow, amuse me!”
Tamerlane was a warrior in the desert, and had lived there most of his life, and so his only encounters with pirates were in stories, and Ripper was far from the cliché. For instance regular pirates don't carry around prisms with GRIM written on it that power up the user if they put gold in it. No, ordinary pirates just buckled swash all day. Whatever the hell that meant.
Ordinary pirates also didn't jump at him with full force.
Tamerlane was a fervent admirer of stylish kills, and had made of that a living for the past few years. Especially dodges with minimal effort, those just screamed “Look at me, I'm mean.”
So he just stepped aside.
And the pirate knew. Instinctively he grabbed for his cutlass. Or rather, his sheath. He remembered Tamerlane had shoved his weapon in the core earlier and of course, the law of irony demanded it, that would play a crucial part at a later stage. Just great.
He tumbled through the air a bit more sad from then on.
In a last desperate attempt at redeeming himself and dealing at least a single blow to the sandmaster, Blackmask flung himself around and hoped to connect with his fist. He didn't.
In almost the same instant he had changed his strategy and used that same fist to tug Tamerlane down. He didn't make that either.
He did, however, manage to straighten Tamerlane's torn clothes. Some sand fell out of them.
-
Moments prior to the moments prior, Tamerlane reflected on how exactly he got himself in this position so quickly. He would say it was only a minute ago a single robot incited the defense system with it's shrieking about bandits and robbers, but that expression would fall apart since it was actually a second ago. In a flash, a single tick on the clock, not even long enough to be worthy of a tock, he was surrounded. There was security everywhere, and for such a small cart and such an amount of foes there was distressingly little sand around.
This would turn out to be quite the tussle.
The four armed guards, each in a cardinal direction surrounding him stood silently awaiting Tamerlane's first move. He delivered. A false swipe in their direction was enough to alarm each of them at once and made bullets fly by as if they were made of astatine: Each one of them, every shot in each round of ammo was so carefully aimed not to make the bullet go to waste. It was clear to the warrior that the ancient trick of having them hit each other wouldn't pass in this fight.
The sandman swiftly ducked and skidded past one of the robots. The bits of sand hiding in his clothing whipped at the robot's gun with such speed they tore apart the fighter's own clothing. The net result, though, was as expected: The robot was unarmed.
It was near depressing, seeing each well-trained robot fall at the hands of a single fighter. Depressing, but not at all surprising. Tamerlane had spent years in training, no wonder he was proficient as he was.
The battler had next to no time to laud himself for an encounter won. The train screeched to a stop before he could as much as feel a hint of pride. Tamerlane's quick footwork kept him from falling over, but he did end up in the doorway of an entirely different room.
-
Moments later, Tamerlane stood more or less victorious. He didn't even have to act, the pirate or whatever had just tossed himself to the ground. He felt smugly superior over his apparent victory, and walked off.
“That's it? Ye'r not gonna finish me? Be a man, for Jones' sake!”
“Death,” the man muttered, “would be a disgrace to my hands were it yours.”
Tamerlane did however find the courtesy to kick some sand in Ripper's eyes.
“Yeah, fair. Real fair.”
-
And even more moments later Ripper would swerve into the first class department where a thoroughly stressed and confused scientist awaited him.
There was no air in the train. Or at least, that's what it seemed like if you would see the scientist's hands grasping at the door's jambs and the young man staggering through and almost folding in on himself the moment he touched the station floor. A mess of oddly coloured laundry sinking either in or straight through the floor. In either case it seemed like its constant spreading meant it would just dissipate soon and apart from an odd glance no one either bothered or wanted to check if by any chance those clothes were hiding something living.
The scientist recollected himself shortly after and in the same long-winded stagger in which he exited the train he found himself, after some time, staring at the strangest of sights. Cluttered around some setup of benches near a taffy shop, some people were grouped together to peer over an edge. Come to think of it, edges aren't that common in the middle of stations.
The world is round, Riko knew, and most of them are at that. Seeing an edge at any spot that just didn't continue either further up or deeper down, was also impossible. He was starting to get annoyed by how much fallacies physics was making today.
It took Riko some time to fully recognise the darkness at the bottom of the chasm. He knew that darkness very well by now, having seen it three times linked with the most suave of voices and a casual announcement of imminent death, and it was the Prestidirigent's. He also knew it wasn't like him, to cut off a round so abruptly, this time in a spacial sense. This, the scientist figured, was the end of the battlefield. It stopped here. It just... stopped.
You could imagine the result. Riko, a young man with an intense fear of trains and everything that sped through the ground, (he had a lot of those phobias, all of which he explained as just not being right. Lenses, for instance.) was stuck in a battle to the death where two out of seven people were about to die and he knew odds weren't exactly in his favor compared to last round and he didn't think logically enough to realise those odds would be less every dang time. And to make everything worse, the setting for this grim game of wheel of fortune was, would you believe it, a train. One that sped through tunnels too. And one with a station attached to it that sounded far too much like “carcass” and seemed to offer a way out which was even labeled a way out but instead just stopped as if to say, “I got you there, didn't I!”
Oh, now he got it. This is a nightmare.
what
Nope. He knew it wasn't a nightmare. Every single feeling, real or ethereal, every tattered piece of cloth winding around what little bare skin he showed, it all felt too real. If this was a dream he should congratulate himself when he got up and give himself the award for having the most descriptive dream and making his dream self metaphysically aware. Ish.
Then again, it would make sense. He wasn't dumb, after all, and he could easily recall the feeling of wind and the feeling of cloth and... No, wait up, until now he didn't know the feeling of suffocating. And, to be fair, that was probably for the best, too.
It was all very confusing and he decided to be totally unscientific for once and pinch himself to test. No given facts, no experimental requirements or officialities to fill in or out or whatever, just a simple pinch to test something. For some reason, he was nervous about such a plebeian thing.
He woke up.
He was still on the train, he just fell asleep for a moment. Sometimes hitting your back against a heavy metal pipe does that. He checked around him to see if he wasn't just at a very bad cop-out ending of a drug-induced nightmare. He didn't see his family, so probably not. He also wondered what potion could vivid dreams be a side effect of and whether he had discovered a new condition to pair with his inventions. But most importantly, why he was thinking of such a trivial detail at this point.
Then a pirate walked in. Could this day get any more screwed up?
-
Moments prior, Ripper Blackmask stood to face another encounter with the robot guards, while most of the dining cabinet had now since fled to the back of the train as the conductors quickly beckoned. For a grand return, so far he had little money in his hands. He made sure to note that down as a memo to future him. Steal more stuff. He'd add something ominous like “if you're still around!” or “for good!” but Blackmask never was too keen on phony horror, like the childrens' horror books of his day and age. Then again he might have been biased since a story once involved ninjas and none of them centered around pirates because those were “unethical” and “murderers”. He wondered when that thing was going to make a move so he could counter, and he was pretty sure they were both thinking that.
The train stopped. Blackmask was flung to the floor, barely avoiding the rolling dining cart headed his way. He was abruptly stopped by a door. Soon after, the door opened. That was just poor timing.
The robot, of course, could force Ripper down, but he didn't even have to try and break free. Splinters of glass darted through the room, water spewed from the hole in the glass wall. The bed of the lobsters' aquarium crashed into the guard, knocking him at least three rooms beyond. It seemed to the customers that the fish tank simply broke on its own, but Ripper was by now used to sand moving on its own.
“No. That will be my kill.”
Tamerlane had used the sudden momentum of the train's stop, and with a swift jump and an opening door he found himself in a dining cart, where the pirate was being outfought by a mere drone. Pathetic.
Ripper noticed how in an incredible flair the hunter perched in the doorstep, tethered clothing draping behind and beside him. He was quite annoyed by the show.
“Dumb move, grains-for-brains! You forgot ye'r messing with a pirate! I don't do gratitude!”
“I couldn't care less. But if you want to try your luck against someone who took out that robot who was winning from you in a single blow, amuse me!”
Tamerlane was a warrior in the desert, and had lived there most of his life, and so his only encounters with pirates were in stories, and Ripper was far from the cliché. For instance regular pirates don't carry around prisms with GRIM written on it that power up the user if they put gold in it. No, ordinary pirates just buckled swash all day. Whatever the hell that meant.
Ordinary pirates also didn't jump at him with full force.
Tamerlane was a fervent admirer of stylish kills, and had made of that a living for the past few years. Especially dodges with minimal effort, those just screamed “Look at me, I'm mean.”
So he just stepped aside.
And the pirate knew. Instinctively he grabbed for his cutlass. Or rather, his sheath. He remembered Tamerlane had shoved his weapon in the core earlier and of course, the law of irony demanded it, that would play a crucial part at a later stage. Just great.
He tumbled through the air a bit more sad from then on.
In a last desperate attempt at redeeming himself and dealing at least a single blow to the sandmaster, Blackmask flung himself around and hoped to connect with his fist. He didn't.
In almost the same instant he had changed his strategy and used that same fist to tug Tamerlane down. He didn't make that either.
He did, however, manage to straighten Tamerlane's torn clothes. Some sand fell out of them.
-
Moments prior to the moments prior, Tamerlane reflected on how exactly he got himself in this position so quickly. He would say it was only a minute ago a single robot incited the defense system with it's shrieking about bandits and robbers, but that expression would fall apart since it was actually a second ago. In a flash, a single tick on the clock, not even long enough to be worthy of a tock, he was surrounded. There was security everywhere, and for such a small cart and such an amount of foes there was distressingly little sand around.
This would turn out to be quite the tussle.
The four armed guards, each in a cardinal direction surrounding him stood silently awaiting Tamerlane's first move. He delivered. A false swipe in their direction was enough to alarm each of them at once and made bullets fly by as if they were made of astatine: Each one of them, every shot in each round of ammo was so carefully aimed not to make the bullet go to waste. It was clear to the warrior that the ancient trick of having them hit each other wouldn't pass in this fight.
The sandman swiftly ducked and skidded past one of the robots. The bits of sand hiding in his clothing whipped at the robot's gun with such speed they tore apart the fighter's own clothing. The net result, though, was as expected: The robot was unarmed.
It was near depressing, seeing each well-trained robot fall at the hands of a single fighter. Depressing, but not at all surprising. Tamerlane had spent years in training, no wonder he was proficient as he was.
The battler had next to no time to laud himself for an encounter won. The train screeched to a stop before he could as much as feel a hint of pride. Tamerlane's quick footwork kept him from falling over, but he did end up in the doorway of an entirely different room.
-
Moments later, Tamerlane stood more or less victorious. He didn't even have to act, the pirate or whatever had just tossed himself to the ground. He felt smugly superior over his apparent victory, and walked off.
“That's it? Ye'r not gonna finish me? Be a man, for Jones' sake!”
“Death,” the man muttered, “would be a disgrace to my hands were it yours.”
Tamerlane did however find the courtesy to kick some sand in Ripper's eyes.
“Yeah, fair. Real fair.”
-
And even more moments later Ripper would swerve into the first class department where a thoroughly stressed and confused scientist awaited him.
quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.