Terminal

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

The passengers seem peculiarly blasé about all this considering that one or more of them may be about to die awfully.

Bear in mind that even if you are not tagged and even if it does not seem like your character can do anything - you can do more than you know to influence what is happening.

The Final Hazard

Donny brought his watch up and began staring at it. The others might notice the hitman absently shaking out a cigarette and lifting it to his lips as he counted each second.

@Doc Doctor

Five whole seconds passed. The tiny dot that was New Nemea below grew larger. The halo of light around it expanded to become the still massively distorted but not faintly recognizable morning horizon. The sun was long, thin, oval-shaped beacon shining to what must have been the East, assuming anything about the crazy geometry held true to what was familiar. The light it cast was so very curiously cold...

"Hiecro, why's ma shield breaking up?" The male pavise knight practically shouted the question with barely restrained panic, the fingers of his gauntlet jerking while his appendages twitched in barely controlled terror.

"Redistribution by volume, not surface area!" Hiecro shouted back, eyeing Donny's movements like a hawk. A hawk in cardiac arrest. "But that doesn't matter because nearly all of it is being contacted across one side and there's too much force to spread! It's also supposed to link with our armor, but that requires contact!"

Another ten seconds passed. The tiny dot bloomed into a sphere with elevating contours and ridges. The horizon started to rise up around the slug like a bug-catching net, and the sun began to shrink and fatten.

"You still have your shield!" The pavise knight yelled, craning his head to give Hiecro a curious look. A look filled with apprehension...and something else. A hint of calculation. "Can you do something for if the sphere doesn't slow us down when it sheds?"

"I don't know!" Hiecro yelled back angrily. "Don't get any stupid ideas! Even if I survived and we made a ring, we'd still be spinning..." Her eyes wildly glanced about. "...too fuckin' fast for Mercury godsdamnit! The acceleration would kill us all!"

Another ten seconds had passed. The contoured sphere's edges began to eerily curve upwards and outwards from an unseen space behind the universe. The horizon enveloped the whole of the slug and snapped shut behind them, the iris of space above vanishing and giving way to the whole of the sky. The morning sun was approaching its original shape, though it was still below them for the moment.

@mdk
"Don't need to ring-up before we slow down! Just need to wait until the spin winds down! You there, gearhead!" The male pavise knight turned his head towards Luca. All traces of fear had evaporated, replaced only with a grim kind of desperation. "You could survive the acceleration! Push her into the wall, grab on, and let your feet hang out behind you! Once the walls start to slow down, we can all grab on and ring up..."

"You fucking bastard! You don't know that the slug won't shed our velocity! We're still inside it, that part should still work! It's gravy, not a fucking bungee cord!" Hiecro shouted, fury blooming across her features. "Don't do it gearhead! Even you can't calculate how my bits and pieces would be affected! They could fly back inwards and kill us all!"

A whole twenty seconds passed during the exchange. The rest of the world below bled up from nothingness, the sphere widening out to become a disc with edges obscured in the distance, as it should have been. Below, the world was gaining fine nuance and detail - they were still a little too high up to make out individual buildings, but blotches of organized color and meaningless vague, clustered shapes were beginning to form. There we virtually no clouds in the sky, with the few that were present looking more like small slices of static on a computer screen than anything natural.

The Final Hazard

On a completely different matter, she was very uncomfortable with not knowing if she could trust her magic, so she was going to try to create an orb, or anything, just a decimeter in diameter if she could right in front of her.

@PlatinumSkink

@PlatinumSkink
For the briefest and most infinitesimal of moments, Amelie thought she might have managed to create something. Of course, as her magic had just rebounded on her moments before and as the entire group was careening through a mysterious structure at high speed, if she had made anything it instantly collided with the walls of the strange vessel of force the knights had called a slug - though normally Amelie might well have been able to keep a redirection orb in place relative to herself, the curious nature of this place plus her condition were both obviously creating problems.

"Hey, do you feel that?" Hiecro gestured at the male pavise knight, a frown visible through her now only faintly stained visor.

The knight paused for a moment, glancing to the side and looking down as he focused. "...Yeah." He said finally. "I think we're wobbling. The slug, that is."

@mdk
Luca could feel as much as well. His internal gyroscopics were telling him that the spherical well of force they were riding in had been, up until a moment ago, proceeding along a precise, curving trajectory, but the invisible platform they were all standing upon was remaining relatively stationary. Now though, there was a faint sort of oscillation present in the sphere's motion. As if something had pressed upon it, making it pinwheel as it rolled along its track. The wobbling itself did not seem to be intensifying, but it was odd how abruptly it had started.

"That's...not supposed to happen?" Hiecro asked, a look of apprehension on her face. The male pavise knight shrugged.

"I don't know the exact numbers, but the occurrence is supposed to be astronomically rare." He saw the look on Hiecro's face. "Also harmless. Er. Not an issue." He assuaged with a placating gesture. "The corridor is keeping our relative motion contained. If it had happened outside it might have been a problem, but the only thing that's different is that the external walls are probably spinning while the interior walls aren't."

As the last word left his mouth, the slug shot out of the corridor and back into space. The latticework of metallic channels and trenches quickly losing cohesion and disintegrating as space collapsed upon itself behind them. Out of the blue, everyone within the slug was come upon by a sensation of weightlessness - followed by the sensation of the invisible surface they were standing on vanishing, leaving them without any support.

"Uh." The male pavise knight said as he floated in place, his eyes widening in fear. "That's not-"

He let go of his pavise - either out of confusion or terror. It drifted placidly across the length of the slug's interior a ways, before making contact with the invisible walls that were presumably in place, keeping the passengers protected from the vacuum outside. The pavise hit something unseen - and immediately began to pinwheel end-over-end at such a high speed the eye could not follow it, save for Luca's - and he determined that the pavise had a speed of well over a thousand RPM. The pavise wildly spun away from the wall before turning in some odd parabolic arc, hitting the side of the invisible wall again and suddenly flattening against it - and began to orbit the group, adhered to the unseen walls of the slug by centrifugal force as it orbited around so quickly that its passage was leaving behind optical after-images, leaving nine slowly spinning and disintegrating depictions of the shield, the emblem displaying the scales slowly flaking away - the angelic being's wings being plucked off before its whole body eroded, leaving only the shackled, damned figures writhing as one as the sole surviving feature as the shield's curved frame crumpled and flattened itself from the force.

@Bright_Ops@Cruallassar@Doc Doctor@Holmishire@WiseDragonGirl
"Nobody move!" Hiecro cried out, her voice torn but her movement utterly still as she lay suspended in space. "Nobody has any more or less velocity than the slug right now! Just stay still and we'll all land safely..."

Below, the singularity that had been New Nemea reappeared, and the details of the stretched out horizon began to coalescence around the small dot as a disc-like aura as the slug approached. Behind them, the massive, double-helix structure began to fade away, just a few lines of color against the void of space and stars.

The Final Hazard

At first, beyond the mere presence of the sepia-toned air and the glimmering flecks of electric-blue light, there was nothing to signify the formation of the curious form of transporation the pavise knights kept referring to as a 'slug.'

Then, all at once, everyone was lifted straight up into the air - all still standing and laying firmly against an impossibly solid surface borne on thin air. Slowly at first, rising but a scant meter, they quickly accelerated, soaring onwards and upwards at tremendous speed. With a sudden and soundless black blur and a small puff of bone and feathers, they shot past the bird that had been suspended in flight overhead - and its grisly remains began to ponderous orbit about the passengers in numerous circular trails across each of the strange, transparent envelope's axis - revealing whatever force that conveyed them to be spherical in shape.

As the sphere tore up through the sky, the passengers were not afforded with anything approaching an informative view. Beyond thirty meters, space contorted and imploded in upon itself, and the entirety of New Nemea became compressed into a singularly small jumble of what could only be described as shape. The horizon was peeled away from the boundaries of the world and fell in upon the city as a halo of sorts, and to surround it the passengers could only see the rest of the world rapidly being stretched out from its furthest boundaries, dragged across the whole of its width as though being pulled taut on a rack - only to then be indecipherable consumed by the ever-shrinking ball of featureless detail that was New Nemea.

Far above, where the horizon had faded and given way to stars and the angry, stinging darkness between them - the faint, grayed outline of a double-helical structure started to slowly come into focus.

The pavise knights, if they noticed anything, seemed unperturbed - beyond Hiecro's half-murderous, half-anxious and wild gaze locked on Donny and every motion he made.

"Alright, we don't have too long before we get slung back around and hit the University landing pad, so I'll have to make this quick - and you had better all get yourself into sorts before then." The male pavise knight began, the line sounding curiously rote and with his gaze settling somewhere behind and to the left of Fortune's head, his expression still decidedly uninterested.

"There has been an incident at the New Nemea School of Engineering. Some kind of SNAFUBAR just before the big symposium they were supposed to have. Private security protocols kicked in, and the entire place is on lockdown - they're a private institution and local enforcement and just about everyone else has been on decidedly shaky ground with them for a while, which means nobody has been able to get in or out. Normally that would be the end of it, but thankfully a fire started on the inside of one of the wings and completely bypassed the security field, which means there is one passage into the rest of the place. It still has a biometric lock though, which is where you come in." He pointed right at Ariett, squinting slightly as he examined her. "Your guest pass plus your biometric data should open the way for most minor doorways. Which is why they need you. Aesch would prefer if you assisted voluntarily, but if you don't want to play ball he might just settle for ripping off the bits and pieces he needs."

He turned to Luca then, and gestured errantly at Donny. "As for you two - apparently Aesch specifically called you two on for troubleshooting. He wants you take to care of whatever the issue that caused the lockdown is. He didn't inform me of the details, but I can tell you that a certain Doctor Leona Olympia Cetona is involved somehow. She's...a touch mythical if you catch my drift. Aesch probably won't tell you shit beyond what he wants you to actually do, so if you two want answers it might behoove you to speak with her as long as she doesn't make it too inconvenient for you." He shrugged emphatically.

In the distance, the large double-helical structure also began to contort as the rest of the world fell away into the singularity below. The thin gray lines began to sweep to the side and downwards, stretching and bending unnaturally around the group's field of view to be dragged down and collapsed into the now infinitesimal dot below. A small section of the structure kept creeping closer and began to come into higher definition - revealing a clustered mashup of metallic structures forming rows of trenches running along the entire length of one of the helical arms.

"As for you, sir-" The pavise knight turned to Fortune, something approaching actual interest now on his face. "The good Duke was going to be attending the symposium, you know? He has relations with Aesch of a short, and Aesch knows why you're here. He's going to try and press you into helping troubleshoot here, both out of convenience and also because it would be quite a feather in his cap if he can later claim he sent someone legitimate to rescue the Duke instead of these shady characters. I don't think he'll try to press you too hard so your call on whether or not you want in on this mess." He nodded in deference faintly.

With a sudden burst of speed, the sphere was pulled into a circular opening in the twisted mass of metal within ones of the channels, and the passengers were pulled into a slowly curving, dark tunnel. Every few meters there was a faint set of four lights ringing the passage, revealing curious side-channels with doors and catwalks along its sides along with long stretches of ribbed spines sticking inwards at intervals. The eerily drifting remains of the bird caused twisted shadows to pass across all of the passengers.

"As for you-" The pavise knight finally gestured at Andreas. "I've not got a lot. I think you're a doctor? One of your patients was apparently a guest of the Duke's, and Aesch wants you there to tend to potential casualties I guess. I dunno." He gave Andreas an apologetic smile. "No idea whether Aesch actually needs you or not."

"And as for you two..." The male pavise knight paused as he glanced between Amelie and Kael.

"Fuck'em." Hiecro practically spat. "As far as I care they don't exist. Once we set down they are officially Aesch's problem."

"What she said." The male pavise knight said blandly. "That's nearly all I got. I don't want to get any closer than I have to, but my advice as an enforcer is not to let Aesch push you around more than you have to. He's a real scumbag." He uttered the last line in a comically cheery fashion, his face splitting with a smile out of the blue.

He then glanced briefly at the passage walls before continuing. "Anyway, looks like we've hit the mid-point. If you have any questions, ask them now."

The Final Hazard

She tried to press space away from her. Clearly, space had been pulled in at her, the relative measure decreased from her point of view. The girl determined to reject it, to restore distance relative to herself, how she was experiencing. Attempting to get it back to normal. Since it was only to herself it was happening, she assumed, she’d focus this effect on herself. Press it away. If it didn’t work, she’d attempt to create an orb the way she knew to see if it helped, if anything she knew how to do would have any effect.

At least transportation would be ready soon, he wanted this girl somewhere inside so he could properly examine her. And properly monitor her as long as she wouldn't snap out of it. Although she seemed calmer now, that certainly was a good sign.

@WiseDragonGirl

Ariett muttered something about how he'd better not be screwing with them before applying a few drops of the liquid to the girl's shirt—she wanted to see the effects before risking a high dose with a potentially volatile chemical.

@Holmishire

He kept his eyes on those whom had been in the 'carriage' earlier in order to see if they were alright and to also ensure that they didn't do something stupid... even if his gaze did linger on the situation with Amelie with a small amount of worry. In general, he was just keeping an alert eye out to make sure that he wouldn't be caught off guard by the next horrible thing that was no doubt going to happen.

@Bright_Ops

@PlatinumSkink

@PlatinumSkink
...But nothing happened.

The pounding behind her eyes had stopped though, and besides the issue of blurred vision Amelie felt reasonably fine.

@Holmishire
The thick, black liquid refused to pour out in small, neat drops - a modest lump of it falling from the lip of the canteen's mouth to slap against the spine-covered, silvery metal coating Amelie's shirt. The substance immediately reacted, seething in every direction like a mass of ferrofluid in a magnetic field, before stretching out to completely and evenly cover every exposed inch of the silver metal. A few moments passed, and then the black substance bled away, seemingly evaporating into thin air while emitting a sound equivocal to a melodramatic sigh. There remained no evidence of the silvery metal that had coated Amelie's shirt.

...Although the fabric that the metal had consume was also gone, leaving a gaping hole in the front of Amelie's shirt.

"It hurt like hell when that metal seared into my back," she said, addressing the knight. "If I used it on myself now, wouldn't I just suffer from an open wound?"

@Holmishire

"Nah." The male pavise knight said indifferently. "It will probably remove any skin directly adhered to the plating, but it's all going to be dead and cauterized most of the way down. Should just leave a clean scoop of flesh where the plate was. Unsightly, but not grisly."

With a grunt donny disassembled his contraption, tugged his shoe back on, replaced his reel, and ditched the piss rod over a shoulder before walking back to the others.

@Doc Doctor

@Doc Doctor
As Donny approached the group, they quickly returned to normal speed - and then started to accelerate. As he took another step, Hiecro, Fortune, and the male Pavise Knight all exploded in blurs of speed, moving several times faster than his eyes could process - and then in an instant, their motion returned to normal, and Donny witnessed Andreas and Ariett tending to the fallen Amelie while the remainder of the group gathered around the male pavise knight.

A curious halo of brown, sepia-toned haze began to fill the air surrounding the male pavise knight and those passengers immediately surrounding him. It was flecked with tantalizing flashes of blue, glimmering sparks. Dust and various microdebris from between the cobblestones began to alight and rush outward as though expelled by a high-pressure force, and a thin line of deep, glittering, carmine-red light seemed to seep out of the ground, demarcating an obvious boundary line. Those within the area, save for Luca, felt their eyes pop.

"Slug is forming up." The male pavise knight declared. "Everyone stay within the pressure field." He glanced over to where Donny had, from his perspective, abruptly reappeared out of thin air. He snorted lightly and hung his crossbow back again his belt loop before beckoning to Donny with his right hand.

"Come on over troublemaker. There is at least one person in New Nemea who would mind if you were left to die here, as surprising as that is."

@Cruallassar@mdk
Hiecro had turned back to face Kael once she had reached the gathered group of passengers. "You coming or not, lion food?" She called out to him. She then turned to glance over at Luca and visibly startled.

"Hey, you! You're standing too close to the line, get closer in to the rest of us. You don't want to be stuck between the folding walls."

The Final Hazard

Donny slipped around the corner and out of sight of the lightning and orb, in view of the others, an assumedly safe position, and waited for any signs that time was about to speed up again.

@Doc Doctor

@Doc Doctor
As he turned the corner once more, the passengers and the pavise knights began to speed up - but only up to a point, halting at a fifth of the relative norm when he stopped to observe them once more. Looking back at the lightning and his golf club, the arcing stream of light had completely frozen in the air. As distant as he was from it now - which was still remarkably close due to how space seemed to become further compressed the more distant it was from his relative position - it did not seem like it would be making any appreciable progress anytime soon.

From what he could see, Hiecro was still in the midst of slamming her free hand into the ground, and the passenger knight looked to be heading to pick up the shield he had dropped earlier after it had blocked a hail from the crossbow knight's vector-fire. If he focused on the knight, the proportions of his form became...curiously apparent. Donny could clearly see through and around the slit of his visor. Through and around the individual breaks in each link of his chainmail.

The same was true of the others as well - by angling his focus just so, it appeared he could abuse his newfound ability to look around corners and obstructions to play the role of a voyeur. He also noticed that the closer he got to the passengers and the faster they began to move relative to him, the more his enhanced vision receded and approached what was normal.

This felt so impossible. The feeling of distance and direction just vanishing, logic undone, Amelie had to assume this was something only she was experiencing. Counter-magic? Aimed at her to get rid of the Redirection Orb? Something which blasted her orientation out of the water? If it was, she had to consider that first after she had recovered, so she focused on trying to get a grip of herself. … What were those talons…?

@PlatinumSkink

@PlatinumSkink
The talons were terrible chariots of rancor and starlight that raked across the whole of the world and tore it asunder, one of them lightly wafting by like a continental shelf uprooting itself and playfully running a sliver of its form across her pate. It came and went swiftly, its presence only felt in the manner by which the blood vessels in her eyes began to rupture one by one. Foreign iron rained upon the dawn, and she then experienced a moment of extreme calm and tranquility as the world came back into focus.

It became immediately apparent - how obvious it was now! - that her magic had irrevocably changed. She could no longer directly manipulate the kinetic energy and potential of various objects and effects - or rather, she never had. All she could and had ever done was change the relative objective measure of the Four Pillars. It would be more difficult for her to do now that the veil of her childish delusions could no longer preserve her from the true nature of the riven universe, but perhaps she would be able to make better use of her abilities for that lack.

If she could get over her magic having tumultuously recomposed itself by effectively rebounding upon the core of her being of course.

No sign of him. Luca looked at the rest of his gaggle. "Did anybody see where he went? I think Aesch is expecting both.... I mean, all of us."

@mdk

@mdk
"Well, it's your loss if he has booked or kicked it." The male pavise knight snorted irreverently as he gingerly began to move once more, taking a tentative step and raising his pavise off the ground experimentally - relief flooding across his face as his freedom of motion was restored. "Aesch may have really wanted him, but priority goes to getting who we can to NNSE. I don't fancy your odds without him, but quite frankly that's none of my godsdamned business."

She called out to the knight who'd spoken earlier. "Hey, delusional or not, she could use some help. Could you get over here with some of that solvent you mentioned?"

@Holmishire

@Holmishire
The male pavise knight waved errantly at them and began to approach. "Yeah yeah, though honestly lady it looks like you could stand to have the stuff a bit more than this inconvenience here does." He practically glowered at Amelie as he reached to his belt and unclipped what looked like a water canteen from it, handing it off to Ariett. The container was a matte-green in coloration, with a chemical hazard symbol clearly emblazoned in solid, bold black along with a warning in text below.

WARNING
Preconfigured Molecular Golem Aggregate
Use Only As Directed

The canteen felt like it was filled with liquid petroleum. Something vaguely fluid in nature, but viscous and heavy. Uncapping the canteen would only reveal a dark interior, the contents a pitch-black coloration.

"What's up with her eyes? She having a stroke or something?" The male pavise asked with faintly raised eyebrows, through his tone was unaffected. After handing the canteen to Ariett, he had set his pavise shield back onto the ground and begun to tap on an unseen set of controls mounted near the grip. "Be aware, I'm having a slug form up in about fifteen seconds. Interior should be stable and sterilized, for what it's worth."

"Alright, we go with you, you keep your helmets off the whole trip, and we get some answers on the way...like who the hell these other people you keep mentioning are, why someone wants to kill us, so on. Does that seem fair?"

@Cruallassar

@Cruallassar
"Or how about you shut the fuck up, sit down, and we might let you tag along with the others we are supposed to convey." Hiecro snapped at Kael as she finally got up, closing her visor back down in the process if only to spite him. While it was still largely ruinously stained and covered by Donny's opportune application of pepper-spray, the fierce coloration appeared to be slowing fading and losing its texture. Hiecro's own previous efforts to wipe it away had clearly been for naught, but some other force was slowly but surely scouring the substance from the visor's surface.

"If you pack in that ass you have for a mouth in the meantime I might not task much effort with the consideration of permitting you to live." Hiecro turned her back on him and began to head over to where the male pavise knight, Ariett, Andreas, Amelie, and Fortune were gathering together. "Keep our helmets off," she scoffed. "what a fucking moron."

She seemed largely unconcerned with the fact that Kael had armed himself with her fallen comrade's crossbow and pavise.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Terminal

Blood and Ashes I just tripped and stumbled into the Dark Souls of writing. What are you?

@Aeonumbra

You shall know me by my many signs and symbols.

My nature shall be unsounded from vacuous truths. My essence rendered from a mill of worlds. My heart tendered through malign bargaining with an odoriferous and invidious rhino. The nebulous courses of my pretense can be distilled using the seeds of Amaranthus Caudatus. My vestiges may be salvaged from the severed fingers of a bidental priest caught in the wiring of a burnt piano. My foibles subsumed in common geodes, unearthed, stolen, then buried. My husk sewn through the commingling of many councils of winged centipedes.

Alternatively, I may be induced to appear via sketchy promises of gift cards.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@terminal -- It's hard to tell definitively from the layout of the latest post. Is the dimensional funkiness meant to be perceptible to anyone other than Donny and Amielle? My impression is that those were experienced only (or just primarily?) by the two characters affected.

I'm asking because if Luca was meant to perceive all that, I'd have to make some decisions about how/if the clockwork biotech would be affected. Reasonably speaking, they're, I mean, they're built on clocks, so if the clocks start going crazy, I need to address that somehow.

@mdk

No comment. If such information was available, it was likely obfuscated by an aspect of the narration.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

I have hammered at all four of the pillars. Matter, energy, space, and time.

Any further disruption of the Contextual Reality will likely be geometrically aggravated and reduce any chances of getting past act three to near zero - and possibly prevent posters from recognizing opportunities to escape.

The Final Hazard

"Maybe it's time we all talk like civilized people, without any weapons raised at each other and without any more deaths. Everybody agree?"

@WiseDragonGirl

@WiseDragonGirl
"Sir, we are not exactly in a state to disagree." The male pavise knight deadpanned. He had largely stopped squirming in place and had adopted a tall, stolid stance - tightly gripping his pavise shield, but having relaxed his right arm. It was still raised, but held in place for the moment by Amelie's redirection orb.

"Who are you and what do you want from me?" He blinked. "I mean, from us." Then Luca's grip on the arrow tightened. Shit. Priority one. "I mean, you need to take us to an infirmary. Now. We have wounded, thanks to you.

@mdk

@mdk
"There's nothing to tell here beyond what I've already said." The male pavise knight said somewhat gruffly. His demeanor was calm, if his expression was somewhat irritated. "We're just supposed to get you to NNSE statim. We owe a few favors and I don't want to get caught up in all of your shit. We have some solvent and can handle any plating you've got, but you lot aren't going to any hospital or clinic. They'd just kill you in your rooms there. Safest place for you all right now is with Platter Aesch."

‘The decision was made in a hurry, I was sent in last second, directly into the limo…’

@PlatinumSkink

@PlatinumSkink
"Bullshit." Hiecro harshly spat the word from where she was sitting on the ground, having finally unclasped the lower hooks for her visor and lifted it up. "But you know what, I don't even fucking care anymore. You trash are all too hot and too much trouble. I don't even care if you actually turn out to be Proxies. We're taking you all to NNSE and then booking it. I just want to be rid of Aesch and out of this fucking town." The bayonet for her crossbow retracted, and she pressed its guard into the ground for leverage as she began to get to her feet, limbs trembling somewhat.

"I'm forming a slug, and you're all coming with us. If you don't like it you can suck on ionized golems after getting fried by the lights. If they haven't all been rigged to aggro on you by now, they will be soon."

Donny backed away to a safe distance, before trotting behind the corner of a building. As he went, he called over his shoulder.

"Awll this essitement has loosen'd mah bladdah. Be back in fahve, frahnds."

@Doc Doctor

@Doc Doctor
"No you fucking don't!" Hiecro shouted after Donny, hastening to rise but only stumbling in the process and falling back down to all fours. "I'm wise to your fucking game you ginger piece of shit! Geeetuuuhaaahhh buuuhaaakuuu huuuuuuuuuuuuuuur-"

As Donny turned the corner, Hiecro's words lengthened and started to drop in intonation, as if being slowed down and played back by an extremely poor answering machine. Looking back, even her motion had slowed down - she was barely moving at all anymore. The same was true of the male pavise knight and the remaining passengers, whose movements had all become infinitesimal and minute. Looking straight up, a bird that had been flying overhead was stopped mid-flight.

With a clear view of the street ahead of him, other disturbances become apparent. The surrounding area was emptied of pedestrians and loiterers as before, but everything seemed much more cramped. Only the space immediately around Donny himself seemed to be in order - beyond a few feet, the wall of the adjacent building scrunched up and shrank to only a foot in width, and he could abruptly see a short distance around the corner - at a flat ninety-degree angle. The street itself had similarly shortened, and the next intersection down (previously more than twenty meters away) was suddenly only a game of hopskotch away from him - as was that intersection's traffic sphere.

As with everything else, it too appeared to be affected by the strange time dilation. It was evident, given that it was crackling fiercely with curiously slow-moving, streaming ribbons of arcing light - and that it had just fired a bolt of lightning at him.

A bolt of lightning moving at a snail's pace. Looking closely, he could see the branching, tenuous, blinding phantoms of light course through the air, piercing through space in countless fractal spines - all scattered haphazardly outward from the surface of the sphere, but all pointedly converging in his direction.

There was a side alley within spitting distance, across the street, and from within Donny both heard and felt the only source of motion seemingly unaffected by the time dilation. The relative proportions of the alley were remarkably preserved considered how contorted the rest of the world had become - it was dark, cast in a fair amount of shade from the morning sun. The wooden buildings to either of the alley's sides had significantly run-down side panels therein, all rotten and with peeling or else entirely absent caulking - and there was a closed, square-shaped sewer hatch planted dead center in the middle of the narrow, grimy path. Further yet, the remainder of the alley was crunched back into the contorted space otherwise surrounding him, and turned a corner - which Donny could yet again somehow see right around perfectly - which led to a dead-end with a heavy-set wooden door with dark iron fittings set atop a short two-step staircase.

He could audibly hear an active, angry, seething noise. Like a marching stream of army ants devouring everything in their path in the jungle - emanating from seemingly every corner of the small patch of undistorted space within the alley. If he focused hard enough, he might even have heard what resembled semi-coherent words, and laughter.

"-Get back here!" Hiecro shouted after Donny as he turned the corner and vanished from sight. "Godsdamnit." She hissed, slamming on the ground with her free hand and starting to get back up once more.

And here’s a reminder that the Redirection Orb is not invisible, it’s fairly visible due to just slightly distorted light in the area of the orb, though it could still be clearly seen through. It was just currently surrounding the knight, pretty obvious something was being done there.

@PlatinumSkink

@PlatinumSkink
Overheard, a bird that had been in flight appeared to have frozen in midair - though it was innocuous and unlikely to be noticed unless any of the passengers looked straight up. And here's a reminder that there are a countless number of ways to describe transient or otherwise ephemeral effects and phenomenon, some of which may be delivered in a fashion that is extremely immersion breaking and likely to have supplanted a more artful explanation. It was just that there were other various nuanced effects in the surrounding environs that were pretty obvious and immediately apparent to the passengers, but which the narrator was disinclined to explain in the moment by taking advantage of precedent established by another poster.

Abruptly, Amelie's redirection orb vanished, and she felt her own innate affinity with her spatial magics go haywire - her senses pinwheeling like a compass trying to find true north in a lodestone mine. As if distinctions such as direction and distance had suddenly lost all meaning and were illusory, and that the whole of the world was rushing in to collapse upon her all at once and as though the land was rising up to meet the sky with all the horizon about to be swallowed whole by finely honed ivory talons.