2017-06-04: Darkest Need
- Log: Darkest Need
- Cast: Isiris Shango'Ra, Josephine Lovelace
- Where: Adelyn Ranchlands
- Date: June 4th 2017
- Summary: Josie's camp is intruded upon. Violence, mistaken identity, and attempted murder occur, roughly in that order. Penelope is everyone's only hope.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
Night has long since fallen, casting the plains in darkness save for the nearly full light of the Old Moon, over head. As always, the New Moon -- so named by the scholars from the distant icy land Sielje Region -- shines brightly, little more than an overly large shimmer of light, larger than any star.
Josie's not looking up. Her attention at present is nowhere but the roaring fire of her camp before her. Seated in front of the flames, she criss-crosses her arms atop her knees, a faint smile playing on her lips. Nearby is a bedspread, a little further still her trusty rifle braced against a scraggly little thing of a tree and the sidearm Lily had given her. She still hasn't had the chance to explore the workings of the sidearm, but that, as tempting as it is, can wait. It looks to be a fairly standard Aveh-style ARM, though.
Still, it's been a long time since she's seen an ARM from Aveh. It'll be good practice.
Tied to the tree nearby is a spotted horse, with a black and white pigeon -- Penelope -- getting some shuteye on the saddle. It's been even longer than she'd thought since she's ridden, and she's regretting it a little bit. Still, though, it feels /right/ to be out this way on her own again, even if it's only for a little while.
It's a long way from what remains of Adlehyde to the blockade, and she's not quite there yet.
No, she's not planning on busting through, not without assistance. But she does intend to take a look for herself, from a safe point. A little intelligence won't hurt things later, she figures.
And besides, she feels oddly out of place in a city of mourners. She has her own thinking to do on everything that's happened, and she intends to do it in private.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
What the New Moon is named depends largely on the locality. The commonly accepted name is one thing, but beliefs across Filgaia are hardly uniform. Like many things in life, the name of the ominous second moon is subject to as much local superstition as anything else. once, to him an old woman referred to the thing as 'the demon's lantern.' Another man, the king of all stars. Whether it is seen as a bad omen or a good one is purely objective.
They say it has been a week of ill omens. First, the devastation at Adelhyde, whereupon many people suffered. The next has been rumors of adventurers travelling to and from the ruins collapsing unconscious in the fields. Easily interpreted as a way to dress up a case of heat exhaustion for novice travellers, the saying goes that a ghost has been traipsing the fields around and near the castle, imperiling adventurers. All manner of fantastic stories are the routine of confession, from dragons to trolls and everything in-between. Every time, an adventurer is found near death in the fields. Novices, all of them, and usually the ones with the most to prove. It's easy to discount such tales.
Until a child sits across from you at the campfire.
The tension is something that can be palpably felt in the heart, an idescribable stress that twists the heart and the mind in a vise, something wrong gripping the world over the space of one single agonizing heartbeat. In an instant, the world is shot to black, and the moon's light disappears. In an instant, the feeling is gone. But then the world is different.
There is a repeating quality to the child's arrival. At first, the old and dead log seems to have been there forever. Then a child comes to sit down at it. Then the log is abandoned, between eyeblinks the child disappears. Then another child arrives. In the next moment, he arrives again. The child itself is hardly real, a young girl with chains around her wrists and piercing blue eyes. But it is the only fine details that can be determined about her, other than her love for the fire that keeps drawing her back. Otherwise, she is almost entirely undetailed, a pale colored thing of translucent nature, much like watching one's own reflection in a lake. She does not greet Josephine the moment she sits across with her, all three times the motion is repeated, erased, and repeated again. But the adventurer may notice that every time she sits, she also hums a soft, sad tune.
In the distance, there are soft footfalls.
He makes no effort to hide the sound of his passage.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
There are other stories, especially with as many lands as exist across the face of Filgaia. As the daughter of a Symbologist, though -- whether she likes it or not -- and a researcher in her own right, perhaps it's understanding that the first names Josie would think, even in passing, to name the two brightest objects in the night sky the ones most used by the scholarly set...
There have been stories. Josie -- positively irreverant even on the good days -- hasn't much noticed. People always say there are ill signs out on the road. And what with events of late -- including the event down around Port Timney that had involved that dark twisting feeling she'd felt hanging around even Lily the night before -- and the destruction of Adlehyde, it's no wonder people are whispering stories again. But it's all just a rumor.
Until she glances up from the fire to stretch, and sees a child sitting across from her.
And it's as if the world itself pulsed beneath her feet, pitching and heaving in a fit. Even as she rises to her feet, Josie -- usually so surefooted -- staggers, something in her gut lurching. "Who--"
Darkness falls, only to part. Josie steps backwards, onto her bedspread. Heartbeat accelerating now, dark eyes widened, she casts one sharp glance at the slumbering horse and bird.
The child -- children -- appear again and again, the whole of it as if the world were starting and stopping and starting again in each instant.
By now, Josie has since dropped back to snatch up the sidearm Lily had left her and has fallen into a crouch by the tree. A few stutters of reality more sees the ARM loaded, and with another still...
This one's a girl. "Who are you?" Josephine demands, ARM directed down towards the earth. It can't be real.
But /he/ had taught her far too well for her to doubt her sorcerous instincts now of all times.
And the full answer -- as she decides it, as her pulse pounds through her veins -- is clear in the sound she hears, not far off. There are footfalls. Under her breath, Josie counts down from five. Without warning, she rises, cracking off a shot into the darkness of the night in the direction she thinks the intruder is approaching from. Hopefully, they're not too far. Hopefully, this has enough range. Gawain would be better, but she doesn't have it in hand. As always, she leaps first and thinks afterwards.
"That was a warning!" she shouts, in the aftermath of the ARM's recoil.
It wasn't a warning.
GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Iron Cobra 325! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Josephine Lovelace's Iron Cobra 325 for 51 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"I'm not anyone important," the child admits, mildly guilty.
The air seems the darkest just behind her, even moonlight not passing, much like how smoke in the night can't be seen but still blocks your view regardless. The young girl smooths out her hair, with the sort of fastidiousness one attributes to a young woman, but at the same time her movements are slow, fumbling, due to the chains about her wrists. She settles both hands on her knees, and doesn't blnk or cry out in the slightest when Josephine scrambles to her feet. The world bucks and stresses, but she does not move.
Until Josephine opens fire.
One moment, her eye is on the sights and the child is in one place. The next, the smoke curls through the air, and the child is in another, only a few feet away from Josephine with elbows on knees and chin in hands, watching her.
In the far distance, time seems to slow to a standstill, and even one gunshot becomes three, the moment stuttering through memories as a white coat whirls into the path of the bullet. Twice, a thing moves, twice a thing canters just faintly out of the way of the smoke-tinged gunfire. A third time, the thing collapses, shot dead on the spot by the gifted ARMS.
But it doesn't appear to stop the little girl.
Curiously, conversationally, she asks, "Soo... what do YOU want me to be?"
She is still humming.
The body burns, black fire pecking at the body in the form of scores of black crows.It is intensely hard to tell if Josephine even hit anything... or anything real. He steps over his own body, slowly making his way to the campfire, approaching with no haste. The feasting crows are disturbed by his passage, fluttering and incorporeal. At least, they are incorporeal until one hand is raised from underneath his coat, opening in thin fingers.
He has blue eyes, just like the little girl.
And then so do the crows, who surge past him, whirling as they fly towards Josephine, a cackling flock of ghostly birds, whose passage cuts like the endlessly sharp knives in dreams must. Weaponized danger, taken to its logical extreme. What sort of sorcery is it?
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with Damnation Dust! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Josephine Lovelace guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Damnation Dust for 38 hit points! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes Cover! He gains 50 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
"Then give me your name, kiddo--"
It's really fucking dark, Josie thinks, gaze resting on the girl, the only thing that seems bright at all in the darkness, right now. Is the girl an illusion? Even illusions shouldn't talk -- or, no, does she remember that one right? In the next second, there's no room for thinking further about it at all.
She opens fire. Again, reality stutters. Zoetrope-like, it seems to grind forward, one image replaced by the next. She would have sworn, if she didn't know better, that she had fired three bullets, not just the one. And as time hiccups, she sees the images as they unfold: a dark shape, a dark shape struck, a dark shape fallen.
She turns. The girl. She's still there. "What do /I/ want you to be? Nevermind that -- be yourself!" she snaps back at the child -- who must, certainly, be at the heart of the trick. She's heard of monsters with trickery that can lure away men -- is this something similar? The sidearm rises in her left hand, directed right towards the face of that ghostly child.
The dark shape burns, an event she's peripherally aware of. The dark shape is set upon by inky black crows, sickly with shadow. She stands there, facing down the humming girl.
And whirls, in the last second. The same person she struck? Another person? It's impossible to tell. The murder of crows rises in a flurry, and there's no chance of evasion -- even Josie doesn't try impossible things. Planting one booted foot firm on the earth, she raises her left arm -- gun and all -- in a defensive posture, face turned away.
They cut. They slide past her like a hail of knives, leaving thin trails of blood in their wake. It's nothing /he/ taught her.
It seems almost like... Lily's...
Dark eyes meet brilliant blue, for just an instant. She's no soldier, not a warrior. She's a Drifter -- pairing off old tricks with hard-earned experience. Nothing more, nothing less. Assuming she survives this, it will be another lesson still.
So it's not for the first time that Josie finds herself stepping backwards to draw upon ancient tricks. Her right hand moves, as sharply as she can manages it with those fingers, and under her breath she mutters the incantation. It's all she needs to tap the one tattoo -- the one that likely forms the base of the others -- etched in white on her back. The sphere of light she conjures in that hand is brilliant, casting forth pure illumination as she palms it, still glowing, in that hand. She casts the perfect sphere forwards at the figure who had rushed her, willing it to explode in a dazzling display.
If he's going to insist on playing in the darkness, she's just going to have to turn the lights back on.
GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Light! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades Light from Josephine Lovelace!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
She doesn't have the same expressions as something real--the same saccades of the eye and the same wrinkles in the skin, the sort of microexpressions that convey the sort of complexities of emotion and all of the little things that combine into the soup of being human. Te glance that Josephine shares with her is of the sort that writes her off. She will not be human, sadly. She will never be, because she never was. It's very sad.
But the gun pointed at her causes her detectible annoyance.
Is it something displayed of her own volition? Is it a figment of your own fevered mind, willing to believe that is how she must necessarily react? Or is it all just an orchestration of something else..
"You know," she says, around the gun's iron sights, "you really should give up before something bad happens."
It's not that the white coat in the distance moves quickly. No, it's not that. It's not even that the crows are still fluttering here and there in the distance. It's really that placing the approaching man in real actualized space is hard. He never actually seems to occupy the same space as one's 'focus of intent,' his approach consistently slow and consistently on the periphery of the vision. With each heartbeat, he changes position.
The light is raised, saturating the small campsite with blinding light. At first, the young girl shields her eyes, gasping lightly with the exertion and opulence of the holy light. As the sphere descends towards the figure in the white coat, he stops, his feet planting evenly in the ground but making no greater move against the woman, either to advance or attack, while the light is on the field. He stands, and time seems to slow to a standstill.
Then, the light cast from it takes on a similar aspect to starlight, or rather the very different, and very abominable light cast from the new moon. The light consumes the white coat, and as it bleaches it out, the white coat becomes indistinct and nothing. A shadow falls over the sphere. First it matches Josephine's shadow, and then it grows, as something rises. Something standing over it. Something drawing a long, curved blade from nowhere at all. One shadow stands over the other.
And then the crows start laughing.
"Enough," Isiris whispers.
In one misplaced heartbeat, the nightmare agent is behind Josephine.
And then he tries to cut her down, in one brutal body-lifting arc of his blade.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with Geist Scything! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Josephine Lovelace takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Geist Scything for 107 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
Not real, she pieces together, moments after pointing the gun at the spectral girl. The face is wrong -- in all those teeny-tiny ways that an illusion never /quite/ looks like the real thing, assuming you knew what to look for.
Not real, but still capable of speech. And apparent annoyance. /That's/ new.
"Too late for that, I think..." Josie murmurs, to what might as well be a ghost. Run, and what? Show her back to a foe she can't see? Be ambushed, as reality continues to seemingly shutter-stop around her?
If she thought she could have, she would have. It's far from an ideal situation no matter which way she sliced it, so she might as well see what good she can make of it.
At the very least she can stand her ground.
Whatever 'ground' is, right now.
Or for that matter, what 'right now' is, right now. Reality, she decides, has stopped making sense.
"Well, it never made a whole lick of sense anyway, right--?" she murmurs, turning, tracking, her ARM dancing through the air as if she could actually keep a bead on him. That man in white. It might be better not to even attempt to try to begin with, she thinks, as the world continues to twitch around her. She can't trust her eyes.
Unless, perhaps, she can cast away what's at the heart of this distortion -- the cloak of darkness.
Light flickers, flares--
Burns outwards in an explosion of brilliance--
Time seems to stop.
With seemingly tarry slowness, Josie takes a step backwards, raising the sidearm. There, while he's distracted--
Light is in its own way as bad as darkness. She can't see a thing. So, she fires off a shot anyway, through the incandescence. And as she takes another step backwards, steadying herself against the recoil, she sees for an instant her shadow. And the shadow that stands behind her.
Time has stopped. A scream escapes Josephine's lips as the blade arcs across her back, scything through longcoat, vest, and shirt, all the way to the flesh beneath in a brilliant arc of red. Staggering forward a long series of steps through a nightmare landscape, the woman shoves the sidearm into one of her coat pockets -- exactly in the way you're never supposed to -- and dips low as she nears the tree. As if falling.
She falls onto one knee, low to the ground as she twists -- back screaming with the movement -- and snatches up the Gawain rifle. Up onto the shoulder. She pivots, levering the longarm at the figure in white. Glances a moment through the front sight out of habit.
She can't trust her eyes. But she will always, always trust this rifle.
She squeezes the trigger.
GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Front Sight! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Josephine Lovelace's Front Sight for 56 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He steps forward into the stroke.
The blade points to the sky as he stands, not pressing his advantage in the slightest as Josephine's uncharacteristically shrill outcry breaks the haunting chatter surrounding them. She staggers quickly away from him, and the earth seems to churn, quiver from being so close, and the electric sensation of his proximity can be felt on the skin, irrespective of the leathers they wear. Perception is a hard thing--the world certainly feels solid enough, the ground exactly as expected underneath the foot. But this close to him, it's a little bit like wading a creek, the ground getting further and farther away with each step, jittering, pulsing.
The effect is less, the further one gets from him.
But then, distance is such a questionable thing, these tri-moonlit nights.
The light from the third moon eventually dies. The entire thing ends up cracking like an egg, disgorging more of the fluttering, inconsistent black, feathers drifting across the path that the drifter staggers through. The agent leans back, his blade lowering to his side. His eyes--horrible blue that they are--narrow as she collapses, drawing her own version of a knight's blade--a long gun whose sight train on him. She fights, on and on.
"Those noble few iscariot who walk blindly into the wheat," he muses, before opening a hand.
His eyes are knife-like in the chaotic dark, at the final moment. The rifle discharges into that dark, and this time there is only one shot. This time, there is only one silhouette. He fires true, he doesn't lie. The agent doesn't move, energy crawling along his hand and infinite reflections at his feet. In the mirror-made ground, his reflection dies a hundred times, in a hundred angles. It is just an idea of things, a reflection, nothing more. But even so, it feels so strongly as if his soul takes the fatal shot in bargain for his body, whose blood only cascades down his free arm, a shot that terminates in a ragged wound in his shoulder. The force of it gives him pause, only realizing his weight on his back foot when he straightens himself.
A long, snakelike breath escapes him.
"An impressive weapon. I wonder if it will survive you?"
Then he rolls his blade in his hand and dips it into the liquid glass.
The world turns upside down the moment he moves, the glass floor solidifying around him shattering into a thousand pieces with his first step. Shards rupture and fly in every direction harmlessly, mirror-sized things floating and rolling past Josephine, showing her from every angle in a hall as he moves. And this time, he does move, military precision marking his movements as he cuts through the floating glass field, reflections of the dual moonlight and the campfire tumbling as glass shatters in his wake, his blade carving great furrows in the earth as he comes for her. His blade flashes as he descends towards her, his blood spattering against the glass in stark relief. He chases her, and he senses the trust in her. That's why he comes for her gun.
Blocking with the weapon--he may intend to go right through it with his sword. He is playing at it, cutting away the option to defend with it, to place her in a position where she may have to sacrifice her own body for her weapon. He wishes to see how far that trust extends.
Is she willing to risk a twinned scar across her front, to see herself cut down from a hundred angles in the mirrors? Or will she find a way to defend?
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with A World Without! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Josephine Lovelace takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A World Without for 70 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
The scream, followed by the second round of gunfire -- very close at range to the tethered beast -- is enough to finally rouse the horse.
Morgan had chosen well -- this one was placid and apparently accustomed to the discharge of an arm -- but even the best-trained horse will panic under the right circumstances. The nightmare that the mount awakens to must be sufficient. Its eyes roll back and it struggles, pulling against its tie. In its panic, it's begun to foam at the mouth as it rears.
Penelope, formerly sleeping on the horse's back, has since evacuated into the sky, leaving a single drifting white feather in her wake.
Josie, her back burning along the length of the cut, eases upwards, leaning back heavily against that same tree that jostles and jerks beneath her as if it were about to be yanked out of the ground. She chances one glance back over her shoulder. The longarm's shifted from her right arm to her left, and in one motion she draws an until-now hidden knife. It flashes, briefly, in the light of a dying illusory moon. With one stroke she's severed the horse's tie.
Which wastes no time taking off in fright.
In spite of herself, in spite of her current situation, Josie flashes the man in the white coat a grin which only barely edges on manic. Now, she can see him. It's not some shadow, lurking in the darkness. Not some mockery of a girl lingering by the fire. Even if she's surrounded by a billion reflections of this bastard, she can see him. He's a /person/.
If he's got a body, she can hit it, she thinks, staring ahead without really looking at the impossibility that unfolds in a maze around her. She can /feel/ his presence, sparking as brilliantly as a charged Symbol might.
"Maybe I'll regret that. Maybe not. I guess we'll see, huh?" Pushing off from the tree feels almost like treading water, and isn't something she can blame on the wound carved into her back. She takes a breath, straightens, rolls back her shoulders as the injury screams and the world around her dips and buzzes impossibly, glittering outwards into a cascade of reflections, and looks him right in the eye. "So, what /do/ they call you, mister...?"
In the midst of the carnival hall-like domain he's somehow created around her, she blinks, once, as he remarks on her gun. Her grip on it tightens. One booted foot grinds into the soil underneath -- reality, or so touch here fills in the gap. Whatever her eyes might tell her.
With one stroke the world
shatters
and Josephine curls the Gawain-series longarm against her body, breaking into a run
it's beautiful, she thinks in passing, knife falling from her grip as she twists out of the way of a shard the size of a two-handed blade
a hundred million shards more that seem to fly around her like the rain without touching her, or like snow if she had ever seen such a thing
and he seems to come out of nowhere in the midst of it.
She twists left. He must have guessed her move, or seen a tell.
At the last possibly second, his blade arcing in at an angle that should have cut across her torso -- and the rifle -- she brings up her left forearm in defense of it. Stumbling backwards, blood flows freely from the long cut, pooling and dripping down onto the earth from her fingertips.
But the rifle's unscathed.
"So," she says, heaving a breath as she straightens, ARM still cradled against her body with her right hand, "Is this personal? Or professional?" In spite of the pain, she grins. Her eyes are bright. "Maybe I'm wrong. But, it's just a feeling I've got, you know? And I like to listen to my feelings. Like, maybe we've met before..."
This grin. This grin is manic.
The fingers of her right hand hitch slightly as she brings the longarm up. They don't work right, that's clear. But the ease here, ah--
If she'd moved like a professional gunner before using her left hand, this is perfection -- or nearly so -- in motion. Before had just been an imperfect mirror.
"So, mister. Are you the one trying to kill me?"
Without any warning, she pulls the trigger.
GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with I'm Not Left-Handed! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades I'm Not Left-Handed from Josephine Lovelace!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
It's fitting that in a field of mirrors and glass, even their injuries come to match.
Some things are more important than life for some. The wild aggression exhibited by the rifleslinger is tempered by the even pressure exerted by the agent. The world shifts, stuttering with his movements, the white coat slung around his shoulders shifting and becoming translucent, his body flickering inches to the left as effortless as it seems pointless, an image superimposed over another for just an eyeblink or two. It is enough to unfurl her.
He pays no heed to the running beast, the only animals concerning him are the sort that do not retreat. The flash of his blade came quickly--Josephine can see it in the flickering memories glancing over the floating glass, which tumbles in the air ambiently, seemingly at the pleasure of the mind that wields the scything blade, focus of so many of the staccato images and anima surrounding them. It's easy to infer that the images are memories and possibilities, the closest possible thing to a collusion of ideas and train of thought belonging to the man in the white coat. Enter, then, his elation when she switches hands for a shot unbelievably perfect in execution. Recognition comes fast. Surprise, and consequent mild delight knits itself across his face.
But he is close. He is far too close.
Sparks fly, the shot resounding painfully just inches away from his ear.
The wanderer's blade clashes garishly with the weapon, parrying it once as he steps into it, and again to lock steel against it, his weight bearing down to keep the gunslinger from getting a clear, clean shot. One arm flexes into the stroke, the spine of his blade humming lightly from the tension levied across it. It is not the same as before, a clear strike for the woman never presenting itself, against her or her weapon, making cutting through either a dim proposition. It is hard to tell, given the events of a moment prior, if he is unable to get past Josephine's defenses or if he is being deliberately gentle.
"It has been some time," the agent comments, words calm even as he attempts to hold her in place under threat of evisceration. His wrist flexes, his weight against his saber. This close, it is very evident that it is not a relic blade, an ARMs grade sword. "and you have been in the wastes overlong. Over that time, a person can come to cherish misery and pain, inviting it into their body like an old lover." Obscene blue eyes shine in the dark, half-lidded. The glass aspects floating nearby are beginning to thin out, but they have also begun to show various iterations and interpretations of Josephine screaming, the soundless image persistent as Isiris's contemplations reach a head.
"I have no practice in you," the agent explains quietly, as if their battle were not happening. As he does so, if Josephine has not yet broken their grip of hands he will take hold of his saber with his other hand, bracing on the pommel. The blade turns flat, and slowly rises, the angle changing inexorably and precisely as he speaks. The orientation will continue, even absent that great pressure. "For I am no one in particular. But in your heart, you already know what it is I am. The one who fell. I am misery, and I am pain. The one who should come to be interested."
Slowly, the point of his saber interjects between them.
"And I feel as if I should become fluent in you."
"Tell me," the nightmare agent asks, slowly sliding his blade forward. If she does not stop him, the point of his blade will slide into her collar with a slowness that leaves nothing to the imagination. Inches come by years, and slowly, each of Josephine's reflections break under the slow insertion of steel. Either by crying, by dying, or simply by going mad with pain. It is interesting to see and count which ones last the longest. "Every person has something they will only tell one other person. Tell me," he repeats, as if to center his words, "your darkest need. Is it your wish to suffer? What shall I take away from you."
Being killed this slow, surrounded by the crushing weight of his power, it is almost easy to forget that he is trying to slide steel into her torso while allowing her to watch from any of a hundred angles. All she needs to break free is a moment of focus, a moment to break away from his words and the horrors he shows. But he wonders if she will want to? She asked, he the one trying to kill her.
"Is that something you would like? For me to kill you, that is.."
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with Pain Paradigm! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Josephine Lovelace takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Pain Paradigm for 32 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG7LX8BHCJY
It was perfect. As close to perfect as is possible, given the current condition of her right hand.
But he was too close.
And he moves too fast.
Dark eyes widen, exultation giving way to a brief burst of alarm as he closes, blade ready--
--and twisting to shove her rifle away, locking it in a position where she has not even a glimmer of a chance of hitting him. Where it feels like the rifle is all that is keeping him from cutting her. "Clever," she hisses out, eyes dipping down to stare at the curve of the blade. Her arm twitches under the weight of his press. Her hand aches. She can't pull away without letting her grasp slip from the rifle now. But if he does press any more than he is now...
Some of the mania has drained from her expression by now, but her eyes are still wild. "Some time? I'll say it's been some time. I don't care how long it takes me, you know -- I really will kill you." Her lips twitch, and that almost, almost could be called a smile. "...What the hell... are you talking about?" A spasm briefly takes that arm, and her guard almost breaks. Firmly shifting her stance, replanting her right foot, she moves against it, as it to brace it with her own weight.
Her gaze doesn't leave him. She's intent upon him as they struggle. Only in passing is she aware of the infinite swirl of herself screaming, bleeding, pleading, dying.
"Just, shut up. Shut up... if you're not going to talk normally..." she breathes, squinting one eye as she tries to lean into his blade with her rifle, push him back. The pain really is bad now, one glance at her face will tell that much. Something is very wrong with her right arm, if just the struggle here is doing this to her.
The angle of the blade shifts. Another spasm takes her arm, try as much as she does to fight it, to use her beloved weapon to lock his blade and spare her life. The ARM can be replaced, but if she dies...
He has 'no practice in her'.
She's quick enough to get the gist of what he means by that, coated in the particular turns of phrase he's using.
And she's furious enough, desperate enough not to care a bit.
"Is that... what you tell all your victims... or am I just special..."
The blade just continues to slide forth regardless. She can feel it, even an inch away from her flesh, like it aims to steal away all the heat in the air. Her struggling is growing weaker with every fraction the blade slides forward. She arches her back, attempting to pull away. Nothing more has yet tumbled from her lips as he continues to state what he is. What he will do. Josie's struggles apparently orient around the points of staying alive and controlling her failing arm and hand. But she's never taken her eyes off his. If hatred can be condensed into a single glance, then her gaze is hatred as she stares straight at him.
Her breathing has grown shallow.
"Take from me? /Kill/ me? Like hell you will."
Her left hand is still free. Her lips move slightly, her gaze unfocused for a brief flurry of seconds as she vocalizes the syllables of the spell. Her fingers curve in a slight arcane gesture. Blood, still flowing from the gash on that arm, patters upon the dirt below.
The only initial warning is a snap of ozone through the air. Then, all at once, the coils of electricity curl around her hand and forearm, like the electrical skeleton of a gauntlet.
Josephine Lovelace stares the mystery man dead in the eyes and moves to plant that gloved hand right on the edge of the blade as it nicks her throat.
She'll discharge the weight of the spell there.
Whether she gets to use her hand there as a pivot point to push herself away or not, it's there that she releases her hold on the rifle and rolls backwards. ""Maybe you're the one after me." Snapping one booted foot outwards to try to catch/kick the longarm upwards as it falls, she then makes a quick, sweeping lunge for it, left arm held out and across in a poor sort of guard. "Maybe not!"
She'll flank him, if she can.
"It doesn't matter. I'll see you dead!"
GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Bolt Lance! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Josephine Lovelace's Bolt Lance for 72 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The nightmare agent holds her down with razor curved steel. The exertion and oppression of the thing is of no great consequence or trouble to him. In all reality, it seems that this man is disconnected enough from reality that he may as well be taking Lovelace across the dancefloor for all of his collected expressiveness, and lack thereof.
He may be strong, but Josephine will note that most of what drives the young man is not any sort of preternatural strength, but domineering technique alone. He leverages the blade against her, and even long after her arm goes numb, inhumanly bright blue eyes barely blink as he slides the blade centimeter by centimeter against her throat. It would make for a slow, intimate, caring end for her. The last thing she would feel is cold steel and eyes, watching her, studying her to the end. No other would take as much compassion in her killing. Or so the reflections promise.
Fury. Desperation. Neither are things that he revels in.
But he is a witness. She has his interest.
And the moment is definitely one that he drinks.
"In the moment of your passing, there is no one more important," the killer remarks, as they entwine. "You should exult in it. You should savor it. Each day passes, and you are ignored. Another day to live a pointless existence. Just another drifter. But the day you die... they will line your casket with their tears. No one will ever care more about you than they will on that day."
"And the only thing I ask is that you pay my tribute with your suffering."
He notices her reaching up, lightning crawling across her glove.
His eyes narrow in recognition.
The explosion of light bouncing across the steel surface of his blade slams into his stone composure like a great hammer, breaking his stance and forcing his blade to spear past Lovelace haphazardly, the cutting edge inches away from taking off her head. It may as well have been a mile. Energy surges across him, ragdolling his body and causing him to tumble end over end. Slamming through panels of glass as he rolls, series of them shatter into nonexistence with each pane, his train of thought disrupted. By the time he regains control of his pitch, the ground is littered with shattered glass. As if physics themselves no longer mattered, he slowly alights on the ground, black feathers slowly falling into the long shadow he casts, close to the fire. The feathers never stop, falling into beyond.
Straightening his coat, he stands, lightning still arcing between his fingers. His eyes darken.
"So hate me, bear a grudge against me for your fortune. Visualize in your mind what you wish to do to me the most. Let it burn away the impure that is in you. Then, when I take even that dream, cry. Weep that you have nothing left..."
The tip of his blade touches to the shadow cast by the fire on the ground. Again, instead of stopping, it ripples, little more than brackish water against his saber. Behind him from her flanking position, she can just barely catch a glimpse of this. The cruel blade looks up into the far horizon, eyes burning.
"...And for a day, I will make you their god."
He whirls. His blade stirs the dark like an oar, sending out the shadow across the glass-strewn battlefield. Everywhere it goes, the shadow crawls underneath the glass, causing the broken shards to fall away into nothing. The creeping hole ripples across the campsite, soundlessly opening long spined wounds in the earth originating from the point of his blade. With one snapping motion, the rippling nothing energy crawling in ever more specific relief after the drifter. At the terminus of the shadow's range, a warped body spills from the hole in the earth, trailing smoke from her body, gloved hands gripping after the earth, pawing up great clutches of it as she drags an intermittent trail of herself along after, emanating from the rippling hole in the world. Inconsistent silver braids spill onto the ground as the dark-skinned monstrosity struggles, before she cranes her neck, focusing indistinct and furious eyes at Josephine.
Heaving her chest into the motion, she shrieks in a hauntingly familiar voice, her wailing bellow deafening after Lovelace. And then from her black tongue spills out another wailing monstrosity, doubling her length. Four hands grip the earth, where two did before. Then six. Then eight. Shrieking, the gestalt monstrosity spawns self after self from the dark after Josephine, until it can lay hands on her ankles. If it can, then the next will lay hold onto her gun. Then her hips. Then her wrists. Then her shoulders. Then her neck. Hundreds of gripping hands later, the eerie mirror image will twist the drifter until she can finally come face to face with Josephine, close enough that she can see the twinned and ragged scar across her neck.
Then, if Josephine doesn't break free, the nightmare slave will unhinge her steaming jaws, and shriek deafening, choking, laughing crows right into her origin's face.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with Merciless Genesis! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Josephine Lovelace guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Merciless Genesis for 130 hit points! GS: Disrupt! Statuses applied to Josephine Lovelace!
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
He speaks of funerals. The expression on Josephine's face goes strange, a difficult, distant quality taking over. In spite of the fury she now holds in her heart towards this man -- and more importantly, in spite of the cold steel pressing against her throat, she still bites off a response towards him: "Sorry, but I'll pass."
Not yet, anyway. It's way, way too early for that.
"On that, and on your 'tribute'. Got it?"
It's in the end more of a stunning hit than she'd expected -- more than the few seconds she'd guessed she might get at best, assuming everything had slotted into place just right.
Her mentor always said she was careless.
It's an apt assessment as that blade comes swinging in a fraction of a moment later. It's a little too close, honestly -- even for her. His sword just narrowly misses giving her a very permanent haircut and she ducks, even as it already passes by. Josie's no trained soldier, just another person getting by as best they can in the wastes. But then, experience /is/ the best teacher sometimes, and 'not getting killed' can be a powerful motivator.
Her only goal right now is to get the drop on him, trap him while he's stunned and--
A boot crunches on illusory glass as she pivots to track him, raising her rifle. Where--
Visualize? She'll shoot him where he stands. One eye squints shut. Fengalon, her hand /aches/. "I said, I'm going to kill you. So, you can just shut up," she says, venting a measure of the frustration she feels right now, the rifle muzzle dancing in the air as she draws a bead on him. The rifle twitches, unsteady in her hands. She eases her finger over the trigger. Slowly, she draws in a breath. "--Just, shut up!"
Dark eyes widen in alarm. Her finger... she can't... pull the trigger back. "Shit..." she exhales, lifting her head and lowering the rifle a degree as she stares at the man in white.
"--I said you're not going to take--"
Darkness comes rising, as if dredged up from the surface of some stream. Josie doesn't stay put. Juggling the ARM from one now-useless hand to the next, she breaks into a run as darkness tears across what had been her campsite. As it chases her. As /something/ rises from the depths, galloping in unholy speed towards her. There's nowhere to run. In an instant, it's upon her.
This can't really be happening. It's not real -- it's an illusion, of some sort, isn't it -- and yet, as the disgusting caricature of herself spills forth -- growing, one after another -- even her desperate attempts to remember the most basic of lessons, let alone the advanced defenses against magical assaults, beats its fists against the presence of the illusion in vain. She -- it -- they seize her wrists, feet, press her down, latch onto her rifle, tangle fingers into her hair regardless of however she still tries to struggle, physically or mentally.
The handgun, in the midst of her struggle, slides easily from her coat pocket.
Dark eyes slide down, towards the neck of the thing as it looms above her. Then, hesitantly, they slip upwards again, staring fixedly at that face.
Her face.
It's the final hammerblow into the cracking wall. Josie plasters herself against the earth below as if she could burrow down through it, writhing and cringing away. She opens her mouth much as her doppelganger does and screams, an broken and animalistic cry into the night.
Until even that's choked and muffled into silence by the onslaught of ether poured directly into her face in the form of spectral birds. For an instant, Josie would be forgiven for assuming she's had her face burnt off. One finger, spared the grasp of the multitude, twitches as she spasms -- or at least as much as her held form is able to.
But even then, held fast against the earth by a monstrosity born of illusions and scoured by etheric might, Josephine Lovelace hasn't gone limp and lifeless. Though she lies still in the wake of the scorching surge, her gaze unfocused and distant, she still draws breath.
And a moment later, she jerks her left arm, spasmodic, free and clear of the hands that grasp it and seizes that handgun. Like a thing possessed, with little room given for thought or feeling or anything except the purity of action and reaction, she brings that handgun up against the head of the creature looming over her and pulls the trigger.
Action, and reaction. The recoil will only push her further against the earth.
Not for a moment is her gaze actually focused upon the illusion clinging to her -- her attention is elsewhere. But is her attention actually on the man in white, or is it a million miles away?
GS: Josephine Lovelace has activated a Force Action! GS: You have activated the Force Action Lock On! GS: Josephine Lovelace has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Have a Blast! GS: Josephine Lovelace has completed her action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Josephine Lovelace's Have a Blast for 146 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He chokes her on his nightmare.
Calmly walking across the empty etheric void that his sword cut into the world, the man in white strides with a crisp, meandering step. The dark ripples as if it were water. "What is real?" he asks, with the air of a musing philosopher. "That is what they ask. But, who has the authority to determine this?"
He crosses the ravine separating them, his saber held lightly at his side, the empty sleeves of his coat drifting in his passage. not three feet from him, a chain of slaves writhe, clawing haplessly at the dirt beneath them and at the others composing their overall figure, forming a vast worm of flesh and leather lolling out of the yawning abyss like some great warm tongue. The collection of screams that cuts into the air, terrible harmony that it is, is broken by the cackle of fluttering black, atypical, continuous, and pouring into the woman who thrashes beneath a hundred hands, kicking boots in the dirt not far from his feet.
By scant degrees, the man with piercing blue eyes inclines his head.
"Certainly, not you."
"I will take whatever is needed, whatever this world wishes," the man in white corrects finally once she no longer has a voice to object, voice low and only barely flecked through with the faint air of a vicious nature. "You can tell me the world you think is real all you please. It makes no difference. In the end, it is the same..."
He trails off quietly as he spies her struggle to raise her firearm. Though in the reality she sees, her gun may firmly sit on the forehead of her own warped self, in the real world, faraway eyes look through him. Slowly, exquisitely, his lips press together into an expression, only somewhat coerced by the disabuse of that nightmare world.
An instant later, the air is filled with black and copper.
"A strong will..."
He made no overt attempt to remove himself from the scenario, to get out of the way. Instead, he flies, his body being blown back by the force of the smoke-belching arms. As he goes, the slave's head is blown clear open by the blast, a hundred hands once acting in chaotic unison now coming completely undone, clawing in every direction as each body fights against the one before to retreat in a different way. Blood and black feathers creep into the air, some of it spraying the earth beneath him as he slams into the dirt, his body rolling. As it goes, his coat picks up tracks of blood, scarlet shining bright against the white. He comes to a still, his body collecting all of the remaining momentum.
"...but," he breathes, "suffering is not a thing that ends with a bullet."
The blood trails on his coat begin to shift, travelling slowly in the white like clouds moving across the sky. Placing one bloodsoaked hand on his knee, the killer slowly gathers himself, rising. The blood makes his silhouette indistinct, hard to track. He labors slowly, settling into a stance. His free hand, dripping blood, raises, and opens.
"...and you will never be free again."
It's at that point that Josephine may realize that the ether boiling in her.. has not faded.
Her shadow is still writhing, still choking, gasping on the ground. The black silhouette beneath Josephine kicks and fights silently along with the other bodies in the dirt. Its-her-stomach distends unnaturally as she does so, filled with something bizarre and unnatural. Beyond the kicking and fighting of the others, the battle is near silent. And finally, in a black burst, chains rip free from her, and extend off in every direction, forcing the shadow to her knees, arms splayed to either side and neck forced low. Very faintly, if Josephine listens just right, she can hear her own shadow whimper.
If Josephine falls into the trap of listening, it will be enough to bind her in exactly the same method, with chains made of pure imagination alone. Then, and only then, will he come for her.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Josephine Lovelace with A Cruel Orisha! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Josephine Lovelace critically Guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A Cruel Orisha for 63 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The weight of those chains might as well be made of steel, for all they budge.
If caught inside her own mind, Josephine's face will be forced almost to the ground, every joint forced to contort until her limbs sing with the weight of castles on them. He is never seen moving, not really. In one agonizing heartbeat, he closes the remaining distance, the intermediary imperceptible. He never looks directly at her.
"Madness," he remarks, lifting his blade, "is a powerful thing."
"But despair is stronger even than death itself."
Absent any fielded recourse, she will be forced to watch the point of his blade erupt through her middle, rammed through her exposed back. There will be a lot of blood at first--more blood than it seems she can live without. The explosion of crimson that casts from that blade will spray across the ground just in front of her face, forming wild patterns in ancient runic, semicircles of it scalding the earth in her own boiling blood. Dimly, a symbolist may recognize the script.
They are protection prayers to something incomprehensible and dark.
And no matter how much blood she sees, how much she may agonize, or how much she may believe she might be dead... there, on the schism between reality and ideation, he has shown no interest in pushing her back to reality with her own death. Instead, he leaves her there.
<Pose Tracker> Josephine Lovelace has posed.
It's a fair thing to wager that if Josie could still speak -- if she were still coherent at that -- she would have had Words for the mysterious man in white, when he speaks about taking what he pleases in this world. As it is, the ability is stolen from her, and by the time her throat works properly again...
The situation has rather changed.
As if still caught in her own reality, Josie still stares dead ahead with that same unfocused gaze, ARM still leveled at a monstrous head that's simply...
Exploded.
In fact, for several dragging seconds, the only change to her expression is a vague and muted glaze of horror that settles over her features, only that only even starts to slip away as a million illusory shadow hands relinquish their grip. Josie blinks once, twice, and finally focuses on the man in white properly. Dark eyes flick over him, and
She smiles, fleetingly. It's a little too wide to be a happy smile. "Wrong," she murmurs, ARM trained on him. Slowly, she rises, right arm dangling at her side. Absolutely everything hurts. This is too much, this is too far, she should run. But it's too late for any of that. And if it's already too late...
"Now, reach for the sky..."
She advances on him just as slowly, treading on the darkness underfoot. If it's too late, she might as well go all in. The one in a million chance is all she's got.
Her gaze flicks downwards. At her shadow, as she writhes. Whimpers. Whispers. Josie pauses a moment as if listening.
ARM still leveled at the stranger, the bloodied archaeologist asks aloud, "What, another trick? Aren't you getting tired of..."
It's an illusion. Someone with Josephine's background must realize it immediately. And yet, to her perspective, darkness-forged chains suddenly erupt from the shadows beneath, curling and pulling taut around her arms. A whimper escapes her lips, pain erupting as one looping chain catches her in a particularly tender spot on her right forearm, The sidearm tumbles ungracefully from her left hand.
She puts her back into it nonetheless. Slamming her right foot down -- onto a shadowy figure and the earth in one go, she arches her back, hauling with every ounce of everything she has in her body. A strained hiss escapes her lips as she pulls and bucks much like her escaped horse had against its tether. It rises into a groan.
Then finally, a defiant scream.
The chains break.
Josephine Lovelace even manages to stagger back a step before she inevitably collapses from the sheer exertion of it, slumping to her knees.
An outside observer would have seen her struggle against nothing and simply fall to her knees.
She stares downwards, utterly exhausted for the moment. Only at considerable length does she drop one hand to the ground -- the darkness the blackness -- and make as if to push herself back up.
"...Ah..."
It's very red, isn't it. Blood. Uncomprehending, she stares at the point of the blade protruding through her middle. Slowly, very slowly, she reaches towards it with her hand, her right. Which falters, slumps. "Despair, huh..." The pain comes in at a remove, and for only a second Josie's struck by the feeling that she's not really in her body anymore. Then, even that doesn't matter so much. Her gaze falls on the odd arc that her life's blood seems intend on falling in.
They're familiar. A few symbols, she can even recognize. That one, that one's about darkness, and that one's...
There's a lot of blood. It's really very red. And a body has only so much right? And when you lose enough blood, you die. Right. Thinking is so sluggish. Like flipping through a book, each page filled with more incomprehensible words than the last.
"...screwed up..."
Clutching a hand to her stomach when the blade finally slides free -- pain, briefly, filters across the rippling numbness, she slouches forward, still seated where she'd landed before. Josie's gaze, unfocused once again, is nowhere but on the odd protective invocation inscribed on the ground before her.
Elsewhere--
It's a bright night, easy to see by. Wings beat furiously as the bird soars through the sky. Pigeons as they are now known were made by people, and made to fly well. This one's no different. She only has one goal.