[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/dwLGk5x.png[/img][/center][hr][hr] [color=a187be]“Woe be the enemy!”[/color] crowed Rikard, spinning on his heel to face the others as they walked. He was trying to convince himself that he liked this group, even though he wasn’t that thrilled about it. Still, it was the Trials and he was in it and… what was there really to complain about? [color=a187be]“Why… with Captain Skuggvarr, Cool Wheels, ‘I Definitely don’t have bodies stashed in my basement’ and…”[/color] He trailed off, regarding Aridane. [color=a187be]“Well, aside from clearly being like… thirty, you’re kinda normal, I guess.”[/color] The fourteen-year-old shook his head. [color=a187be]“Anyway, we’re pretty stacked. I like our chances.”[/color] They were walking - well, four of them were, anyhow - back to their assigned base. All about them, other teams were doing the same. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, and the leaves were green on the trees. [color=F0FFF0]“Sooo… you guys just… play games for a week?”[/color] Seviin was asking, and a couple of the others nodded. Juulet grinned toothily. In truth, the young priestess was wary of the claimed Avatar of Vyshta, not just because she was in conflict with the claim of Tyrel, who was something of a friend, but because of her entire bearing. Something about her rubbed Seviin the wrong way. Regardless, she found herself agreeing this time. [color=8B008B]“Seems like it,”[/color] the one-legged girl chirped. [color=8B008B]“Yaniis, am I right?”[/color] At least a couple laughed. This group was no democracy, so the genuineness of the reactions was perhaps up for question but, regardless, it did not appear to be in any particular hurry. Elsewhere, clusters of five and ten were hustling over to their assigned bases: academic housing of the city’s Zenos, temporarily cleared out for the games. A couple of squirrels skittered across the open expanse of the Arboretum before diving into the safety of the trees. If there were people outside of they city vying for the attention of those inside, if a place called either Mudville or Belleville was about to decide its future in a high-stakes election rife with foul play, if Ai Medda had been conquered and, just one night prior, Solcuura had fallen, it did not seem to matter within these hallowed hallowed halls and verdant gardens. For over five centuries, the famous white walls of Ersand’Enise had stood impregnable, a resolute barrier against an outside world that was often a source of danger and turmoil; a place where these young Biros of magic - scions of elite families and leaders of tomorrow - sought calm and sanctuary. This fourth day of Velles, its streets, parks, and squares were littered with melons in a great many colours, shapes and sizes. These fruits sat under the sun: some mundane and some enchanted. They perched in market stalls, they hung from trees, they floated in ponds and canals, and they waited in dressing rooms, offices, pantries, and shoppes to be claimed by the teams involved in the Great Melon Derby of the year Dami-Zept 55. Yet, the melon derby was not alone among games this year… [color=ffdead]“Perhaps I am mistaken,”[/color] El Alacran was saying, [color=ffdead]“but this does not look like a normal part of the house’s furnishings.”[/color] There was a small, ornate lockbox on the dining room table and, from it, issued a slight ticking noise and some faint kinetic energy. As he spoke, voices from the drawing room - those of their allies, the Dark Protectors, rose in startled Retanese. It appeared that they encountered the same thing. Each box had a note attached. [hider=Note One][i]"Welcome to the game of Thieving Cherune,"[/i] it read. [i]"I am yours to protect from a hidden enemy who are coming to steal me. I may not be tampered with in any way or hidden in a place where I am effectively impossible to retrieve,"[/i] it warned. [i]"[b]You[/b] are a hidden enemy to the team known as the Huggy Bears. Place two hands for five seconds on their box to steal it and progress in the game. Protect me to stymie your unknown rival. Reshta Favour You."[/i][/hider] [hider=Note Two][i]"Welcome to the game of Thieving Cherune,"[/i] it read. [i]"I am yours to protect from a hidden enemy who are coming to steal me. I may not be tampered with in any way or hidden in a place where I am effectively impossible to retrieve,"[/i] it warned. [i]"[b]You[/b] are a hidden enemy to the team known as Technically Correct. Place two hands for five seconds on their box to steal it and progress in the game. Protect me to stymie your unknown rival. Reshta Favour You."[/i][/hider] [color=ffdead]“Parallel games…”[/color] murmured El Alacran, and that seemed to be the general sentiment. Marceline nodded along with it, but she narrowed her eyes. [color=598527]“Defense is basically worthless from what I can see,”[/color] she decided, but she appeared to be effectively alone as the others on her team and on many other teams began making complex plans to keep their boxes out of the hands of their opponents. Outside, the first few clouds had begun to move in. Everyone was busy making their frantic - or perhaps measured - final plans. All that was left to do, for most, was wait. It was naught but five more minutes before the bells in the city let loose with a great cacophony of ringing. They flooded the streets by the thousands, then: the young biros of Ersand’Enise and a half-dozen other academies. For the five-hundred-fifth-fifth year - an auspicious one to be sure - the Great Melon Derby was underway! Within twenty minutes, two of the five sacred elemental melons had been claimed: water and thunder. The first clouds began to appear in the clear blue sky. By the end of the first hour, the terramelon and cloudmelon had been grabbed as well. Fluffy and white, clouds drifted lazily across the heavens. Fire went half an hour after. The Fat Bastard was lifted from the lake. All but two dark melons were gone. Oh, how the sky had clouded over now! Then, in the far southeast of the city, came a mighty beam, rising kilometers into the sky, disappearing into the whitish-grey blanket above. Attention turned, in earnest, to what had, now, to be the melon supreme! It lasted all of two to three seconds. Then, it was gone, and the rush was on! While some clashed over the apparent prize, others snuck into each other’s bases to steal either melons, Thieving Cherune’s boxes, or both. The Melon Derby, in time-honoured tradition, was headed, once more, for its climax and it was all to play for. Then, just as an unholy alliance of Juulet and Johann was breaking down the door to King’s Ear’s base and wreaking havoc within, as Marceline was juggling the [i]true[/i] melon supreme six kilometers up in the sky, above the clouds, there was an accident. A girl named Lucia Moli, who had inadvertently set into action the very chain of events that had led to the death of Hugo Hunghorasz almost a year earlier, ran straight into an aberration. It had not been visible, hidden within a potted rosebush, but its [i]effects[/i] were. Immediately, it leapt out, actively predatory, and the girl screamed as it wrapped pitch black tendrils of nothingness around her. Most ran at the sight, their bravery and bravado from moments earlier evaporating in the face of [i]true[/i] danger: children now waiting for the adults to come and solve the problem. A few stayed, however, hammering it with kinetic attacks that passed right through it, arcane attacks that did not burn it, and chemical manipulation that had nothing to seize upon. [hider=Lucia’s Desperate Flight]Lucia Moli once again faces peril, but it is not from a sanguinaire this time. Rather, a predator aberration stalks the girl. She starts to break free, getting a foot on the ground. She tries to run for it and even starts to put some distance between them, but a tentacle seizes her roughly around the arm. Again, she hammers it with her magics, screaming for help from someone - [i]anyone[/i]! It’s no use. She tries to pull free and the aberration-beast pulls back. It pulls so hard that it rips the arm clean off. The girl shrieks and staggers. The severed limb is reeled into its tentacle-lined mouth and it springs forward, lionlike. She can't fight this thing. She tries, once more, to escape. Then, deliverance: three fellow students step in to hammer the beast. A boy from her kinetic class named Gareth does his best to hammer it into a storefront with kinetic magic, but the Predator is hardly bothered. It snaps his neck and leaves him for dead. Sylvie, her roommate, tries a piercing arcane lance, but its tentacles grab her by the hair and rip her scalp off, 'degloving' her face. She collapses immediately. The third student, Dante, is a very powerful chemical mage of 8.5 RAS, and he blasts himself free of the chasing tentacles like a rocket. They wither and writhe in the heat and the predator lets out a screech. "Help!" he shouts, "Anybody! There's a monster here. It's... tearing us apart! Help!" Lucia is not able to do anything for her arm. It's gone and that still hasn’t completely set in. She stifles the pain of severed nerves and seals the wound admirably, though, no longer in danger of bleeding out. Dante’s timely intervention succeeds in forcing the tentacles to retract. "We can't win!" Lucia shouts. "We need the zenos!" "We need to run!" Dante replies. "Especially you! You're hurt, Luce!" She shakes her head. "'Tis but a flesh wound!" she jokes weakly. There's no escaping this. They have to keep their distance and hold it off until an intervention comes. She doesn't dare attack it directly, instead turning the ground slick and slippery in front of its path with chemical and binding magic. To her joy and amazement, it works! The beast skids and stumbles and falls, unhurt, but successfully stalled. "Dante, do you see anything from up there!?" she calls. His eyes widen. "I do! Zenos Silvestri and Masson!" The predator begins to recover. It reaches out for Lucia once again. "No..." she half-screams, half-whimpers. "No!!! Get away! Get away, you... thing!" The zenos do not arrive quickly, however. They are delayed by the mortally wounded Sylvie and Gareth. They have no choice but to stabilize both. The predator does not lash out with its tentacles. Instead, it leaps, this time, and there is no batting [i]that[/i] away. It smashes Lucia to the ground, breaking two of her ribs. "No! Please no!" she wails, "Not like this! Not like this! I [i]won’t![/i]" Dante tries to intervene. It's no good. With one great bite, the monster decapitates the girl. The boy lets out a roar of anger. A colossal blast wave races towards the unholy thing. "Burn in the flames of Eshiran, beast!" It is just in the process of consuming her body, totally transfixed by its macabre undertaking, and it does not react on time. The damage is catastrophic. Trees are uprooted and burnt to cinders. Three townhouses - thankfully unoccupied - are reduced to rubble. A great mushroom cloud rises into the sky. Dante - sweating, panting, shaking with exertion - watches his handiwork. Lucia... his cousin. His... teammate and friend. Is it exhaustion or rage that shakes him? Then, from the smoke, ash, and debris, comes a roar. It is a strange, unholy sound, part in the air, part in his head. The predator aberration, more corporeal now, with a strange sort of sheen to it, lurches forward, half of the tentacles that ring its mouth blown away. It has eyes, now. They are blue and eerily human and... Dante freezes. He knows those eyes. They're Lucia's eyes. They fix upon him hungrily. Then comes a shout from behind him. "Down, boy!" "Artifact: form of Ahn-Sa-Khet's Eternal Prison!" The Zenos have arrived! As the youth staggers back, still in shock, the buildings and trees begin to reform themselves. The beast moans and growls and strains, struggling to move. In the smoky sky above it, something begins to take shape. "Hold it off a bit longer for me!" shouts Zeno Silvestri. "We're almost there." Olivier Masson nods. The air crackles with lightning. The beast thrashes. "STAY DOWN" the Perrenchman bellows, and it slams into the pavement with sickening force. He strains and grimaces, but there is no holding this thing down for long. It begins to break out of his grasp. "Has... to be... now!" the Zeno grates from between clenched teeth. A great black cage, something like an iron maiden, lined with deadly inward-facing spikes, finishes forming above the beast and, all at once, Giancarlo Silvestri, head of the archaeology department, drops it! His gestures are swift and precise and he speaks in the tongue of ancient Zaqhoria: "Aqhel, zan sekht bu simbel! Ahakh enaz!!!" It contracts around the screeching predator and there is a strange 'smell' to this magic: ancient and musty and not of a form nowadays encountered. Zeno Silvestri's eyes glow golden and markings beneath his billowing shirt let off scintillating light. Zeno Masson stands in repose beside him, arms crossed, alert, his shoulder-length hair whipping about in the fantastic gusts of wind. Pulses of power, like sonic booms, emanate from the scene, but they cause no damage. They do not make it past the kinetic barrier of Zeno Masson. The spikes begin to pierce the aberration and Lucia's eyes bulge in pain and terror. Blindingly white blood leaks from the wounds. Ahn-Sa-Khet's Eternal Prison burns and shudders, the waves of heat rolling off of it truly fantastic! Then, from within, the predator begins to disintegrate, chunks of it dropping to the ground, pitch black and blinding white sizzling and blending to grey. The prison groans and stops, its work completed, and the strained face of Zeno Silvestri relaxes. He takes a deep breath. "It's finished." Masson nods. "So it is." He furrows his brow. "But so is that poor girl." In the end, the only thing that remains of the unholy beast is the pair of eyes it stole from Lucia Moli, a girl who used to exist.[/hider] They were too late. Even as a pair of zenos arrived to lay low the monstrosity, Lucia lay dead and mostly devoured. Dozens of other students encountered aberrations in strange places. Some faced life or death peril. Some screamed and slumped as they were overwhelmed by the otherworldly energy. A few went mad and attacked their fellow students or ran for the high heavens. The game had become frighteningly real and even more so when Juulet’oli’muusti’zan of Team Vyshta’s More Favoured - a hyperpowered yasoi who fancied herself the avatar of the fallen goddess - imbibed one too large for her to handle and went berserk. It took the combined efforts of her fellow students and three zenos to put an end to her rampage and, nearly, her. The event was called off. Teams would be scored on their current possessions, both on and away from base. To avoid causing panic, this was presented as an unexpected twist to shake the game up. Some believed it; many did not. Regardless, as chemical magic ‘reset’ memories, as snapped necks and skinless faces were restored, as property damage was repaired and Arch-Zenos and bureaucrats met frantically in secret to discuss their next course of action, winners and losers were declared. Wearing sometimes paper-thin smiles, half of the school’s Zenos flitted about from house to house and team to team, investigating melons while the other half investigated the catastrophe that had occurred. Areas were roped off and sonically sealed. Robed figures clustered around them, removing ‘environmental hazards’. A grand open air feast was hastily arranged in Balthazar Square and, there, teams gathered to await Zenith Upta’s announcement of the Melon Derby’s victors. Meanwhile, the people of Mudville - or, rather, [i]Belle[/i]ville - had their own storm to contend with. Hundreds of aberrations had appeared there as well, though all of them had been tiny and dark. If some of them would be irritable and suffer from headaches for the next few days, perhaps it was worth it, for they would soon find that they had gained the ability - in some small measure, at least - to use The Gift. The trials and triumphs of those people - so near and yet a world away - were little on the minds of the students gathered in the square, however. It had been explained to them that there had been a mishap and that there was nothing to be worried about. The integrity of the derby would be unaffected. Perhaps a few disagreed, but there wasn’t truly much recourse for them, and so they stifled their gripes and accepted the results as announced. [hider=Named Team Melon Derby Results][h2]Results[/h2] 1) King's Ear: 14454 2) Teatro Sorridente: 5670 3) Raffscallions: 4108 4) Fiske n' Chips: 3311 5) Fait Accompli: 3264 6) The Invisibles: 3159 7) Vyshta's More Favoured: 2785 8) Beware the Nice Ones: 2721 9) Dangerous when Wet: 1841 10) Rogue Wave: 1680 11) The Nice Guys: 1559 14) Singers & Saints: 1320 16) Rock & Stone: 1236 18) Crying Wolves: 1090 19) Law & Order: 994 24) Perrench Connection: 728 36) 'Dogs: 349[/hider] Some celebrated. Some grumbled. Many hung around and, over the next few hours, dispersed. How the taverns and bierhalls and places of entertainment swelled with young patrons. Others were exhausted. There were time differences to account for, after all, and the day had certainly been full of action. Whatever the case, they all eventually found sleep in some form and, as the morning bells tolled halfway through the Hours of Shune, they rose and - one would hope - shone. Today was the day of the second event, the infamous relay race known as the ‘Dragon’, and it required a bright and early start. Once more, they gathered in the square, where a grand breakfast buffet awaited them on a series of long tables. Exactly one hour later, the Zenith raised her arms and announced the selection of allies. They would have five minutes and then another ten to strategize and prepare. Then, the portals would open and the students would step into their starting positions all across the Sipenta. The second game of The Trials of DZ55 was about to begin! [hider=The Dragon: Rules, Opportunity, and Info][h2]Resources[/h2][list][*]All information on the race itself is available in [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j66Pf8SWKPj3jolqbIZOxuL9Rw8AwaIGLSjsj1Jx9yw/edit?usp=sharing]this document[/url]. [*]Allied team selections for this event can be found in [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tzS9vL-xSQJydDYj7Bd_j8vj_82-yk7RtBbzv2enC3E/edit?usp=sharing]this document[/url]. [*]Profiles of all guest teams are located in [url=https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D_qSivxmZtb9UFzpn68Ds7fX4ZYxPhRgg4NNqP0wylw/edit?usp=sharing]this document[/url]. [*]The leaderboard may be accessed through [url=https://keepthescore.com/board/dwtqbjlhqymte/]this page[/url].[/list] [h2]Posting Rules[/h2][list][*][b]Two Posts:[/b]You will write [u][i][b]two[/b][/i][/u] posts this round. The first will be a strategy post sent to me on here as a DM and the second will be your normal post summarizing any other actions over the previous evening, night, and morning, up to and including the race. [*][b]Strategy Post:[/b] This is a [u][i][b]DM[/b][/i][/u] sent to me on the forum (not on discord) of up to 200 words outlining your strategy for the race and that of your partnered NPC from your allied guest team. Think of it as a persuasive piece where you present a plan, leverage your character's strengths, and shore up their weaknesses to obtain your desired outcome. The start of this post should include a number from one to ten denoting how much effort you will put into searching for treasures. [*][b]Normal Post:[/b] This is just your regular post. What did you get up to during the derby? The evening and night before? How about this morning? Anything interesting happen during ally selection? Have you stolen any boxes for Thieving Cherune? Remember, this doesn't have to be long at all and it doesn't have to cover anything. Heck, you can write a couple of short ones or have a back-and-forth with someone! [*][b]Deadline:[/b]The deadline for Strategy posts is Thursday, December 14, 12:00 PM (EST). Failure to post your strategy by this deadline will result in your character failing to finish their leg of the race and being ineligible for any treasures. However, all is not lost. In the event that one of your team members has not submitted their race strategy with 24 hours or less remaining before the deadline, another team member may submit a strategy on their behalf. The person whose stead that strategy is submitted in will be considered to have failed the leg of the race. However, their partnered NPC from the allied guest team may finish, allowing their team to progress. [/list][/hider]