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7 yrs ago
dissertation done. can actually post again. yay.
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wordcount: 990 (+4)
Midna: level 10 EXP: ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (135/110)
Location: The Dead Zone


Minda’s mount skidded to a halt as a wall formed in between her and the trio who’d been distracting O. It wasn’t that much of an obstacle, and she considered simply shadow hand hauling herself over it, but the confident tactical call out of Jr and Pt’s describing their foes as ‘cute little bears’ made her think it was unnecessary. Besides, the Gravemind clearly wanted her attention, given that it detached and sent a flight of Mutalist Ospreys in retaliation for the spear team attack she and Primrose had launched at them.

Pivoting to this incoming threat, she used what little of her mana remained to charge her sword with electricity, which she then thrust out in a beam at them as they approached, only for one to produce a chilly looking frozen bubble shield to block the strike.

Undeterred by the attack, the Osprey then airdropped a small pack of crawlers on the ground, which charged towards her, but the princess was already doing the same. She thrusted her sword forward with the intent to pop the bubble shield, only to find her attack, and then her body, passing right through it and into a chilling aura found within, one that gripped her bones in such a way that it would have slowed her stride had she not been riding an untouchable otherworldly horror.

”Alright, that’s it, you’re mine!” she declared, hopping her legs up onto the back of her beast legion, and then launching herself at the Frozen Mutualist. One clawed hand and two clawed feet grappled the foe, but she found they dug into some sort of protective barrier rather than its own metal/flesh, which protected it from har.

That was fine, she felt, as she started hacking at it with the war-fan, but naturally the other Ospreys weren't going to just let her do that, diving at her and releasing clouds of toxic gas all around their ‘leader’. Her mask and armor protected her against it better than she would have before she started wearing it, but it still bit and stung at her, especially her exposed ears.

As such she let herself fall, and then pulled herself down onto her Beast Legion, which had been slashing away at the crawlers. They tried to swarm her, but crawling as they were, they struggled to strike the mounted princess, who considered them ”Not worth killing” and instead turned her eyes skywards for her prize.

The Frozen Osprey emerged from the toxic clouds above a moment later, at which point she and it immediately launched themselves at each other.

Gas erupted, obscuring vision, and a moment later, the frozen aura vanished… only to appear again. Then, a moment after that, the Frozen Osprey rose into the air out of the cloud and beneath it hung Minda, the princess making the Night Bloom raised flood-fested carry her up into the air and out of its own attack.

”This is mine now!” she taunted the gravemind, before calling out ”Thank you Selene!” to the grander of the boon.

She ditched her sword and fan into a portal as she rose up, freeing up two hands so she could strum her lyre with one, and get a better grip on her temporary ride with the other.

She and it ascended up, a melody following them along as they floated over the people fighting D and the Grave mind, granting them all her Rainbow Rondo boon. That included her ride, which the other Ospreys found out as they rushed her again, covering Minda and her own Osprey with their gas attacks. Said gas constantly gnawing at hem meant they kept on procking the boon she had just given her minion, causing several trios of musical bolts to launch out from the lyre she was strumming, and to crash into them, leaving her and hers the only things to escape from the cloud.

”Music to my-” she began to joke, only to cough and finish more dryly ”ears”

All this gassing left her in need of a fair bit of healing, but she only had 12 seconds with her frosty friend, and she intended to make the best use of it.

Thus she rapidly ascended up towards the Gravemind’s body, the frosty barrier tanking any lesser shots that might get thrown her way. Then, when they got close to her, she had it race forward, the dumping of a toxic cloud over the foe’s head mainly a bonus to the intent of using the speed for evasiveness purposes, before using the momentum generated by its subsequent rapid deceleration to toss herself up and forwards.

Heat and ash from the burning foe buffeted her, spikes formed, hands grasped and jaws opened below her, but she did not intend to touch down upon any of them. Instead, at the top of her arch, she used her astral chain to yank her Beast Legion to her, the creature having followed below and even began to climb the foe in-order to keep up with her flight.

It arrived beneath her just in time for her to land on its back instead of on the back of the Gravemind itself, with the height of its body hopefully keeping her out of easy arms reach. She portal tossed and caught her sun on a stick in-order to further reduce the risk of being cooked alive, while using the mana she’d stocked up by melee fighting the Ospreys to form her shadow hand up above her in preparation of her main attack: crescent moon slashing the Dead End Express out of the twilight realm.

The massive engine of destruction smashed down into the shoulder of one of the Gravemind’s tentacles, blades whirling, wind based aftershocks smashing and slashing as she proceeded to try and finish her severing of the limb, chainsaw style.

As she did this, the Frozen Osprey hovered above her, its frozen shield blocking enemy fire, slowing down any flood-fested that tried to charge her through it. Once it was spent, either due to 12 seconds passing or its bubble bursting under the onslaught, she was bailing, releasing the blade to let it rev itself into a portal and then tossing herself skywards before summoning her twilight Flygon to ride on out of there, ascending on the thermals roaring up from the body of their flaming foe.
Rose


Rose entered the ladies changing room with just enough time to spare, and proceeded through her changing with regimented efficiency. Casual wear was tossed off, exposing biology that was considerably more alien than it had first appeared when covered in clothing. It also exposed a body worn by time and injury. Ironically the major signifiers of the latter were patches of skin considerably less scarred by the former, where skin grafts had replaced scars and burns.

After that she pulled on a Rosnian made pilot suit, armored plating covering her extremities, while lighter Nanoweave hugged closer to the alien’s hyper-dense muscles, trading increased vulnerability for increased flexibility. Nothing unusual there. What was perhaps unusual was the last items she donned, namely a pair of laser-handguns that she magnetized to her hips. They were unloaded, if the digital ammo counters on the back were to be believed, but the presence of several small cartridge shaped batteries attached to the armor above the handguns indicated that they were not ceremonial in nature in the slightest.

What was not clear from the outside was the multipurpose nature of the weapons. More than a weapon of last resort to prevent, one way or the other, capture by the enemy, they were also to be used as cutting tools to help a pilot escape the wreck of their vehicle, as well as as additional thrusters for navigating zero-G environments.

Thus prepared, the veteran pilot stepped out of the changing room, and headed out to see if this VR setup they had really would feel like the real thing.




The first thing Rose did upon entering the virtual cockpit was reach up to and pull down what looked like a blindfold from the ceiling of her cockpit, and slipped it over her third eye. Her ears shivered with discomfort for a moment as the blindfold tightened around her head, the front bulging as it pressed right up against the eye beneath it, before she re-acclimatized to the feeling.

Only then did she fire up the engine using a triangular key, causing patterns then lit up on the front of the blindfold, stylized to look like a symbolic depiction of an even larger eye, one that tracked the movements of the one below. Around her, conventional screens lit up, revealing the forest of greens and browns. That quickly changed, as with an intonation of “Testing, 1, 2, 3” the view switched from optical to RADAR, LADAR, Infrared and then back to optical again, basking the interior briefly in cold and then warm hues.

Ears flicked in please affirmation at this, before she switched to the command channel and said “Concerned warning: if you have an aversion to flashing lights, don’t look at my secondary feed!” cheerful sounding as ever, before testing the different settings of her Multiple Fire Control System once more. The mains screens did not change, but the smaller one inside the blindfold that her third eye was pressed against did, flicking first though each in turn as a test, only for some kind of debug console to pop up, Rose to type in a string of Rosnian glyphs, which caused the flicking between view modes to rapidly increase in speed till it was doing so at epileptic seizure inducing speed.

It should have resulted in a completely incomprehensible blur, and indeed to anyone looking over her figurative shoulder it did, but veteran Rosnain pilots swore that their third eyes were able to enter a zen state where all the feeds blurred together, where they could spot the unseen with ease.

Of course, they then had to work out what feed the independently operating eye had spotted something on, and hope that what it had spotted wasn’t just something that looked a bit too much like the shape of a Homeworld predator, but still, they swore by it, and as one of them, as perhaps one of their exemplars at this point, so too did Rose.

Once her hack was set in place, Rose set about making use of the MFCS’s actual intended functions, opening up the shared communication channel and saying “Informative: sending sensor data gifts to you!” before doing a test of pinging the other framewerks with data packets containing (fortunately non strobing) sets her visual feeds so they could get an example of what those were like to receive, and adapt their own interfaces to handle them accordingly.

Once that was confirmed to be working, she then directly asked Elora “Polite query: Does this help with your maps!” assuming that their two data gathering systems had been configured to work together in preparation for them working together, but making sure to double check.

With the data feeds all set up, she then did a quick test of the other systems.

The Stargazer test was simple for all that it was an incredibly complex device: she made a falling leaf dance to her tune right before her framewerk’s primary sensor.

The actual motion of the mech meanwhile was a slightly more involved process, the Ronsian flexing her fingers, making each of her framewerk’s tendrils flick and squirm to test their dexterity and responsiveness, before doing a few steps to ensure the three legs were all working properly, the limbs tracking off her own 2 and the nerve impulses of a residual tail her kind had.

It was an unorthodox setup by human standards, but was actually a rather mature Rosnain technology. Their low gravity incredibly vertical homeworld had never been very suited for roads, its trees, mountains and cities all reaching far higher into the sky than they did on Earth. As such something that could navigate that difficult terrain had been a much higher priority than it had been on the human homeworld, and the reduced gravity had also reduced the material science requirements needed to make something that would not be at the mercy of the square cube law.

The original designs Senko-San was a distant descendant too had used the brain of a native beast of burden to bypass the need for complex AI, but obviously they were far past such things these days.

Obviously.

The setup had then followed them to the stars, be it as landing legs on shuttles or as vehicles to explore low-G frontier worlds. They had even found use even on Rose’s much higher gravity world, the most ubiquitous use being that of an amphibious craft that worked around and under the floating cities dotting its globe spanning ocean. It was that, she thought, which gave the vessel such a nostalgic feeling, one that reminded her of happier days before she had lost so much.

A pinging sound caused the Rose to blink all three eyes, the woman having been briefly lost in a memory of watching a vast migration of native sea life from within those vessels alongside her lost loves, and returned to the present. A glance at the cause of the noise, a report that all three of her Framewerk’s weapon systems had passed the automated diagnostic tests she’d initiated, firmly anchored her back in it.

With that, all the systems were good to go, and so after reporting as such, there was little to do but hurry up and wait for the mission to begin.

wordcount: 1,420 (+6)
Bowser Jr: Level 14 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(254/140)
Rika: Level 10 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(170/100)
Location: The Dead Zone


”Oh come on, he can just replace the stuff? Lame” Jr complained as O began selling the ruins of his first run of attacks. Still, it gave him a brief free moment to raise his staff up and cast ”Medica!” in-order to produce a pulse of healing to restore his, Pits, and Rika’s Beast form’s health, undoing some of O’s own efforts in the process.

Of course, then he got right on trying to make up for lost time, building tall stone walls around them, freezing the ground beneath them and popping down a trio of very large and irate polar bears at the opposite end of the enclosure.

If O thought that it being cold was going to stop Jr making a mess though, he had another thing coming. Having poisoned a swamp, Jr now set about melting the ice caps, switching his brush from its default ink to the hot and spicy flavor. With sweeps of his brush, the prince laid down a moat of burning ground between them and the bears, saying that they should ”Let em come to us!”

He then called up to Peeka (who’d been left in the dust by O) to ”Ready a Plasma Fission for the middle one” and then to ”Wait.. Wait… fire!”

At her trainer’s command, the floating ghost fired the twin bolts at the center bear right as it started to cross the burning goop. The bolt struck the target, splitting as it did so, causing resulting pair bolts to lash out at a right angle and hit the other bears as they too got stuck in the goop zone, slowing them all by 70% for a brief moment, making sure their paw pads got extra toasty.

Beside him, Rika took that moment to counter charge, over a dozen pointy legs skittering across the ice for a not half bad grip. Enough to get up to speed anyway. Stopping would have been somewhat hard however, which is why she didn’t even bother, ramming horns first into the left side bear.

In the process she slammed it back onto the fire patch, which it very much did not like. With a snarl lunged towards her and off of the goop, clamping them around one of her legs as she tried to get the rest situated on the mix of ice and slush she was now standing on. She cried out with pain as the limb was ripped clean off, only to thrust that open maw towards the bear, catching and snapping off an ear as the bear dodged back from her. Right back onto the flaming goop.

The producer of that fire hazard was having a little trouble meanwhile, because he was a child sized turtle facing town a two full grown men sized bear. A bear that had not cared at all for the iron spikes he’d shot it with. Rather than get trampled, the boy lowered the hand shooting spikes to his tape player and hit play. Then wearing Undyne’s form he thrust her spear forwards, stabbing it into the bear’s side and trying to hold it back.

Unfortunately, they were standing on ice, and metal boots did not give good traction on that at all, causing the prince to slide backwards along it till he was slammed into the stone wall. Built to keep the bears in, it was nice and sturdy, and thus very unpleasant to get flattened against.

Gritting Undyne’s very pointy teeth, Jr endured it, and retaliated, raising an armored hand and giving the bear a right good Wallop to the snout, preventing it from clamping its jaws around his head by knocking the snap of course.

Spotting movement above, jr snapped ”Confusion ray!” at what he hopped was Peeka and, sure enough, from above, a purple ray struck the bear. At first this had no seeming effect, the bear swiping at Jr with a claw and denting Undyne’s armor, but with its second strike it somehow managed to hit its own head, causing it to stumble.

Taking advantage of this, Jr lurched the still embedded spear to the side, pulling the bear off of him and getting out from between it and the stone wall. The bear stumbled to the side, attempted to turn on the prince, and for its efforts received several gashes in its side as the prince hit it with a double slice, and his cyber-ninja stiker Sho hit it with a flurry of his own.

”Plasma!” Jr commanded as he backed up, getting Peeka to hit it with another slowing bolt, giving him just a few extra moments to dodge to the side of the bear’s charge, and score more slashes on its side.

The bear scraped against the wall, only to suddenly as it pushed off of it with a paw and round on Jr with increased speed. Unfortunately for it, it was still confused, causing it to stumble and fall instead of catching the prince, landing hard on its bloodied side.

As it struggled to rise, Jr pulled his spear back, charged power, and then unleashed it in an Undertow attack, causing an anchor of water to smash up beneath the bear. The beast was promptly launched up into the air, before slamming back down right onto a swoopin stu that had formed out of the burning goop, splattering it and the ground with yet more toasty slime.

It raised its head, growled, and then succumbed to the dots and its wounds.

It did so right next to an open mouthed and staring skywards Rika

”What?” Jr asked her, glancing up just in time to see Sectonia finish getting run over in the sky by a roller coaster cart, prompting a bemused ”What…” before what was actually processed what had happened.

”Oh no no no no!” he rambled in a panic, making a run for the wall. His tape was paused, and making use of Roxa’s flow motion the prince leapt up, put a foot to the stone blocking his view of the fallen queen, and then wall-jump off it to get just enough height to see over the wall for just a moment.

It would have been enough time for him to cast his instant full heal on the queen, but instead he saw he was already too late, and only managed to spot the tail end of the queen bee getting carted off by cats, prompting a ”huh?” of confusion before he fell back down. He did so right into Rika’s clasped together palms, with which the princess then immediately launched him skywards again with a team jump.

He landed atop the wall, balanced there with a single cartwheel of his arm, and was joined a moment later by Rika who escaped the enclosure via her grappling hook.

”what happened to Sectonia?” Rika asked as she failed to spot the queen, to which her brother gave the only possible answer which was a slightly bemused ”Cats saved her”

Behind them, much of the enclosure had been splattered with burning ink, mainly due to Rika and her bear’s tumultuous brawl right on top of it. The rest would no doubt soon be smeared over by the swoopin status currently forming from it. Ahead, the vast majority of the seekers were brawling either with the gravemind or with consul D in what looked to be an absolute mess of a fight.

They had arrived just in time to see D barraging Roland, Roxas, and Geralt with all sorts of magic, and to see the state of post 1 vs 1 brawl Nadia and Juri.

Having missed one opportunity to intervene to help save life/lives, the prince did so now. First he raised his staff and cast ”Presence of Mind” upon himself to boost his overall casting speed, and then threw out a ”Cure!” spells for each of the 5 fighters facing down Consul D.

While Jr was doing this, his sister went off to do a lap of the top of the wall, which was at first a little confusing to her brother, at least until bits of it started exploding behind her, the princess expanding her entire supply of torpedoes in order to use them as demolition timed charges. They were only as strong as hand grenades, but the Rika had dropped them down right by the wall, causing the detonations to go off point blank against the outer side of it, which should at least crack them, if it did not shatter them.

Once he got what she was doing, Jr briefly paused casting Cure to call up ”Peeka! Blast the bits she’s blown!” to his Flutter Mane, prompting her to hover back into the enclosure and to start firing plasma bolts at the bits of the wall that where still standing after Rika had torpedoed them.

wordcount: 1,378 (+6)
Bowser Jr: Level 14 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(248/140)
Rika: Level 10 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(164/100)
Location: The Dead Zone


Jr childishly blew a raspberry up at O as he complained about how much the hippos had cost him, before going ”wait…” as he started to have an idea based off of said comment.

Unfortunately that thought process got interrupted by a 5 meter long alligator lunging up out of the murky water he was floating on.

He was promptly dragged down into the water by the gator, the way his shell spikes stabbed into its mouth flesh being of little consolation as it began death rolling him. What was a consolation was that the nature of the attack, crushing jaws and being rotated to death, meant that his new Stygian Turtle Shell activated almost immediately, giving him three seconds of invincibility, and his sister three extra seconds to save his hide.

Having taken their moment of respite to sharpen her Beast form’s natural armaments, Rika dove in after her brother, her 8 meter long form creating a massive splash as she did so. Over a dozen insectile limbs reached blindly in the murk till they found the beast in the swamp water, and then gripped it tight, stopping the death roll in its tracks. That still left Jr stuck under water, flailing in a blind panic due to an inherited fear of drowning, and the beast wasn’t exactly built to hold its breath either.

Still, at least she knew where the creature was now, and promptly slammed the Beast’s horns into the crocodile, knocking the wind out of it, and getting it to release her brother. Unfortunately it then immediately began to bite at her instead, clamping onto a leg and thrashing about to try and rip it free.

Up above, Jr surfaced and made a mad swim for solid ground, forgetting entirely that he could stand and sail on the water in his panic. Coughing and spluttering on all fours on the marshy ground, the boy tried in vain to get a hold of his racing heart, but there simply was no time. Behind him came splashing as the two massive creatures brawled and bit at each other in the water, yet only one was built for that, and so if he didn’t find a way to help things were not going to go well for his sister.

The prince glanced around for his paintbrush, only to find it floating atop the water, bleeding paint into the swampland, so there’d be no healing Rika from the surface, and with how murky the water was, there was too much risk of hitting her if he just fired harpoons.

He had to get back down there.

He thrust a hand into his bag, put on a set of headphones, steeled himself both figuratively and literally, and then dove back into the water wearing the form of the fish woman Undyne.

Clad in armor, the prince sank fast, and then as he drank in the water in-order to breathe it, almost choked, both on the act and on the thickness of the murk. He endured, pushed forward, spear in hand.

The thrashing in the water intensified, suddenly stilled and then after what could have felt far too long for anyone looking out for the children, both of them burst from the water, both wrenching up water from their battle in the murk

”Urgh, ugh, bleh, I, ug, really don’t like this guy now” Jr complained, as before once again glancing for his staff, and finding the ink bleed had intensified, fouling the water even more.

”I.. Huh… Oh yeah!” he said, completing the thought he’d been having when the crocodile attacked them, which was ”If he’s spending money on this stuff, let’s bleed him dry!”

”Huh? How can we bleed him if we can’t touch him?” Rika asked, briefly switching out of her Beast form to use her grappling hook to retrieve Jr’s paintbrush. The prince accepted this with a nod of thanks, before saying that his idea was ”Simple! We keep breaking all his stuff till he runs out of money!”

”Ohhhh” Rika replied, before getting right to it, promptly singing a fist around and punching the closest tree. Two more strikes broke its bark, boosted her attack speed, and then the fourth smashed clean through it, and sent it tumbling down into the mud, its branches smashing down onto the trough of vegetables in the process.

”Yeah! That’s it” Jr said, having dropped his own cassette-beast form so he could heal Rika, and then joining in on the mess making. With his left hand he swatted his paintbrush around, splattering toxic goop around and poisoning the swamp waters, while his right created iron cans of all things, which he began littering around, both actions together to make a right mess of the place.

”How do you like this, you big jerk!” he yelled up at O, only for one of the consuls' own allies to do way more damage to the enclosure than they were: The Gravemind slammed a tentacle down into the enclosure, wrecking the fences even more, and leaving a great grove in the wet earth that quickly flooded with water as it pulled back.

Thanks to all the speed boost buffs, the kids got out of the way with ease, but the danger didn’t end there, as rushing out of the groove as it flooded came a wave of infector forms, all of them scuttling towards an undead mutant hippo that Blazermate had made. Given that they’d ended up on the other side of the groove from it, the koopa kids were not in danger immediately, but if they got to the hippo, that’d be a problem for sure.

”We gotta stop those!” Jr called out as he formed a flurry of iron knives and began to launch them towards the infected. He mitigated the potential risk of friendly fire by having the knives fly above the infectors, and then pivot 90 degrees in the air to lance down on top of them, showering them with a rain of falling metal.

Rika followed suit with the targeted attack method, launching a shocker swarm from her gauntlet hangers, which buzzed forwards and discharged electricity into the mass of infectors, while also having her scout planes dive down to do strafing runs against them.

As they did this, Jr breifly stabbed his paintbrush down into the mud to free up his other hand, and then blindly grabbed and tossed a pokeball at a fallen tree. The orb bounced once, and then released Peeka, his fluttermane, who he commanded to ”Blast those freaky things!” This prompted her to fire plasma bolts after the infectors, the mon artfully triggering the shot’s splitting ability to have its twin bolts to split apart and hit pairs of targets on either side of her shot, again preventing the risk of said shots flying onward to accidentally hit Blazermate.

It was this set of assets and powers on the field that gave Jr another idea, and so, after the infestor situation was resolved one way or the other, he set this new plan into motion.

”We can’t hit O, but he can still see us, so let’s make trying to even look at us a pain!” he called out in suggestion, before first getting Rika to send up a diversion swarm from her hangers, the electrical fireflies buzzing up to flash and blink in front of O’s eyes in a very annoying accuracy reducing fashion, and then sending Peeka to be a menace to the elderly.

The pokemon drifted up as close as it could to the Consul, and then used Dazzling Gleem in his light of sight, causing a bright pulse of light to flash from her necklace of energy eyes. Whether the offensive fairy light would work to harm O through whatever projection method he was using was debatable, but Jr was quite sure that having a bright light flashed in your face would be annoying. As would having the ghost pokemon subsequently floating around in front of O, pulling faces and “flutter flutter flutter!”-ing as she did so.

”Come on, get mad, and buy stupid expensive stuff in stupid places” Jr quietly urged O, while both he and his sister kept on their toes be ready to deal whatever financial investment the old man made next.
Rose


Nero wasn’t the only one marveling at the ship the shuttle was approaching, though with the presence of a contingent of engineers onboard that should hardly be surprising. Something interesting that could be gleaned from this, however, was the way that more or less all the Rosnians were set chattering by the sight, marking most of them as engineers. The sound of their chattering would have been described by a 21st century human as sounding exactly like some cheesy b movie alien would make, unaware that the beings before them were very much responsible for that trope due to their ancestor’s abductions and experiments on humans.

At any rate, there was one exception to the nerding out over the vessel, and that was the older lady who saw it as the absurd resource investment that it was, and thought only of how much would have had to be sacrificed to make it possible. An investment and sacrifice she wondered just how long they could endure making.

Still, she didn’t throw a damper on her people’s enthusiasm for the marvel of technology, and especially not that of her daughter’s, Rose’s third eye giving her just the right amount of attention to indicate that yes, she was paying attention, even as most of the technical terms went over her head.

She genuinely wasn't bord or faking attention however, it was always nice to listen to She Who Notices The Little Things In Life And Sets Them Right (who went by Fixi when humans asked) talk about something that excited her, and so she was paying plenty of attention to respond when her daughter said “and to think that She By Whose Hands We Will Forge A New Age Of Wonders has had a hand in it! It is just so amazing! I can’t wait to see her again

Neither can I the woman who was ever so proud of her daughter (who went by Val when humans asked) replied, before telling her other daughter that she was also ever so proud of that as soon as we’re settled we’ll need to organize time to see her

As it turned out, such an formality was not necessary, as the pair were ambushed by Val right as they were coming down the ramp (a fairly easy task given that the humans loomed over them all and how she’d had to weave between them all to get to them)

The trio embraced, foreheads touching as part of the hug (which, due to gesture needing them to close their third eyes, was one of great trust and affection) and then broke apart as they began chattering in their native tongue.

My child! I hadn’t expected to see you here. Do they not have you working? Rose asked, which got her a negative ear wiggle in response from Val, who then explained “They do, but we got everything sorted for you in advance so I could come greet you. They insisted. It's a human thing to welcome people right when they show up apparently

A good human thing then, though it is sad this will be such a short reunion Rose replied, her third eye having seen both the engineers moving off and the lieutenant preparing to address the Pilots.

Rose pivoted and snapped to attention, ears up and alert, while her daughters stepped behind her. What followed was a very… interesting introduction to the people she’d be working under.

While Ritsu Kaname seemed like very typical human military personnel, she was entirely bemused by the comment about brothels made by the Professor. Rose had been around humans a fair bit, and so she thought she knew a lot more than average about how their body language and the ‘tone’ they used to communicate verbal intent worked than the average Rosnian. Here and now she was, however, entirely stumped and could not tell if this was some kind of joke, an attempt at hazing, or if he was actually flirting with her.

As such she just smiled at him, mouth spreading wide enough to reveal the 2 extra sets of pointed teeth her kind had, while fixing him with a three eyed stare. Smiling was, notably, not a Rosnian thing, and their attempts at it sometimes made humans uncomfortable, especially with the extra teeth. In Rose’s case this was an entirely intentional mixed signal. The way she looked at him with all three eyes (an act normally reserved for threat assessment) meanwhile made it clear, to her daughters at least, that she did nor approve of this man.

Given that she worked around him, Val felt the need to drop in the flimsiest of defenses, quietly saying that he was “He’s a bit eccentric” the last word being a human tongue rather than their own due to a lack of an equivalent term.

Rose would have had words about that later, but she tentatively accepted the explanation with a flick of the ear and dropped the fake smile, while her eye began idly roaming around again, inspecting her fellow pilots, and only periodically flicking over the pair of superiors as they kept speaking.

As such she picked up on the Marques’ subtle gestures, Zane’s wince and heavy breathing, and Elora’s trembling though she received little idea what any of them ment at the instinctual level the third eye was operating at. It also, for some reason, kept looking at Minerva for uncomfortable long stretches of time, as if seeing something it couldn’t quite put its metaphorical finger on.

The sudden change in the professor’s disposition at the end when looking at the white haired woman certainly didn’t help Rose work out what it had been so interested in, but she did mentally file it away for later. Top priority was Elora, because that was the worst case of pre-battle jitters she had ever seen in a human.

Still, while some of the others addressed that directly, adding extra crowding wasn’t going to help at all. Nor was focusing everything on her either, so after reminding her daughters “Don’t stare” she did her best to soothe some fears without, specifically, singling out the person who was gripped the most by them.

Admittedly her style of doing this was, well, somewhat unconventional. Mainly because Ronsian’s lack of natural tone modulation made them sound energetically, bordering on manically, chipper about anything and everything they said, something Rose tended to very much lean into rather than attempt to mitigate.

“Enthusiastic: I’ve heard of these! Will be good to make our mistakes before meeting the enemy!” she began, and then in the exact same enthusiastic tone said “Serious: But if it will feel like the real thing, I’ll treat it that way” before insisting “Confidence: So I, Rose, will be making sure each and everyone of you makes it back alive!”

Val’s ears perked up at that, thinking it might work, while Fixi’s drooped a little.

In her capacity as part of her mother’s pit crew, the younger of Rose’s remaining daughters had heard the woman make and then fail to keep that promise one too many times. As such she knew just how much each failure weighed on her mother and none weight more than the first.

That was, however, exactly why she kept making that promise.

wordcount: 1,679 (+6)
Bowser Jr: Level 14 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(242/140) (+5) (+5) (+3) (+5)
Rika: Level 10 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(158/100) (+5) (+5) (+3) (+5)
Location: The Dead Zone


Jr and Rika mostly stuck to the center of the pack while exploring the maze. Not really because they wanted to, both wanted to go off and explore a bit too, but because Jr was more or less stuck on healer duty, and thus Rika was stuck there right alongside him.

She, at the very least, made that job a bit easier on him, as she made extensive use of the Beast’s tape, flicking into it whenever they got attacked, and biting the life out of the floodfested in it. Literally, as said bites healed her for half the damage she inflicted, and thus meant Jr didn’t need to expand mana to keep her topped up on health after she’d finished trading blows with them.

Eventually the maze came to an end, and they were confronted with the door, the creepy watching floodfested (which Rika used to full heal after it became clear they weren't gonna fight back), and finally the reveal of three Consuls waiting for them in the region’s boss arena.

”Oh come on! That’s not fair! At least fight us one at a time in a boss gauntlet!” Jr threw up his hands to complain about this state of affairs, while Rika wondered why they were standing around letting the Consus say their pieces instead of just shooting them in the face right away.

Before she could action that idea however, their foes made their opening move, summoning all the floodfested from outside into the room to join those inside in the act of turning themselves into a giant pile of meat. The kids started to try and destroy them, but when it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, they yelled a quick plan and set about making a little addition to the pile..

Junior first tossed his paintbrush to Rika, and then tossed the girl herself, who proceed to slam down explosively into the doorway using her new H3AD-5T boon, briefly clearing it before whipping around with her splattershot and the paintbrush, coating the threshold to the room burning goop. This didn’t stop the floodfested’s suicide run, but it did mean that they got their feet coated in goop and started tracking it across the floor. Under conventional physics, this should have just left a light smear and messed up just the first few ranks of runners, if it weren't for the goop’s ability to generate swoopin status, the jellyfish like blobs who burst into more goop when they died (via being trampled or hurling themselves at floodested).

And so the more they spread the goop across the floor in a trail towards the forming mound, the more goop was produced in turn, and the more goop was produced, the more of the floodfested got covered in it, and the more that got covered in it, the more of the burning goop ended up inside of the resulting towering Gravemind. Rika added more by hopping up into the air and blasting and splashing more goop down ontop of the runners, till they where all past them and had merged themselves, and a whole heaping of goop, into the Guardian they had come here to destroy: the Gravemind

”Let’s see how you like heartburn, you big weirdo!” Jr called over at the distant titan, despite having not had that much to do with the plan to make that happen. He hadn't been idle while his sister did all the work however.

Placing his right arm on his left shoulder, the surface of it bristled, revealing the entire length of it to be covered in a dozen hedgehogs worth of small metal spikes he’d produced after giving up on floodfested murduring. As a finishing touch, he caught his paintbrush as Rika tossed it back to him before quickly running it over the bed of nails, coating the spikes with more burning goop, before selecting his target

”And now you, get down from there and come fight us!” he yelled up at the hovering O, before unleashing all of the shards at once, unleashing a veritable storm of iron spikes, shotgunning them up at the Consul.

Somewhat to his dismay, each and every single one of them failed to hit anything, the hail of spikes impacting the wall behind the Consul. Not a lick of paint left on the eyes despite dozens having passed right through them, nor had they revealed any sort of invisible solid part anywhere close to them.

"Hmph! Did you think it'd be that easy?" the Consul retorted, briefly fixing the boy with a stare of contempt.

Jr recovered quickly from this failure, deducing that ”Ha, you’re not even really here you wuss!” before tauntingly yelling ”What’re you gonna do, huh, just watch us win from up there?”

Rika was about to point out that it would be pretty silly of O to declare he’d be their doom when he couldn’t do anything, only for O to proceed to do something that seemed very silly. But only at first.

Namly, before his eyes, a 2 meter all iron fence was erected behind the koopa kids (and anyone else who’d come to face him down) before yet more was spawned, being built section by section into a square around some of the seekers, literally fencing them in. Then, grumbling and muttering to himself unintelligibly, O started to change the ground beneath them, painting the terrain into a muddy wetland, including pools of deep, dirty water right beneath their feet. Finally several trees sprouted up as well, along with a trough full of vegetables, completing the enclosure they were now fenced inside of.

”I don’t… what?” Rika said, dumbfounded by this unorthodox strategy, thought to be fair she and her brother were mostly unaffected by the wet terrain that had left them simply floating atop one of the pools.

Others would have bigger issues with the terrain modification, naturally, though what did not have any issue with the train were the enclosure’s intended inhabitants, which O proceeded to pop down several of in quick succession, now truly completing his creation.

”Huh, are those deflated Hoppo?” Jr asked, referring to the pink bounce platforms from the Flower Kingdom, having never before seen an actual regular Hippopotamouse before. He then started to ask ”what are those supposed to do?” only to cry out in alarm as one of the most dangerous animals on earth spotted the intruders in their 5 star enclosure and started charging towards them, mouths opening wide to reveal massive sharp teeth backed up by crushing jaws.

Rika promptly shot one, but the bulky beasts that could give many fantastical monsters a run for their money cared little for small arms fire, and were swiftly upon them.

The one Rika had shot promptly went to try and crunch its jaws down on the short girl who had shot it, only for its jaws to find chitinous scales filling its mouth instead of the entire ship girl, as said girl flicked on a tape recording and became the towering centipedal Beast. As the Beast, Rika arched her long neck around and promptly chopped her fangs into the hippo’s flank, biting a chunk out of it that caused the cracks in her armor to regrow as she healed for half the vitality she’d just drained.

Still, it was a tough beast, and so that wasn’t even close enough to take it down, leaving the now grappled Rika open to further attack.

Neither she nor her brother would allow that however.

Strikers where deployed, the Vespid Ichor Queen and the fist of Blodia appearing and delivering a devastating cleaver chop and bone shattering punch respectively with weapons as large as the hippos where, and there was no enduring that.

Jr meanwhile used his borrowed shipgirl floatation ability to sail around the hippo that came for him, painting goop onto its flank, poisoning the beast, while also forming several spears that he proceeded to launch into its side, driving the deadly goop deeper into it. Rika did much the same to the one grabbing her, breathing globules of poison directly into the bleeding wound she’d bitten in its flank.

After cackling at the sight of the cage match of carnage for a few moments, O floated off and promptly topped the absurdity of his opening move by spawning in a barnyard bash ride next to the hippo enclosure. This quint farmyard themed merry-go-round quickly proved itself to be from a not at all reputable carnival ground as it rapidly spun up to speeds far faster than its own maximum tolerances, before launching the vehicles mounted on it outwards as four large projectiles, two of them crashing straight through the fence and into the hippo enclosure.

Spotting this coming, Jr leapt up and, using Roxas’ flowmotion to guide his parkour, planted a foot on the hood of the tractor and used that to leap even higher, getting the height to clear its exhaust to still be above as it the trailer whipped on by below him.

He landed in a puddle with a splash, only for them to come a crash behind him as the tractor barreled into Rika and the hippo that had had her grabbed. Still, both where big and tough, and so both survived the collision, though while Rika rose up the hippo failed to do so, the Beast’s venom sapping the last of the life from it.

The Hippo that had attacked Jr still had some life in it despite its own poisoning, but all that meant that it was ripe for the eating as Rika scuttled through the mud towards it, falling upon it with a series of bites to restore her HP, while Jr held his mana in reserve for anyone without self healing abilities.

Still, while they had dealt with O’s opening gambit there was no indication he’d stop at building just two attractions, ”So how the heck do we stop him from making more if he’s untouchable?!”

“You cannot!” O cut in to declare, before gleefully stating that “I can toy with you however I wish”
The Statue Calls

Ft. Juri, Edelgard and Edward
Words: 3813 (+4 exp) (+2 rapport)


After the seekers had gotten to the Scarlet Swamp they got a little chance for some rest. Most of them. For a pair of them, whispers only they could hear prevented any relaxation from being had.

Edward had heard them since his arrival, and had intentionally followed them with weary interest, wading through swamp water with hands firmly placed on hilts of weapons in anticipation of this being some kind of trap.

They lead him to the island upon which Miss Fortune had tried to wash herself, but by then both she and her companion had abandoned the spot that led him too, leaving only a pool of diluted blood as evidence of her attempt. Instead, he found only the source of the whispers, a talllion-headed statue holding a massive hourglass.

He paused for a moment, examining the artifact with a clinical eye, blood dripping from his wings and clothes, before movement to his right caused him to tense and shift it. He did not find an enemy there however, but instead the armored form of Edelgard causing him to relax, hands moving away from his weapons, and for him to instead rais one in greeting.

”Well met. I’m glad to see you made it out of that gauntlet as well”

Edelgard nodded, eyes focused on the statue before the pair. ”Indeed. It was a…most frustrating experience, if I am to be blunt with you. I hope that your ascent was less unpleasant, at least.” The small talk was helping to keep her mind off of the frustration of being frozen within the Sepulcher, but it could not break her gaze from the statue.

”Another of this tree’s mysteries, you think?” She suddenly spoke after a few moments. ”I noticed that we are the only two so…drawn…to this thing.”

”Hordes and an unkillable hunter, horrors both” Edward replied to the first question, before saying that ”and now this regal statue that would seem rather out of place if not... well…” as he gazed up at the piece of art before them before he glanced at her and asked to confirm ”I assume you hear the whispers too?”

Edelgard let out a huff of air, nodding imperceptibly. ”Were it not for the peculiarities of this place, I’d have thought myself mad. I assume the two of us being the latest additions to this group has something to do with it?” She mused, still staring at the statue. Why was it calling to them? What did it want?

”Hey Ed,” She said, ”If you two like this statue so much, why don’tcha marry it?” She dropped down from where she had been watching. Setting a hand on her hip she balanced on one foot, hooking the other behind. Truth be told she had been hearing whispers, too, but, like, who didn’t? But more than one person hearing voices from the same source was something to investigate.

Edward suppressed a sigh as he turned to face the quarrelsome streetfighter, and then tried to avoid being derailed from the topic at hand, saying ”I suppose that throws a wrench in that theory, unless you joined only somewhat recently as well? Before us, naturally, but how long before?”

”I dunno when you guys joined, you’re all so forgettable. But I was a little over a week ago.” She said.

Edelgard did not suppress her sigh when Juri approached, not looking forward to her intrusion. Thankfully, however, this time her ‘barb’ was more of a juvenile teasing than anything meant to actually rankle a person. ”Regardless, we ought to do something. Does it want us to call out to it? Touch it? I suppose we do not have overly long to wait to test our theories.” And with that, she strode confidently up to the statue and placed her hand upon it.

For a few moments, her vision flashed white and red, before returning to reality. She gasped as the xylem slowly flowed from her arm onto the statue, pooling into a large bubble that floated between her and it. Leaving her hand there, Edelgard watched as her armor was cleansed of the bloodlike substance, which floated into the statue and disappeared. ”How odd…” She muttered, stepping back.



”Even if that is all it does, then this meeting will have been worth it. These wings have already proven a nightmare to keep clean” Edward said as he stepped forwards to touch the same statue, and he too was cleansed of the tree’s stolen vitality. Then he stepped back, blinking as if he’d been blinded by a flash. He waved a hand before his eyes and then looked into the distance, before saying that ”Odd certainly describes it. I think my vision just got sharper?”



”Haaah?” Juri put her fists on her hips and leaned forward, taking a big couple steps before she plopped her hand on the statue. The blood was absorbed from her as well. But in her mind’s eye, she was taken back to her first kill when she was still a freshly orphaned teenager prowling the rainy streets of the criminal underworld in Seoul. Then the one after that, and after that, and after that. Everything she did for SIN and Shadaloo. That long day when she scoured the entire research division of everyone who knew about Seth and the Feng Shui Engine. Every life she’d ever taken. But she didn’t get the impression the statue was judging her. Just acknowledging it, and taking it, and turning it into strength she had yet to remember. The others would see each life represented by a small orb of blood that left Juri’s hand and travelled into the statue, the victim dimly reflected in the orb itself. There was probably a little more than fifty orbs in total.



Juri pulled away her hand and looked at her palm, now clean of blood. ”What the hell?” She asked. But she couldn’t deny, she was brimming with restored power. ”Let’s just hope this lion statue isn’t a snitch.” She looked at the other two.

”You’re tellin’ me neither of you saw anything?” She asked.

Edward glance up at her from where he was checking over one of his floating tomes, one that looked like it could be used as a weapon thanks to the spike lining it, with a questioning look.

”Nothing specific” he replied, before the commander gave it a moment more thought and saying that ”there was something of a blur, as if something was attempting to be communicated, but no discernible details came through” and then asking ”why? Did you see something clearer?”

”I likewise only saw flashes of color. White and red. I have little idea as to what it meant.” Edelgard added, somewhat confused. What did Juri see that they did not?

Juri looked between them. ”I saw every chump I ever merked.” She said, and then cast her eyes upon her own hands. ”Guess the statue didn’t mind all the killin’, though. Hell, I feel stronger for it.”

She set a hand on her hip. ”Either you two goodie two shoes have never killed anyone, or…” She trailed off, letting the implication hang.

The look on Edelgard's face was a mixture of bemusement at being called a ‘goodie two shoes’ and horror at what her empty flashing vision had meant. ”Indeed.” She simply replied, turning away and steeling her gaze.

Edward’s meanwhile was a stern mask, the man effortlessly hiding whatever it was he felt at this revelation, yet not quite well enough to disguise the fact that that was what he was doing. ”I am exactly what I appear to be” the man in military dress holding a tome with which he conjured weapons of war explained simply, before snapping the book shut and moving to affix it back at his hip.

Juri let out an appreciative whistle. ”Mrs and Mr Geneva Suggestion over here! What’s your favorite type of township to raze?”

”Where were you raised?” Edelgard replied with a cold glare, before rolling her eyes and continuing without giving Juri a chance to respond. ”I did what was necessary to root out those who had forced innocent people to toil under an unjust system, hiding a shadow war beneath the noses of an entire continent, all to maintain the last dying throes of the power they once had. And I will do the same to Galeem.”

Juri’s grin widened, feeling like she touched a nerve. ”Oh, forgive my manners, your majesty. Don’t throw me to the lions! You’re right, I’m sure all those dead people are super grateful you came in to save them.”

”and do you consider the deaths at your own hands just, or did you needle them to death with endless provocation for your own amusement?” Edward stepped in to ask, more to diffuse Juri’s attention than to get her to lay off.

Juri swivelled, leaning forward. ”Nah, I killed ‘em cuz I wanted to. Though I’m sure if I asked them, they’d say they were only doing what was necessary.” Juri winked.

”and if you were in our boots, with armies, cities, a whole nation at our beck and call, would you do the same? Kill whoever you wanted too simply because you felt like it?” the man replied, hands folded behind the small of his back as he stared her down.

Juri shrugged, making a face. ”Meh, too much work. I’m not the world-conquering type. Plus, I prefer to kill people with my own hands. Just seems like the decent thing to do.” She added cheekily.

”I will not pretend that what I did was good. Only that it was necessary for people to live a life of their own choosing, rather than being suppressed by hidden societies carrying out a millenium-long war. And if you think I took no pleasure in ending the people who tortured me and turned me into a living weapon, you are as much a fool as you've made yourself out to be already.” Edelgard replied, her voice steady and emotionless.

”I do not need your approval of my actions to assuage my conscience, I assure you. Some of the others gathered here may fancy themselves heroes or champions, but I've a feeling you think yourself their better for your lack of restraint. Such narcissism ill suits a woman of your talents.” Letting out a short breath, Edelgard turned away, a distant look on her face. This woman reminded her of a less magnanimous Ferdinand, though she was just as self-aggrandizing.

Juri raised her hands placatingly, making an exaggerated face of surprise. ”Hey, you’ll get no arguments from me, princess! I’m sure you had a grand old time. That’s why I asked. Not often I get to chat with a fellow carnage enthusiast.”

She took a few steps forward, swooping around Edelgard’s side. ”And so ambitious. And you hate a secret society, too? We have so much in common! Why don’tcha like me, huh?!” Juri asked, pouting.

”I can hardly guess” Edward said with a straight face as he stepped around Edelgard’s other side to keep track of the young woman, and in so doing making circling her like some kind of street shark that much more awkward.

Juri was suddenly in Edward’s face, her eyes bulging. ”She’s a big girl, I think she can handle little ol’ me.” She whispered. ”Maybe you’re just trying to make up for something.” She said with an unimpressed shrug, backing off.

She turned to walk away, raising a hand in a flippant goodbye wave. ”Have fun reminiscing about the good old days, Eds! Don’t lemme get in yer way.”

Once Juri was well out of earshot, Edelgard sighed. ”That woman is insufferable. And I have more than enough to ‘make up’ for than she could begin to fathom.” Gritting her teeth, Edelgard whirled on Edward, before slowing to compose herself. ”Though, I must thank you for attempting to take her attention off me. She is simply a nuisance, and I wonder if she realizes it, or she believes herself clever for managing to get a rise out of us?”

”I spent far too much time trapped in a forest with her and an unkillable mass of bodies, and she was more of a threat to my sanity than it by quite some margin” Edward quipped in response, leaving out the two rogues who had has seen neither hide nor hair of due to their talents. He added that it was ”most certainly not a fate I want someone else to endure, particular when she had latched onto something so… personal” before leaving the floor open for her to vent about or withhold what it was she had made up for, at her own discretion.

Edelgard hummed, nodding. ”I can scarcely imagine how miserable that must have been, Commander. I suppose I should count myself lucky with regards to those I encountered on the scent of this demonic tree.”

Taking the hint, he made no effort to pick up that dropped subject, and pointed the conversation towards the future, saying ”I expect once she is distracted by the chance to commit violence again that’ll be the last we hear of her on the rest of the climb other than the odd bit of inflammatory yelling that the din of battle should mostly drown out” as he scanned the room with his sharpened sense of sight, spotting and then pointing out that ”and there does at least seem to be a path heading upwards. So perhaps we’ll be able to ascend in a more coordinated fashion this time?”

”That would be nice. I grow weary of these strange challenges we face, in limited numbers. I would much rather overwhelm our enemies with unstoppable numbers and power, rather than have to guess at what strange manner of fighting we will need to employ to win.” Nobody ever called her a tactician, that was for sure. ”You remind me of my retainer, Hubert. Only much less…dour in outlook. It might have been easier to get a demonic beast to smile than that man.”

Proving that point, that certainly got a smile from the man, who guessed that ”I take it he was the sort of man to foresee every possible bad outcome? That certainly has its values in a strategist, as long as there is some counter balance”

”He was. After the attack that destroyed Arianrhod, he drafted a letter to release to our enemies should I be felled in battle, giving the location that he determined the weapons had been launched from. It took some time, but he was a military and magical genius, if a bit stone-hearted. He had to be, to do what we did.” Sighing, Edelgard shook her head. ”I look forward to the day I can see him again. If only to have a truly loyal face around. Not that you haven’t been pleasant conversation thus far, but we’ve known each other only a day.”

”Of course” Edward replied matter of factly, along with a slight nod in additional agreement. ”Still, I have so far found your company entirely agreeable. A steady ship in a lake of… eccentricity” he said, choosing the word politely rather than carefully because they were ”competent, certainly, but from different worlds than you and I. More than just literally I mean. This is perhaps the most adhocly run force I have ever been a part of, save perhaps the one that was meant to save my world before Galeem so rudely interrupted our attempt. Some of them where already well past it before starting to style themselves as ‘Godir’ of that I’m sure”

Edelgard let out a small chuckle at Edward’s description of their compatriots. ”Indeed. I am used to people of a much more military bent, whereas this group is very cobbled together from whomever they could find. I understand the reasoning, but it has resulted in a very eclectic group nonetheless.”

”Indeed” Edward agreed, before suggesting ”I suppose we shall simply have to lead from example in the professionalism department”

Shaking her head, Edelgard gave another mirthless chuckle. ”I feel that might be a fool’s errand, Commander. Regardless, let us join the others, it appears that the time has come to mobilize.” Nodding at the group, which had begun to stir and move out, Edelgard likewise followed.

”I suppose, but what else is there to do but try?” Edward asked, only for Edelgard’s point to be hammered down by a tiny turtle yelling ”hurry it up slow pokes!” at them from the exit of the chamber, prompting him to gave a sigh that turned into a slight, genuinely amused, chuckle at the absurdity of it all and add ”If only for the sake of attempting to maintain our own dignity”

”Whatever dignity I had died in the mud, Commander. I have only spite left.” She sighed, rolling her eyes at Junior as she broke into a light jog. The shuffling and clinking of armor heralded her every step.

”Mine alone then” Edward said, only to himself, and then moved to follow, the more lightly armored man catching up and then keeping pace while his mind switched gears to strategizing army compositions.



Two Women Scorned

Lvl 14 Ms Fortune (132/140), Midna
Word Count: 3427 (+4) (+4 rapport)


After some time off, and some folks getting out, the seekers were on the road again. Or trail. Or really on the spelunking path when you got down to it, because neither the tree itself nor the floodfested were particularly interested in providing a straight forward route into the Qliphoth’s upper reaches.

Case and point were the massive valves in the biological structure, tough as vault doors and always placed at the most inconvenient points, as well as being spots that whatever intelligence controlled the swarm had delighted in setting up ambushes. There were enough heroes on hand to slaughter the Floodfested before they could call for backup, though, so the bigger concern for Ms Fortune was the opened valves’ resemblance to large lamprey-like mouths, which gnawed at her lingering phagophobia.

For the most part the biological mechanisms for opening these blockades provided little challenge, but in one early case, after whipping the floor with the monsters that had tried and failed to crush the Seekers in these choke points, the associated puzzle did not turn out to be located in plain view of the door.

Various tunnels snaked off from the tricky valve’s main chamber, including one that lead into a ruined chunk of some kind of high tech facility, though it was only large enough to roll a large ball through, rather than crawl in any practically distinguished manner. Well unless you were a child, however Midna, who had found said hole, wasn’t exactly a fan of the idea of sending the koopa kids crawling through no matter how tough they were, because even for Bowser Junior id’d be a squeeze with his hard shell. After a moment she did however come up with a different candidate based on recent interactions with them.

”Miss Fortune?” the princess(who was hanging from the ceiling from her shadow hand to inspect the duct that halfway up the wall) ”Do you think you can get your bits and pieces in here? If you do I can ride your shadow and we can see if the meat buttons have grown into this ruin?”

By this point the team had been trekking long enough that even Nadia’s motor mouth was running on empty, so when Midna hung down to say hello the feral didn’t mind turning her attention away from Ace for a bit. “In there?” Nadia hopped up to grab hold of the ledge and inspect the opening. She was no stranger to squeezing through vents when it came to heists, but these days she wasn’t quite as skinny as she’d been in her vagabond era. Her head would fit with room to spare though, and while she would be loathe to dispatch her noggin on a solo mission in a hellish place like this, Midna’s company offered a little more assurance. Plus, Midna coming to her for help felt pretty nice–no doubt their battles had shown just how capable the catgirl was!

“Yeah, sure! Good thing I’m not claw-strophobic, eh?” She swiveled her head around then waved goodbye to the others with her ears. “Be right back. Won’t be a meowment!” Then she rolled her head backward off her shoulders and into the duct upside-down, where she used her ears to walk. Meanwhile her body dropped back down, detached her tail, and began to dance.

The farther the duo got in the vent, though, the less happy-go-lucky Nadia became–inwardly, at least. As demonstrated by the team’s various encounters throughout the demon tree, the Qliphoth had consumed a great variety of detritus from Redgraccoon City when it first grew. Now, with the city destroyed, the Qliphoth was a literal vertical slice of the Dead Zone itself, housing everything from demons and zombies to ghosts and goblins, with a healthy -or rather, unhealthy- dose of extraterrestrial parasites to boot. Nadia had never seen an area like this before, though. While it still seemed high-tech from the perspective of these two Seekers, the facility they were infiltrating was a far cry from the clean, sheer, well-lit metallic interior of Alcamoth, or the militaristic utilitarian style of the Avenger. Instead a strange smell filled the air, and deposits of unidentifiable meat grew along the seams and cracks in the duct like mold. When Nadia’s head finally reached an opening, she hopped down into a hallway of bizarre and macabre design, equal parts ghoulish and alien, all hewn from some unidentifiable material in unmistakably organic shapes.

“Huh. That’s new,” the feral remarked, struggling to think puns that might suit this unsettling environment. The floor in here was tilted, making her wonder if this whole area would be a little off-kilter. The more pressing concern was the fleshy mold. She looked around, raising an eyebrow. “Midna? You can come out now. Mind carrying my head? I’ve got no-’body’ else.”

Like a demon called, the princess appeared, monochrome form stretching up out of the feral’s shadow before the vibrant red and gold was painted across her armor as she solidified fully and her heels clacked against the tilted ground. Claws of purple energy snapped out of them, preventing her from sliding down the corridor as she took it all in.

”Can’t remember dreaming about a place like this, not that they were ever that exact. Blurred nightmares those two, except for the start and the end” Midna said as she crouched down and picked up Nadia’s (living) severed head. It took a few moments for her to figure out how to actually hold her in all her arms, resulting in her placing two hands on either side of the neck and holding her up in front of her chest.

”There, if that works? Or would you prefer the back of the neck like a kitten?” she asked with a light tease as she summoned up her shield in one of her remaining free hands to let her better defend her cargo if need be. The head was a little less than she’d hoped for assistance wise, but the lady’s strikers would be a help if nothing else.

“This is fine. The more stable, the better,” Nadia reported. “If something comes at us, just chuck me at ‘em. I’ll head ‘em off.”

”Will do” princess replied as they set off down the corridor

At one end of the hallway sat a strange chair festooned by scraps of skin like Spanish moss, wholly unsuitable for any humanoid occupant. At the other end, past what looked to Nadia like a trough of ground beef, lay a decently-sized room. The growths in here were extreme, and strange organisms the size of human heads clung to the dangling masses like polyps. Repelled by the disturbing sight, Nadia failed to suppress a shudder, even though the rest of her wasn’t here right now. “Ugh…what’re we looking for, again? Some kinda switch?” Her eyes fell on what looked like a some kind of console with a number of lit and unlit nodes arranged around a system of rotating connectors. “Uh oh…that looks like a puzzle.” Nadia grimaced. When it came to logic puzzles, Nadia Fortune was the wrong girl to ask.

”I’ll take that over more meat monsters. Maybe it’ll even be fun?” Midna replied, before taking a second glance at all the twisted machinery and revolting growths and making groan that made it clear she had a hard time believing her own statement

”Whoever built this place probably wouldn’t know what that is with all this grey. Still, might open a way forwards or reveal a hidden chest?” she said instead, approaching and using one of her secondary hands to interact with what seemed to be a controller on the right hand of the device ”Let’s see, what do you do”

The controls weren’t immediately obvious, but with a little trial and error they turned out to be relatively simple. A button could be pressed to change which of the four nodes was currently active, and around the button were two dials. The outer dial would rotate the rod attached to the currently active node, while the inner dial would rotate the node itself. Once each rod pointed to the correct dial, that node would light up, but any node connected to another would rotate it if it itself was rotated. Nadia stared at the intricate device as the rotation of rods and nodes caused lights to flicker on and off, thoroughly baffled. After about fifteen seconds she lifted her eyebrows and blinked a couple times, shaking her head. “Ahem! Well, seeing as I don’t have any hands to fiddle with, why don’t I just, uh, keep watch? Set me down somewhere reasonably clean, will ya?”

”Hmmm? Oh” Midna replied, the expression of confusion mixed with focus on her face obscured by her helmet being wiped away by a few blinks. She glanced around, saying ”lets see” and finding nowhere that really, truly, counted as clean, before coming up with an Idea.

A moment later she’d summoned up her Darknut, and had it hold its shield out in front of it horizontally like a serving tray, onto which she popped the feral’s head, before saying ”There, that should work. You can even order it to serve you up in whatever direction you’d like” before returning to fiddling with the dials somewhat ineffectually. During her stint of dungeon crawling, she hadn’t exactly been the one figuring out the last step of the puzzles most of the time.

Nadia gave the skeletal juggernaut a dubious glance from her new perch. “A little knight-marish, but I’ll take what I can get.” She took the chance to scope out the room, but there was not much she particularly enjoyed looking at. All the alien meat, much more visceral than the reddish-purple plant matter that constituted the Qliphoth, made her stomach churn despite her stomach being a good hundred feet away. A shame, she thought, that she couldn’t have left her nose behind as well. With nothing else worth seeing, the feral turned her attention back toward the puzzle. “So, Midna. You went to the desert and the city, while I hit the sea and the caves. Haven’t seen much of each other before today, but I guess we’re makin’ up for lost time now, huh?” She wore a friendly smile, as usual. “I hear you’re some kind of princess? Lotta royals in the Seekers. At least you’re not snooty like Toni, buuut I couldn’t say I’d blame ya. Not every day a royal gets to hang around some mangy alley-cat, or vice versa.” Her tone had become somewhat pointed, as if leveling a vague accusation.

”Toni… Sectonia?” Midna, who had been humming to herself tunelessly while failing to crack the puzzle during Nadia’s look around, guessed. Rather than being annoyed at being interrupted from her task, she was rather thankful Nadia was here for conversation instead of to ask why she wasn’t done yet.

”Maybe not a cat, but I owe a lot to a flea bitten mutt. Well, farm boy turned wolf turned hero but still. Not that I was as above it all as the Queen before him but I had my own kind of contempt I needed to deal with” she replied with more honesty than might be necessary, before really losing track of her tongue, first saying ”I wish he was here” more than a hint of wistfulness before catching herself, switching gears much to hard, and promptly thumping the machine and declaring the reason for that desire was ”so he could solve this goddess forsaken puzzle!” even if that obviously wasn’t all of it

Either Midna hadn’t understood Nadia’s subtle provocation, or she’d rather effortlessly deflected it. The feral didn’t mind, though; so far, Midna’s behavior had been much more down-to-earth fashion than the team’s other royals, so much so that Nadia might have never guessed at her status otherwise. If the Twilight Princess did not acknowledge any disparity between the two of them, the cat burglar wasn’t going to draw any more attention to it. Instead, she considered asking about the farm boy wolf hero Midna mentioned, but truth be told, she wasn’t all that interested. It seemed like neither of them was suited to this task, but at least Nadia had the excuse of not having any hands to help with.

She couldn’t help but smile at Midna when she vented her frustration with the alien mechanism. “Hey, if you don’t have any ideas, might as well go ham on the controls. Gotta luck out sooner or later, right?”

The princess paused, thought about this and then grinned under her mask, saying ”You know what, I can do one better” and setting about a quick little magical scheme. She placed the false set of arms on the controles, and then her real ones on top, sinking the fingers of them into the fake ones and then rapidly rearranged the glowing green runes and lines that appeared as a result of this action. Then she pulled the fingers back and smiled as the second set of limbs did indeed start to go ham on the controles, while Minda rested an elbow between them, turning her focus away from the puzzle entirely and moving it over to Nadia.

”There, now they’ll do it for me” she declared smugly, clearly quite pleased with her little automation trick, before trying to pick up the same conversation from where she’d interrupted it.

”So, yes, odd how that worked out. Not even those silly games put us together” she noted, adding more to the pile of coincidences, they really had missed each other at every turn somehow hadn’t they, before she thought about how to further rectify that ”But maybe next time? Or something before we launch ourselves back into the fray? I could go for another spa visit or twelve after this grim grimy place.”

Though the spectacle of magical automation stole her attention for a moment, the mere mention of Balan’s Big Top was enough to bring a bright smile to Nadia’s face. “Oh man, those minigames were the cat’s pajamas. We’ve gotta go back some time, or find more stuff like that. I like a good scrap as much as the next gal, but we all need breaks, ‘specially after crap like this, yeah.” She chuckled, her nose wrinkled by the ambient foetor. “I’m sure that angel lady feels bad sittin’ out, but even a live wire like me has her limb-its. After the Maw, all of us on Blue Team spent, like, a whole day on a tropical vacation.” She stared off into the middle distance, the morbid architecture fading away into white sands and crashing surf. A heavy sigh escaped her. “Life’s a beach, eh?”

Just then, the swivels and clacks of the alien machine gave way to a loud click, then silence. When Nadia looked over, she found four yellow lights starting back at her. There came a series of loud, mechanical -or possibly organic- sounds, and after another moment, a door near the hallway began to slide open. The sudden movement disturbed a handful of the head-shaped parasites, which flew up toward the rafters. Nadia made the mistake of looking too closely at one as it passed by, and despite being elsewhere, her stomach did not thank her for the experience. Green-tinged smoke wafted through the doorway as it revealed a triangular room. One wall, even more bio-engineered than the rest of this alien facility, hosted a row of canisters in which ghastly homunculi had been grow to fit their containers. The other wall lay in pieces, exposing the familiar Qliphoth matter behind it, and with it the nerve cluster that would open the valve back in the main tunnel. In between lay some sort of workbench, or perhaps operating table, on which a handful of biotech weapons had been fashioned.

“Guns?” Though leery of the freakish tube-babies that were definitely starting back at her, Nadia edged toward the table to satisfy her curiosity. Of the various half-baked projects on the table, only three seemed to be complete: two pistols of flesh and bone, not quite alike, and a scoped SMG. Nadia seemed especially interested in the pistols, but with no hands of her own to claim them with, she could only raise an eyebrow at Midna. “Finders keepers?”

”Power is power but, urgh, it's hardly ever pretty in this world” Midna replied as she caught up, having had to pause to set her false limbs back to normal. Unsurprisingly she used those to pick up and carefully examine the weapons rather than her own ones. Doing so also let her avoid looking at or thinking about the tank beings, but she’d have to get round to what to do about them eventually.

”Not exactly an expert with guns even if they can be useful” she said, implicitly asking if the feral was.

If Nadia had her shoulders around, she would’ve shrugged them. “Not really my deal, to be honest. Only got one, and it’s more for…’meating’ people.” Though the Bait Launcher was a pretty unforgettable weapon, she couldn’t remember if she’d used it around Midna so far. “But I wouldn’t mind tryin’ them. Got an itch trigger finger lately, for whatever reason.” Maybe that cowgirl she’d fused with was rubbing off on her, but Nadia couldn’t help but feel like she had some sort of potential that she couldn’t tap into without a gun or two.

”I know the feeling” Midna replied, as she pulled her Nightsky Ripper scimitar out of a portal ”Wouldn’t have known the first thing about using one of these a few weeks ago, and now it just feels…right”

She then put the guns down on the table again and opened a portal below them while saying ”Once we get you back to your fingers we’ll see if these fit like a glove. If not, trying to give them to Edward would be funny” before then moving onwards to the nerve cluster and slicing into it with her sword.

With their task complete, there was nothing stopping them from heading back. Nothing except well…

With a sigh, Midna stepped towards the pods with the creatures inside, saying/asking ”OK, can’t avoid it any longer, what are you and are you going to be a problem or burden?”

Though the homunculi within tracked her movements with their bloodshot eyes and bared their lipless teeth at her, they couldn't move an inch inside their pods, having been horrifically molded into ovoid shapes by their own steady growth within their cramped confines. Nadia did not like looking at them or thinking about them. “How about we skedaddle before we find out? ‘Uppies’ me!” She hopped her head up and down to signal Midna to pick her up.

Midna glanced down at the feral, up at the trapped creatures that didn’t seem very friendly all things told, and then up at her darknut that was no longer burdened by its body-less cargo before replying ”Sure” and picking Miss Fortune back up in the same manner she had before.

She turned away from the creatures and strode out of the door without looking back, heading for the vent into which she popped Miss Fortune’s head. Right as she did, there came a crash as her darknut ripped the top of one of the pods trapping the homunculi, and prompting the princess to declare it was ”Time to go”.

Whatever the homunculi did with it's freedom now, it wasn't her problem.



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