Terminal

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

Oh...
Oh Terminal, you glorious hellspawn.

I am onto you.

@Cruallassar

About time. I've only been hinting at it for around nine pages now.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

@Terminal

Damn, you beat me to the post by just a few minutes.

Edit: May I edit my post due to the fact that it was written before I had a chance to read the GM post that ninja'ed me?

@Bright_Ops

Permission granted.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

Roster and lives have been updated.

The Final Hazard

"Leona," he called to her, continuing to drift around a bit, "you know I wasn't kidding about that voodoo-curse, right? I can see obvious signs it's already working, bad luck is surrounding you like a dark cloud. But, I can be coerced in sharing what I know about countering it over a cup of coffee. It would be a shame if pretty woman like you would die and you have no idea how much I long for a cup of coffee, I'm close to selling my soul for one decent cup."

@WiseDragonGirl

@WiseDragonGirl
What Andreas saw was nothing he would have cared to have coffee with.

The woman's mass was rapidly expanding in every direction, her flesh seething and roiling like a bubbling sea of bile. Her clothes were in the process of shredding themselves as her mass broke through their seams. Her features were still vaguely the same though, even as they became bloated and twisted, and Andreas could still detect the hint of a smile about the contorted ridge that must have been her lips as she fixed her bulging, malignant golden eyes on him.

"Little mote, The sound she uttered possibly came from her mouth, but sounded less like a human voice insomuch as a chance acoustic phenomenon created by the expansion and incidental sound of her bloating form as razor talons began to sprout from her extremities and what looked like golden fur began to grow across her collar. "I am far beyond whatever feeble cantrips your pissant tribesman could have concocted."

The moment he saw Fortune bring his sword up, Donny fired off a second shot to blast out the knight's elbow joint, effectively interrupting his attack.

@Doc Doctor

Before he came back into view, the group would have just barely enough time to react to a grenade being tossed right back at them, a dark blur hurtling through the midst of the smoke. No, not quite. The grenade was /arching/ out of the smoke, flying around in a wide circle towards the party's right. If they remained where they were, it seemed that the grenade would somehow pass around and behind them...

@Doc Doctor

@Doc Doctor
Which was when the frankly queer suggestions that were space and time acted up again. Possibly. It was incredibly hard to tell what was going on with all the smoke from the incendiary grenade blooming in the empty, featureless battlefield. What Donny felt and what he saw though were both mutually exclusive, as well as impossible.

The first thing being the long gash that had slid open across the left side of his clothes and through a good few centimeters of his abdomen, resulting in a small splatter of blood flying free through the darkness. It was not a bad wound, all things considered. Very precise and clean. He was unlikely to bleed out from it anytime soon - which was to say, in the next thirty minutes or so. What was bad was that it had come completely out of nowhere and had apparently been caused by nothing.

The second thing being Fortune's blade flying, pinwheeling end over end - probably from the knight's interrupted, botched throw of the weapon - through the space just behind the trajectory arc of the grenade Donny had thrown, where it made contact with and sliced cleanly through the razor wire Donny had secured to the projectile. Due to its thinness and coloration, it had been effectively invisible in the void to the other passengers. There was no way any kind of throw the knight had made should have even come close to the wire unless he had specifically known about it, and even then, Donny's shot to his elbow should have precluded that.

In a single, smooth motion he slid five of the strange metal-coating crossbow bolts from his belt and cast them toward Donny and his new friend in a blanket pattern while Kael was nice and obscured by the smoke, then looked down at the machine and willed himself there. From here, to in front of the device, to hell with transit time, this was the test of his theory on this space.

@Cruallassar

@Doc Doctor
Three of the blindly scattered crossbow bolts were dead misses, having been cast by hand through a large cloud of smoke in a void without gravity. By chance though, one was headed on a direct collision course with Donny's right leg - it was not coming straight at him, its head facing several degrees away from the actual heading of its trajectory, but there was no telling whether the cylindrical head needed to hit him directly or lightly graze him in order to go off.

Also by chance, one punched directly into the woman's expanding, fleshy form - and then sank in as the rising walls of flesh washed over and consumed it whole. There was a wet sort of popping noise from her, followed by a long hiss, as though somebody had left a kettle with water out on a stove, but her body continued to grow and her expression was unperturbed.

@Cruallassar
It worked.

The transistion through space and and time came with a number of other revelations. Perhaps manipulations of this sort had been possible even when the illusory world itself had still been whole - though surely more difficult, as the nuances of time, space, relativity, matter, and energy would have complicated the effect.

The revelation also struck him, out of the blue, that perhaps he could have saved Ariett if she were still merely bleeding out with his newfound power. If he could move from place to place at will, who was to say he could not mend her flesh and vigor with but a thought?

However, that possibility was no longer available. The first thing he saw upon looking at the computer screen mounted on the cairn's body was a rapidly rolling wall of text, not all of it in legible type, but two of the newest lines were written in perfectly coherent words and had been emphatically highlighted by whatever force governed the flow of information.

>Entity V [4165277] Ariett Deveca has died.
>Entity V [4165277] Ariett Deveca cause of death: Cerebral Hypoxia following excessive blood loss.
>Entity [Ghost with no home] penalized.

Another line of text appeared on the screen directly below that morbid announcement, shifting the remaining text upwards. Given the mass of incomprehensible text sliding across the screen, he otherwise might not have noticed it - if his name had not been listed in the same line.

>Entity Proxy [Iris] vitiating Entity VII [4167067] Kael Arvindr.

_{"You could have saved her, you worthless thief."}

"How did you do that?" The pavise knight said as he finally arrived by Kael's shoulder, drifting through the void hastily. The whole of his face remained obscured by the radiant, golden haze emanating from his eyes like a noxious gas. "Is that just a thing you can do? You should have just appeared behind that fucking Proxy Donovan and ended him on the spot! Uh." He paused as he reached out with a tentative hand for Kael's shoulder. "...Can you do that again? Maybe you should do that now..."

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

For those concerned with the issue of how I described the blade's trajectory earlier:

Let it be. Wait for it.

In other news though: @Doc Doctor, you are allowed to post more than once between my own posts. You could have posted in regards to shooting at Fortune's arm prior to my own post.

In this case it's not a problem, since the contextual reality is flexible like that. Just something to bear in mind.

The Final Hazard

"Um, not to rain on the party or anything, but if you are now free to leave...and do leave...then what's to stop us from resetting the whatever it was you said afterwards and leave ourselves? Seems like that's a win-win situation."

@Cruallassar

"I just thought I'd let you know before you begin spewing riddles and make us squirm and stuff."

@WiseDragonGirl

"You can't leave... not really anyway. You don't have a body in the physical world of your own, so the only ways you can enter the real world is if someone created you a body out of dark, twisted magic or if you possess someone... which is why we're really here, isn't it?" Narrowing his gaze at their 'hostess', he felt more and more confident with his theory as he continued "It's why this world was designed to make us suffer... to try and break our wills to make it easier for you. But you couldn't just take anyone; A weak soul begets a weak body and a weak host wouldn't last long... but while you managed to clear away those with weaker souls, you're not confident that you would win in an outright battle with us, thus this 'game' of yours."

@Bright_Ops

The woman blinked several times rapidly, her smile twisting in bemusement as confusion blossomed across her face.

"...Are you little motes being serious? I am having genuine trouble telling otherwise..."

A flash, a splitting boom, tatters of Donny's coat spinning in the void. The entire time the group had believed Donny to be on their side, but the only side Donny had ever been on was his own. He was no longer under contract, and so just like that, there was one less party member and one more dangerous foe. He'd have fired across his belly and through the side of his overcoat, drawing his revolver from its leg holster while his flank was hidden to the others. Ariett had been the one Donny considered the most threatening, so he aimed to shoot her down first with a .454 to the heart.

@Doc Doctor

"How...very bold of you." The woman practically purred as she straightened again, neatly folding her hands together - the claws extending from her fingers silently retracting. Her eyes narrowed ever-so-faintly as she gave Donny a lazy, contemptuous smile. "...and how very conceited. Hubris within hubris. Though the audacity does-"

As she forced herself limp, she surreptitiously armed the grenade, holding it by her belly, and drifting lazily back towards Leona and Donny. Once she drew close, she spin around to protect the others from the blast with her body, and release the grenade.

@Holmishire

"Oh my." The woman said faintly, her voice slightly raised and distant. The maneuver had apparently caught her entirely off-guard. "That's troublesome-"

Like most other incendiary grenades, the M-14 napalm grenade was not strictly intended as a lethal weapon, but rather to burn through fortifications or to destroy troublesome objects. Its effective range upon detonation was quite limited, though it was likely to be quite unpleasant to anything it made contact with. Like other incendiary grenades, it also possessed an exceedingly short fuse, and started to burn a mere second after Ariett released it - combusting with a blinding light, sending sparks and embers flying in every direction throughout the void as a second star was born in the darkness followed immediately thereafter by a billowing cloud of obscuring smoke, obstructing both the woman and Donny from view - as well as the sword that Fortune saw fit to throw, which plunged straight into the fog tip-first, and flying eerily straight. Straighter than it had any business being, considering the angle Fortune had hurled it at. If Donny did not move away from his position, the weapon would hurtle through the cloud of smoke and impale him right through the chest - though he would have faint warning of its approach, only in that he could have seen Fortune throw it before Ariett had released the grenade.

The haphazardly flying sparks and cinders erupting from within the cloud of smoke shot through every direction in the surrounding darkness - and directly below them, approximately three meters down, they hit something before snuffing out. The darkness below them shivered, and gave way.

The source of the audible humming was revealed. It was a machine - insomuch as such a curious assembly could have been called mechanical. Resembling a large stone cairn, with twelve layers of monolithic stones layered atop each other, separated by thin films of cerulean static energies and adorned with strings of carved bones and chunks of obsidian. A series of precision linework arranged in fractal geometric patterns covered the surface of each stone, and set into the face of the sixth from the bottom was a computer screen gilded in brass, with a pewter case seated within the monolith's body. A fine mechanical keyboard with extremely robust but ornate pewter keys with pearl-coated surfaces and emerald typeface extended from below it, along with a messy guts-worth of cables and wiring worming out to trace all around the cairn, secured by clasps of the strung bones and connecting to obtrusive pewter ports in the side of the other eleven monoliths. Twelve small levitating spheres not entirely dissimilar in appearance from the traffic sphere from earlier hung about the top of the cairn, with holes along each of their three axis. A glittering black fluid of sorts circulated in and out of each opening, passing between each sphere in turn as a coursing, levitating river that formed a wavering, triple-layered halo of starlight around the assembly.

"What a hassle." The woman's voice was utterly flat, but Donny could see that her face had twisted into a vicious snarl. As the rapidly approaching cloud of smoke approached them - the incendiary grenade having been flung at some speed - she reached out with her right hand, grasping at the device inside.

She missed, but apparently managed to graze it. The grenade and the cloud of smoke surrounding it pinwheeled a ways above her head, leaving behind a trail of sparks. Though it began to ascend, the woman's gesture had apparently robbed it of most of its velocity, leaving it hanging in space, still burning viciously, rather than flying away into nothingness. The woman hissed angrily, waving her hand as though it had been caught in a mousetrap. A fair amount of smoke clung and wafted from it conspicuously, but it appeared unburnt.

"I'm not positive, but I'm pretty certain that's the Allineator." The pavise knight commented from between Fortune, Kael, and Andreas. "Given none of you are local, I probably have the best chance at deactivating it...and if you know anything about magic, I guess you'd be the next best thing to our technician..." He nodded at Kael. "What do you all say to us two going down and switching it off while the others go and distract Leona and that fucking Proxy?"

The Final Hazard

"Oh, I wasn't tasked to slay you," Andy said, his voice almost casual, but he had a tired look in his eyes. "I was asked to come so I could take care of a Kanuri boy, all the other things were more or less added afterwards, in a 'since you're here, could you do this too?' kind of way." A resigned smile appeared on his face and he sighed. "Quite frankly, the one who gave that task vanished. I don't see any of the wounded I was supposed take care of, so I'm going to see if I can work my way down and see what that humming sound is. For the slaying part you have to be with the armed people."

@WiseDragonGirl

@WiseDragonGirl
"The Kanuri boy...?" The woman repeated with a deadpan expression. A moment later, recognition flashed across her face and she broke into a light laugh - a deep and rumbling sort of sound, completely alien to human vocal cords - it sounded almost strangely like a very low-pitched purr. "Oh yes, the little riddle master..." She abruptly snarled. "I killed that third-world trash. Thinking he was better than me..." She sniffed haughtily, bringing her right hand up to her face and...

She licked the back of her own hand. Four times. It seemed almost like a reflexive habit. Each motion was long and languorous, drawn out deliberate. With the odd woman's mouth fully open, her severely pointed canines were now in full view.

"Are you done? Are you finished finding amusement out of this twisted game?"

@Bright_Ops

"What good would killing us do you now? We have no way of leaving this place, and nowhere left to go even if we could."

@Holmishire

"Oh, but you're wrong about that little mote." The woman Ariett a generous smile. A smile that showed nearly all of her teeth. They seemed larger than normal. "All you have to do to leave is to reset the Fractal Analogue Iteration Transistor. It just happens that you will have to kill me before I permit that." She smiled primly at Ariett as the other woman willed herself to drift forward - and began to do just that.

"And of course, this instance is far and long too gone. You silly little morsels never stood a chance - our encounter was preordained, and we share a little something in common..." The golden-eyed woman reached out with a lazy hand, five short but sharp razor claws erupting from the tips of her fingers to dig into Ariett's shirt with a firm grasp, little scathing the belated visitor's skin. "I too was fated to die." She rasped. "I too was sent here to suffer. But you meager little chops did the impossible and turned that right around. I can leave at will now. Her grip tightened, and she drew her face closer to Ariett's, leering all the while. She was breathing deep, heavy, panting breaths - that smelled strongly of rot and refuse. "It is only fair I should reward you...but I am still a creature of its own nature made. Not even Hubris to my benefit deserves such rich privilege. Let us see...if you lot are as good at riddles as that little shred of a brat was." She let go of Ariett, shoving her forcefully back through the air.

@Bright_Ops@Doc Doctor@Holmishire@WiseDragonGirl
"You may each answer separately or as a party with each other. Answer incorrectly, and you will be mine. Answer correctly...and you may leave." The woman grinned again - a predatory expression, punctuated by the lustful manner in which she licked her own chops a scant moment later. "Or, if you're perhaps a touch more curious...instead of leaving...I will answer one question truthfully in turn for each right answer. That is your purpose here, yes? Treacherous little secrets and tender little screams of pain..." She hunched over in the air, her arms rearing back, the fabric of her coat seeming to bulge as hidden cords of muscle impossibly surged just beneath the surface.

"Or maybe you would like to squirm a little more first...?" The woman's voice practically rolled with a continuous, humming purr of a sound, continuously building up in the back of her throat as she spoke.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

You were not tagged, so you did not have to post. No harm done.

The Final Hazard

He didn't even bother listening to whatever filth it was spewing, reaching down to pick up the blade that he had dropped when his head felt like it was melting in order to aim a swing to decapitate the monstrous centipede. "Burn in whatever pit spawned you vile creature!"

@Bright_Ops

The blade's tip sliced cleanly through the hideous, writhing creature - its head separating from the rest of its body. The man who choked on his own mettle was oddly still despite the injury, unmoving as the centipede's head drifted off into the void, leaking a trail of black ichor globules.

A moment later, the husk of the man who choked on his own mettle took on the texture of soot, cracks growing across his form before it simply came apart and blew away in every direction, a brief flurry of its ashes vanishing into the darkness without trace. The centipede's head likewise disintegrated, leaving naught but the visceral shadow of the man who choked on his own mettle. It began to shrink, imploding in upon its own iridescent heart - soon reduced to naught but a single frail mote of light, casting the faintest pool of detail across the cobblestone path it stood upon.

The remainder of those who were fated to die and the one who felt no loss experienced their own uncoiling - the surrounding burnt hall took on a texture less burnt and more stonelike, akin to petrified wood - and then they were all buried in a flurry of disintegrating ashes as the world came apart around them, leaving nothing behind.

To punctuate their loss, the cold sun then blinked off. One moment it was there. The next it was gone.

Much like the ground, which gave beneath their feet, shuddering like a layer of tar before giving way like a snapping plastic lid. Nobody fell - merely drifting in the darkness.

Quivering in that dark, the faint mote - all that was left of the man who choked on his own mettle - uttered its last words.

"If they do not come, why build?"

Then it, too, was gone - leaving those who were fated to die and the one who felt no loss drifting, relatively helpless and without direction in the hideous, empty world.

"My my. They must really want you dead."

A feminine figure bled out of nothingness, its form edging into what little was left of reality like ink staining paper. She stood perhaps 1.8 meters tall, with a somewhat full and unathletic build. Her face was pleasantly rounded about the checks, but angular and narrow from her forehead to her chin. Her hair was wavering jet, drifting loosely and freely in this world absent of any kind of cohesive force. She wore a black coat with light gold trimming over a red shirt, along with khakies and a pair of long black boots. Her eyes were a hard metallic gold in coloration, and she was giving those who were fated to die a predatory smile - revealing her notably pointed canines.

"I was not expecting you for...at least a little while longer. I suppose their patience could not be contained." Her voice was somewhat bemused, containing a trace of surprise heavily buried under layers of smug contempt. She drifted freely, seemingly with full control over her motion despite the absence of anything to propel her, until she was roughly halfway between both Fortune and those who were fated to die - approximately three meters out from both parties.

"Well, you were tasked to slay me, yes? Go ahead. Here is your chance. Try." She turned to lock her gaze with Donny explicitly, granting him a softer and seemingly apologetic smile.

Somewhere in the darkness, a soft sound had emerged. A faint humming. Rather than coming from all about, it seemed to originate from a particular direction - somewhere below them all, poised a ways beneath the golden-eyed woman's feet - though what it was coming from could not be discerned. Whatever it was, it was completely hidden in the darkness of the world.

TTL: The Final Hazard OOC

Less than an hour remains and yet again not everyone who was tagged has gotten around to posting.

The End approaches.