Re: Pitched Combat [Final Round: Simulacrum Citadel]
12-30-2010, 05:30 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
It certainly was somewhat difficult to go through eight fairly large and verbose tomes. Even more difficult when they all seemed written by a dyslexic. Still, Jordan got the general idea of things just by skimming. It was all fighting and fighting and alliances and sometimes escape attempts, all which failed.
Winning was out of the question for him. Maybe those dragons wouldn’t mind another go against these…stranger contestants, but like hell he was just going to go through this again.
But…it seemed the only other option was losing. Which meant death. Which was something he…just felt uneasy facing.
Okay, seriously, did every escape attempt fail? He thought skimming these passages would give him a hint about what exactly he should do next. Instead, it was just depressing him. Even more. Every book just showed hopelessness and inevitability, conveyed in a misspelled manner. Alliances were made and then fell apart as each member died one by one or one member turned on the others. Constant plotting and scheming against a fellow man (or…alien) in order to just survive. Random messages from a guy about turning on the grandmasters.
Wait, what?
There it was, in the sixth book or so, The Bortel Mjastec. There was a formless god or something and a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand, and a message from “Scandlor Rainhat,” a man who had somehow managed to transcend dimensional barriers (at least vocally) to make alliances among all grand battlers to overthrow the grandmasters and go home or something.
Maybe it was some sort of trick or a hallucination or something. But then, in the Souvague Bwarl, it was referenced again, sort of. At least he learned the name of the real man behind the other man (“Hsoo”). And, after skimming through a bunch of science bullshit, he learned, somewhat disappointingly, that the whole thing seemed to have some sort of ulterior motive…or something. (There was also the implication that there were even more battles, but by now, he wasn’t particularly surprised about that.) The point was, it was somehow possible to communicate to other people in other battles.
If you had the right equipment, that is. And he somehow doubted he did, judging from the technological stuff that littered the page. It would be nice if he did, though…though actually, no other contestants could probably help him escape. Even if they did, who knew when they would even be able to respond. But maybe if he sent a message…just something to last after he died (which he was now completely certain he was going to do; perhaps not quite happy with it, but at least not freaking the hell out about it). A message that would bring at least some importance to his life. Because seriously, his life was just a waste.
Guests. The Organizer had guests. Meaning, most likely, Grandmasters. Meaning he needed a way to communicate with them, like that guy, the Complower had, which was how Drawnard Skarlot managed to contact those two people from the future or whatever, and and and if this place also imitated what his guests’ places looked like, maybe that included their way of communicating and and and and
But the Organizer wouldn’t make it that easy. In fact, they probably didn’t work.
Did they?
Was it worth it to try to find out, at least?
And then a door flew into a bookshelf and fell to the ground. Jordan jumped and moved to flee again, went back for four of the books, and went back to fleeing.
----------------------------------------------
“Oooh, books!” Rong cried out happily when they finally managed to go in the direction Eemp seemed to want them to go. “They burn nice!”
“I’d really rather not see some fine novels go to waste,” Right said.
“You say you want fire, and now suddenly you don’t,” Rong grumbled.
This library seemed quite large and very fancy. A private library. But looking closer, Right quickly realized that all the books were nonsensical. At least their titles were. And none of them he really felt interested in. Even if he did want to read Vintatey Fare, he had more important things to do at the moment.
“I suppose we better gain some altitude again to find him. Again.” And it was only a matter of leaping up on top of the bookshelves and crawling about up there and being a little sneaky and listening intently and occasionally telling a certain blue dragon to shut up for once. It didn’t take long for them to pick up on the sound of pounding feet and, following that sound, it didn’t take long for them to actually see the young man running about below, like a rat in a maze.
“Heya, little guy!” Rong called out cheerfully before sending a friendly fireball his way. The bespectacled man turned at the sound of her voice and, waving an arm in a wide arc, redirected the stream of fire up into the air, where it just dissipated. Then he continued running.
“Why, exactly, did you shout first?” Right asked as Eemp kept up a pursuit.
“Uh.”
“If you actually have an answer for that, I don’t want to hear it. Let me handle this.”
Right didn’t actually find any torture devices that had to do with water, disappointingly enough, but he still had some water. Though it actually wasn’t water. But in any case, he sent this down now as Jordan randomly flipped through a book, apparently all the way to the end. He read something there and as a brandy-tea arm reached out to grab his ankle, he twisted a little, getting his foot out of reach just as it went for it.
Hm. Interesting.
“Hey! Hi! Um, can we please talk about this a little?!” he shouted, trying to pay attention to the ending of the Potched Kumquat while avoiding running right into a bookshelf while trying not to get killed by the dragons behind him.
“What the hell could you possibly want to talk about? The ways I’m gonna kill you?!” Rong replied, sounding a tad too eager for his liking.
“No! Look, I know I’m gonna die! I surrender and stuff! Just…I need to do something!”
“Y’mean like figure out a way to win?”
…Ringo blue ut norher pyrebll t th buy…
Jordan suddenly jumped to the right, out of the way of the fireball that Rong had been aiming at his back. Unfortunately, right led to a bookshelf. He slammed a shoulder painfully into the shelves, toppling them over, and stumbled a little before turning into the new opening he accidentally made.
“I’m serious! I think there’s something you oughta know too!” Oh god his shoulder hurt.
Rong launched more fire at him which he redirected to the ceiling. Right, who had caught on for a while now that something weird was happening, asked, “What is that you’re reading?”
“If you stop killing me, we can talk about it,” Jordan called back.
“Maybe,” Right started.
“Never!” Rong declared.
The two looked at each other.
“The hell’d ya say that, ‘maybe!’ You’re really growing soft! Geez, we’re almost done here, can’t we get this over with, already? He’s gonna run away again and then it’ll take us hours to find him and it’ll be so boring and”
“Look, I sincerely think that he might have something interesting to tell us that may be important to us as well as him and in any case he seems to be anticipating our attacks somehow, which I believe has something to do with those books he happens to be clutching”
“You know what I hear? ‘Wah wah wah blah blah blah I’m a scholarly wimp whine.’ If you had just let me burn everything down in the first place like I wanted to, this whole thing would have been over so much faster and don’t you dare say”
“Oh, of course, and the first time you decided to use your flexible and only solution, it worked out wonderfully for us. Remember that? Wow, I wonder why didn’t we use it more often considering”
Sumwhor, teh sunsd of the arging dragans dd noting to lessing th tenshon of th stichuashun. Jurdon luked oval hz shuldar an sow Iimp, shtl rinnun afte him, stairn blackly wif tat ficed miles…
It certainly was somewhat difficult to go through eight fairly large and verbose tomes. Even more difficult when they all seemed written by a dyslexic. Still, Jordan got the general idea of things just by skimming. It was all fighting and fighting and alliances and sometimes escape attempts, all which failed.
Winning was out of the question for him. Maybe those dragons wouldn’t mind another go against these…stranger contestants, but like hell he was just going to go through this again.
But…it seemed the only other option was losing. Which meant death. Which was something he…just felt uneasy facing.
Okay, seriously, did every escape attempt fail? He thought skimming these passages would give him a hint about what exactly he should do next. Instead, it was just depressing him. Even more. Every book just showed hopelessness and inevitability, conveyed in a misspelled manner. Alliances were made and then fell apart as each member died one by one or one member turned on the others. Constant plotting and scheming against a fellow man (or…alien) in order to just survive. Random messages from a guy about turning on the grandmasters.
Wait, what?
There it was, in the sixth book or so, The Bortel Mjastec. There was a formless god or something and a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand, and a message from “Scandlor Rainhat,” a man who had somehow managed to transcend dimensional barriers (at least vocally) to make alliances among all grand battlers to overthrow the grandmasters and go home or something.
Maybe it was some sort of trick or a hallucination or something. But then, in the Souvague Bwarl, it was referenced again, sort of. At least he learned the name of the real man behind the other man (“Hsoo”). And, after skimming through a bunch of science bullshit, he learned, somewhat disappointingly, that the whole thing seemed to have some sort of ulterior motive…or something. (There was also the implication that there were even more battles, but by now, he wasn’t particularly surprised about that.) The point was, it was somehow possible to communicate to other people in other battles.
If you had the right equipment, that is. And he somehow doubted he did, judging from the technological stuff that littered the page. It would be nice if he did, though…though actually, no other contestants could probably help him escape. Even if they did, who knew when they would even be able to respond. But maybe if he sent a message…just something to last after he died (which he was now completely certain he was going to do; perhaps not quite happy with it, but at least not freaking the hell out about it). A message that would bring at least some importance to his life. Because seriously, his life was just a waste.
Guests. The Organizer had guests. Meaning, most likely, Grandmasters. Meaning he needed a way to communicate with them, like that guy, the Complower had, which was how Drawnard Skarlot managed to contact those two people from the future or whatever, and and and if this place also imitated what his guests’ places looked like, maybe that included their way of communicating and and and and
But the Organizer wouldn’t make it that easy. In fact, they probably didn’t work.
Did they?
Was it worth it to try to find out, at least?
And then a door flew into a bookshelf and fell to the ground. Jordan jumped and moved to flee again, went back for four of the books, and went back to fleeing.
----------------------------------------------
“Oooh, books!” Rong cried out happily when they finally managed to go in the direction Eemp seemed to want them to go. “They burn nice!”
“I’d really rather not see some fine novels go to waste,” Right said.
“You say you want fire, and now suddenly you don’t,” Rong grumbled.
This library seemed quite large and very fancy. A private library. But looking closer, Right quickly realized that all the books were nonsensical. At least their titles were. And none of them he really felt interested in. Even if he did want to read Vintatey Fare, he had more important things to do at the moment.
“I suppose we better gain some altitude again to find him. Again.” And it was only a matter of leaping up on top of the bookshelves and crawling about up there and being a little sneaky and listening intently and occasionally telling a certain blue dragon to shut up for once. It didn’t take long for them to pick up on the sound of pounding feet and, following that sound, it didn’t take long for them to actually see the young man running about below, like a rat in a maze.
“Heya, little guy!” Rong called out cheerfully before sending a friendly fireball his way. The bespectacled man turned at the sound of her voice and, waving an arm in a wide arc, redirected the stream of fire up into the air, where it just dissipated. Then he continued running.
“Why, exactly, did you shout first?” Right asked as Eemp kept up a pursuit.
“Uh.”
“If you actually have an answer for that, I don’t want to hear it. Let me handle this.”
Right didn’t actually find any torture devices that had to do with water, disappointingly enough, but he still had some water. Though it actually wasn’t water. But in any case, he sent this down now as Jordan randomly flipped through a book, apparently all the way to the end. He read something there and as a brandy-tea arm reached out to grab his ankle, he twisted a little, getting his foot out of reach just as it went for it.
Hm. Interesting.
“Hey! Hi! Um, can we please talk about this a little?!” he shouted, trying to pay attention to the ending of the Potched Kumquat while avoiding running right into a bookshelf while trying not to get killed by the dragons behind him.
“What the hell could you possibly want to talk about? The ways I’m gonna kill you?!” Rong replied, sounding a tad too eager for his liking.
“No! Look, I know I’m gonna die! I surrender and stuff! Just…I need to do something!”
“Y’mean like figure out a way to win?”
…Ringo blue ut norher pyrebll t th buy…
Jordan suddenly jumped to the right, out of the way of the fireball that Rong had been aiming at his back. Unfortunately, right led to a bookshelf. He slammed a shoulder painfully into the shelves, toppling them over, and stumbled a little before turning into the new opening he accidentally made.
“I’m serious! I think there’s something you oughta know too!” Oh god his shoulder hurt.
Rong launched more fire at him which he redirected to the ceiling. Right, who had caught on for a while now that something weird was happening, asked, “What is that you’re reading?”
“If you stop killing me, we can talk about it,” Jordan called back.
“Maybe,” Right started.
“Never!” Rong declared.
The two looked at each other.
“The hell’d ya say that, ‘maybe!’ You’re really growing soft! Geez, we’re almost done here, can’t we get this over with, already? He’s gonna run away again and then it’ll take us hours to find him and it’ll be so boring and”
“Look, I sincerely think that he might have something interesting to tell us that may be important to us as well as him and in any case he seems to be anticipating our attacks somehow, which I believe has something to do with those books he happens to be clutching”
“You know what I hear? ‘Wah wah wah blah blah blah I’m a scholarly wimp whine.’ If you had just let me burn everything down in the first place like I wanted to, this whole thing would have been over so much faster and don’t you dare say”
“Oh, of course, and the first time you decided to use your flexible and only solution, it worked out wonderfully for us. Remember that? Wow, I wonder why didn’t we use it more often considering”
Sumwhor, teh sunsd of the arging dragans dd noting to lessing th tenshon of th stichuashun. Jurdon luked oval hz shuldar an sow Iimp, shtl rinnun afte him, stairn blackly wif tat ficed miles…