Terminal

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Terminal are edits still punished or did you stop doing that too?

@WiseDragonGirl

Edits are still punished.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Terminal

You know, I was content to just stop posting and have Fortune just disappear from the Rp. I wasn't having fun anymore because I was tried to dealing with a GM that actively punishes me for my mild dyslexia... as well as the problems caused my others that makes figuring out what this so called 'bigger picture' of the game is.

Then you had a demonic looking bug call Fortune a coward. He is many things, but he isn't a coward. I'm going to make you a promise; He is going to win this one way or the other.

@Bright_Ops

If it is any consolation, I decided to drop the issue of distorting the text using posters' own grammatical errors. They were simply piling up too quickly - and not just from you. Not by far. Additionally, adding errors in did not actually deter future errors from being made.

So now the only things you have to deal with our the other contestants and my punishing continuity errors.

The enthusiasm though, is a great relief. I look forward to his ascending victory.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Terminal

I withdrew from the game at the wipe. Fortune's not in it anymore.

@Bright_Ops

Well, here's your opportunity to exit stage right. Aesch just pointed it out for you.

That's currently the mechanism for leaving. Otherwise you can eat a lost life from something happening to Fortune, possibly after causing another disturbance.

The Final Hazard

"Here. If you're accompanying us, you might want a full kit." Since after all, his last shield had been turned into doom incarnate...

@Cruallassar

@Cruallassar
"Oh. Thanks." The knight replied, gingerly taking the pavise by its sides in both hands. "Uh. Sorry for trying to kill you earlier. We were pretty sure - Hiecro and me that is - that you and that girl were proxies. This whole situation is just..." He shook his head, the golden light pouring from his eyes blooming with intensity for a moment. "...we thought that just because we weren't told about you that you were a suspect - and then that gearhead turns out to be a proxy all along despite being one of the people we really were supposed to retrieve? Madness." He moved the pavise to his left hand, sliding his arm into the mounted straps on its back before straightening up. "I guess if nothing else we don't need to worry about them turning on us anymore. Maybe it thought it would kill more of us in the sphere by gibbing itself like that. Uh." He coughed, turning his head to glance between Donny and the open door leading into the university proper.

"If any of you find weapons on one of the bodies, bring it to me, please. I'll probably need something to break any security systems acting weird."

@Holmishire

@Doc Doctor@Holmishire@WiseDragonGirl
"About that. I know this will sound really stupid, but maybe we should consider splitting up in there? I mean, what Aesch told you does not really cover just how freaky Leona is, from what I heard just before the lockdown. If Donny and I and Sir Fortune can't handle her, at least the rest of you might be able to get the Duke or some of the others out safely. Let Aesch burn the whole place down with her trapped inside." He looked around warily. "Where is Sir Fortune, by the way? He sort of vanished on us..."

@Bright_Ops
The tongue-mounted centipede wriggling out from the widened maw of the man who choked on his own mettle chittered sardonically, a note of scorn somehow permeating the echoing, cohesive voice it conjured with its rubbing legs as it addressed Fortune. "You seem out of place. If it is the Coward's Heart you seek, it may be found yonder; trail but back out. Perhaps this task is too much for you, little mote?" The small centipede uttered a rattling laugh. The husk it extended from raised one shaking arm to point with a wobbling digit towards the void behind Fortune, out across the landing pad and its current carpet of viscera, bodies, and shattered gears. One by one, without any fuss, the miscellaneous bits and pieces of debris were turning to black and bleeding out of the air, soon to leave nothing behind. It seemed mere remnants could not survive in this place. What precisely the husk of the man who choked on his own mettle was gesturing out remained out of sight, obscuring by oblivion - perhaps it could see what he could not?

The Final Hazard

Donny blinked. His perception of Andy had indeed taken to reality. A year previous Donny had given anime a try. Who exactly did he picture every time he saw Andy?

@Doc Doctor

@Doc Doctor
Simon shook his head with an exasperated sigh, and stuck both his hands in his pockets before glancing warily into the angry black void above them.

"There aren't any heavens to dig to anymore." He said, his voice plaintive in tone. He glanced back down at Donny. "You're all going to die here Donny. You're kind of a dick, but Ariett, Andy, Kael - that's gonna be pretty sad." He gave Donny an exhausted smile. "But it's not your fault, you know? You're kind of the victim here. How can you help but believe in the one who believes in you?" He shook his head ruefully before staring right through Donny with a hard stare, a faint stream of tears beginning to fall from his eyes.

"Who the hell..." He whispered, his whole face crunching down in anger. "do you think you are?" His eyes wavered again, affixing on Donny properly. "Keep moving forward. Bit by bit." He said. "Maybe you'll find a way out of this place - and even then, don't stop. Find whoever did this to you and go right through them. Then maybe..."

Simon smiled faintly as his body began to evaporate in spiraling streamers of red and blue smoke. "Maybe...nobody else will have to suffer."

A moment later, he was gone, the smoke dissolving into the void beyond those who were fated to die and their small sphere of personal space. The ectomorph was nowhere to be seen.

"Oh hey, look, field-triage kits," he said as he rummaged through it, he could live with this 'you ask, we serve instantly' aspect of this world, reality, dream, whatever. He lifted a spray-bottle to examine it. "And this looks like that metal-dissolving spray. Cool." He put it back, but before he closed the backpack he took a small piece of licorice and put it in his mouth.

@WiseDragonGirl

@WiseDragonGirl
The licorice, somewhere between his hand and lips, transmuted from a pleasantly malleable lump of bitter-tasting goodness into a hard, crunchy stone of some loose and salty material. VERY salty. In fact, it probably WAS salt - it was burning the whole of his tongue, and the rest of his mouth immediately turned numb.

There must have been an odd look on his face as a result, because the trouble shooter was giving him a look.

Kael...really isn't sure how to react here. Having nothing better to do under the circumstances, he decides to use his Ethereal Sight, his eyes glowing green as the magic of the world is lain bare before him. It feels an awful lot like someone took reality and made it into a five-dimensional maze...

@Cruallassar

@Cruallassar
This world was dead.

With his ethereal sight, the boy who was both live and dead could see that there had been magic here, once - but it was gone now. Not merely absent or sealed - it was as if the magical forces underpinning the whole of creation had choked and died. This became all the more evident when his vision burst with an aching pain, as though filled with swarming spiders so packed thick that his eyes were about to burst like egg sacs. It was as though some invasive force had stabbed into his eyes - using his own magic as a channel to attack him.

Pale as a ghost, she turned to the direction the pavise knight had pointed and began shuffling stiffly away. As she passed Andy, she muttered something about needing meds to take the edge off, but she did neither stopped nor hesitated; her gaze was fixed ahead, unblinking and empty.

@Holmishire

@Holmishire
The last visitor did not have far to go. The angry black curtain of the world drew back before she had taken three steps, revealing the burnt-out shell of what had probably once been a hallway of some kind. The carcass of layered wooden paneling over old brickwork formed ruinous, fence-height spires to the left and right, the stone having been subjected to a heat so intense that it had crumbled into ashes, leaving only cinder blocks behind. The floor seemed relatively intact at first - blackened stone rhombitrihexagonal tiling - but at contact the small, fine shapes disintegrated and blew away in the cold light of the sun, leaving naught but flat, featureless, pockmarked concrete behind. With every step, the clouds of ash and dust were flung up into the vestiges of the burnt passage, threatening to choke those who were fated to die and the one who felt no loss.

Straight ahead though, set into the one wall still standing, was a door. A gleaming contrivance of seamlessly cast metal, a black frame with brass trimming surrounding a handsome arrangement of carved pewter with a softly glowing computer screen recessed in its upper panel. It displayed a simple green text against a black background.

>Welcome Ariett Deveca. The Way Is Open.
>WARNING: Uninvited guests detected. Please call or else seek out your nearest security professional immediately.
>WARNING: Security systems engaged. Keep distance from intruders to avoid potentially fatal collateral injury.
>Notice: Due to the presence of unregistered intruders on university grounds, the internal map has been disabled on all public monitors. Please call or else seek out your nearest security professional for assistance if needed.

The unblemished door slid open, retracting into the wall as she approached - though the area behind it was still obscured by the veil of hideous darkness that had consumed the whole world, for the moment.

The man who choked on his own mettle had turned to watch her approach the entrance. He called out to those who were fated to die in farewell.

"Your hero will regret their choice! You wear betrayal on your fifth finger!"

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@WiseDragonGirl I am probably the wrong person to ask that question of.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Doc Doctor
I have never watched TTGL.

Now I need to watch all of it in just under 24 hours so that I can make use of this new utterly imperative development.

Mot fucking damnit.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

I feel like, logically, this catastrophic series of events would not occur in response to a person simply standing in an inert fashion...

@Cruallassar

You would think so. Strange, no?

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

The World Has Broken.

Good fortune to you all. I would wish you good luck, but it does not exist.

The Final Hazard

Aesch craned his head back to gape in silence at the passengers, seemingly at an abrupt loss for words. In that moment of silence as he stared at them, the world came undone.

A fine line wove its way across the breadth of the world where the sky met the land, and all of the works of mankind fell away as darkness spilled forth, stretching across the land like a veil, each mangled and contorted structure in the near distance slowly losing all depth and falling into a featureless morass of angry pitch. Twelve fine lines of jet split their way across the apex of the sky, enclosing the whole of the universe in a cage of ink. The triangular patches of the dawncast sky grew brittle, an iridescent radiance shearing through their fragile veneer and erupting in an ultraviolet cascade of light that shone an empyrean blaze. The light quickly grew beyond what mere human vision could espy, and vanished from all living memory, leaving naught but the cold and alien sun alone in the void casting a frigid light.

The man who choked on his own mettle and his coterie changed in the new light before those who were fated to die. Aesch was briefly wracked by perturbations across the whole of his body, his flesh bulging and surging in every direction like a broiling cyst. The wheelchair he was ensconced in shuddered violently, emitting a constant clattering noise of fine silver platters falling to the ground. The tubing and the I.V. drip connected to the man elongated and were reduced to fine silver wires that rearranged themselves, animating in the air without any motive force to guide them, Aech's blood coursing along them like surging worms.

Radiance bloomed around his form - the cold light of the sun banishing the morass of hideous black cast across the ground and air, as though now detail was cast by that which obstructed the sun as shade. In that small halo of detail, those fated to die saw as Aesch underwent a most curious transformation - he levitated in the air, his skin splitting across his back and the coils of his pretense unwinding from his body in a stream of burgundy vitriol, the mass pooling across the ground to form a puddle of his mortal foibles in the visage of his shadow. It was many times larger than the man himself, its two-dimensional features brimming with barely-contained power that rippled in surges and waves. The visceral shadow bore a crown, and in the center of its naval was an iridescent star that shone in wet and gleaming colors mixed of bile, phlegm, and marrow. The twisting, animated cords of silver that had been woven from the man's tubing strung themselves to the shadow's form by its arms, legs, and head - connecting to the emptied husk that now drifted in the air before those fated to die. The husk itself deteriorated as the shadow waxed in strength, the whole of its lower body withering and then putrefying before dissolving to ashes, followed by most of its chest, leaving only the husks's collar, shoulders, arms, and head intact. Extending down from the feeble facade was a warped and fractured mass of sinew and bone supporting a slowly-beating heart, the arteries and capillaries severed - kept suspended only by a webbing of silvery metal that grew from it like a weed, keeping it connected to the rest of the body even as spines and spires of metal cut greedily into the cardiac muscle. Aesch's face grew in size, its mouth increasing in volume until it took up a good half of his face, his eyes and brow horribly shrunken and flattened just above it. From within the darkness of his maw, a single centipede wriggled forth, wings sprouting from its back with a small pop and a spray of tar, coursing outwards until it reached nearly a meter in length. It wavered from side to side in the air wildly.

The coterie of the man who choked on his own mettle fared somewhat more favorable fates, merely being diminished in essence and depth - flattening and imploding into tree-like towers of thin, cylindrical lines joined together in a vaguely humanoid shape. Reduced to little more than coordinate impressions of personages against the true void of the world.

The passengers remained unchanged - at least, as to their own minds and impressions of themselves. Whether their forms had twisted from each others' relative perspectives was to be seen. The one who accompanied them, who felt no loss, had barely changed at all - naught but his eyes, which now shone a brilliant golden-orange hue with an explosive captivation, obscuring the rest of his now effectively featureless face with their shine.

"Seeing how well you though everything through I'm sure you'll have some additional medical supplies for me." Andy said. "I would have packed more if I had known I had to do some heroic stuff today." His eyes moved from the wheelchair to Fortune and rested on Ariett. "Other than that I'm ready to go. Are you people ready too?"

@WiseDragonGirl

"I have some first aid materials in my pack," Ariett started, addressing Andy before taking on a more bitter tone. "Though my impression is that any injured we'll find inside will need far more than that." She then stepped over to stand by the doctor, but looked back at the pavise knight as if for guidance. "I'm ready to move on."

@Holmishire

@WiseDragonGirl@Holmishire
"Don't look at me, Ms. You're the one with the visitor pass." The one who felt no loss said in response, holding his left hand up in a placating gesture. "I know that we're supposed to head for the burnt-out wing though - the one right over there, with the billowing smoke and such. If Mr. Aesch has no more imperatives and if none of you all have any more questions, we should probably get moving..." He pointed vaguely in the indicated direction - somewhere behind the man who choked on his own mettle, where there was naught but angry, hideous darkness as the world fell away from the tenuous shores of reality cast by those assembled.

The winged centipede extending from the depths of the mouth of the man who choked on his own mettle wriggled excitedly in response, wringing its many legs together in order to create the many-layered, seething semblance of Aesch's voice.

"How do you intend to bind questions without answers, if truth dost bleed? Nobility has proven worthless, only heroism can shield you."

The ectomorph felt their backpack suddenly gain several stones of weight and partly dislodge itself as several unseen but felt objects appeared within its interior. If the ectomorph is the first to check and examines the contents in the first stable branch, they discover several compact, specialized field-triage kits - including bottles of spray-solvent akin to what the one who felt no loss had provided to one of those who were fated to die earlier. If the ectomorph is not the first to check and examine the contents in the first stable branch, they instead discover the shrunken heads of the boy who was an egregore, the child who drowned others in open space, the boy who both lived and died, and the servitor whose death was not foretold.

"Sir, are there any other hostiles currently inside the university besides Dr. Leona, and can you guarantee the security of the perimeter?"

@Cruallassar

@Cruallassar
"They will only ask you three questions. It might seem like they might ask more, but they will only ask three. Then you will die." The wriggling centipede echoed helpfully.