The World

Darkest Before the Dawn: A CYOA Magical Girl Roleplay [Completed]

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Myriad Reality

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Spirit Wielders!

Scarlet Leone

"I feel like I've been here before."

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Scarlet's week had been pretty sub-par, honestly. To start off, on Monday she had been late for school and ended up deciding to skip her first class entirely because of it, spending the time sneaking around the school to figure out where things were, making a mental map of all the water fountains and general areas. Other than that, it was a normal day for a seemingly normal student, albeit one who never talked to anyone and sat in an obscure hallway to eat her lunch.

Wednesday she forgot her lunch and had to actually eat the garbage the school called a lunch. Not horrifying, but not very good either. She ate the little she already knew she'd like from what she was given and threw the rest away, spending the rest of the time exploring the school some more instead of sitting alone in the cafeteria.

And now on Friday it seemed that someone had reached into her mind and brought out her worst fears. She stood in shock in the cafeteria as an arthropod-like creature crawled along the window. After the wall broke and the crowd began swarming around, she found herself stuck between the creatures and the horde of teenagers behind her. Her eyes closed and she took a deep breath, calming herself as much as she could. She opened them to see the lunch lady get impaled by one of the monsters. Not the worst thing she'd ever seen, but it was still a different beast to see it happen in person rather than on a video, and she nearly passed out despite her best efforts.

As she faded in and out of consciousness, the world around Scarlet seemed to drip into nothingness around her to be replaced with a small padded room, about 15 cubic feet in size. The smell of blood permeated the area and as she looked around, she found that the ceiling was made of glass, showing stars above it. There was a small knife on the ground in front of her.

Mortal. I have a offer for you. A cold, almost metallic voice echoed through Scarlet's mind.

"Mortal? Great, so not only do monsters exist, but immortals too? What is this, a manga? Where am I, anyway?"

You are in your mind, though an area that is in my control.

"And... who are you?"

I am known as Kokou.

"And your offer is...?"

Form a pact with me, and I will grant you my power so that you may survive.

"A pact?"

In return for my power, you will give me your spiritual energy.

"I have that?"

Yes.

"Interesting. So you'd be able to slaughter those damn bugs?"

With my power, it should be a simple matter for you.

"Heh. Alright, where do I sign?"

Simply swallow the knife before you and our contract will be complete.

"... That's weird. You're weird."

I grow tired of using your human language. Hurry and form the contract, or don't and die to those creatures.

"Tch. Alright. Guess maybe dying is better than definitely dying."

With that, she reached down to grab the knife, about six inches long in total, lifted her head straight up and dropped the blade into her mouth. As it cut its way through her tongue and mouth, the pain and blood choked her, forcing her awake as the room faded around her like fog. As the pain faded the world returned to the cafeteria she was in.

"Shit that hurt." She glared across at one of the creatures that had the lunch lady impaled on its tail. "Okay, how do we do this?"

Instead of a response, Kokou forced her instincts to cry out, allowing her to know how to channel it. She followed them and red markings formed over her body and a scythe formed in her hand. "Whoa! That's awesome!" Scarlet said as she spun the scythe around between her hands. She jumped from foot to foot and noticed that she was moving faster than she intended to. After a few seconds of mental adjustment, she charged the nearest monster, the one that killed the lunch lady. With its tail occupied, it was forced to shoot its tongue at Scarlet, who was able to use her increased speed to knock it out of the way with the side of her scythe. Unfortunately, when she got to the creature she was unable to slow down correctly, her reaction time being off-sync with her speed, and she jumped well over the creature, smashing into a wall behind it.

"Owww..." she said as she stood up and turned around in time to see the creature about to fire its tongue at her again.

Watch out. Use your shield.

"Shield?"

Once again, Kokou showed Scarlet how to use its power through her instincts, forming a red dome of small hexagons in front of her that blocked the creature's second attempt to impale her with its tongue. "Whoa, shit! That was close!" Scarlet said when the shield faded after about a second. This time she wasn't going to make the same mistake. She rushed the creature at a slower speed, this time pausing before she got to where she wanted to get to in order to actually stop there, and then jumped onto the creature's back.

"Heh, this is awesome!" she said as she lowered her scythe under the creature and pulled it upwards, slicing its head off. Scarlet looked around the room. There seemed to be four other monsters in the area as well, but many of the students had dispersed, leaving her an exit. As much as she wanted to kill the bug things, she knew better than to risk taking on all four at once. She allowed herself to relax, the red markings on her body disappearing before she slowly backed out of the cafeteria, looking behind her every few steps to make sure not to run into another monstrosity.

Spirit Wielders!

Scarlet and Kokou

Medium

Name:
Scarlet Leone

Age:
16

Normal Appearance:
Scarlet stands at 5 feet and 4 inches (164.5 cm) and weighs approximately 118 pounds. She is of above-average athleticism with minor muscle definition.

Medium Appearance:
Her transformed appearance is the same as her natural one, aside from gaining a few inches of height (to 176.7 cm) and her eyes turning red.

Channeling Appearance:
She looks the same as she normally does though with these markings overlaid onto her body.

Channeling Abilities:
In her channeled form, she can create a red scythe in the form of Kokou's own. While this scythe is nigh-weightless and easy to use, her skill with it is limited by her lack of training/practice. She is also able to create a shield momentarily (1.5 seconds) in front of her. If the shield is broken, it will not be usable again for the remainder of the channeling duration. If the shield is not broken, it will require a five second recharge before it can be summoned again. She also gains enhanced strength, speed, and durability while channeling Kokou.

Grade:
10

Personality:
Scarlet tends to come off as brash and haughty, a front she has calculated and refined through years of practice. In reality she is eccentric to the point of nigh incomprehensibility, going from one extreme to the other at the flip of a switch. The most obvious facets of her personality are her strange sense of humor and extreme excitability/extroversion or her tendency to be extremely introverted and reflective, with no apparent middle ground aside from what she calls her "jokes." These extremes have made her a target of both admiration and ridicule throughout her life.

Background:
Born the bastard child of a computer science major and a firefighter, Scarlet spent most of her childhood online, where she learned many things very quickly on her own, putting her at an advantage over her peers until recent years. A lack of supervision scarred her mental development, due to her being exposed to many things a child shouldn't be exposed to. By the age of seven, she had come across, consumed, and discarded many philosophies and views of the world, settling on one of personal irrelevance to the world and universe. This was in part due to intellectual arguments in the vein of nihilism and partly due to her coming across videos of horrific scenes, things that she would often share with her peers. She had already become numb to the sight of maiming and blood by this time, and she found it funny how others would react and how she would get in trouble for talking about them. Her behavior changed at age nine, when she was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which caused her to retreat from her peers for fear of contamination, further distancing herself from normal relationships with those her age, a distance that was started by her strange interests and lack of motivation in life.
In an ironic twist of fate, her own home burned down from an electrical fire and she and her parents had to move elsewhere when she was ten years old. This is around the time that she began being medicated for her disorder, and she took full advantage of the new environment by reinventing herself almost completely. She continued her belief that nothing really mattered but instead of simply giving up on life, she decided it would be better to play it like a game. So she crafted a facade of being better than those around her and began to hide her real personality which grew more and more strange as time went on.
Most recently, her parents split up and she and her computer tech father moved to Lakewood. This was only several weeks ago, and she has yet to really interact with anyone in town, spending most of her time in her home.

Other:
She has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with snakes and an equally unhealthy hatred of insects, both exacerbated by her rather severe OCD.

Spirit

Spirit Name:
Kokou

Spirit Classifications:
Meta/Null

Spirit Personality:
Unknown. It rarely speaks and only really ever expresses rage, though only when something causes it to. It is otherwise fairly tame.

Spirit Appearance:

Kokou

Sealed Appearance:
A jeweled slab of stone, about the size and thickness of a textbook with a red eye-like marking on the center of the front.

Summoning Abilities and Stats:
N/A

Spirit Charge:
N/A

Other Information:
It is the most violent and powerful of the (lesser) Yoruba spirits and the voodoo rituals surrounding it involves its followers falling into a deep trance. During this trance its followers display a strong thirst for blood and high durability by swallowing knives and bashing their heads against a surface until they bleed profusely.

Weakness and Limitations:

- Kokou is unable to manifest as a Summon or use a Spirit Charge. It is limited solely to being channeled.

- Kokou, and by extension its medium, is not able to draw out its full power on demand. Rather, its power is temporarily unlocked in two ways, either by Kokou experiencing rage or during battle, where life and death are usually on the line.

- While Kokou and its medium's range is severely limited, Kokou grants its medium improved speed. However, this does not improve the medium's reaction time to enough of a level to properly use it. Rather, it only increases enough to be about 75% effective at controlling their channeling speed, even at the minimum increase. This starts at a 50% increase to the medium's base speed and goes up equivalent to how much of Kokou's power it can draw out, so if a battle wears on long enough to reach its maximum speed, it would be 2.5 times the speed of the medium normally by themself. It is a struggle for the medium to temper their speed to more manageable levels, meaning it will be difficult to do anything while channeling without practice unless standing still.

- Kokou will gradually take over the mind of its medium while channeled if it is experiencing rage, which will eventually devolve into a berserker mentality and damage its medium's mind in a minor, though cumulative and permanent way.

- At the beginning of a channeling, the medium's physical strength increases by 50%. If they could normally lift 100 pounds, they could now lift 150. At the height of its power (which usually means complete overtaking of the medium) it is 2.5 times the physical strength it begins a battle with, this scales 1 to 1 with its speed increases. For example, if the medium could normally life 100 pounds, and could lift 150 when channeling, they could now lift 250 pounds.

- Kouko endows its medium with increased durability, enough to stave off the effects of wounds temporarily. For example, a wound will hurt far less than it normally would, allowing for the medium to push through it and continue fighting. However this will not stop bleeding or other effects such as the spreading of poison, so it is a temporary measure at best.

Contract

TBD

Myriad Reality

<Snipped quote by The World>

Ah I see. So at the most basic of levels Code is within the "empty" spaces in Existence whereas the Outside has none? Just want to be sure I understand this correctly.

@ZAVAZggg

Actually no apparently? Sorry, I was misunderstanding what "Outside" was and ended up describing something slightly different.

Myriad Reality

<Snipped quote by Webmaster>

I must ask though how specifically empty space would repel something. Or is this just one of those things where it's Outside things and don't look too deep into it?

@ZAVAZggg

It's not "empty space" for one, it's absolute emptiness. Normal "absolute emptiness" is still a state of Code, this has no Code whatsoever.

Myriad Reality

<Snipped quote by Fractured>

Hmm I see. Well the info gather aspect would really happen regardless with such an idea, in the off chance it does get wiped out. As for the barred part, maybe this Outsider did something to an existence or something to offend the others and was banned from interacting with realities for a certain while, during which time they just decided to live in a sort of self imposed exile as a means of atonement, only watching and eventually recording out of boredom. Of course by that point they could theoretically enter a reality, but choose not to at least personally anyway.

Either way, it's just a thought I had.

@Caldizar

That couldn't really work because there's no "control group" for a Scale. Each Plane either does or doesn't have one, but the Planes themselves don't have anything that would be able to bar something from entering them, other than the insane difficulty of entering one other than your native Plane. Even the control group of a Plane couldn't kick you out of it, really.

Myriad Reality

how do I make a character sheet?

@Alex87

Oh thank gods that worked. Okay, so. It's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the site as a whole before working on a sheet. I suggest going to the home page and the introduction section, just introduce yourself as an RPer to everyone, but Legend (Several of the accounts on this RP) can help guide you through everything.

Myriad Reality

<Snipped quote by Legend Begins>

Fair enough. It resides outside existence as its own plane, then?

@souleaterfan320

I mean... It would be more like a buffer between Existence and Outside, wouldn't it?

Myriad Reality

<Snipped quote by The World>

Musta been quite the trip. But if he did it by deletion then it must be true that there is more than one way to do it, since deleting became impossible post-Triggers.

@Nemeses

I mean... I don't know that there is. Again, the only people who might know are Blake and maybe Techi. Nobody else is really Outside often enough to have maybe figured anything out.