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[center][hr][b]Location: City Ruins[/b][hr][/center]

Dracula awoke, his eyes briefly flaring a bright crimson that died away soon after as he slowly got to his feet. Resting a pale hand against his forhead with a soft grunt, he tried to recall exactly how he had gotten here, wherever here was anyway. Closing his eyes, he let his mind drift, back, back over the events that had led him here. 

The one's he could recall, anyway.

[i]Dracula, Prince of Darkness, stared at the empty display with disdain. His old combat cross, the only thing that could end his eternal existence permanently, had been stolen. And the ironic thing was he knew exactly who did it.

Alucard. His own flesh and blood.

He was the obvious culprit. No one else had the skill or fotitude to infiltrate his vault. No one else could have possibly seen that battered and burned old cross as something worth stealing...

Besides him that is.

Of course the question now was why?

That the ancient being couldn't even begin to guess, though he suspected it might have had something to do with his own mood as of late. Truth be told, he had been becoming much colder recently, which must have been why Alucard had taken the cross. He must have feared his father was going to slip back into the same dark pit he had been trapped in for so many centuries, and acted accordingly.

In all honesty, he didn't blame his son. He would have done the same most likely, had their situations been reversed.

Still, the weapons loss troubled him. It was the one thing that could put a final end to his long existence, and send him into the comforting embrace of death. And not having it here with him, especially after everything he'd gone through to reclaim it, infuriated him.

"But," he reminded himself. "I am nothing if not patient. I have waited this long for death, I can wait a bit longer."

Turning away from the display, his long coat unfurling dramatically, Dracula made his way back through the long and winding halls of his underground vault, a hideaway he had constructed in place of his castle, albeit within the ruins of the city rather than the mountains barren expanse. While it wasn't anywhere near as impressive as his old home, or as fortified, it served the purpose towards which he put it well enough.

Making his way through the structure, his hands clasped behind his back, the elder vampire turned a corner, only to have his vision obscured by a blindingly bright light that slowly consumed him. Mind, body, and soul, until there was nothing left.

Was this it? Were his wishes finally being granted?

Was he finally receiving the death he so desperately craved...?[/i]

[i]"Apparently not,"[/i] he thought sourly, carefully examining his surroundings. He was in a ruined office of some sort, with rotted stacks of paper and ruined pieces of furniture scattered haphazardly throughout the room. Shaking his head to clear it, Dracula cautiously made his way towards the nearest exit-a worm eaten wooden door barely attached to the frame upon which it hung-tore it off its corroded hinges and tossed it to the side.

Sprawling out before him was a ruined husk of a city, massive in scope, filled with all manner of decayed buildings. Hollow sentinels of a civilization long since fallen from grace. Much like him, in a way.

Shifting his gaze downwards, away from the silent remnants, Dracula's eyes narrowed into thin slits. He was standing before a yawning precipice. Had he taken another step, he would have found himself becoming more intimately acquainted with the ground below. Not that it really mattered. Survival wasn't an issue for him, but time was. He wanted to find Vampire Killer as soon as possible, and loathed the idea of having to spend what could be days clawing his way back up to the surface.

No, he'd have to find a different way, if he didn't just fly to the other side outright that is. Speaking of flight, he felt... different. Weaker, somehow. As though some vital parts of him had been torn away, although he wasn't sure what that could be.

He didn't have much time to ponder this, however, as a gilded parchment materialized in the air before him. Remaining suspended for only the briefest of moments, the scroll dropped to the ground, only to come to a halt at the last moment as Dracula used his telekinesis to hold it aloft. Positioning it where he could see it's contents, he unfurled the scroll and began to read.

[hider=A Pile of Secrets For You!]
Despite the mystery and surreality of the Crossroads, it does function on a game-like "token system", the rules of which are as follows:

1: When you enter the Crossroads, you are immediately given 5 poker chip-esque objects called "tokens". These tokens cannot be destroyed, they are completely impervious to any type of method used to destroy them. These tokens are able to be "spent" on the following things:

        1(a): Spending 1 token will give you a 50/50 chance to have something either good or bad happen to you. Maybe you'll gain a super useful powerup, but maybe you'll spawn a large monster that you'll have to fight instead. This is performed by flipping the token on your hand as if you were flipping a regular coin
        1(b): Spending 3 tokens allows you to bring one person, place or thing of your choice from your home universe to help you. This can be anything from an ordinary knife to an entire military base, it's entirely up to you (as long as it actually exists within your home universe). This is performed by holding 3 tokens up in the air and saying the name of the item
        1(c): Spending 100 tokens grants you a single wish. This wish can be for anything, including a trip out of the Crossroads. This is performed by placing 100 tokens on the ground and saying what your wish is

2: Other tokens are collected by gaining them from other token holders. A token is considered to be yours the second you touch it

        2(a): The methods of obtaining tokens are completely open ended and any method is allowed: beating/killing someone and taking their tokens, stealing them covertly, convincing them to hand them over, etc

3: You have the option to join together with one or more token holders to join a "pact". When in a pact, all tokens held by each member of a pact is pooled together, and is counted towards the token count of every other token holder in the pact (for example, if you had 5 tokens and joined a pact with someone who had 20 tokens, all of you would have 25 tokens after joining the pact). This means that joining pacts can lead to getting a wish earlier than you otherwise would alone. This is performed by shaking hands with one of the pact members (or the closest equivallent, if none of the relevent individuals have hands to shake). Pacts can only hold up to 4 members

        3(a): When joining a pact, your powers and abilities will all be less effective than normal. This effect is reversed as soon as you leave the pact

4: It is permitted to betray a pact and take their tokens for yourself. However, this comes at the cost of 2 punishments:

        4(a): The second you either attack or steal the tokens from any of your pact members (whichever comes first), only half of the other pact members tokens will be available to you, the other half will become completely intangible and impossible to touch for you
        4(b): Additionally, you will be branded as a traitor for an hour, signified by a giant red X on your wrist. If you encounter somebody in the Crossroads and you see that they have a red X on their wrist, you will know they are a traitor

When players enter the Crossroads, they will find their tokens placed next to them. They will look similar to this except colored in the character's associated color and with their face in the middle of it (which changes whenever a token is taken by another character). A list of the above rules will also be given to them through whatever method is most familiar to the character. For example if the character is a ninja then it might be delivered through a scroll, or if the character flies a spaceship then it might be delivered through the readout on their ship's viewscreen. If there is no obvious form for the message to take, the default is just simple text on an 8x11 sheet of printer paper. The translation of the rules is also personally customized to whatever language and method of communication the character is most comfortable with. This even includes dialects and slang terms, so if the character is a pirate for example, the rules will be translated into pirate lingo.
[/hider]

Rolling the scroll back up now that he was finished with it, Dracula looked down to find five crimson and gold colored chips lying on the floor, which must have fallen while he was preoccupied.

"Those must be the tokens it mentioned," he muttered, picking them up and smuggling them away into a newly created pocket in his coat. Taking hold of the scroll, he took a few moments to commit its contents to memory, before summoning his chaos claws and setting it alight. Even though he now knew the name of the place he was in, despite not knowing where it was in relation to Europe, he had no idea how valuable the information he'd just received was or if there were other's here who might be after it, so he decided to play it safe and destroy the original outright. That way the only place it existed was the one place it couldn't be stolen from.

His mind.

Once he was done with that, Dracula dispelled his claws and strode back over to the open doorway he had peered through earlier. Fixing his gaze on the chasms far side, the old vampire focused on his body, willing it to shift into a thin, black and red mist. Taking to the air, the Prince of Darkness descended upon the desolate wastes below.

Upon the Crossroads.