Re: Pitched Combat [Round 5: Garden of Shades]
08-25-2010, 06:26 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
Everything went to hell fairly quickly.
The blast from the gun had glanced off one of the gardeners without any apparent damage. The man who had fired cursed and somehow brought out an even bigger gun out of apparently nowhere. Unfortunately for him, a gardener had come up and snipped off the barrel of the rifle with its shears before grabbing the toughened soldier by the neck. As it attempted to drag him away, a woman with dark hair covering half her face tried to attack it with her sword while a wolf tackled it. Other beings joined in the fight while some attempted to run away in the confusion only to run into more gardeners. Soon it was a big, confusing brawl that seemed to have, as far as Right could see, flailing scarves, flying books, sentient gloves and, for some reason, a vacuum cleaner.
The Manikin looked rather befuddled and nobody seemed to be paying attention to the dragons. It seemed to be a good time as any to make an escape.
One woman leapt high into the air, intent on flying off, before being skewered by a thrown shear. There were several loud screams and alarmed yells as her body fell back into the rolling masses and Rong took this chance to start pushing her way through the crowd towards the edge, shoving aside anybody who was unfortunate enough to be too slow for her tastes. They left Sir Pellinore quickly behind, as well as his protesting yelps pleading them to slow down.
A horrible grinding sound started up and, looking backwards, Right could see the gardeners throwing some of the fruit-people in the machines. Though people were jostling him from all sides, he could still see them getting shredded and hear their screams abruptly die as they were churned into juice.
"Ah...Rong...?" Right turned back to her, feeling a bit queasy. "I...I think--"
"Not now!" she shouted back, pushing down some guy in a cape that may have been recognizeable had she looked closely enough. Another guy with a fishbowl or something saw her barreling towards him and somehow managed to vault over Eemp before landing on someone else's head. The both of them tumbled over behind them.
"But there's, well, something's, er..." He was suddenly interrupted by someone grabbing ahold of his neck. It was a strange-looking feathery woman.
"What are you doing?" Her grip was oddly strong. "We have to team up or else--"
Rong didn't like people holding them back. She twisted and grabbed hold of the wing that clutched Right and easily broke it in her jaws. The woman screamed and let go and they were off again. Rong licked the juice off her maw and said, "It doesn't taste too bad."
"I hope you know that that's disgusting."
Rong headbutted some other odd character out of her way and it hissed at her, swinging a tail that seemed to have some sort of roundish thing inside. "What? Are you feeling guilty?"
"I tend to feel guilty, yes, when a whole swarm of people are getting massacred."
"Look, it's just like--move it, buster!--just like the wars back home! Get over it!" This rather blunt answer was quite jarring, but Right had no chance to say so because the very ground underneath them shuddered as several large green tendrils shot upwards. One man was apparently controlling them all and seemed to not be on any particular side as he indiscriminately attacked anybody he could, machine, gardener and fruit.
The Manikin had also started acting, apparently quite angered that its food was suddenly getting stolen from it and it charged right up to the line of gardeners, devouring more fruit when it could. It released a flamethrower at the gardeners that tried to attack it and burned down the vines. The plant-controlling man did not like this much and started trying to entangle the Manikin and force it down while the gardeners tried to hack at its toughened scales ineffectively. Right didn't think it could have gotten more chaotic, but somehow, it did.
"See why we've gotta get outta here? We don't have any time for you to get all sappy on me!" The twisting vines were easy for Rong to take care of and they burned away quickly. This turned the strange plant-man's attention towards them as well and the gray grass beneath them started to entangle Eemp's legs. "Don't--" Right started hastily, but Rong had already utilized her solve-all solution of blasting everything with fire.
The field caught fire surprisingly quickly and now the crowd was even more bewildered and was pushing around in all directions at once. Some tried to stamp it out and the fishbowl-man even took out a fire extinguisher from somewhere to help out, but the fire simply continued to spread. It eventually reached a tree and at that point, the gardeners appeared to panic and rushed to the tree's aid. The fruit-people that remained saw the opportunity to escape and rushed off in every direction. The large Manikin chased after a group of them, intent on gorging itself even more. Rong, realizing that the advantage of a crowd cover was now gone, tried to pull Eemp along even faster, but was slowed down by Right. "Argh! What is it now?!"
The Chinese dragon had stopped, noticing someone rather familiar, and called out, "Hey!" The figure turned and, as he thought, it was the monochrome fruit version of that wizard who had, all those years ago, stumbled across his corpse and decided it would be a good idea to graft his head onto a large straw doll. The expression on the wizard's face was unreadable, but nevertheless, Right roughly grabbed his collar and said, muffled, "We need to talk to you."
"Who's that?" Rong asked immediately and her face soured in recognition. "Him? Why'd you get him out of all the--" Her rant was broken off when she noticed that they were suddenly being threatened by a large group of gardeners armed with a number of large gardening shears. Several juicers churned behind them, humming contently with the juice they now contained. According to a little glass measurer, the machine was full.
Unwanted baggage forgotten for the time being, Rong attacked with another large flame that washed over the gardeners, but as it died away, it seemed that they hadn't gone through anything besides a particularly warm bath.
"Iiiii am all out of ideas," Rong confessed again. Right didn't reply as his mouth was full of wizard.
Speaking of the wizard, he did not like dangling uselessly from a dragon's mouth. He attempted to ammend the 'useless' part by muttering some sort of spell under his breath and waving his arms, which caused several pillars of earth to rise up, impaling several gardeners in the chest. The gardeners did seem rather startled at this development, but got around the problem of being impaled by just prying themselves off with their lanky arms.
Rong glanced at the wizard, who seemed momentarily baffled and therefore still quite useless. "Uh, Right?"
Once again, he didn't answer, for, besides having a mouth full of wizard, the red dragon was concentrating hard on that tiny meter, that little window inside the vat of the churning juice machine. He stared hard at it. The juice bubbled once.
The meter suddenly cracked, and from there, the juice rushed out and into the air, swinging in a wide arc around Eemp before catapulting itself back into the gardeners. As they all toppled over, the juice froze fast to the ground to at least attempt to slow them down. Eemp immediately rushed off to a particularly thick grouping of trees and ran until the wizard regained his composure, tried to act as though he knew what was going on, and demanded to be let down.
"Now's a good time to stop as much as any," Right said, spitting out the collar.
"I didn't know you could do that!" Rong suddenly spluttered.
"Neither did I. But juice is like water. Sort of." But Right wasn't concentrating on the not-so-startling revealation that he could control juice and possibly other liquids that he had never tried before. "First thing's first," he continued, still staring at the wizard. "Your name. I don't particularly feel like constantly refering to you as 'wizard.'"
The wizard straightened is robe and looked sternly back at his creation. "I see you've gotten impudent in your sudden absense. Have you forgotten that I am your master and that you shall call me as such?"
There was a low rumble in Right's throat as he drew himself up and towered over the wizard, glaring down hatefully. "I know you don't fully understand what is going on, so let me englighten you," he hissed. "You are not who you think you are. You are merely a copy, and though you may have all of the original's powers, you certainly don't have power over us. You see, your little scarecrow won't recognize an oddly-shaped fruit as its creator and thus we are free to dismember you as we wish. And though I dearly would love to rip off an arm or two to drill it into your thick skull, I don't believe we have that much time and I am certain your screams would attract attention I don't currently want."
There was a stunned silence. "I didn't know you could do that either," Rong suddenly said.
"In any case, knowing your name doesn't matter right now. Actually..." Right paused, apparently thinking of something. The wizard looked uncertain for a moment before trying to appear stoic. "...Do you happen to have a teleportation spell? To take us off this..." There was a short pause that would have accomodated a small gesture at their general surroundings. "...world?"
The wizard let out a short bark of laughter. "Teleport between worlds?! Do you know how much energy that would require? Impossible!"
"And yet your beloved weapon has disappeared and ended up here, on an entirely different world." Right paused to let the very idea sink in. "If you can't teleport, then perhaps you can tell us our real names? The ones you have apparently wiped from our memories?"
"He what?" Rong shouted, looking from the wizard to Right to the wizard again, confused.
"You...how could you remember..."
"It was only off-hand, but I suddenly remembered a little while back that, well, Right is not my name. It was only your idiotic name for me, as though I was some sort of undead pet. I can only assume that you somehow surpressed it in my mind. Really, I can only feel stupid now for not realizing sooner, I mean, what sort of name is 'Right' for a Chinese dragon, hm? And now I would appreciate it if you gave it back."
"Look, wait, you...I don't know your true names, alright? I only just suppress it!"
"Then it'll be a simple matter of just removing that stupid spell of yours."
The wizard narrowed his eyes. "I'm no fool! Names are power! And you ask me to give yours back? Doing so would just give you more power, leaving me unable to...escape!" Right ducked under a thrown lightning bolt and Eemp had to jump about to dodge some earth pillars.
Rong needed no urging to shoot a fireball at the retreating wizard, but he countered with a water spell that drenched her. Right took the opportunity to whisk the water into a large ball and whipped it at the wizard's head, causing him to fall over. In an instant, Eemp was beside him again and several large icicles floated menacingly near the wizard's head.
"Ugh, I'm all wet..." Rong muttered. "Right? I think those scissor guys are gonna come soon..."
Well, we better hurry up, then. Last chance to be even remotely useful. Is there a way to undo your morbid operation?"
"Look, you can't--"
"And I'll remind you that this project of yours was done without our permission. I find this to be a little unfair, don't you? Would you like to wake up to find your head grafted to the body of a rabbit? No? Would you feel confused and wonder what sort of god had abandonned you to allow this sort of inhumane experimentation to be performed without your knowledge? What if you had been dead, ready to embrace the afterlife when all of a sudden, you were jolted back into an existance you'd rather not have? A satisfying life, a job well done, and suddenly you were forced to go through the whole troubling thing again? Can you really tell me what I can't do?"
Rong broke the tense silence by saying, "You know, they're probably coming really soon..."
Despite the situation, the wizard managed to hautily say, "You couldn't have remember that much!"
"Maybe not, but I intend to. And you're not helping a bit." The icicles fell and dug themselves into various parts of the wizard's body. "He's as arrogant as I remembered..."
"Yeah, well, they're coming close, and, you know, fire apparently doesn't kill them..."
"Yes, I know. Let's go."
A few minutes of running later and they couldn't hear anybody nearby. Eemp slowed to a walk. Right contemplated something a little before turning towards Rong. "How much of your life do you actually remember?"
"Well, there were knights...and I set fire to them..."
"That can't be all you've done."
Rong scrunched her brow and Right wondered if her brain was overexerting itself by thinking of something other than setting fire to things. "I...guess not? I dunno. I don't remember."
"No family? No childhood?" Right pushed.
"I...um...I don't know!" Rong shouted back desperately and he stared at her before looking around suspiciously at the other trees.
"I don't know either..."
Everything went to hell fairly quickly.
The blast from the gun had glanced off one of the gardeners without any apparent damage. The man who had fired cursed and somehow brought out an even bigger gun out of apparently nowhere. Unfortunately for him, a gardener had come up and snipped off the barrel of the rifle with its shears before grabbing the toughened soldier by the neck. As it attempted to drag him away, a woman with dark hair covering half her face tried to attack it with her sword while a wolf tackled it. Other beings joined in the fight while some attempted to run away in the confusion only to run into more gardeners. Soon it was a big, confusing brawl that seemed to have, as far as Right could see, flailing scarves, flying books, sentient gloves and, for some reason, a vacuum cleaner.
The Manikin looked rather befuddled and nobody seemed to be paying attention to the dragons. It seemed to be a good time as any to make an escape.
One woman leapt high into the air, intent on flying off, before being skewered by a thrown shear. There were several loud screams and alarmed yells as her body fell back into the rolling masses and Rong took this chance to start pushing her way through the crowd towards the edge, shoving aside anybody who was unfortunate enough to be too slow for her tastes. They left Sir Pellinore quickly behind, as well as his protesting yelps pleading them to slow down.
A horrible grinding sound started up and, looking backwards, Right could see the gardeners throwing some of the fruit-people in the machines. Though people were jostling him from all sides, he could still see them getting shredded and hear their screams abruptly die as they were churned into juice.
"Ah...Rong...?" Right turned back to her, feeling a bit queasy. "I...I think--"
"Not now!" she shouted back, pushing down some guy in a cape that may have been recognizeable had she looked closely enough. Another guy with a fishbowl or something saw her barreling towards him and somehow managed to vault over Eemp before landing on someone else's head. The both of them tumbled over behind them.
"But there's, well, something's, er..." He was suddenly interrupted by someone grabbing ahold of his neck. It was a strange-looking feathery woman.
"What are you doing?" Her grip was oddly strong. "We have to team up or else--"
Rong didn't like people holding them back. She twisted and grabbed hold of the wing that clutched Right and easily broke it in her jaws. The woman screamed and let go and they were off again. Rong licked the juice off her maw and said, "It doesn't taste too bad."
"I hope you know that that's disgusting."
Rong headbutted some other odd character out of her way and it hissed at her, swinging a tail that seemed to have some sort of roundish thing inside. "What? Are you feeling guilty?"
"I tend to feel guilty, yes, when a whole swarm of people are getting massacred."
"Look, it's just like--move it, buster!--just like the wars back home! Get over it!" This rather blunt answer was quite jarring, but Right had no chance to say so because the very ground underneath them shuddered as several large green tendrils shot upwards. One man was apparently controlling them all and seemed to not be on any particular side as he indiscriminately attacked anybody he could, machine, gardener and fruit.
The Manikin had also started acting, apparently quite angered that its food was suddenly getting stolen from it and it charged right up to the line of gardeners, devouring more fruit when it could. It released a flamethrower at the gardeners that tried to attack it and burned down the vines. The plant-controlling man did not like this much and started trying to entangle the Manikin and force it down while the gardeners tried to hack at its toughened scales ineffectively. Right didn't think it could have gotten more chaotic, but somehow, it did.
"See why we've gotta get outta here? We don't have any time for you to get all sappy on me!" The twisting vines were easy for Rong to take care of and they burned away quickly. This turned the strange plant-man's attention towards them as well and the gray grass beneath them started to entangle Eemp's legs. "Don't--" Right started hastily, but Rong had already utilized her solve-all solution of blasting everything with fire.
The field caught fire surprisingly quickly and now the crowd was even more bewildered and was pushing around in all directions at once. Some tried to stamp it out and the fishbowl-man even took out a fire extinguisher from somewhere to help out, but the fire simply continued to spread. It eventually reached a tree and at that point, the gardeners appeared to panic and rushed to the tree's aid. The fruit-people that remained saw the opportunity to escape and rushed off in every direction. The large Manikin chased after a group of them, intent on gorging itself even more. Rong, realizing that the advantage of a crowd cover was now gone, tried to pull Eemp along even faster, but was slowed down by Right. "Argh! What is it now?!"
The Chinese dragon had stopped, noticing someone rather familiar, and called out, "Hey!" The figure turned and, as he thought, it was the monochrome fruit version of that wizard who had, all those years ago, stumbled across his corpse and decided it would be a good idea to graft his head onto a large straw doll. The expression on the wizard's face was unreadable, but nevertheless, Right roughly grabbed his collar and said, muffled, "We need to talk to you."
"Who's that?" Rong asked immediately and her face soured in recognition. "Him? Why'd you get him out of all the--" Her rant was broken off when she noticed that they were suddenly being threatened by a large group of gardeners armed with a number of large gardening shears. Several juicers churned behind them, humming contently with the juice they now contained. According to a little glass measurer, the machine was full.
Unwanted baggage forgotten for the time being, Rong attacked with another large flame that washed over the gardeners, but as it died away, it seemed that they hadn't gone through anything besides a particularly warm bath.
"Iiiii am all out of ideas," Rong confessed again. Right didn't reply as his mouth was full of wizard.
Speaking of the wizard, he did not like dangling uselessly from a dragon's mouth. He attempted to ammend the 'useless' part by muttering some sort of spell under his breath and waving his arms, which caused several pillars of earth to rise up, impaling several gardeners in the chest. The gardeners did seem rather startled at this development, but got around the problem of being impaled by just prying themselves off with their lanky arms.
Rong glanced at the wizard, who seemed momentarily baffled and therefore still quite useless. "Uh, Right?"
Once again, he didn't answer, for, besides having a mouth full of wizard, the red dragon was concentrating hard on that tiny meter, that little window inside the vat of the churning juice machine. He stared hard at it. The juice bubbled once.
The meter suddenly cracked, and from there, the juice rushed out and into the air, swinging in a wide arc around Eemp before catapulting itself back into the gardeners. As they all toppled over, the juice froze fast to the ground to at least attempt to slow them down. Eemp immediately rushed off to a particularly thick grouping of trees and ran until the wizard regained his composure, tried to act as though he knew what was going on, and demanded to be let down.
"Now's a good time to stop as much as any," Right said, spitting out the collar.
"I didn't know you could do that!" Rong suddenly spluttered.
"Neither did I. But juice is like water. Sort of." But Right wasn't concentrating on the not-so-startling revealation that he could control juice and possibly other liquids that he had never tried before. "First thing's first," he continued, still staring at the wizard. "Your name. I don't particularly feel like constantly refering to you as 'wizard.'"
The wizard straightened is robe and looked sternly back at his creation. "I see you've gotten impudent in your sudden absense. Have you forgotten that I am your master and that you shall call me as such?"
There was a low rumble in Right's throat as he drew himself up and towered over the wizard, glaring down hatefully. "I know you don't fully understand what is going on, so let me englighten you," he hissed. "You are not who you think you are. You are merely a copy, and though you may have all of the original's powers, you certainly don't have power over us. You see, your little scarecrow won't recognize an oddly-shaped fruit as its creator and thus we are free to dismember you as we wish. And though I dearly would love to rip off an arm or two to drill it into your thick skull, I don't believe we have that much time and I am certain your screams would attract attention I don't currently want."
There was a stunned silence. "I didn't know you could do that either," Rong suddenly said.
"In any case, knowing your name doesn't matter right now. Actually..." Right paused, apparently thinking of something. The wizard looked uncertain for a moment before trying to appear stoic. "...Do you happen to have a teleportation spell? To take us off this..." There was a short pause that would have accomodated a small gesture at their general surroundings. "...world?"
The wizard let out a short bark of laughter. "Teleport between worlds?! Do you know how much energy that would require? Impossible!"
"And yet your beloved weapon has disappeared and ended up here, on an entirely different world." Right paused to let the very idea sink in. "If you can't teleport, then perhaps you can tell us our real names? The ones you have apparently wiped from our memories?"
"He what?" Rong shouted, looking from the wizard to Right to the wizard again, confused.
"You...how could you remember..."
"It was only off-hand, but I suddenly remembered a little while back that, well, Right is not my name. It was only your idiotic name for me, as though I was some sort of undead pet. I can only assume that you somehow surpressed it in my mind. Really, I can only feel stupid now for not realizing sooner, I mean, what sort of name is 'Right' for a Chinese dragon, hm? And now I would appreciate it if you gave it back."
"Look, wait, you...I don't know your true names, alright? I only just suppress it!"
"Then it'll be a simple matter of just removing that stupid spell of yours."
The wizard narrowed his eyes. "I'm no fool! Names are power! And you ask me to give yours back? Doing so would just give you more power, leaving me unable to...escape!" Right ducked under a thrown lightning bolt and Eemp had to jump about to dodge some earth pillars.
Rong needed no urging to shoot a fireball at the retreating wizard, but he countered with a water spell that drenched her. Right took the opportunity to whisk the water into a large ball and whipped it at the wizard's head, causing him to fall over. In an instant, Eemp was beside him again and several large icicles floated menacingly near the wizard's head.
"Ugh, I'm all wet..." Rong muttered. "Right? I think those scissor guys are gonna come soon..."
Well, we better hurry up, then. Last chance to be even remotely useful. Is there a way to undo your morbid operation?"
"Look, you can't--"
"And I'll remind you that this project of yours was done without our permission. I find this to be a little unfair, don't you? Would you like to wake up to find your head grafted to the body of a rabbit? No? Would you feel confused and wonder what sort of god had abandonned you to allow this sort of inhumane experimentation to be performed without your knowledge? What if you had been dead, ready to embrace the afterlife when all of a sudden, you were jolted back into an existance you'd rather not have? A satisfying life, a job well done, and suddenly you were forced to go through the whole troubling thing again? Can you really tell me what I can't do?"
Rong broke the tense silence by saying, "You know, they're probably coming really soon..."
Despite the situation, the wizard managed to hautily say, "You couldn't have remember that much!"
"Maybe not, but I intend to. And you're not helping a bit." The icicles fell and dug themselves into various parts of the wizard's body. "He's as arrogant as I remembered..."
"Yeah, well, they're coming close, and, you know, fire apparently doesn't kill them..."
"Yes, I know. Let's go."
A few minutes of running later and they couldn't hear anybody nearby. Eemp slowed to a walk. Right contemplated something a little before turning towards Rong. "How much of your life do you actually remember?"
"Well, there were knights...and I set fire to them..."
"That can't be all you've done."
Rong scrunched her brow and Right wondered if her brain was overexerting itself by thinking of something other than setting fire to things. "I...guess not? I dunno. I don't remember."
"No family? No childhood?" Right pushed.
"I...um...I don't know!" Rong shouted back desperately and he stared at her before looking around suspiciously at the other trees.
"I don't know either..."