Re: The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round One: Genreshift
08-06-2011, 10:28 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Akumu.
Things were not going according to Ivan's plan. The Tome was gone, lost in the attack after he had worked so hard to get them all out of Castle Matic undetected. Far too many things were on fire. Even as the rain poured down, drenching him to the bone, Merrifield, Nalzaki and the shadow being blazed with a white-hot light that threw sharp shadows onto every surface. He sank back against a wall, wishing he could merge back into his own shadow, or just vanish from sight as Abys had already done. With the Tome lost, there was no reason to remain with these creatures. The vibrations of her footsteps resonated through his legs as she stalked invisibly towards the sewer grate down which her target had vanished.
All of three of Nalzaki were in terrible pain as the ends of their limbs burned. That was quickly remedied as they forced flesh down from their upper arms, underneath the metabolically hypercharged outer layers, which sloughed off like gloves to land smoldering on the slick pavement below. Razeran's head twisted about to sight Merrifield, blazing merrily away and sniffing around the alleyway, poking at this and that with her large flippers. This one is not to be trusted. We should kill it now and be done with it. Nalyg swung his head the other way, towards the thrashing Klendel. No, she is unbalanced and unpredictable to be sure, but she is not the real threat. The other two hissed their agreement, and Nalzaki dropped down into a quadrupedal stance and advanced on the stricken Cog.
As they moved cautiously forward, Kanpeki was the first to notice the sudden decrease in rainfall. A torrent was still falling upon Klendel but there seemed to be a soft wall moving out through the rain, reducing it to a few errant spatters on her scaly hide. Her eyes widened and she whipped her neck upwards. From above!
A squad of men on billowing black parachutes were dropping from the sky, nearly on top of them already. One lashed out with a savage kick to the side of Nalyg's upstretched head and then they were down, covering the area in nylon.
Ivan saw his chance, and scurried through the concealing folds of the parachutes. He did not make it far, however, before he ran straight into a brown-clad leg and fell back on his ass. Above him a boy even younger than himself was glaring at him from under a broad-brimmed helmet and pointing a pistol. “Don't even think about it, Natzi scum.”
Quickly the parachutes were bundled up and the three traveling companions found themselves encircled by armed men, with Merrifield once again uninflamed and upon Nalzaki's back. Abys had slipped away after the Tome, and Klendel was nowhere to be seen. One man stepped forward out of the ring, as the others kept their sidearms leveled. “I am Lieutenant Ryan of the 1st Airborne Division of the Greatest Degeneration. Cooperate and you will not be harmed, nor will your beasts. Tell us, where is the Tome? We know it was here in the castle.”
Ivan cowered against Nalzaki. I am no threat, you believe this, I am only a scrawny boy in glasses. “P-please sir, the Tome is not with us. I was j-just taking my pets out for a walk.” Razaran hissed indignantly but quickly quieted as communication flitted from his more judicious parts. Lt. Ryan did not seem convinced, and he looked sternly at Ivan for a long moment, rainwater streaming down his face. “Fine enough, boy, but either way you'll stay our prisoner. Matic's son will be a useful bargaining chip. We have our sources, you know. So let's go and see the good doctor.” Shit, that one came back in a bad way...
---
On the other side of the river, Dr. Melissa Harmon and Sir Cedric were taking refuge from the rain in an alcove in front of a townhouse. As they had been walking, the signs of wild-west themed decorating became less and less, and their current location looked like it was outside of that zone of influence. It seemed safe enough to rest here for a moment.
Cedric had continued to go on about how he was clearly much more strong and capable than her frail self, launching into many a tale of his heroic evil-vanquishings, and she had more or less tuned him out by this point. Watching the display of her hand-held sensor as they walked had been very enlightening. Now safely out of the rain, she slipped a small netbook out of a slot on her backpack and connected it to the sensor. She was so intent on the code she was writing that she didn't notice for a moment that Cedric had stopped talking. She looked up and found him looking questioningly at her.
“What?”
”I said, what are you doing?”
”Well,” she began, going back to her typing, “I noticed that when we were moving, the hyperspatial distance between the grouped worldlines here was spatially dependent. A mapping of the dependence implied a local singularity somewhere out there, a nexus where they all join and become indistinguishable. And that's interesting as hell. So I'm writing an app to keep a running update of the gradient and point us towards that singularity.”
She glanced up at Cedric, who seemed to be absorbing as much of this as she had his prattling about maiden-rescuing. She smirked, and kept working.
“When that... change occurred back there, my apparatus went on the fritz, but I suspect we jumped from one of those worldlines to the other, somewhere similar but following slightly different rules. And I'm fairly certain a similar jump brought us here in the first place, since very little here or about the other 'competitors' jives with the rules I got multiple degrees for learning.”
Cedric had taken out an oilcloth and was polishing his sword. She sighed, but honestly wasn't expecting much better. He still seemed to be listening with half an ear, though.
”I may not have a magic flaming sword, or biokinesis, or an all-seeing eye, but I do have science. It got me this,” Harmon shook the sensor in his general direction, “it was going to get me tenure, hell, it was going to get me the Nobel Prize. But now...”
She tapped execute, and after a second of compiling the graph on the sensor's output screen was replaced by a red arrow, pointing in the direction of the castle that loomed in the distance, and rotating slowly towards the river they were nearly upon.
“Now, it's going to get me home.”
Things were not going according to Ivan's plan. The Tome was gone, lost in the attack after he had worked so hard to get them all out of Castle Matic undetected. Far too many things were on fire. Even as the rain poured down, drenching him to the bone, Merrifield, Nalzaki and the shadow being blazed with a white-hot light that threw sharp shadows onto every surface. He sank back against a wall, wishing he could merge back into his own shadow, or just vanish from sight as Abys had already done. With the Tome lost, there was no reason to remain with these creatures. The vibrations of her footsteps resonated through his legs as she stalked invisibly towards the sewer grate down which her target had vanished.
All of three of Nalzaki were in terrible pain as the ends of their limbs burned. That was quickly remedied as they forced flesh down from their upper arms, underneath the metabolically hypercharged outer layers, which sloughed off like gloves to land smoldering on the slick pavement below. Razeran's head twisted about to sight Merrifield, blazing merrily away and sniffing around the alleyway, poking at this and that with her large flippers. This one is not to be trusted. We should kill it now and be done with it. Nalyg swung his head the other way, towards the thrashing Klendel. No, she is unbalanced and unpredictable to be sure, but she is not the real threat. The other two hissed their agreement, and Nalzaki dropped down into a quadrupedal stance and advanced on the stricken Cog.
As they moved cautiously forward, Kanpeki was the first to notice the sudden decrease in rainfall. A torrent was still falling upon Klendel but there seemed to be a soft wall moving out through the rain, reducing it to a few errant spatters on her scaly hide. Her eyes widened and she whipped her neck upwards. From above!
A squad of men on billowing black parachutes were dropping from the sky, nearly on top of them already. One lashed out with a savage kick to the side of Nalyg's upstretched head and then they were down, covering the area in nylon.
Ivan saw his chance, and scurried through the concealing folds of the parachutes. He did not make it far, however, before he ran straight into a brown-clad leg and fell back on his ass. Above him a boy even younger than himself was glaring at him from under a broad-brimmed helmet and pointing a pistol. “Don't even think about it, Natzi scum.”
Quickly the parachutes were bundled up and the three traveling companions found themselves encircled by armed men, with Merrifield once again uninflamed and upon Nalzaki's back. Abys had slipped away after the Tome, and Klendel was nowhere to be seen. One man stepped forward out of the ring, as the others kept their sidearms leveled. “I am Lieutenant Ryan of the 1st Airborne Division of the Greatest Degeneration. Cooperate and you will not be harmed, nor will your beasts. Tell us, where is the Tome? We know it was here in the castle.”
Ivan cowered against Nalzaki. I am no threat, you believe this, I am only a scrawny boy in glasses. “P-please sir, the Tome is not with us. I was j-just taking my pets out for a walk.” Razaran hissed indignantly but quickly quieted as communication flitted from his more judicious parts. Lt. Ryan did not seem convinced, and he looked sternly at Ivan for a long moment, rainwater streaming down his face. “Fine enough, boy, but either way you'll stay our prisoner. Matic's son will be a useful bargaining chip. We have our sources, you know. So let's go and see the good doctor.” Shit, that one came back in a bad way...
---
On the other side of the river, Dr. Melissa Harmon and Sir Cedric were taking refuge from the rain in an alcove in front of a townhouse. As they had been walking, the signs of wild-west themed decorating became less and less, and their current location looked like it was outside of that zone of influence. It seemed safe enough to rest here for a moment.
Cedric had continued to go on about how he was clearly much more strong and capable than her frail self, launching into many a tale of his heroic evil-vanquishings, and she had more or less tuned him out by this point. Watching the display of her hand-held sensor as they walked had been very enlightening. Now safely out of the rain, she slipped a small netbook out of a slot on her backpack and connected it to the sensor. She was so intent on the code she was writing that she didn't notice for a moment that Cedric had stopped talking. She looked up and found him looking questioningly at her.
“What?”
”I said, what are you doing?”
”Well,” she began, going back to her typing, “I noticed that when we were moving, the hyperspatial distance between the grouped worldlines here was spatially dependent. A mapping of the dependence implied a local singularity somewhere out there, a nexus where they all join and become indistinguishable. And that's interesting as hell. So I'm writing an app to keep a running update of the gradient and point us towards that singularity.”
She glanced up at Cedric, who seemed to be absorbing as much of this as she had his prattling about maiden-rescuing. She smirked, and kept working.
“When that... change occurred back there, my apparatus went on the fritz, but I suspect we jumped from one of those worldlines to the other, somewhere similar but following slightly different rules. And I'm fairly certain a similar jump brought us here in the first place, since very little here or about the other 'competitors' jives with the rules I got multiple degrees for learning.”
Cedric had taken out an oilcloth and was polishing his sword. She sighed, but honestly wasn't expecting much better. He still seemed to be listening with half an ear, though.
”I may not have a magic flaming sword, or biokinesis, or an all-seeing eye, but I do have science. It got me this,” Harmon shook the sensor in his general direction, “it was going to get me tenure, hell, it was going to get me the Nobel Prize. But now...”
She tapped execute, and after a second of compiling the graph on the sensor's output screen was replaced by a red arrow, pointing in the direction of the castle that loomed in the distance, and rotating slowly towards the river they were nearly upon.
“Now, it's going to get me home.”