Re: Pitched Combat [Final Round: Simulacrum Citadel]
01-07-2011, 11:56 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
Oh goddammit how is it that things could continue to get worse when it was impossible for it to. It was literally impossible, and somehow, now everything was worse. Oh dear lord he was running again and he really didn’t want to run so much god augh.
Wait. Where was he now?
Monitors, drab decorations (or lack thereof), impressive chair, weird device thingy, was this the place where they started? At least before the Organizer transported him over to the museum. Could he…do something with all those buttons? At least see if they worked.
As Jordan approached the bank of monitors, they all suddenly went black and then displayed the face of the Organizer leering down at him. “Hello!” said the Organizer
“WAAUUUGH!” said Jordan in return and he fell over backwards in his desperate attempts to flee (again). And then the Organizer was suddenly in front of him and setting him back on his feet.
“Surprised you?” he asked rather flippantly. “Oh dear, silly me. Must’ve given you a heart attack, oh my. I wasn’t done talking to you because I know how much you don’t want to win this and about all those other ideas you have flitting about in your mind like dramatic sacrifices and making your life meaningful. So before you go all suicidal prematurely and end this whole thing before it actually gets interesting again because frankly, you’re getting about as interesting as a stone wall here, I want to ask you; what message can you give?”
Jordan, still puzzling out the mess of dialogue, could only manage a “Whu—“
“Think about it hypothetically here, and let’s be generous enough to allow you the means with which to contact other contestants, hm? Then what can you say right now? ‘If you win, you go into another battle called All-Stars?’ Not a very important or helpful message.”
“I, um,” Jordan managed to stammer.
“Say we were generous enough in this hypothetical situation to give you, somehow, knowledge of how to destroy every Grandmaster and thus stop every battle occurring right now, everybody celebrates, we all get tea and go home. If you got this knowledge, do you think I would honestly just leave you alone? Because even if you found a weakness you could exploit, I could just erase you from existence, no underworld or whatever you believe in or anything. Or if I was nice, I could make it so you don’t even remember that you had the knowledge to begin with. You see? You’ve been chasing a romantic dream of a romantic death and neither will ever occur.” The Organizer paused for a bit. Jordan breathed heavily, yet did not move to take out his inhaler. “Actually, I never really thought of you much as a romantic. More cynical. Hm.”
Jordan took advantage of this pause and said, “I’ll, I’ll,”
“You honestly can’t do anything, kiddo. Face up to it already. In every single timeline, you couldn’t do anything. I seriously had to delve into an impossible one to get a Jordan that turns out somewhat interesting. Maybe I should have had him to begin with. In any case, even now, you’re running away when other Jordan’s possibly about to win this whole thing for you, which, as I remember, is something you don’t want happening.”
“I, er, what?” Jordan stuttered before suddenly flipping through The Potched Kumquat.
“Don’t bother. We’ve completely branched off what is going on in there. That finished before I decided to bring in Other Jordan. Which I suppose doesn’t make sense to you. Basically, that book is completely useless to you now, and yes, you did die in the end.”
“I can’t…I’m not going to…”
“Even if you were going to make good on your suicide threats, I wouldn’t let you end the game just when the action’s starting to get interesting. Actually, I was just going to give you something like a fair warning, you see? Try to end the whole thing now before a huge climax is even starting to boil, and I’ll have to…hmm…leave you in a state where you can’t kill yourself. I guess that doesn’t sound suitably horrible enough, does it? I’ll take away your pyrokinetic powers and put you into a disgusting, blobby, squishy little form where you won’t even be able to walk without your many little blobby legs shooting off all over the place as though you’re walking on banana peels. I’ll probably be able to come up with something even more horrible than that later. I have a fairly good imagination.”
Jordan stared at the Organizer for a long time. He heard a faint crash coming from some other room.
“So basically,” The Organizer continued, “You can either just keep out of the way and let your other you do his job and either end up winning or losing through no power of your own, or you could actually do something for a change and take part in the fight. I suggest if you don’t want to win so badly, you do something about…you. You know what I mean.”
And then Jordan took off towards where he thought he heard the crash come from. The Organizer just stood there, calling out, “Remember! Little blobby legs! It’s not pleasant!”
----------------------------------------
“I told you! I told you he was totally up to something!” Rong shouted.
“And I’m telling you I cannot imagine how he would be able to get a prosthetic arm, especially seeing as the arm is from that mannequin who died already, the sword from a swordsman who also died, and a complete overhaul of his personality in the few minutes we didn’t see him,” Right shot back. The elemental sword was making fighting troublesome, especially after Rong instinctively tried to set fire to him and it all went to power the sword and now he appeared to be on fire and taunting them. Luckily, the sword appeared to be stuck on ‘fire,’ so Right felt certain he could safely use his shitload of water to attack him. Unfortunately, the water was more likely to just evaporate as soon as it got near and if not, then it got eaten by the Manikin’s arm. Somehow.
“Unfortunately, this version of Jordan doesn’t seem to be willing to talk too much,” said Right as they continued running through random rooms. “It would probably be a good idea to disarm him. Though I can’t say I want to go anywhere near that wooden arm, considering where it’s from. So perhaps we should go about it literally.”
“Would you stupid lizards just stop so I can kill you and win my own battle!” Jordan B shouted out behind them, having found out through trial and error that he simply just couldn’t set them on fire. Finally, he just sliced his sword through the floor as easily as though it were melted chocolate, swinging it forwards and up. The flaming crack in the floor kept going, though, spewing fire and buckling the floor. It quickly caught up to the dragons and the shaking actually managed to throw them into the air. Being in a hallway, there wasn’t much air to begin with and they slammed right into the ceiling and emerged in the room above it.
“He’s probably going to be able to get up here as well fairly soon, so get ready,” Right said quickly while getting some water ready.
“Get ready for what? What’m I supposed to do? We didn’t’ go over a—“
Jordan jumped through the hole they had made in the ceiling/floor and immediately, Right reached out and grabbed the sword with his claws (oh dear god that’s hot) and, leaning in close to Jordan’s face, sprayed water from his mouth. It still didn’t do much, though at least it startled him enough for him to flinch. Then Rong came in and headbutted him, of course, shrugging off all the fire like it was nothing. Didn’t manage to impale him, though, but sent him backwards.
Right tried to keep his hold on the sword, but the wooden arm’s grip (hm, why wasn’t it burning away?) was too strong and coupled with the force of the headbutt, the sword just simply slid from his grip, taking some scales with it as well.
“Agh,” Right spat out in both pain and frustration.
“You alright?” Rong asked, biting back another smug remark.
“I can grow it back,” Right grunted as Jordan recovered and pushed himself back to his feet.
“Alrighty then, I guess this’ll actually be a little tougher than Hatman, eh?” he said, strangely cheerful. “No problem, no problem…” He swung his sword as though experimentally before charging in again.
“Okay, well, um—“ Right said before blocking a strike of the sword and gaaaahh that’s hot and this time Rong went ahead and caught the sword in her teeth and tried to pull it away but again, the Manikin’s arm kept its grip. Jordan then stepped forward to try to force the sword down to slice through Rong, so then Rong had to push back instead of pull. And Right came in and tried to snap the arm in two, but it turns out it’s hard to bite something that can bite back and also grow mouths everywhere so Right was biting it and at the same time it was biting him so overall, it was just a weird freaking tangle of stuff.
Then Jordan punched Rong in the…neck? And then Rong snorted smoke right in his eyes and he stumbled back and the Manikin arm let go of Right who took the chance to just rip a part of the arm off and then Jordan kicked Eemp and that pushed them apart.
And then they stared each other down until the other Jordan came stumbling in which surprised just about everybody, especially Jordan A. Then, quickly thinking, he collected all the fire that was engulfing Jordan B and whisked it away to form a fireball in the air.
Tough Jordan stared for a while then said a little casually, “I had no idea I could do that.”
Right took this chance to try to stab right through him as a sword.
“Hey, man,” Jordan B called out as he parried and moved to try to chop off Rong’s head but was blocked. “You, or me or whatever, I’d kinda like my fire back. It’s good protection.”
“Oh goddammit, why the hell are there two wimps,” Rong moaned, turning her attention to Jordan A in case he tried to flank them or something.
“I told you, this one isn’t the same Jordan,” Right said before turning back towards Jordan B.
“Look! Um, I don’t want to win! If you beat them, uh, I have to go through another battle thing, and I just don’t want to go through that again!” Jordan A shouted out. He jumped backwards as Rong snapped at him, causing Jordan B to gruffly call out, “You stupid blue lizard, you aren’t killing him…”
“Are you even listening to me? If you win too, you’ll just have to go through another battle against seven totally insane guys!”
“Yeah? And I’ll just kill those guys too. You really just wanna die here instead of win and fight again? At least you’ll be alive!” Jordan B spat.
“Is he arguing with himself oh god he’s arguing with himself this is stupid”
“Oh shut up we argue all the time—“ Right managed to get out before going back to the sword fight.
“Okay, I don’t want to die! I really don’t! But I can’t handle another fight! Maybe you can, but I just can’t!”
“Well, sorry, but I need to get back to my battle, you get it? And I can’t do that unless I kill these lizards, which means that, whether you want to or not, you win. That’s just how it goes. You don’t have to help me if you don’t want to. Really, though, help would be appreciated,” he added slightly hopefully after pushing back an attack from a giant broadsword.
Jordan A stood there for a while, getting glared down by Rong, still holding up a freaking huge fireball in the sky and not entirely sure what to freaking do. “I…uh,” he said. An idea crossed his mind. In fact, it had crossed his mind several times ever since his talk (or rather, lecture) with the Organizer. But he really didn’t think he could…I mean…sure, this Jordan was different than him, but he was still him, you know? You just don’t…I mean…you can’t…and also he was sure he watched or read something about killing yourself and then disappearing, but that was time travel but this felt eerily like that sort of situation and…you just don’t do that…and goddammit HE HAD TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW IF HE REALLY WANTED TO PREVENT HIMSELF FROM WINNING AAAAUUUGH.
Oh goddammit how is it that things could continue to get worse when it was impossible for it to. It was literally impossible, and somehow, now everything was worse. Oh dear lord he was running again and he really didn’t want to run so much god augh.
Wait. Where was he now?
Monitors, drab decorations (or lack thereof), impressive chair, weird device thingy, was this the place where they started? At least before the Organizer transported him over to the museum. Could he…do something with all those buttons? At least see if they worked.
As Jordan approached the bank of monitors, they all suddenly went black and then displayed the face of the Organizer leering down at him. “Hello!” said the Organizer
“WAAUUUGH!” said Jordan in return and he fell over backwards in his desperate attempts to flee (again). And then the Organizer was suddenly in front of him and setting him back on his feet.
“Surprised you?” he asked rather flippantly. “Oh dear, silly me. Must’ve given you a heart attack, oh my. I wasn’t done talking to you because I know how much you don’t want to win this and about all those other ideas you have flitting about in your mind like dramatic sacrifices and making your life meaningful. So before you go all suicidal prematurely and end this whole thing before it actually gets interesting again because frankly, you’re getting about as interesting as a stone wall here, I want to ask you; what message can you give?”
Jordan, still puzzling out the mess of dialogue, could only manage a “Whu—“
“Think about it hypothetically here, and let’s be generous enough to allow you the means with which to contact other contestants, hm? Then what can you say right now? ‘If you win, you go into another battle called All-Stars?’ Not a very important or helpful message.”
“I, um,” Jordan managed to stammer.
“Say we were generous enough in this hypothetical situation to give you, somehow, knowledge of how to destroy every Grandmaster and thus stop every battle occurring right now, everybody celebrates, we all get tea and go home. If you got this knowledge, do you think I would honestly just leave you alone? Because even if you found a weakness you could exploit, I could just erase you from existence, no underworld or whatever you believe in or anything. Or if I was nice, I could make it so you don’t even remember that you had the knowledge to begin with. You see? You’ve been chasing a romantic dream of a romantic death and neither will ever occur.” The Organizer paused for a bit. Jordan breathed heavily, yet did not move to take out his inhaler. “Actually, I never really thought of you much as a romantic. More cynical. Hm.”
Jordan took advantage of this pause and said, “I’ll, I’ll,”
“You honestly can’t do anything, kiddo. Face up to it already. In every single timeline, you couldn’t do anything. I seriously had to delve into an impossible one to get a Jordan that turns out somewhat interesting. Maybe I should have had him to begin with. In any case, even now, you’re running away when other Jordan’s possibly about to win this whole thing for you, which, as I remember, is something you don’t want happening.”
“I, er, what?” Jordan stuttered before suddenly flipping through The Potched Kumquat.
“Don’t bother. We’ve completely branched off what is going on in there. That finished before I decided to bring in Other Jordan. Which I suppose doesn’t make sense to you. Basically, that book is completely useless to you now, and yes, you did die in the end.”
“I can’t…I’m not going to…”
“Even if you were going to make good on your suicide threats, I wouldn’t let you end the game just when the action’s starting to get interesting. Actually, I was just going to give you something like a fair warning, you see? Try to end the whole thing now before a huge climax is even starting to boil, and I’ll have to…hmm…leave you in a state where you can’t kill yourself. I guess that doesn’t sound suitably horrible enough, does it? I’ll take away your pyrokinetic powers and put you into a disgusting, blobby, squishy little form where you won’t even be able to walk without your many little blobby legs shooting off all over the place as though you’re walking on banana peels. I’ll probably be able to come up with something even more horrible than that later. I have a fairly good imagination.”
Jordan stared at the Organizer for a long time. He heard a faint crash coming from some other room.
“So basically,” The Organizer continued, “You can either just keep out of the way and let your other you do his job and either end up winning or losing through no power of your own, or you could actually do something for a change and take part in the fight. I suggest if you don’t want to win so badly, you do something about…you. You know what I mean.”
And then Jordan took off towards where he thought he heard the crash come from. The Organizer just stood there, calling out, “Remember! Little blobby legs! It’s not pleasant!”
----------------------------------------
“I told you! I told you he was totally up to something!” Rong shouted.
“And I’m telling you I cannot imagine how he would be able to get a prosthetic arm, especially seeing as the arm is from that mannequin who died already, the sword from a swordsman who also died, and a complete overhaul of his personality in the few minutes we didn’t see him,” Right shot back. The elemental sword was making fighting troublesome, especially after Rong instinctively tried to set fire to him and it all went to power the sword and now he appeared to be on fire and taunting them. Luckily, the sword appeared to be stuck on ‘fire,’ so Right felt certain he could safely use his shitload of water to attack him. Unfortunately, the water was more likely to just evaporate as soon as it got near and if not, then it got eaten by the Manikin’s arm. Somehow.
“Unfortunately, this version of Jordan doesn’t seem to be willing to talk too much,” said Right as they continued running through random rooms. “It would probably be a good idea to disarm him. Though I can’t say I want to go anywhere near that wooden arm, considering where it’s from. So perhaps we should go about it literally.”
“Would you stupid lizards just stop so I can kill you and win my own battle!” Jordan B shouted out behind them, having found out through trial and error that he simply just couldn’t set them on fire. Finally, he just sliced his sword through the floor as easily as though it were melted chocolate, swinging it forwards and up. The flaming crack in the floor kept going, though, spewing fire and buckling the floor. It quickly caught up to the dragons and the shaking actually managed to throw them into the air. Being in a hallway, there wasn’t much air to begin with and they slammed right into the ceiling and emerged in the room above it.
“He’s probably going to be able to get up here as well fairly soon, so get ready,” Right said quickly while getting some water ready.
“Get ready for what? What’m I supposed to do? We didn’t’ go over a—“
Jordan jumped through the hole they had made in the ceiling/floor and immediately, Right reached out and grabbed the sword with his claws (oh dear god that’s hot) and, leaning in close to Jordan’s face, sprayed water from his mouth. It still didn’t do much, though at least it startled him enough for him to flinch. Then Rong came in and headbutted him, of course, shrugging off all the fire like it was nothing. Didn’t manage to impale him, though, but sent him backwards.
Right tried to keep his hold on the sword, but the wooden arm’s grip (hm, why wasn’t it burning away?) was too strong and coupled with the force of the headbutt, the sword just simply slid from his grip, taking some scales with it as well.
“Agh,” Right spat out in both pain and frustration.
“You alright?” Rong asked, biting back another smug remark.
“I can grow it back,” Right grunted as Jordan recovered and pushed himself back to his feet.
“Alrighty then, I guess this’ll actually be a little tougher than Hatman, eh?” he said, strangely cheerful. “No problem, no problem…” He swung his sword as though experimentally before charging in again.
“Okay, well, um—“ Right said before blocking a strike of the sword and gaaaahh that’s hot and this time Rong went ahead and caught the sword in her teeth and tried to pull it away but again, the Manikin’s arm kept its grip. Jordan then stepped forward to try to force the sword down to slice through Rong, so then Rong had to push back instead of pull. And Right came in and tried to snap the arm in two, but it turns out it’s hard to bite something that can bite back and also grow mouths everywhere so Right was biting it and at the same time it was biting him so overall, it was just a weird freaking tangle of stuff.
Then Jordan punched Rong in the…neck? And then Rong snorted smoke right in his eyes and he stumbled back and the Manikin arm let go of Right who took the chance to just rip a part of the arm off and then Jordan kicked Eemp and that pushed them apart.
And then they stared each other down until the other Jordan came stumbling in which surprised just about everybody, especially Jordan A. Then, quickly thinking, he collected all the fire that was engulfing Jordan B and whisked it away to form a fireball in the air.
Tough Jordan stared for a while then said a little casually, “I had no idea I could do that.”
Right took this chance to try to stab right through him as a sword.
“Hey, man,” Jordan B called out as he parried and moved to try to chop off Rong’s head but was blocked. “You, or me or whatever, I’d kinda like my fire back. It’s good protection.”
“Oh goddammit, why the hell are there two wimps,” Rong moaned, turning her attention to Jordan A in case he tried to flank them or something.
“I told you, this one isn’t the same Jordan,” Right said before turning back towards Jordan B.
“Look! Um, I don’t want to win! If you beat them, uh, I have to go through another battle thing, and I just don’t want to go through that again!” Jordan A shouted out. He jumped backwards as Rong snapped at him, causing Jordan B to gruffly call out, “You stupid blue lizard, you aren’t killing him…”
“Are you even listening to me? If you win too, you’ll just have to go through another battle against seven totally insane guys!”
“Yeah? And I’ll just kill those guys too. You really just wanna die here instead of win and fight again? At least you’ll be alive!” Jordan B spat.
“Is he arguing with himself oh god he’s arguing with himself this is stupid”
“Oh shut up we argue all the time—“ Right managed to get out before going back to the sword fight.
“Okay, I don’t want to die! I really don’t! But I can’t handle another fight! Maybe you can, but I just can’t!”
“Well, sorry, but I need to get back to my battle, you get it? And I can’t do that unless I kill these lizards, which means that, whether you want to or not, you win. That’s just how it goes. You don’t have to help me if you don’t want to. Really, though, help would be appreciated,” he added slightly hopefully after pushing back an attack from a giant broadsword.
Jordan A stood there for a while, getting glared down by Rong, still holding up a freaking huge fireball in the sky and not entirely sure what to freaking do. “I…uh,” he said. An idea crossed his mind. In fact, it had crossed his mind several times ever since his talk (or rather, lecture) with the Organizer. But he really didn’t think he could…I mean…sure, this Jordan was different than him, but he was still him, you know? You just don’t…I mean…you can’t…and also he was sure he watched or read something about killing yourself and then disappearing, but that was time travel but this felt eerily like that sort of situation and…you just don’t do that…and goddammit HE HAD TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW IF HE REALLY WANTED TO PREVENT HIMSELF FROM WINNING AAAAUUUGH.