Spider Pickle

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Another secret she knew, but had forgotten in the heat of the moment, was the interaction between dark matter and negative-mass objects. Namely, an alchemy that could and did aerosolize her sword.

The colossus that was Barrusom then turned to face her, and her eyes widened.

"Oh. Well damn."

She wouldn't disregard that dark matter's properties further. But she wouldn't disregard her sword, either, not even in its current state as a gas. She promptly dispersed the dark matter surrounding and penetrating the sword's molecules, making way for lifting Disconception off Barrusom's fur. She coalesced it into a basketball-sized sphere, and although it wouldn't stick together anymore as it had before due to its reversed gravity, she could still move it as one pseudo-solid object far away from Barrusom. That pesky negative-mass feedback loop also allowed it to accelerate fast enough that as it hurtled towards the forgotten snack of a planet, Barrusom's backwards movement wouldn't catch up to it.

She guessed that he was making large waves, using the inertia loss in his arms to gauge how powerful they could be. Swing after swing, and then swipe after swipe -- spangling stars giving way to red and white like his puke from before. So that must've been his breakfast. She couldn't help but be impressed that a creature like him managed to make such a clever attack as this.

With the acid waves heading her way, she decided to do another experiment. Activating her anklets for extra speed, she started skating far off to the side outside the reach of the waves; A safe evasive curve while using her telekinesis to attempt to swerve this acid in the other direction. Surely, despite its extra-versal origins, she should be able to manipulate it like any matter -- but she preferred not to put all her eggs in one basket, especially after failures like her time-machinegun setup. The skating, she expected to put her well out of harm's way; Whether or not she could manipulate this acid would not impact her chances at surviving it, which currently looked to be 100%.

While her experiment went underway and the waves were passing her by, she got a strange feeling like something was looking over her shoulder... no, looking over the universe's shoulder, encompassing it. Observing. Maybe it, too, was watching an experiment of its own.

Now she had the shivers of existential dread, a feeling she as a Lumanar didn't know she could have.

Adding onto that dread was the spreading rend in space, a domino effect that translated Barrusom's clever attack into a deadly plague hellbent on unraveling the universe. Something of this scale and urgency no doubt would send many priests and priestesses of spacetime into prayer to reinforce every corner, nook, and cranny of the galaxy against this threat and to contain the breach. That left Exeter to stop him from nullifying those efforts with further space-breaking.

The nets were too small to do anything.
Her sword was a stress ball of fluid.
She had five nova grenades. Firecrackers -- against Barrusom's skin.

She had an option, if it came down to it.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Exeter was no expert in currency conversions, but she did know that loopholes could be found which might cause drastic changes in value.

Disconception, true to its name, did not behave as expected. Outerversal matter shot out to slow it down and take a hold on it. This would have succeeded perfectly on any other weapon.

But it never slowed down. With its negative mass dealing in inverse ways to matter, the root system actually increased its speed just the same way as it interacted with Exeter's hands opposite to how a normal sword would. The many roots sucked it in and it only wormed its way out faster and faster. Soon, the system had inadvertently bestowed upon it the tremendous speed she was looking for, which she then used as a diving board to give it one last push towards Barrusom, at an angle to avoid hitting any celestial bodies.

Naturally, her disconnection from that harrowing speed limit extended to her telekinetic abilities.

It did not, however, continually extend to objects upon letting go of them, physically or telekinetically. What was, at one moment, unproblematically flying at nigh-lightspeed with a linear energy-to-speed proportion... was now flying at the same speed but with the speed limit looming over it. Necessarily, an object hoping to reach lightspeed under normal conditions had to expend exponentially more energy to achieve an incremental increase in speed.

All this to say, at the moment that blade met flesh, it necessarily had nearly infinite energy behind it. Hence, a conversion and drastic relative value change.

Whatever toughness his tissue, Barrusom would find that it only imparted that much more power onto the blade. Disconception instantly flashed through his entire torso. It wasn't a mosquito bite; It would be a bullet wound, through and through. How big the "caliber" of this unstoppable force would depend on how immovable, and therefore inversely un-rupturable, his organs would act -- and heavens forbid it hits any bone, if he had any.

Whatever the case, she wouldn't stop with that. Halfway through Barrusom, she'd push it to the edge, nudge it to straddle the speed limit, and then let its negative-mass properties do the rest. Being a priestess of spacetime meant studying spacetime secrets that most would think to be science-fiction. Apparently, she'd snoozed in the class about unworldly spacetime-bending shockwaves... More realistically, they were a secret the Star Council hadn't discovered yet.

One thing she did know (and was told never to employ) was that an object's negative mass, if already at exactly the speed of light, would allow it to gain unholy acceleration that would rip causality a new one.

In the event Disconception got to this point, ripples in time would fly out, rubber-banding would occur, and a second self-same Disconception would appear and repeat what the first will have already accomplished.
Rinse
and
repeat
Her bullets would then be firing out of a time-machinegun (horrible pun intended).

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

An ant can hardly say that the ground is changing when it walks upon playing cards being rearranged.

This thought occurred to her when she was inexplicably moving away from Barrusom -- not because of the blast, for its center was gaining distance on her as well. No, Barrusom had reeled his arms back as if to attack, but just before they hit, they lost momentum, and in tandem did she gain momentum. Only then had she put two and two together:

He was creating shockwaves in the very fabric of the universe.

Barrusom and the explosion fell away from her point of view. She checked for her belt and found that, on the left side, its metal-cloth alloy had melded with her left hip, like a road succumbing to wind-mailed sand. That same side's shoulder pad and the breast curtain below had evaporated; That side of her face and chest, and her shoulder, were smattered in grayish specks and streaks of their materials. But the belt and its items were safe.

She'd thought the apparent shockwaves only a gravitational effect on light. Now it was clear to her that, by being so embedded in the universe as to be connected to matter, she had a blindspot -- in each wave, matter curved with spacetime. It was an illusion affecting only her. She was, and had been unwittingly, flying on a wave of spacetime curvature -- the very same that had been detected by techies across the galaxy and for which she was sent to neutralize the beast. How did I not realize this sooner?

Regardless, Barrusom was now catching up. With the supernova absorbed into his coat, the sight of a flaming blackhole tumbling her way unsettled her. She was caught in a wave of unknown size and shape like a fly in the maze of a cobweb. How to deduce the extent of this shockwave...

Like a scientist, she figured, I should do some experimenting. Even as the living planetoid hurtled towards her, she splayed her limbs out as though bathing in a sensory deprivation chamber -- the sense of the proportions and nature of this shockwave was certainly counted as a deprived sense -- and closed her eyes, concentrating on the one source of matter she could trust to be stable: The center of the galaxy. Using her telekinesis, she attempted to accelerate herself up, then down, then left and right, followed by slowing and then increasing her incongruous backwards movement. It only took about four seconds. The feedback was instantaneous, and thus so were the results. She had a rough idea of its shape, size, and the fact that she was "sliding" along the wave a la a surfer riding a tsunami.

Like an apocalypse, Barrusom approached. His flesh was a shore she did not want to land on. She sped herself up and penetrated the "surface" of this wave, sinking away and ahead from its influence. From there, she zoomed the opposite direction.

She felt a presence growing. A cosmic affluence that registered as an invasion, whether witting or otherwise; Upon the sludge made in the acid's wake were many creatures. Were they growing from it? Were they utilizing Barrusom the way a police or military unit uses canines to sniff out explosives? Were they truly using him as a vector for an invasion? Did he even take notice of their presence?

She hadn't the time to seek or reason her way into answers to these questions. Barrusom was heading for a planet near the core of this system, the closest world there was. She wasn't sure if there were sapient lifeforms on it, but waiting for the potential cosmic cries of millions being extinguished didn't appeal to her at all.

Her sword Disconception was still out there. She curved Disconception and took it on a long-way-round trip to Barrusom. Meanwhile, she fell back into and through the shockwave. Once past its push and pull, she accelerated freely towards the legion.

E=mc². That equation was taught as-is to many students across many galaxies. The speed of light would not, after all, be amended any time soon.

But Exeter wasn't bound by that universal speed limit one bit. For her, c was a variable that increased with experience and power, yet was not so much an increasing limit as it was a flexible power ramp; A measure of limitlessness. And, even when not traveling FTL, the altered equation held true. She stuck her leg out, bracing her rotation so she wouldn't "trip" over the warriors, then dipped her foot into the chitinous waters. She was blurring by so fast that their exoskeletons splashed outwards, thanks in part to that alteration in equation which had also helped her to power through the waves with ease. In her own wake did she leave two rows of viscera diverging. A hundred or more would be slain by the time she reached the beginning of this other-verse takeover -- and she was raring for round two.

Having been itself accelerating this whole time ever since it left her hand, Disconception was now on its way to puncture Barrusom like a ballista bolt, and it was halfway to him, chasing him down as he headed towards that distant planet, ideally before he could reach it. It was traveling at nearly the speed of light. Like many katanas used by superhuman warriors, it boasted obscene durability; It would not squash itself against his hide like a mosquito. But would it do any more damage to him than a mosquito would to a human?

Exeter thought so.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Exeter narrowed her eyes -- not that doing so clarified his image, but something about the way he moved didn't make sense. He slowed, only to spring forwards by unknown means. Her first thought was that he also possessed telekinetic manners of locomotion. If he did, it wasn't the same type that she possessed. She couldn't discern any "push" on his atoms, regardless. Surely there would be, however?

Narrowed eyes then widened to compensate for everything dimming. She guessed that the creature was trying to blind her before gunning for the kill. She felt a tinge of superiority that she could still tell exactly where it was extrasensorily.

Then her path changed. Blinded as she was, she couldn't place how, but it just felt off. First his movement, now hers; Discrepancies were piling up. Matter didn't move like this, in this sloshing sense that disoriented her -- more accurately, dislocated her. It felt like distances between herself and other objects were shrinking and growing arbitrarily.

Speaking of matter-
She sensed the climbing liquid in his stomach, throat, mouth -- the buildup to a cannonlike surge of hurled cookies -- and instantly knew that she couldn't endure it, not at the piercing PSI it'd launch at. She telekinetically curved her sword far out of harm's way as she snatched one of six white walnut-sized sphere from her belt and, skipping any button presses and costly countdowns, simply held it out in an open palm, turned her body to protect the other spheres and a bag holding a few high-tech nets, and crushed it with her mind.

Instant flash. A supernova erupted from it. The blast launched her back, though bathing her in radiation of all types from the entire spectrum.

In the back of her mind rang a reminder of the results that letting the lower wavelengths flow through her would entail-
She opened herself up to the greens and blues of this white void of plasma. It was destroying her outstretched arm and body, no question, but just as quickly it was showering her in the light needed to stave off and repair the damage via regeneration and come out stronger for it. Even if the plasma didn't burn or blow away the acid, it would help her to survive it, like a cosmic version of Emergen-C. Exeter had given herself a boon.

Barrusom, on the other hand, had gotten a ball of hellfire the size of Denver, Iowa to deal with -- and by all (current) accounts he was trespassing on this perilous property.

To her shock, when she reached out with her connection to matter to find the beast again amid the blinding blast, Barrusom now seemed larger than before. And... something, in the acid's wake, was emerging from nothing.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

I'm going to be unavailable for a couple-few days, so I probably will have time to make a reply on the 22nd or 23rd. So no rush!

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

One of those pin pricks was blue. Slowly, it grew.

Exeter flew through space at ludicrous speeds. Light, like animals, was limited to its own nature; But Lumanaru simply surpassed the natural speed limit of light, just as sapient beings routinely surpassed their own alleged limits. She had been accelerating for only a few moments -- quite literally since the minute the cosmic disturbance was detected.

With her arms crossed, she stood on the pommel of her sword, its black blade camouflaged in the galactic background while its white hilt, complete with navy-blue accents, matched her pelvic curtain and the twin curtains over her chest that merged into one collar around her neck whence dark shoulder pads spawned. The sword rose through space -- lack of true "up" and "down" notwithstanding -- a most dangerous one-occupant elevator that felt like standing on a wobbling high-gravity planetoid. She was looking "up" with grim determination.

She was to subdue and capture this extradimensional beast. Dead or alive. That was the order.

She wasn't so sure that the "dead or alive" part was referencing only the beast she would hunt. There was more than one reason the Star Council sent her out here, of all people.

But no time to think about that. Already, she had crossed the entire galaxy. She entered within a lightminute of the creature and telekinetically slowed and halted. This far, yet this close, Barrusom's image lagged behind where he actually was; She could roughly feel his true location. She matched her speed with the galaxy itself to determine his relative speed.

But no time to waste. While making note of his speed, Exeter lifted one foot off her sword, then the other, letting it fly up into her grasp. She had to grab it with a rising hand, pulling upwards, to get it to stop rising; Every movement backwards, slow but steady like her breaths, aided by being practically embedded in the universe where others merely shuffled atop its surface.

If she was embedded in it, she thought, then this beast was a fossorial predator.

She held her sword in a forward guard directly towards Barrusom, as still as she could make it, though it swayed and rolled in her hands yet. She squeezed with even pressure to further steady it. The moment Barrusom was within such distance that it would take him half a second to reach her, she would yank the sword towards herself -- instantly impelling it, and herself, forwards -- then simply let go to launch it into him, center-mass. Then she would activate her anklets to skate away; The galaxy's rotation curved her technically straight path to her left and out of harm's way. Within a second, she sped up to a thousand miles per hour, just to be sure he couldn't back-tag her.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Exeter, Priestess of Spacetime

Name: Exeter, formerly Ecluy Dawylwa Vlandjany
Age: 1754
Gender: Female
Species: Lumanar

Physical Description

They say no two Lumanaru look quite like they come from the same species. Exeter is lithe and beastly, like a cat, with clawed hands to boot, though her long, lupine legs stand against this idea. Really, she's a hodgepodge of mammalian traits; Her head is dubiously feline or goat-like, for instance, with lop-ears; Her tail is slender until it flares out into a large curved blade, a natural scimitar, blood-red and black. The only binding physical traits of Lumanaru are their blue crystalline skin, silver hair -- she cuts hers to chin-length -- and, most lucratively, their composition.

• Height: 6'3"
• Weight: 600 lbs
• Arm Span: Equal to height
• Tail Length: 52 inches total (Tail blade: 24 inches)

Natural Abilities

• Lifting Strength: 2500 lbs
• Running Speed: 95 mph
• Reaction Time: Instantaneous (see below)
• Regeneration: Occurs while bathed in blue or ultraviolet light (see below)
• Lightning in a Bottle: Lumanaru are an ancient creation. Whether forged in stars or in fits of passion, their blood is the light of galactic origins. Their bones are an exotic alloy of various types of stone and metal. Rather than eating, Lumanaru soak up light. Soaking up blue or ultraviolet light quickly regenerates; Absorbing green light is akin to stocking up on carbs; Red and purple can be calming. Red and infrared can have various effects, but actively channeling those effects while absorbing those wavelengths is taboo among the Lumanaru...

Learned or Innate Skills

• Martial Arts: Exeter knows many martial arts styles, and has learned how to switch between them to blend together the right martial mix for the job.
• Swordsmanship: The latter half of her long life was spent learning how to wield Disconception. Even with that nearly 900 years of experience, she still isn't a true master -- but then, can anyone be? Not unless they themselves are negative-mass beings, she figures.
• Hunting: Who better to send to defeat a strange animal than a hunter?

Supernatural Powers

• Cosmic Awareness: Upon becoming a priestess, Exeter was bestowed with cosmic awareness; She is immaterially connected to all matter in the universe. Within a 2000m vicinity, she effectively has instant reaction times. Outside of this range, the clarity of her awareness diminishes. Awareness of events and phenomena of colossal scale -- galactic rotation, gravity wells, supernovae, and planetary-level genocide -- is not inhibited or delayed by the speed of causality.
• Telekinesis: Her connection to matter is a two-way street. She's input-output: Just as she gets sensory information from the universe, she can manipulate it as if it were an extension of her body.
• Red Geyser: Unbeknownst to most whom she works with -- and she likes to keep it that way -- the effects of channeling absorbed red and infrared light are far stronger for her than others and can lead to disastrous results... mostly for everyone besides herself. The Star Council itself has thus publicly explicitly forbidden her from doing so, under pain of banishment to the Everblack. This is assuming she can take control of herself once she succumbs to the Red Geyser...

Equipment

• Disconception: A negative-mass sword, weighing about -17 lbs on Earth. It somewhat resembles some East-Asian swords, though mostly for its curved blade and lack of a crossguard. Measurements: 48 inches length, 1.75 inches width, 1.25 inches thickness with an ovoid cross-section matching the grip.
• Nova Grenades: These grenades recreate the same intensity light, heat, and plasmatic power of a nuclear explosion, minus the fallout.
• Enchanted Anklets: Iridium jewelry is her thing, but these anklets are for more than decoration. She uses these to skate across the very fabric of reality. Turns out, skating is also her thing. She can surge them with power to increase their grip on that fabric. However, she can only skate along the orthogonal directions that run parallel to the three-dimensional warps and wefts of the universe. So much for relativity...
• Flash Freeze Nets: Cryogenic blanket with like-seeking weights that, upon impacting one another, meld into a single powerful clasp that prevents escape. The fabric then neutralizes the vibrations of everything inside via contra-vibrations, nullifying and freezing matter to a toasty 0 degrees Kelvin. The weights look and feel like balls of gray sludge; In reality, they're collections of nanobots.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

@Alucroas If that character won't work for you, I've been developing a fully original character from scratch: A "space priestess" who wields a negative-mass sword using her innate connection to all matter in her vicinity to account for how unintuitively it would move (not to mention telekinesis as a fallback for when chasing it with her hands becomes infeasible). Her fighting style would be partially inspired by the swordfighting aspect of Tai Chi, but of course in space and with the caveat of the feedback loop present in this exotic weapon: "you pull sword -> sword pulls you (which is the same as you pulling the sword due to relativity)".

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Long time no see o/

I'd like to apply with a character I made but never used, a Lucario named Typh... underwhelming-sounding character i know but it'd really fit the fight, given how "true nothingness" is being affected and a creature is fucking up the fabric of reality. ItreallydoesfitTyphasacharacteriswear lmao. And we never did get to fight. Now seems like a good time to.

(Typh is an unwitting goddess of the void/chaos from which all spawned and the oblivion into which all things become non-existent, is why I think she'd be a good fit)

Purr-fect Betrayal

An orchestra of rattling pots and pans erupted from the kitchen as Victoria scavenged for the right size. Intending to make the perfect cat treats for when Mr. Whiskers came back, like any nine-year-old left unattended in a kitchen, she created an absolute mess whisking a battery concoction. Debatably edible, it was filled with random things with no rhyme or reason other than the child's personal preference on what tasted good. Wrapped up in child-like joy, the heiress, for a moment felt relieved of the stress of the situation as she tasked away, failing to notice the woman slip right into the kitchen behind her. Despite the friendly tone, Victoria shrieked. The second two eerily familiar hands touched her back, PTSD from the last time someone got behind her triggered a fight-or-flight response.

Tossed was the multicolored batter of who knows what over the girl's shoulder. The nine-year-old snatched herself out of Ryuko's grip, falling on her butt as she turned around. Unsure if she hit the stranger or not until she got a good look at her, Victoria was puzzled with the sight of some Blasian woman bowing, sincerely apologizing. Wide-eyed, the girl had a simple question. “Who are you?”

…The rumble could be felt as far as the quarters where Ryuko and Victoria were stationed. After the dust settled...

@Liaison

It was tough to describe the effects of combat drugs on her reaction speed—she knew the batter was going to fly at her before she knew it. She twisted and leaned backwards. Not a single drop would've landed on her, except on the finger she raised specifically to catch some of the batter.

Like a game of horseshoes, she ended up catching the whole bowl. Batter spiraled out in a sheet. Now her left arm was covered in it. A lot of her was covered in it.

Turning the bowl upright in her other hand, she looked down at the little girl. The violent response had only delayed her words and caused her to change her tone to be even softer and gentler.

"I'm Ryuko." She deepened the bow of her head to show she meant no harm. How to make her less afraid...

"I heard you talking to my friend Mr. Whiskers," she lied, and she was a damn good liar. She stuck her finger in her mouth. "Mm! Your batter tastes delicious!" It tasted okay. It was the expected quality for a child.

She set the bowl down on the floor, kneeling before her to make herself small to the girl; She leaned forward as well, placing her un-battered hand on her knee for support, though she didn't need it. "It's nice to meet you, Veronica. I'm sure we'll become great friends."

It wasn't long before a rumble reached the room. Ryuko sat up and turned as she rose. She grabbed Victoria's hand and led her out to the main room to look out the balcony. Smoke, and fighting. Energy weaponry.

They needed to leave.

Once again, Victoria's dignity was dispensable to Ryuko, though now not entirely, as she had a friendship to keep up. She scooped the girl up in her right arm, swatting her left at the curtains to wipe off the batter before swapping her over to it, then clutched her tight and ran to the balcony. She leapt, clawed the ledge—

She swung down to the lip of the balcony, then swung off it to the exterior wall. Her metal digits sparked as she scraped down the side of the building. The wind lifted her curls. Lifted them faster. Even faster. This wall is slipperier than I thought! The balcony below approached dangerously fast.

Probably a suicidal move in Victoria's eyes, she kicked away from the wall, flying past the rails—now it'd be the ground they would slam into.

Until Ryuko, arms together to tap the touchscreen, stuck her right arm out towards that balcony's underside. TWU-WEEEEEW. Cord spilled from her wrist and a grapnel thwacked the stone. They bungeed into the wall feet-first. Now Ryuko was squatting against the luxurious surface, cradling Victoria on top of her body. "You're safe, don't flail around," she ordered. She spared a glance to the balcony far below. "Two or three more to go... Let's do that again."

Perhaps the easiest of the combat drugs' effects to convey was that it made you a little crazy. Ryuko was gaining a bit of an adrenaline rush from this. The compound-laden rush was clouding her sense of self-preservation just a bit and tinting her emotional quotient gray and dry. She wouldn't just drop Victoria, of course—the "new best friend" act, on the other hand...