RE: The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Six: Eddelin City]
06-02-2014, 11:31 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-02-2014, 11:57 PM by Elpie.)
Jen set down her coffee and found herself in pain—excruciating, intimate, innately familiar pain.
It was not that she had ever had her wrist and shoulder twisted in precisely this way before, or even really that she had ever spent more than a few minutes in the company of her attacker. But this was the dark and exciting antithesis of love-at-first-sight, a relationship fully-formed at the dawn of destiny. She knew this touch. She knew this pain. She knew this hatred.
“Hallo, Jen,” said Kath.
Jen replied by way of an agonized gasp that she hoped managed to sound contemptful and dismissive. Then she grabbed for her sword with her left hand.
Kath whirled her around, put a hand against her collar and threw her onto the table, pinning both arms beneath her. Jen kicked out with both feet. Kath pirouetted away from the kick, picked up Jen’s coffee mug and casually overturned it into her eyes.
Jen screamed.
Kath upended the table with a shrug and knelt over Jen, producing a length of green rope from her purse. A waiter moseyed over to clean up the spilled coffee. The other guests enjoyed their beverages and checked their pocket watches in anticipation of the day to come. Above the arches and decorative hammocks of the cafe the cobalt-molasses of the morning had sharpened to the yellow-white-blue of midday in Eddelin. It was just getting warm enough to trigger the deployment of a dozen or so twirling parasols on the streets below. Jen’s hands were bound.
“Not killing you yet,” reassured Kath, tightening the binds on her wrists. “Just a reminder of my—” a strange gesture and lilt over the word “my” left Jen thinking she’d missed a fish pun “—inevitability.” She indicated her fingernails, painted coral green. “Call hallo at your death, Jen.”
Jen kicked out again and caught a foot to the ankle—a bare foot with a stomp that hit like a stiletto heel. “Fuck y—“
A swift kick to the cheek left a tic tac toe pattern of red on Jen’s face. Not quite bare, those feet, as much as Kath had that ability to look naked in anything. Fishnet stockings. Of course. “Shhh,” sounded Jen’s captor, tracing a glyph of St. Elmo’s fire with her fingertips. “Silent now.” The glyph dispersed. Jen tasted something in her throat like a cough drop.
Kath jerked the rope and pulled Jen to her feet. “Down into the murky green quiet with you,” she added. “I think you know this spell.” Flashes of green light in the air between them disrupted the sunbeam outlining the mermaid's shoulder. “Maybe float around town, catch a show.”
And Kath melted into the crowd.
Somebody stepped on and over Jen’s sternum. She tried to scream, found she couldn’t, and dragged herself under a table. The spell the mertwat had cast had would make her invisible, inaudible, and generally easy to ignore, which was an inconvenient condition when involuntary. Especially with her hands tied. She grabbed a knife off of someone’s table and made to cut herself free, but the green rope didn’t so much as fray.
Discarding the knife, Jen hopped over the fence to the alley beside the café and attempted to shimmy up a storm drain. With her hands tied it took her nearly a minute to awkwardly shimmy up thirty feet to the rooftop. She collapsed to the shinglery and lay looking up at the sky for the space of three breaths before picking herself up. The shadow of a cloud drifted lazily over central Eddelin. From above—even a scant few stories above—the city reminded her of a Spanish painting, or her idea of what Spanish painting was like. It had a palette.
Jen scowled. If she had her voice she could run a rough locator incantation for Kath, but as it stood she had only hate as her compass. And good old-fashioned deductive reasoning, she supposed. Why wasn’t she dead? Kath wasn’t a supervillain; she was ultimately too pragmatic to run a long campaign of demoralization and torture if she could end it shortly. Her first thought was that she was being goaded, that Kath needed her for something in particular. But, comfortingly egocentric as that notion was, it didn’t hold up: Kath’s control had been complete enough a few seconds ago that it was hard to imagine any goal she couldn’t have forced Jen into. The beating and curse were a diversion, then—a stalling tactic. So long as Kath was in Eddelin, searching for whatever she was searching for, Jen would eventually have found her, so she wanted to get Jen first. Crippling and cursing her, probably gaining distance and keeping a peripheral scry on her was a better move than any sort of imprisonment she could muster.
Xadrez.
Getting to Xadrez necessitated keeping Jen alive, given that it was likely impossible to predict what would happen to the spirit if he “won” by way of Jen’s death. Xadrez, for his part, was desperate enough for assistance in his crusade against the Observer that he wouldn’t be inclined to screen powerful allies on the basis of sanity or twatty-twat twattitude fish-smelling… stupid bitchiness.
So chasing Xadrez away probably wasn’t a good idea. Considering that she knew literally no one else in this city. She sat down on the ledge and pulled her new chess piece out of her pocket. The chessmaster had at least afforded her a knighthood, a step down from her former queen (which she had lost… in New Battleopolis? Tor must have gotten it off her).
With a sense of timing that she didn’t think was coincidence—fish eyes always looked to both sides—a Xadrez-o-gram crackled up her arm into her language center.
Should you wish to turn your re-adolescent rage towards more fruitful pursuits
Pang Hall
University East
On the hour
The chess piece didn’t work both ways, of course. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t send a message. She threw the knife down three stories to the ground with a crack. And then spat on the pieces for good measure. Jen, for all her inadequacies, knew how to aim a lugie.
* * * * *
Xadrez didn’t feel the spit, but the cutoff of his link to that particular piece did, somehow, transmit a hint of malice. Maybe just his own sentimentality acting on him.
Kath smirked, tossing her coat over a valet’s shoulder as she passed through the archway, hand on her general’s board. “Private conversation?”
Xadrez winced. Was Kath’s magic-sense so delicate that she could perceive even a rapid-fire communiqué, or had she simply read his face?
Not offering an overture would have been unwise
We want her close
”You were the one storming off ere the quarter hour,” mocked the queen. ”But then you were angrier than frightened. And ultimately always counted on your pet to protect you from, glugluglug, wicked sorts.”
Frankly your highness
One unfortunate complication of your presence in this round is the destabilization of my relations with your predecessor
She is not as
Pragmatic
As yourself
”Do you have accommodations for mer?” Kath asked another usher, touching his face—lightly, playfully tracing out his vulnerable arteries, as only Xadrez (and not even she) seemed to notice. The usher folded his hands over his crotch and pointed up a rounded staircase. Kath licked her lips.
“Fearing me needn’t ashame you.” She ascended the stairs two at a time, backwards, watching Xadrez awkwardly tilt his board up at an angle to follow. “And shame has its own glitter. Mind only that your fear and shame don’t carry you away to destructive irrationalities.” She turned on her toes again, affording Xadrez a disinterested view of her twitching buttocks. ”I know you bear some attachment to your guardian nayad yet, but I can name, hmmm. Six other names she failed to protect. Only one of them my doing.”
At the top of the stairs the hallways opened up to a series of terraced shallows overlooking the lecture stage. The queen’s legs had fused and she was nude save for the circlet before she so much as hit the water.
Xadrez lingered at the top of the stairs. ”Rude of me,” she yawned, not turning back in his direction. ”Do the threads of fate abhor a little water?”
Xadrez dropped himself into the water ungracefully, splashing on the queen’s smiling cheek. Fate does as it must
You don’t really understand her
”I’ve known her body and sword,” responded Kath. ”Only way to acquaint oneself with a maid of her sort is physically. Yours has been a romance of the shallows. You’ve only known what she wants you to know.”
Your suppositions are accumulating, my liege
I only expressed a predilection towards keeping crucial parties within arms reach
In fact I recall having this precise conversation with she-who-we-seem-not-to-be-naming herself not long ago
These tactics of whimsy appear to be a commonality in those of your shared profession
Kath glowered for just a moment before resuming her stance of aloof sensuality. “The difference between me and Jennifer, the first of her name, is that she gets off on losing control of a situation. Whereas you simply can’t fathom a queen whose control extends beyond the length of her tail. I have allies keeping Jen occupied.”
The queen and her general had been among the first, but other attendees were now beginning to fill out the auditorium. Xadrez found himself scanning for suspicious characters, but lacked the cultural context to be able to casually judge people on the basis of clothing and race. Allies
Paranoia was inconveniently taxing and potentially cognitively limiting, but a necessary recourse at this junction.
What allies would those be
And then the three words he least expected to hear from his new comrade:
”People I trust.”
* * * * *
University East it was. For a score to settle and nothing better to do.
Moving along the rooftops of Eddelin with her hands bound proved less difficult than she’d feared. The city had a fairly intuitive spiral geometry and hadn’t yet reached the point of saturation where the rooftops were grappling for control over the third dimension. Everything seemed to be two or three stories, the walls littered with sills and ledges and emergency escape ladders. Jen thanked whatever gods were available that her two recent deaths and resurrections had done nothing to diminish her consistent twelve-foot standing jump height, honed in a four-month retreat in the bog-monasteries of the amphibbelum south.
She was glad that her body still bore the evidence of these memories, but she wasn’t sure about her mind. The old stories were still there—most of them, as many as her brain had room for—but they didn’t feel like anything any more. Maybe it was just the battle, the constant tension and death and chaos. But she could feel that winding down—they’d solved the problem of the past, she was pretty sure, and by extension the problem of the future, which only left the present—and as it receded it had taken something with it. She felt tired and slow and quiet. The only thoughts she could summon that made her happen were killing this merbitch and this city—the sound of music from curtained windows and the smell of coffee… added up to something… something that seemed important. Something that felt and tasted like a future.
Jen hated futures. Something was wrong with her, clearly. Hopefully killing the mertwat would help.
There she was loitering outside the auditorium, fishnet fucking stockings and all, waiting (presumably) for Xadrez. The object of all her hatred and frustration. The knot in her throat and that feeling in her stomach like she’d eaten some bad shellfish. She thought about just diving, wrapping the ropes between her wrists around the bitch’s neck and strangling her nice and slow. Practicality got in the way: she was in no condition to win a fight, and definitely not against Kath in particular. She needed to play this smart.
Smart, but not necessarily graceful.
It was not that she had ever had her wrist and shoulder twisted in precisely this way before, or even really that she had ever spent more than a few minutes in the company of her attacker. But this was the dark and exciting antithesis of love-at-first-sight, a relationship fully-formed at the dawn of destiny. She knew this touch. She knew this pain. She knew this hatred.
“Hallo, Jen,” said Kath.
Jen replied by way of an agonized gasp that she hoped managed to sound contemptful and dismissive. Then she grabbed for her sword with her left hand.
Kath whirled her around, put a hand against her collar and threw her onto the table, pinning both arms beneath her. Jen kicked out with both feet. Kath pirouetted away from the kick, picked up Jen’s coffee mug and casually overturned it into her eyes.
Jen screamed.
Kath upended the table with a shrug and knelt over Jen, producing a length of green rope from her purse. A waiter moseyed over to clean up the spilled coffee. The other guests enjoyed their beverages and checked their pocket watches in anticipation of the day to come. Above the arches and decorative hammocks of the cafe the cobalt-molasses of the morning had sharpened to the yellow-white-blue of midday in Eddelin. It was just getting warm enough to trigger the deployment of a dozen or so twirling parasols on the streets below. Jen’s hands were bound.
“Not killing you yet,” reassured Kath, tightening the binds on her wrists. “Just a reminder of my—” a strange gesture and lilt over the word “my” left Jen thinking she’d missed a fish pun “—inevitability.” She indicated her fingernails, painted coral green. “Call hallo at your death, Jen.”
Jen kicked out again and caught a foot to the ankle—a bare foot with a stomp that hit like a stiletto heel. “Fuck y—“
A swift kick to the cheek left a tic tac toe pattern of red on Jen’s face. Not quite bare, those feet, as much as Kath had that ability to look naked in anything. Fishnet stockings. Of course. “Shhh,” sounded Jen’s captor, tracing a glyph of St. Elmo’s fire with her fingertips. “Silent now.” The glyph dispersed. Jen tasted something in her throat like a cough drop.
Kath jerked the rope and pulled Jen to her feet. “Down into the murky green quiet with you,” she added. “I think you know this spell.” Flashes of green light in the air between them disrupted the sunbeam outlining the mermaid's shoulder. “Maybe float around town, catch a show.”
And Kath melted into the crowd.
Somebody stepped on and over Jen’s sternum. She tried to scream, found she couldn’t, and dragged herself under a table. The spell the mertwat had cast had would make her invisible, inaudible, and generally easy to ignore, which was an inconvenient condition when involuntary. Especially with her hands tied. She grabbed a knife off of someone’s table and made to cut herself free, but the green rope didn’t so much as fray.
Discarding the knife, Jen hopped over the fence to the alley beside the café and attempted to shimmy up a storm drain. With her hands tied it took her nearly a minute to awkwardly shimmy up thirty feet to the rooftop. She collapsed to the shinglery and lay looking up at the sky for the space of three breaths before picking herself up. The shadow of a cloud drifted lazily over central Eddelin. From above—even a scant few stories above—the city reminded her of a Spanish painting, or her idea of what Spanish painting was like. It had a palette.
Jen scowled. If she had her voice she could run a rough locator incantation for Kath, but as it stood she had only hate as her compass. And good old-fashioned deductive reasoning, she supposed. Why wasn’t she dead? Kath wasn’t a supervillain; she was ultimately too pragmatic to run a long campaign of demoralization and torture if she could end it shortly. Her first thought was that she was being goaded, that Kath needed her for something in particular. But, comfortingly egocentric as that notion was, it didn’t hold up: Kath’s control had been complete enough a few seconds ago that it was hard to imagine any goal she couldn’t have forced Jen into. The beating and curse were a diversion, then—a stalling tactic. So long as Kath was in Eddelin, searching for whatever she was searching for, Jen would eventually have found her, so she wanted to get Jen first. Crippling and cursing her, probably gaining distance and keeping a peripheral scry on her was a better move than any sort of imprisonment she could muster.
Xadrez.
Getting to Xadrez necessitated keeping Jen alive, given that it was likely impossible to predict what would happen to the spirit if he “won” by way of Jen’s death. Xadrez, for his part, was desperate enough for assistance in his crusade against the Observer that he wouldn’t be inclined to screen powerful allies on the basis of sanity or twatty-twat twattitude fish-smelling… stupid bitchiness.
So chasing Xadrez away probably wasn’t a good idea. Considering that she knew literally no one else in this city. She sat down on the ledge and pulled her new chess piece out of her pocket. The chessmaster had at least afforded her a knighthood, a step down from her former queen (which she had lost… in New Battleopolis? Tor must have gotten it off her).
With a sense of timing that she didn’t think was coincidence—fish eyes always looked to both sides—a Xadrez-o-gram crackled up her arm into her language center.
Should you wish to turn your re-adolescent rage towards more fruitful pursuits
Pang Hall
University East
On the hour
The chess piece didn’t work both ways, of course. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t send a message. She threw the knife down three stories to the ground with a crack. And then spat on the pieces for good measure. Jen, for all her inadequacies, knew how to aim a lugie.
* * * * *
Xadrez didn’t feel the spit, but the cutoff of his link to that particular piece did, somehow, transmit a hint of malice. Maybe just his own sentimentality acting on him.
Kath smirked, tossing her coat over a valet’s shoulder as she passed through the archway, hand on her general’s board. “Private conversation?”
Xadrez winced. Was Kath’s magic-sense so delicate that she could perceive even a rapid-fire communiqué, or had she simply read his face?
Not offering an overture would have been unwise
We want her close
”You were the one storming off ere the quarter hour,” mocked the queen. ”But then you were angrier than frightened. And ultimately always counted on your pet to protect you from, glugluglug, wicked sorts.”
Frankly your highness
One unfortunate complication of your presence in this round is the destabilization of my relations with your predecessor
She is not as
Pragmatic
As yourself
”Do you have accommodations for mer?” Kath asked another usher, touching his face—lightly, playfully tracing out his vulnerable arteries, as only Xadrez (and not even she) seemed to notice. The usher folded his hands over his crotch and pointed up a rounded staircase. Kath licked her lips.
“Fearing me needn’t ashame you.” She ascended the stairs two at a time, backwards, watching Xadrez awkwardly tilt his board up at an angle to follow. “And shame has its own glitter. Mind only that your fear and shame don’t carry you away to destructive irrationalities.” She turned on her toes again, affording Xadrez a disinterested view of her twitching buttocks. ”I know you bear some attachment to your guardian nayad yet, but I can name, hmmm. Six other names she failed to protect. Only one of them my doing.”
At the top of the stairs the hallways opened up to a series of terraced shallows overlooking the lecture stage. The queen’s legs had fused and she was nude save for the circlet before she so much as hit the water.
Xadrez lingered at the top of the stairs. ”Rude of me,” she yawned, not turning back in his direction. ”Do the threads of fate abhor a little water?”
Xadrez dropped himself into the water ungracefully, splashing on the queen’s smiling cheek. Fate does as it must
You don’t really understand her
”I’ve known her body and sword,” responded Kath. ”Only way to acquaint oneself with a maid of her sort is physically. Yours has been a romance of the shallows. You’ve only known what she wants you to know.”
Your suppositions are accumulating, my liege
I only expressed a predilection towards keeping crucial parties within arms reach
In fact I recall having this precise conversation with she-who-we-seem-not-to-be-naming herself not long ago
These tactics of whimsy appear to be a commonality in those of your shared profession
Kath glowered for just a moment before resuming her stance of aloof sensuality. “The difference between me and Jennifer, the first of her name, is that she gets off on losing control of a situation. Whereas you simply can’t fathom a queen whose control extends beyond the length of her tail. I have allies keeping Jen occupied.”
The queen and her general had been among the first, but other attendees were now beginning to fill out the auditorium. Xadrez found himself scanning for suspicious characters, but lacked the cultural context to be able to casually judge people on the basis of clothing and race. Allies
Paranoia was inconveniently taxing and potentially cognitively limiting, but a necessary recourse at this junction.
What allies would those be
And then the three words he least expected to hear from his new comrade:
”People I trust.”
* * * * *
University East it was. For a score to settle and nothing better to do.
Moving along the rooftops of Eddelin with her hands bound proved less difficult than she’d feared. The city had a fairly intuitive spiral geometry and hadn’t yet reached the point of saturation where the rooftops were grappling for control over the third dimension. Everything seemed to be two or three stories, the walls littered with sills and ledges and emergency escape ladders. Jen thanked whatever gods were available that her two recent deaths and resurrections had done nothing to diminish her consistent twelve-foot standing jump height, honed in a four-month retreat in the bog-monasteries of the amphibbelum south.
She was glad that her body still bore the evidence of these memories, but she wasn’t sure about her mind. The old stories were still there—most of them, as many as her brain had room for—but they didn’t feel like anything any more. Maybe it was just the battle, the constant tension and death and chaos. But she could feel that winding down—they’d solved the problem of the past, she was pretty sure, and by extension the problem of the future, which only left the present—and as it receded it had taken something with it. She felt tired and slow and quiet. The only thoughts she could summon that made her happen were killing this merbitch and this city—the sound of music from curtained windows and the smell of coffee… added up to something… something that seemed important. Something that felt and tasted like a future.
Jen hated futures. Something was wrong with her, clearly. Hopefully killing the mertwat would help.
There she was loitering outside the auditorium, fishnet fucking stockings and all, waiting (presumably) for Xadrez. The object of all her hatred and frustration. The knot in her throat and that feeling in her stomach like she’d eaten some bad shellfish. She thought about just diving, wrapping the ropes between her wrists around the bitch’s neck and strangling her nice and slow. Practicality got in the way: she was in no condition to win a fight, and definitely not against Kath in particular. She needed to play this smart.
Smart, but not necessarily graceful.