POOHEAD189

Dwarves!

I completely didn't know this started. I'll post ASAP!

Dungeoncrawl: I Want to be a Wizard!

I must post!

Fire Emblem: The Slumbering Goddess

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@Achronum@Obscene Symphony@Scribe of Thoth@Hero

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Kayden's father had once told him, 'If one wants peace, prepare for war.' At the time he didn't give it much thought, but he trusted his father in matters of state. Apparently many of his ministers considered him a great leader. Kayden believed them, simply because he felt the man had to be good at something other than his favorite hobby of being an asshole to those closest to him. Still, sound advice in a vague sort of way. Peace was never on the table if one didn't make sure they could protect themselves, and such a philosophy helped him gather his thoughts and prepare for battle. He hoped one day he could be as good of an emperor as his father whilst being kind to those around him. Somehow, try as he might, he seemed to never be able to salve strife or broker agreements until every other option was expended. Veronica took forever to calm, and Rudolph was as cowardly as ever. And then there were those outside of his guild...

“Pull any shit like back in Luin,” Jorah had growled when Kayden passed him, “and if the heretics don’t get you, I will.”

The Prince had nearly stopped, and he didn't know whether to laugh or get pissed. Kayden had come to the conclusion Jorah utterly lived outside of reality. Who in their right mind chastised someone who had risked their life to keep men with swords off the backs of his allies? Kayden had guarded the flanks with his own life and Jorah was enraged?? The logic was simply not there, and Kayden came up with two outcomes. Either Jorah was jealous, which wouldn't be the first time he had experienced such from a lesser noble, or Jorah was utterly batshit crazy. He wanted to give the man the benefit of the doubt and go with option one, but option two was seeing far more likely. The man had even eavesdropped on Kayden and his house, thinking Kayden had eavesdropped on Clarissa who was, quite literally, loudly calling out a professor in public. He earnestly did not see what someone as honorable as Clarissa could see in him, but at least he had made acquaintances with her and spoke to a few of the other students from the other houses. Imogen was always pleasant to be around, as well.

He took all but three seconds to think this all through, and made a mental note. He had always tried to be nice to Jorah, even whilst the fellow was being an asshole, but he decided his patience was growing thin. One more vague threat or outwardly malevolent intention to Kayden, and Kayden would go from pleasant to pissed off. Perhaps it would teach Jorah a valuable lesson in diplomacy when he ascended to whatever Dukedom he would inherit one day. Kayden snorted. He didn't know if this mental note would stick, but he also doubted Jorah could learn anything meaningful after the way he had been acting. He purged the thoughts from his mind. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand, and the prince went to retrieve his armaments.

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The carriage was musty and cramped, and it did wonders for those who wished to venture into the wide world of back pain. However, he supposed it was more expedient than walking, and this let him gauge the thoughts of his fellow students in far closer quarters than was socially acceptable on a hike or horseride. So far, everyone seemed at least passably prepared save for Rudolph, and that was to be expected. They needed to be ready for whatever the battle would throw at them or they might collapse formation and potentially lose their lives. The advanced unit had the glory, but they were to be the backbone.

Kayden stepped off the carriage, gathering his wits and taking in fresh, albeit humid breathes of air into his imperial lungs. He stopped at their center and leveled his striking eyes on the fog permeating the perimeter, his gaze fixed like a hound's. Kayden had the air of a veritable statue, stern and imperious all at once. Whatever others might think of him, he very much had the look of the princely ideal. After a few moments passed and no screaming heretics were stampeding into their ranks, he managed to glance at the others as they gave their commentary.

"They're right," He informed Rudolph, referring to Lienna's comments and Clarissa's speech. They needed to get out of this in one piece, and to do that, they couldn't lose morale. They were here for a reason, and that was to protect the people. Kayden drew his sword, hefting it into the sky like a beacon, though with the fog he doubted it would have the same effect as in the tales.

"Citizens of the Empire, this will be a day of victory! If we stand with our distant cousins of the Alliance and the Holy Kingdom, no foe can overcome our combined might!" He called powerfully, hoping his crest was aiding in the proclamation. He wasn't going to give a long winded oration after Clarissa, but he did feel the need to speak and reiterate their stridently important goal. "We will stand and fight, and by the Goddess's mercy, no heretic will lay a hand on the innocent's of Magred!"

Arena Battlegrounds 2.0

Why have the character section of this topic also be the battleground? Are you literally retarded?

@Viper Sebastian

Hey, who the fuck goes into a 3 year old thread and insults people? This is a warning. Another one and you're banned.

The Sunday Group

Mal tapped his pen, and Jaelle slipped back into the transmuted staff like a genie in a bottle. Neatly he slid it into his shirt pocket and adjusted his glasses as he reviewed the corpse one final time. It wasn't as reliable as one of those spy glasses one saw in movies, but it saved a 'picture' of the corpse in his glasses to be saved in a way for a later date. He walked over to his vehicle, a stylish red ford fusion, and drove off at Eleanor's behest.

He drove off out of the countryside, past Lake Pontchartrain. He let the windows down as he drove, his glasses glinting in the sun. Jaelle tended to stay in the staff when he drove, because they found that the physics of her floating was centralized to the earth's rotation, not a moving car. She would need to truly concentrate to treat the car as the 'physical realm' she was attached to. If not she would have to fly and catch up to him, so it was good to keep her in the staff unless they had something to talk about. Though she had merely poked her top half out of a staff before, adorably making herself miniature sized while she did so.

Once he and Jaelle reached the Sunday Group headquarters, Mal strode in, adjusting his jacket and taking out his pen, and once he passed through the glass doubledoors at the front, the pen wheeled betwixt his fingers three times before transforming into an arcane staff, nearly five feet of obsidian topped with a bloodstone that held Jaelle and a few extra tricks he had conjured up and kept in there in case of emergencies. He passed by the lady at the front desk and gave her a deft wink, lowing his glasses for but a moment before sauntering into their offices, her giggles audible until the door closed behind him.

Taking his glasses off, he stepped into his personal office and found the scrying stone he kept, picking it up and taking it out to the center of the first floor. Lightly placing it on a desk, he gently applied the glasses to the stone and drew a summoning circle with erasable chalk, using the magic the Sumerians called Zisurru. As he uttered the words in the language of the ancients, a picture began to form above the stone.

"Abnum muda'um abartum, subulum naplusum." He revealed, and before his eyes was a picture of the corpse, able to be viewed from three hundred and sixty degrees from any angle, as long as the chalk remained in place. He gave a smile, admiring his handiwork.

"The things I do for these people," he deadpanned.

Hider

Mal took Jaelle, went back to the office, and made a magical version of a 'hologram' to be viewed of the corpse.

The Sunday Group

I'll post within a day or two and have Jaelle hold up in Mal's staff.

I'm too old

HEY HEY @POOHEAD189 I've been here since you weren't a mod >:p

@Dark Cloud

That's true! There was a good two years before my ascension.

Maverick Malediction

It was all going so well.

Neil and Calliope had not been a poor team, though whether he found it surprising, he hadn't really thought about it. The scoundrel had always had good eyesight, but he felt a bit more used to the dark ever since his resurrection. He couldn't see into darkness as if it was nothing, but he felt he could adapt to it better. At first he had the horrible thought that he might be a vampire, or one of the undead. That sort of life really didn't suit him. He'd rather be dead or alive than some faux realm in between, perpetually stuck in a single place or form. But after checking he had a heartbeat and could survive the sun, he was pretty certain he was still mortal. Maybe his vision was just him, or maybe it was due to the the Jymen's blood. Either way, it was a nice touch to his skillset.

Calliope was an entire thieve's toolkit along with an armed guard, all wrapped up in a darkly beautiful package. Sure, pretty much every other man that Neil knew that wasn't some pompous lord who thought they could control her would be off-put by many things about her, and the fact that...well, she tried to kill him twice and pretty much indirectly led to his death. But as excruciating as it had been, he found he liked her. Plus they were two dates in!

But after evading a few patrols, they wound up bumping into something that couldn't be controlled or even real without magic that was likely outlawed by every major magisterium's ethics committees across the continent. Calliope would know far more than Neil, but from what limited knowledge he had, necromancy was the art of soul manipulation. The minotaur this thing had been in life could not conceive the state of eternal slavery or the bodily invasion of eldritch spirits that caused it to still move and wave its axe around after its death.

Neil threw himself left as Calliope leaped right, the bone-beast's horns stabbing into the mortar of the wall, sending small bits of rock scattering to the ground. Neil hit the floor in a roll, planting his right hand behind him to halt the tumble. Just as he planted it on the ground, the faux stone gave way. Neil face went from surety to a surprised expression as he went from a sitting position to prone as his hand went from solid ground to empty air. He nearly fell down the hole, and if he didn't have a strong core that kept his body rigid, he would have.

He scrambled away from the edge of the hole, the carefully carved stone split from the minotaur's next attack, cracking the stone right where Neil had been just a moment ago. Neil dived between its legs, going behind the thing. It didn't have eyes, but somehow it could still only see from where it's skull was pointed. Meanwhile, Calliope whipped a line of black nether energies like a bullwhip emanating from her hand, cracking against the minotaur's femur, causing a hair-line fracture in the bone. Neil looked up at the undead monstrosity from behind, and he began to notice something as the abomination fixed its gaze at Calliope.

Some...aura. Something that glowed darkness, if that made sense. A weave of latent energies that wound around the thing, woven into the shape of a circle around the center of the skeleton. The lines of energies flowed through the black magicked runes like estuaries of abyssal power. He could tell it was extremely significant to this guardian of necromantic energies. Damn.

He had no idea how this could help.

Calliope controlled the black length of the whip as if she had years of experience, her feet firmly planted and her lips curled into a wicked smile. Unfortunately, the spell wasn't picking the guardian apart fast enough. The thing began to move, but not its legs. Rather, it lifted its huge axe up, and Neil knew it meant to throw. Calliope was more physical than Neil would have first thought, but at the range in this narrow corridor, he didn't know if even he could dodge the blow with certainty. He saw Calliope saw it too, trying to spin away as she sent the black whip at the axe to try and wrench it from the skeletal hands. Neil wasn't finished with her yet, so he hopped to his feet and sent his foot into the leg the sorceress had cracked.

It was a strong kick, in fact a donkey probably couldn't have done it better. Unfortunately it didn't break the bone and just lengthened the crack. The thing began to pull the axe forward over its shoulder to throw, and Neil did something stupid. He grabbed the minotaur's leg and pulled it off the ground with a great yank, causing it to lean off the stance it had. The axe swung, but when it left its hands, it flew awkwardly to the left of Calliope's position. Neil had other things to worry about, being pulled forward as the minotaur's weight fell forward into the trap-hole. Vainly it grabbed at the opposite end of the expanse, but its skeletal hands found no purchase as it began to plummet.

Neil began to fall too, but with a strangled yelp and quick reflexes, he pressed his feet down on the skeletal body below him, pushing himself against it and giving him just enough for a second, unimpressive leap to reach the other side. Desperately, he grabbed at the edge like a wet dog trying to get into a boat. Once he grabbed a flaw in the stone in front of him, he managed to haul himself out right at Calliope's waiting feet.

He breathed a sigh of relief, changed his face from desperate to debonair, and gave her a smile as if he hadn't just been in a manic state of survival.

"How was that? Hot right?"

The Pavonis Campaign - Warhammer 40000

Theme

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Ultima Segmentum
999.M41
Planet Iax: Agri World of Ultramar
1800 Hours

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Zeb had done this three times in his career, and he still wasn't used to it. His skin felt like it was peeling off his bones, and his helmet pulled at his chin by the strap, almost as if it wished to strangle him through some warp infused spirit. He opened his eyes, sweeping his gaze around the two thousand odd guardsmen now with him in the drop. Every last one of them strapped into a compartment like an old terran roller-coaster, only far more tightly and marginally more secured. Above him, the speakers blared their descent in low gothic. Twenty thousand meters...eighteen thousand meters...fifteen thousand meters...

The reinforced steel of the drop-shuttle's hull was layered with three inches of ceramite, easily able to shrug off any small arms fire and some lower yield missiles, but still dangerously vulnerable to anti-orbital guns, lascannon or kinetic. Even past the howling of the wind and the murmering and coughing of his fellow troops, gunfire from the planet could be heard roaring and screeching past their shuttle. He was glad he didn't have a view of the outside, he could imagine what it was like out there, even with his experience.

Twelve thousand meters...ninety five hundred meters... seven thousand meters...

Something rocked the drop-shuttle as an explosion tore into the trooper's eardrums. For one horrifying moment, Zeb thought apart of their hull had been breached, but a moment later he realized the distance of the sound and the fading rumble leaving his ears. Another shuttle had been obliterated, likely within a thousand meters of their own. Emperor, he hoped it wouldn't happen to them, and it was a small relief to know the explosion had only now knocked them slightly off course. Not that they were usually sent to the ground with a high expectation of accuracy. After a moment, he thought for a minute and prayed Katia hadn't been in that shuttle, either. He had never heard of a guardsman making "friends" with a commissar, or even the bureaucrats keeping them together as a team because of "the Emperor's Luck." But somehow it had happened to him. If any of the troops with him knew they were a pair without hearing of their exploits on Pavonis, they would assume the two of them were 'fraternizing,' or worse, that he received his Sergeant rank by nepotism. Of course it was bullshit. Katia was pretty, maybe even beautiful, but he wasn't going to risk losing his head over it. And he had faced too many horrors to have his promotion questioned.

As the distance was listed again, he made sure to pull his tongue behind his teeth and gently shut his jaw behind his closed lips. Many guardsmen had lost their tongues and senses from one of these landings. There would be more than a few casualties. There always was.

(Two weeks earlier...)

"Judging by the maps, there's a small village northeast of your drop point. Meet me there, and we'll coordinate with the colonel." Katia said in her moderately smoothed valhallan accent.

"Isn't the entire planet filled with small villages?" He asked, a bit less formal to the Commissar whilst they were in private. Iax's climate and verdancy made it one of the most naturally agriculturally productive worlds in the Imperium. In fact it was the breadbasket of all of Ultramar. The inhabitants harnessed the planet's inherent fertility, covering its surface with well-ordered farms and cultivated woodlands. Other than a few stretches of mountains and a various collection of shallow seas, it was all green.

"Yes," she said, flashing a grim smile. "But this village will be called Du-retour, a few hundred miles from the only city on the planet, First Landing. We'll need to reinforce the troops stations there and hold out until the Ultramarines can return from their crusade."

"How long?" he asked, betraying no emotion.

"Two hundred Terran days. Not too bad."

"Yes ma'am." was all Zeb said, saluting her. They might have begun working together less antagonistically, but he still treated her by her rank when needed. His refined jaw squared and his blue eyes stamped forward when his hand raised out of respect, before turning tail and marching out. She stopped him at the door by barking his name. He turned to her. "Commissar?"

"Get there alive." She said.

"You too."

The thrusters activated, a low rumbling that sounded like waves crashing against rocks erupted from beneath them. Now they could hear the 'pings' from small wartrukk shootahs ricocheting off the hulls of the shuttle. One large bullet even penetrated the hull, making a small hole in the far wall. The bullet sprang against steel in flashing sparks, but the primitive slug hit no one, luckily. The hole it made whistled with a gale-force pressurized wind, like a hellish stean train.

Three thousand meters....one thousand meters...

They had slowed down, but not enough to make the abrupt, concussive landing any less jarring. If Zeb had not been strapped in, he would have been flung to the ground and broken a bone or three. When he regained his vision, blood was pooling on the steel girders below his feet. Three men down from his position, one man had crimson pouring out of his nose and mouth, his body unresponsive. Alarms blared and lights flashed, and the buckles were automated to release every man simultaneously. One buckle had malfunctioned, the trooper scratching at the straps wildly. Zeb stepped out without issue, adjusting his helmet. The cries of "WAAAAAGH" could be heard just as the doors were rolling open.

"Grab your guns! Left wall!" Zebulon cried, pointing over the men as the imperial guardsmen began yelling in confusion. A few saw him, followed by dozens more, becoming hundreds as they stampeded to the gun rack. Zebulon remembered that rush. A few men wouldn't survive the charging press of the others. As an officer, his lasgun was on the right. He needed to remember he wasn't above them, even with his newfound privileges. The other five sergeants followed him, grabbing their frag and krak grenades. Three chainswords were presented for them, and Zebulon saw two be taken by a pair of older sergeants. He looked at the third, and then shook his head. Not against Orks, he wouldn't. He didn't plan on getting close enough, and he preferred his newly acquired Cadian-modified Lasgun and the Catachan Fang he had acquired on Pavonis.

The doors opened, and blissful sunlight peered through the open hull of the shuttle. The Ork Nob that stood in the opening cast a great shadow over the frightened men.

The Elder Scrolls: In the Shadow of Oblivion

I probably can