Re: Pitched Combat [Round 5: Garden of Shades]
12-04-2010, 06:17 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
To call the scene chaotic would have been a near-criminal understatement; the little pocket dimension was literally aflame, regiments of gardeners were scurrying around like particularly confused ants trying simultaneously to quell the invasion and the inferno, and frightened fruit-beings were shrieking as they ran from the juicer, the fire, and the squawking house-sized geese. It was certainly the most successful round from this battle in terms of sheer excitement for onlookers; it might have been in the running for that title among an even larger group for that matter.
It was a shame, therefore, that its primary audience's attention was rather divided at the moment.
Omnipresence is harder than it sounds; even beings like the Organizer that were at a higher level than most gods and indeed most of their peers struggle to maintain exact awareness over infinite points within multiple universes, especially if some of their mind is being focused through the cracked, dirty lens that is a mortal frame. That's not to say that the grandmaster wasn't still paying rapt attention to his battle, simply that the metaphorical eye was trying to watch two hypothetical screens at once. Details were bound to slip through, and multiverse-spanning powers were pushing the limits of the distance they could effectively reach.
As the goose was crushed, the Organizer was lecturing a rather uppity skeleton. As the Manikin's teeth bit into its flesh, a borrowed hand was lashing a proud mage with his own spell. As the puppet swallowed, temporal and spacial distortions were being channeled through a shell that could barely handle them. All it took was a moment's inattentiveness, and a seemingly-preventable event that was required to happen for the course of causality took place.
It is necessary to employ stop-motion prose at this point; the events that were taking place occurred in the span of mere microseconds. Feathers sprouted intermittently across the Manikin's ever-changing body, replacing and mingling with scales and spreading across the skin membranes that were its wings. A beak formed around the daggerlike dragon teeth that lined its mouth. A halfhearted webbing stretched across a claw or two. It all served to give the already-strange creature the appearance of the multiverse's largest, fieriest, and most awkward archaeopteryx for the briefest of moments. And then, with a flash and a squawk that was cut off before the air had time to alert the nearest of ears, it was gone. Dozens of unlikely events had colluded to allow the near-mindless Manikin to be the only contestant to escape its battle; had its timing coincided with any point other than the one it had, the Organizer's usual safeguards and intervention would have prevented the dimensional travel as similar ones had trapped more than a hundred other contestants before and since.
For that matter, even should the travel itself have been allowed, the next anomaly never would have. With the clock of narration slowing even further such that vision fine enough could have seen individual atoms as near-static clusters of energy and mass, the Manikin appeared in another universe. It wasn't used to its powers, and in fact hadn't even consciously used the teleportation ability; its mind hadn't had the chance to fire a single synapse since its appearance, and it never would.
The new universe was not only new to the Manikin, but new period. It wasn't even properly deserving of the term yet; it was just an infinite expanse of empty void with a single pinprick of superheated, superdense matter at its core. A spontaneously-generated seedling universe which was about to sprout. The pull of it was of course such that the Manikin was drawn inexorably toward and into it, with the current speed of narration such that one could actually see the mad goosedragon stretching and distorting around the singularity. In the blink of even this hyper-slowed eye, the first living thing this universe would ever see wrapped, mouthfirst, around the first point of matter it would ever generate. A clash of forces as were never seen outside moments like this one (or rather, moments like it was supposed to be) ensued, gravity fighting strong-nuclear, repulsion pushing against attraction, mass and energy near-indistinguishable as they tore into each other. But... It was complicated by forces this plane was never supposed to see; magic intertwined with gravity, enchantment butted against electricity, and the nonphysical elements of the Manikin's erstwhile being refused to fade away, forcing themselves into the very fabric of the universe's existence.
There was a Big Bang... After a fashion.
A universe proper came into existence... If it could be called that.
It wasn't a universe like most were; it didn't simply expand, letting its fragments of matter collect into stars and galaxies, but stayed mostly localized. The vast emptiness around it gradually shrank, the nothingness of space losing itself to the firm existence of the manikinverse. What there was of the abnormally-small universe writhed and changed, directed by what weren't quite natural forces but wasn't quite intelligence.
The eye of observation sped up. From watching picoseconds tick by like minutes to a speed where time ebbed and flowed like water and words like "year" and "eon" had no meaning, it watched the universe grow. It grew like none other before or since, gradually devouring the void around it until it was naked to the less familiar emptiness not of its own nothingness, but of the multiversal sea. It began drifting slowly through the True Void, seeking matter other than its own and evolving as it went.
No life spawned in the manikinverse, but that wasn't to say it never held life. It was a strange place, roving the multiversal void and colliding as it went with other, more traditional worlds. It was a place of mouth and teeth and eyes. It was a place of hunger and a great, beating heart. It was a place of rain.
And most of all, it was no longer the Manikin in any sense but essence.
The Organizer became aware of what had happened; it was frustrating, but it was already done, and he began the next round. Two beings vanished from the orchard, and for all anyone that matters cares, the orchard itself might well have vanished into nothing following their passage. The two surviving contestants, a pair that no sane grandmaster or gentleman had bet would be the two duking it out in the final round, reappeared. They were standing about fifteen feet from each other in what appeared to be a large, cement room, with banks of monitors along much of the walls and a couple of metal doors visible. The only other adornments were a large swiveling chair and a table with a cold tea set laid out for three; Jordan and the dragons' eyes rolled in their sockets, taking in the vast array of screens, each showing in impossible resolutions stills and video from their own battle and and situations they didn't recognize which were presumably other battles.
The ominous, high-backed chair turned to face them, and to nobody's surprise the Organizer was sitting in it, holding a glass of brandy entirely incorrectly. He smiled at his guests and gestured to the room around him.
"Welcome and congratulations, you two! Er, three. Fourish? Anyway, congratulations and welcome, regardless of how many of you there are. You should be proud! Only a few beings can count themselves as Grand Battle finalists, and now, you can too!"
He stood up and took a few steps towards his finalists, still smiling like an indulgent grandfather about to give ice-cream money to his grandkids in spite of their mother's wishes. "I must admit, I'm impressed, both in the general terms of this battle as a whole and with last round in particular. A wonderful show. And it's not over yet!"
With another sweeping gesture, he continued. "Traditionally, the last round is held somewhere near or important to the Grandmaster, and I'm certainly not one to stand on tradition. So, welcome to my base. You probably can't tell, but it's a bit like a friend's. To the untrained eye, anyway. The whole place reacts and changes with my whims and my guests, so it's not that static. Good for keeping things moving, certainly. I suppose you can think of it as a bit of a counterpart to the Orchard, really; there won't be people from your pasts and others', but there will be things and places, out of your own histories, but mostly from mine. A certain library comes to mind, of course, as well as a conservatory and a museum. Feel free to explore! But if you find a sealed portal, don't try to force it. Neither of you could survive the Timeless Interstice, and that would be such a dull way to end things."
"Of course, in fairness, I'll be sticking around myself. Also in fairness, and to keep things from being quick and boring..." He clicked his fingers and Jordan's skin momentarily glowed, wounds mostly healed. For a given value of mostly. He clicked them again and the boy was gone, whisked off to another part of the... building... thing. Despite the distance, he could still see and hear the Organizer as he spoke. "If you need me, I'll be over there."
He pointed, and as he did, the pointing hand disappeared up to the wrist. He took a step and vanished, the untouched brandy crashing to the ground. The finalists felt their invisible bonds release them and knew that the end had finally begun.
To call the scene chaotic would have been a near-criminal understatement; the little pocket dimension was literally aflame, regiments of gardeners were scurrying around like particularly confused ants trying simultaneously to quell the invasion and the inferno, and frightened fruit-beings were shrieking as they ran from the juicer, the fire, and the squawking house-sized geese. It was certainly the most successful round from this battle in terms of sheer excitement for onlookers; it might have been in the running for that title among an even larger group for that matter.
It was a shame, therefore, that its primary audience's attention was rather divided at the moment.
Omnipresence is harder than it sounds; even beings like the Organizer that were at a higher level than most gods and indeed most of their peers struggle to maintain exact awareness over infinite points within multiple universes, especially if some of their mind is being focused through the cracked, dirty lens that is a mortal frame. That's not to say that the grandmaster wasn't still paying rapt attention to his battle, simply that the metaphorical eye was trying to watch two hypothetical screens at once. Details were bound to slip through, and multiverse-spanning powers were pushing the limits of the distance they could effectively reach.
As the goose was crushed, the Organizer was lecturing a rather uppity skeleton. As the Manikin's teeth bit into its flesh, a borrowed hand was lashing a proud mage with his own spell. As the puppet swallowed, temporal and spacial distortions were being channeled through a shell that could barely handle them. All it took was a moment's inattentiveness, and a seemingly-preventable event that was required to happen for the course of causality took place.
It is necessary to employ stop-motion prose at this point; the events that were taking place occurred in the span of mere microseconds. Feathers sprouted intermittently across the Manikin's ever-changing body, replacing and mingling with scales and spreading across the skin membranes that were its wings. A beak formed around the daggerlike dragon teeth that lined its mouth. A halfhearted webbing stretched across a claw or two. It all served to give the already-strange creature the appearance of the multiverse's largest, fieriest, and most awkward archaeopteryx for the briefest of moments. And then, with a flash and a squawk that was cut off before the air had time to alert the nearest of ears, it was gone. Dozens of unlikely events had colluded to allow the near-mindless Manikin to be the only contestant to escape its battle; had its timing coincided with any point other than the one it had, the Organizer's usual safeguards and intervention would have prevented the dimensional travel as similar ones had trapped more than a hundred other contestants before and since.
For that matter, even should the travel itself have been allowed, the next anomaly never would have. With the clock of narration slowing even further such that vision fine enough could have seen individual atoms as near-static clusters of energy and mass, the Manikin appeared in another universe. It wasn't used to its powers, and in fact hadn't even consciously used the teleportation ability; its mind hadn't had the chance to fire a single synapse since its appearance, and it never would.
The new universe was not only new to the Manikin, but new period. It wasn't even properly deserving of the term yet; it was just an infinite expanse of empty void with a single pinprick of superheated, superdense matter at its core. A spontaneously-generated seedling universe which was about to sprout. The pull of it was of course such that the Manikin was drawn inexorably toward and into it, with the current speed of narration such that one could actually see the mad goosedragon stretching and distorting around the singularity. In the blink of even this hyper-slowed eye, the first living thing this universe would ever see wrapped, mouthfirst, around the first point of matter it would ever generate. A clash of forces as were never seen outside moments like this one (or rather, moments like it was supposed to be) ensued, gravity fighting strong-nuclear, repulsion pushing against attraction, mass and energy near-indistinguishable as they tore into each other. But... It was complicated by forces this plane was never supposed to see; magic intertwined with gravity, enchantment butted against electricity, and the nonphysical elements of the Manikin's erstwhile being refused to fade away, forcing themselves into the very fabric of the universe's existence.
There was a Big Bang... After a fashion.
A universe proper came into existence... If it could be called that.
It wasn't a universe like most were; it didn't simply expand, letting its fragments of matter collect into stars and galaxies, but stayed mostly localized. The vast emptiness around it gradually shrank, the nothingness of space losing itself to the firm existence of the manikinverse. What there was of the abnormally-small universe writhed and changed, directed by what weren't quite natural forces but wasn't quite intelligence.
The eye of observation sped up. From watching picoseconds tick by like minutes to a speed where time ebbed and flowed like water and words like "year" and "eon" had no meaning, it watched the universe grow. It grew like none other before or since, gradually devouring the void around it until it was naked to the less familiar emptiness not of its own nothingness, but of the multiversal sea. It began drifting slowly through the True Void, seeking matter other than its own and evolving as it went.
No life spawned in the manikinverse, but that wasn't to say it never held life. It was a strange place, roving the multiversal void and colliding as it went with other, more traditional worlds. It was a place of mouth and teeth and eyes. It was a place of hunger and a great, beating heart. It was a place of rain.
And most of all, it was no longer the Manikin in any sense but essence.
The Organizer became aware of what had happened; it was frustrating, but it was already done, and he began the next round. Two beings vanished from the orchard, and for all anyone that matters cares, the orchard itself might well have vanished into nothing following their passage. The two surviving contestants, a pair that no sane grandmaster or gentleman had bet would be the two duking it out in the final round, reappeared. They were standing about fifteen feet from each other in what appeared to be a large, cement room, with banks of monitors along much of the walls and a couple of metal doors visible. The only other adornments were a large swiveling chair and a table with a cold tea set laid out for three; Jordan and the dragons' eyes rolled in their sockets, taking in the vast array of screens, each showing in impossible resolutions stills and video from their own battle and and situations they didn't recognize which were presumably other battles.
The ominous, high-backed chair turned to face them, and to nobody's surprise the Organizer was sitting in it, holding a glass of brandy entirely incorrectly. He smiled at his guests and gestured to the room around him.
"Welcome and congratulations, you two! Er, three. Fourish? Anyway, congratulations and welcome, regardless of how many of you there are. You should be proud! Only a few beings can count themselves as Grand Battle finalists, and now, you can too!"
He stood up and took a few steps towards his finalists, still smiling like an indulgent grandfather about to give ice-cream money to his grandkids in spite of their mother's wishes. "I must admit, I'm impressed, both in the general terms of this battle as a whole and with last round in particular. A wonderful show. And it's not over yet!"
With another sweeping gesture, he continued. "Traditionally, the last round is held somewhere near or important to the Grandmaster, and I'm certainly not one to stand on tradition. So, welcome to my base. You probably can't tell, but it's a bit like a friend's. To the untrained eye, anyway. The whole place reacts and changes with my whims and my guests, so it's not that static. Good for keeping things moving, certainly. I suppose you can think of it as a bit of a counterpart to the Orchard, really; there won't be people from your pasts and others', but there will be things and places, out of your own histories, but mostly from mine. A certain library comes to mind, of course, as well as a conservatory and a museum. Feel free to explore! But if you find a sealed portal, don't try to force it. Neither of you could survive the Timeless Interstice, and that would be such a dull way to end things."
"Of course, in fairness, I'll be sticking around myself. Also in fairness, and to keep things from being quick and boring..." He clicked his fingers and Jordan's skin momentarily glowed, wounds mostly healed. For a given value of mostly. He clicked them again and the boy was gone, whisked off to another part of the... building... thing. Despite the distance, he could still see and hear the Organizer as he spoke. "If you need me, I'll be over there."
He pointed, and as he did, the pointing hand disappeared up to the wrist. He took a step and vanished, the untouched brandy crashing to the ground. The finalists felt their invisible bonds release them and knew that the end had finally begun.