2017-09-26: The Nexus Hours
- Log: The Nexus Hours
- Cast: Cassidy Cain, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: D-Block Sewers, Nortune, Kislev
- Date: September 26, 2017
- Summary: Personal business has pulled Cassidy Cain away from November City and deep in the slums of Nortune, familiar, old stomping grounds from years past. In her attempts to elude the city patrols of a country at war, she once again encounters Isiris Shango'Ra in its darkest underbellies, lured to Kislev due to his encounter with Lily Keil. In an attempt to finish what they started in Lacour, they clash once more, fighting through its dangerous labyrinthine depths...
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Descent into Darkness *>++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Entry |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
The sewers lie deep beneath D Block, and getting to them is dangerous
business. Beneath the hatch is a ladder that trails down into the darkness.
It's slick with condensation, and parts of it look too rusty to be safe
Nevertheless, it's your way in.
Did something just move down there?
+Dungeon Conditions: Hesitate+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
This is pretty much what she expected when she found herself and her partner fleeing further west due to ridiculous and chaotic circumstances, ending up in the Badlands. She knew, somehow, that personal business will inevitably take her back to Nortune where questionable elements are lying in wait for her. Most days, this can only mean one thing.
As Noah Hawthorne and Josephine Lovelace are ensconced safely in a watering hole in Dazil, sharing a pint, in the dead of night, deep in the heart of the city's slums, a slim, dark shape soars out from the upper window of one of the area's dingiest tenement buildings, a ball of fire erupting somewhere above her as she drops...and completely oblivious to the fact that the aforementioned two were just talking about the very thing when it comes to their lives and her own. A hand snaps out, snagging a free-hanging post, using her current velocity to push her body forward in a swing, a single, stationary revolution on the metallic bar executed before she lets go and sends herself flying into another lower rooftop.
Her body tucks in a roll, skidding to a stop on bent knees and well-practiced feet. Her dark-clad form looks up from where she is, most of her pale-gold tresses tucked under a balaclava pulled over her head, stray wisps having escaped to tangle on her shoulders and frame pale cheeks. Narrowed emerald eyes shot with gold watch the thick cloud of smoke billow out from the shattered sill.
She doesn't permit herself an exhale of relief. Not yet. It isn't long that she finds herself in street-level again, prying open a hatch that she knows is there; Nortune takes up one part of her short list of old stomping grounds, in her days as a novice thief. These parts, especially - where the dirty, poor and downtrodden dwell - are well familiar to her. Dropping further into the darkness, a hand lifts to seal the manhole shut over her head just as several booted feet and the unmistakable ring of ARMs file past, the presence of the city guard making itself known. It is the curse of frequenting areas that are rife in crime, as any civilized heart would station only the brave, hardy and well-trained in such areas.
Kislev, in spite of all the press it has received being part of the war, has its share of secrets and military conspiracies, and knowing the very fact only reminds her as to how dangerous it is to step on the wrong toes in the country. But peril is never something that dissuaded her from doing something; if nothing else, it always has an opposite effect on her.
Its sewers - a twisting labyrinth that reeks of rot, waste, rust and the metallic tang of blood - are as dark and daunting as she remembers. Still, she can't linger and she presses forward, moving quietly through remembered passages.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Descent into Darkness.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The dark is a pregnant one.
In the times folded up into long ago and not so, he has slowly become aware of Kislev. For reasons of his own, he has made the pilgrimage into the country, with the blood of many sprayed across his coat to gain an otherwise unknown entry inside. He dwells now, in the darkest spaces of Nortune, the blade of a Kislevi tucked into his waistcoat belt. The young one he crucified in the alley was not wrong, and he made a great stride to find out more about her, a quest that has ruined more than one beyond the point of repair.
'but then,' the young girl reminds him, 'most are expendable, aren't they?'
"Aa." Something abominable writhes underneath his eyes, before he looks on into something dark and chasm before him. It is not the thundercrack of distant explosions above, but the bent of something far more subtle that reaches him. The faintest scent catches him by the waysides, his ever-thoughtful mind lingering on something real in the morass of vomit-inducing copper and wastrel's leavings. The scent is faint, but it is one he recognizes. A faint expression of satisfaction slowly builds in across the hard-cut features of his face.
With patience winnowed away to cruelty, he looks down at the squirming thing at his feet.
"Sing for me."
The song that fills the sewer is bestial, eruptive and gutteral in its tonality. There is nothing beautiful about it, no winsome songstress to fill the sewers like a harp. But in its tonality, there are the subtle details that once made up something beautiful. Where a golden strand of hair would fall across a cheekbone, the high keen of a beast indicates just when bone is broken. The mortal cry of this thing reaches a different pitch with each controlled choke, as if a hundred leashes taught the thing in the only way it knew how.
The song carries, and it carries the intimation of something's slow and suffering death.
"To think that we would meet in this place," the Ra comments absently, from far beyond, a voice in the dark, around a corner that has no turn and through a tunnel that has no exit. In this space, the world seems to compress, green-slicked iron gates gaining more prominence and promise than they had before. He is not yet seen.
"I am pleased."
The killer makes the steep drop from his space, perhaps even the faintest whisper of his coat seen from just beyond.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Descent into Darkness.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 10 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Sludgefall *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
A pipe on the wall disgorges a stream of vile-smelling sewer water into the
main canal. The path continues beneath it, but the ground is slick, and the
sludge comes in irregular fits and spurts.
Something gleams bright green in the darkness behind you, and disappears.
+Dungeon Conditions: Exhaust++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
As the song ripples through the sewers, another explosion rips through the city above, the sign of a bad situation becoming worse. The sewer shudders, something overhead straining hard to withstand shock. A single crow rests on a transmission pipeline above, the thing exploding and spraying a thick black viscous gunk across the iron walls and access walkways. Like an dying dragon, it disgorges black across the ground, forming a thick pile of fetid doughy slime across her path, sloughing off into the hip-deep river of wastewater at her feet. The smell is that of the dead, itself a crippling affair. A pile of corpses eight mornings into the sun could not give a worse promise.
The slough of the pile of waste takes far too long to complete on its own, an obstacle in and of itself.
A blue-eyed crow clinging to a nearby grate laughs at her misfortune.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
She stops moving before she hears anything at all.
It is the way everything around her changes; Nortune's sewers are dark and foreboding at best, but instincts already elevated from her earlier escape rattles at the invasion of someone else's presence. A hand grips at the handle of her revolver at the small of her back, though she doesn't draw it yet, the taste of danger spreading over her tongue and causing her rapid heartbeat to quicken all the further. These ever present shadows, moving as if a tangible caress on their own, are those she hates...but there are some in her distant past, still living, who know very well that she has been born, beaten and hammered into shape in the dark, and when it comes to bloodletting, she is never more dangerous than she is when enshrouded in it.
The sudden, keening cry makes her hair stand on end. Lashes shutter over her eyes briefly, and when she hears him speak in the dark, there's a sigh and a slight smile.
Within shafts of sickly-green light, emanating from only god knows where in the space, she steps forward, half her frame carrying those illuminated splinters, whatever isn't swallowed by the black of her clothes. A hand comes up, fingers tangling into the cloth binding that keeps most of her hair from view, pulling it off and letting those sunlit rivers spill to her shoulders and back in a tangled array. She has it in her to look slightly exasperated.
"Of all the sewers in all the world, you had tae show up tae this one," she says, tucking the balaclava in her back pocket. The fingers of her free hand find the curve of her right hip.
She can't see him, not yet, but she doesn't have to. Her head tilts slightly to where she hears the softest flutter of gray cloth.
"Hello, luv."
She could use a cigarette, but not yet. She does prepare herself to have one, though, a slender, pale stick finding the dewy space between her lips.
"If I asked you what the bloody hell you're doing here, would you humor me? Ahhh....y'ken, I told someone recently that the world looks vast and wide when traveling all on your lonesome, but when you come across a familiar face, you're reminded once again that the world's nae as big as initially thought." Lashes lid faintly over her eyes. "Heard that you've been getting around, menacing the fair and optimistic. Keep that up and you might start tae hurt my feelings."
Amusement glitters in those eyes, darkened to evergreen by the lack of light.
"But I s'pose it's simply too much tae expect that once dance would make me all that special tae anyone. So what now, Ra?"
As if by magic, another explosion rocks the world above them. Deep in the endless shroud, something breaks. She hears it first, the wet squelch as sludge and the stink of death suddenly exploding somewhere to the side of her. She's already moving when she hears the rumble; there's no way she could avoid it getting on her clothes, but as she nimbly dances sideways and back, flipping on a higher access way, hopefully she gets away enough that she'd regain her footing before she slips.
"Ha ha ha ha." She can't help but let out a laugh. "Ach, I s'pose that's what I get for asking."
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Sludgefall.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The ephemeral song continues to wind its way through the sewers, as enchanting as it is abominable. The nightmare spinner cannot be seen now, the rustle of fabric placing him somewhere faintly beneath her, somewhere deep in the labyrinthine system. The explosions that ratchet overhead cannot be said to have a measurable effect on his demeanor. The world seems to tilt on its axis, dumping sloughing refuse across his coat, and though even the smell of it is enough to cripple a man on its own, the faint frown that echoes across the killer is unperturbed.
She says she might start to get her feelings hurt.
"I would have nothing less," he suggests.
'you should have killed her when you had the chance,' he is told. Instead of humoring the young girl, he absently checks his clothing, assuring a small ribbon is still secured at his neck. He favors the edge of it thoughtfully.
"The world is not as large as you'd imagine, it would seem," he reflects simply. "I find that it is rather like a crumpled up ball, with everything crushed helplessly against one another. All they can do is writhe and scream." Almost as if on queue, the song reaches a feverish crescendo, as the thing that is dying reaches its final crescendo. He leaps.
The launch is incredibly high for a human, and his coat flutters around him as he drops to meet her. Even coated in filth and blood, he lands in the slowest motion, subsumed by impossible, abominable grace. The catwalk he joins her own is slippery, but the person he is is not afraid.
He has never been afraid of falling.
Looking up, his eyes are cut out of that knifelike blue. They shine, even in the dark.
"It's a beautiful thing," he continues of his thoughts a moment prior.
"It's almost like the world wants us to kill each other."
He draws his sword in a flash, and with it, it sends a shrill composure of crows through the accessway, the wave of shadows he unleashes with cheap Kislevi steel enough to flood the sewer accesss with cackling, fluttering, choking blue-eyed black. The surge is as immediate as it is phantasmal, and ripples out towards the rogue, making the balance of the two an even more dangerous proposition.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has used his Tool Silver Ribbon toward his party's challenge, Sludgefall.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 10 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Obscene Wave!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Obscene Wave for 51 hit points!
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Rotten Sod *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Combat |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
Some of the things down here should never see the light of day. This one is
a bulbous mass of flesh that barely approximates a human form, its skin pale
and studded with veins. The Rotten Sod constricts foes with its rubbery,
prehensile 'arms', sucking the life out of them.
Is it the worst that's down here, or is there something else?
+Dungeon Conditions: Wound++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The world is like a crumpled ball, he says. A place where everyone and everything are hopelessly crushed together.
"Well, for all of your refined way of speaking, you're nae exactly a poet," Cassidy tells him with that same, easy smile. The rickety catwalk bends and twists when he leaps from the shadows, to land across the way; uncaring as much as she of the sludge that has slickened it, leaving it easy to fall when one isn't so careful. Rivers of waste and brackish water flood the space underneath them, the dull roar echoing with the strange, keening song that etches its terrible harmony within her ears. "But I have it on good authority that your talents lie in other things."
That gold-flecked stare hoods. "Ay. The world certainly has a very specific sense of entertainment. Between you and me, luv, you're the philosopher. Maybe I should ask you why you think the world wants us tae kill each other."
His stare burns in the dark, cold and inhuman but beautiful - almost solely because of its ice and the light within, so insistent that the color defies the very darkness around them, filled as it is by the stench of corpse-decay and the distant flutter of crows' wings. They remind her of polished gems, nothing like valuable sapphires and more like moonstones. The thought brings yet another twinge of amusement, her head tilting slightly.
"Or maybe I ought tae ask you where I could get eyes like yours."
Her grip tightens on the handle of her revolver at the small of her back.
"Would nae expect you tae spill such heavy secrets on the second meeting. I s'pose I'll just have tae pluck one out from your skull and examine it for myself. Are you more partial tae the right or the left?"
She is moving the moment she sees a centimeter of silver gleam from the scabbard, her revolver out. His recovery proves itself in spades when the swing of the blade cracks a nearby pipe further, making their footing all the more precarious. She twists immediately, to flatten herself against an unseen wall. The scourging ripples of fell sorcery skim past her, tearing at the side of her black clothing, ripping a piece off her sleeve.
She crosses one arm over the other, the single shot aimed for the center of his forehead exploding in their ears like a cannon, tearing through the ambient noise.
"Oh, Ra," she can't help but laugh. "This is just a guess. But I think you actually missed m-- !"
Something large suddenly emerges from the whirling pools of fetid water underneath them. Its appearance cuts the rest of the comment off when the creature emerges from the dark depths of the sewer. The gelatinous mass encased in rubbery, corpse-like skin wobbles, fat and barely human, its pallor making the black veins that crawl across its skin all the more stark and obvious. A single eye bulges out from its twisted head, the other ones encrusted shut by pus and whatever black matter coats the very bottom of the sewer floors.
The stench is unbelievable.
Cassidy's expression flattens.
"I think your date's here," she tells Isiris dryly.
The ping of something metal rings in the air, a winking indicator light tossed towards the Rotten Sod. She's already leaping away, towards another catwalk, leaving Isiris behind with the monster when the thing detonates in a flash of light, yet another ball of fire roaring through the tunnel, and chasing her black clad form as she rushes away.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Rotten Sod.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Bye Bye Baby!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra critically Guards a hit from Cassidy Cain's Bye Bye Baby for 28 hit points!
GS: Cripple! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The slickness of the iron catches his boot. It's enough to throw his attack stance wide. It's enough to cause the surge of corvid force to miss its mark, leaving the blue-eyed killer to furrow his brow, a silver thread of annoyance playing at the breath snaking from his chest. The fierce shine of his eyes slivers, catching an interesting disposition as he steps into the stroke, swinging the cheap mass-production steel back down to his side. A band of pale pus-colored light catches his obscene eye, bringing out the glacial patterns in it as he meets the woman's easy disposition with the relaxed demanor of an old friend.
Little would anyone know exactly how close they would come to killing one another.
"Do you like them?" the Ra asks mildly, of his eyes.
"Come kneel before me, and I will let you drown in them."
The burst of water and filth that disgorges the hairless abomination runs between them punctuates his statement, leaving the creature's billowing stench to cut across him in waves, the hot and fetid rush of the thing more than enough to send ripples through his already filth-stained coat. Evidently, he's been moving through these sewers a little longer than his lithe charge has.
He looks down passively at the reaching, pestilent and lump-ridden creature as it rises over him in dominating aspect. His gaze slowly tracks the change in height as the detonating charge clicks across the walk towards them. He doesn't move away, nor does he have a greater reaction to the savage thing. But his hands slowly raise, and by the time the explosion rips through the creature and towards him, the explosion detonates in a scything wave of shadowy hands. The explosion is deflected mostly away from him, rendered into something horrific by the force of his ideation, tainted with nightmare.
The blashemed explosion grows in volume and force exponentially, rippling through the sewer as countless shadowed hands and tongues surge and move to wrap around the creature, probing into every malodorous crevice and breeding into multiples of force, boneless at first, and then gaining more structure and solidarity as they crawl up towards Cassidy, spawning a shadowy wave of grasping hands that causes the catwalk she lands on to dangerously urch, the shockwave from the blast forcing him up to her level, navigating the foul-slicked iron with more than one steep needed, even as his phantasmal shockwave hauls hard onto the catwalk, climbing over to grip onto Cassidy and drag her back down to the deep.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Rotten Sod.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Merciless Genesis!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 10 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
GS: Cassidy Cain guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Merciless Genesis for 73 hit points!
GS: Disrupt! Statuses applied to Cassidy Cain!
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Batrats *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Combat |Challenge Rating: 1 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
Batrats are dog-sized, rat-like creatures with bat wings, and they like to
hang from pipes and cables along the sewer ceiling. They abhor light, and
tend to respond to disturbances by dive-bombing them, screeching and
emitting ear-splitting sonic booms. You just ran into an enormous flock of
them.
The screeching echoes down the tunnel. What if something else hears it?
+Dungeon Conditions: Reckless+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The explosion rocks the tunnel, and while it leaves Isiris with only some minor injuries, it does nothing but singe the cancerous, tentacled mass writhing at him. Given the sorcery he wields, however, he is able to tear it apart, energy - whatever it is that he wields - ripping flesh and whatever passes for bone in the rotund body before it bursts like a lanced boil, adding its fluids to the swamp of refuse all around them.
It doesn't stop there.
She had been told that what he wields may be a different kind of magic, that those from Solaris can manipulate elements with pure will alone. Dangerous, that, in the hands of someone practiced in the art, for it sideskips the necessity of activating the requisite series of runes necessary to give a sorcerous objective its due effect. It cuts down on the preparation time, if nothing else. Theoretically, his brand of magic enables him to cast much faster than any Symbologist.
Cassidy continues to move, skidding down the catwalk that suddenly lurches upright when the stygian mass of sick, wretched things rise from the fetid sewers of Nortune's swamps, twisting metal with a deafening screech, popping rusted bolts and tilting it upwards - which means that she is sliding down into the darkness. She slips, and slides along the length of it, unable to have the time to cry out when she angles her body and uses her agility to twist it, to flatten her scrambling feet against the side and brace herself as the world tilts, and tilts...
...and she launches herself off it.
She soars across the way, grabbing onto a network of dripping pipes. But she doesn't even look at them, already looking several steps ahead. Fingers let go at her swing, to land on a lower platform in a meaty thunk, and a heavy roll. But when she finishes, she remains crouched on one knee. Aches and pains throb through her muscles, but she elects to ignore it. She is used to, and even relishes pain.
"Ach, luv, you ought tae be more careful about what you're proposing!" she calls out, launching another grenade across the distance.
"Because in that kind of position, while I'm on my knees, I'll still have you by the balls."
Her tone is light, almost playful, but those sharp eyes suddenly shift sideways, deeper into the tunnels.
What the hell was that noise?
It sounds like...
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Where Angels Fear To Tread!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades Where Angels Fear To Tread from Cassidy Cain!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The hands, cut from rapidly shivering bands of bad dream, ripple out and tear down the catwalk with motive, grasping force as Cassidy slides along and down it, scrabbling at the catwalk with crazed rattlesnake grace. To contrast, the Ra is blown back by the force, but seems inured to mayhem. When he lands along that very same walk, his stride slowly orients vertically as the hands lift, crumple, and fold the catwalk ahead of him, ravaging it entirely until the angle pitches to a full 90 degrees, and physics no longer can strictly be said to apply to the Ra's movements.
He steps towards her, his sword tapping along the ground absently, before his form flickers--shifting dangerously between eyeblinks, between heartbeats. It's hard to lock eyes with the killer, lock eyes with that painful blue, as he tracks her acrobatic movements. Below, the creature moans as a sewerful of hands pull it apart, piece by piece.
"Thrust out your hand to me," the Ra invites, when she makes her comment.
"Let me show you how long your heart will beat."
The world does not twist as she lets her grenade fly, the explosion engulfing the nightmare spinner, who buckles back in consternation. The flames seem to eat him, only for a moment, before shadows rip through the cloud of flame, shadows shot through with veins of night. The undulating and ghostly flesh coils around the Ether conjurer, rippling and churning away the force of the blast, forcing fire to grow ribs, a heart, and a great maw.
A preternatural roar fills the cavern, the phantasmal tide crashing through the pipes and shearing them to boiling nothing. It follows the coiling path of Cassidy herself, as the pipes above rain a black slime with the consistency of heavy whipping cream and the scent of anything but. Through the downpour, the night falls.
Ripping through adjacent piping, Isiris drops onto the platform with Cassidy, attacking during the downpour with a flash of his blade. Or at least, such is the intent. A bat the size of a dog rips between them, and is cut down by the agent's blade. Undeterred, he moves towards Cassidy, his blade flashing as the swarm begins to boil up from the remains of the creature below.
The vicious creatures take umbrage to the terse battle going on between them, and flood between the two. It is a numbers fight, forcing the Ra to focus more on clearing the way to his quarry than directly engaging her. Slowly overwhelmed by sonic blasts, he is disoriented just enough to be knocked off-balance. A bat latches itself to him, and the swarm threatens to overrun the killer, making him a very easy target for another grenade.
Right up until the monstrous ghost serpent winds back around. Shearing metal coming with it, it crashes down towards the platform, jaws made of ghostly sabers open wide.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Batrats.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Enmity Radius!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Enmity Radius for 51 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
There's a flick of that emerald stare towards the blade he wields. That isn't his usual blade, not unlike the strange, but deadly beautiful object he has wielded in the past. And she would know, having taken up her most reckless self in their first meeting, when she deliberately put her face so close to the edge of his steel.
What happened to it?
It is a question that flits through her already busy mind, already taking to account her dark environs and the confusion he introduces to it; it isn't unlike their first encounter, but he has learned his lessons well. Like the hare from many a teachable fable, she finds more stable footing, and moves in an attempt to escape. This is unlike before - Lacour was like a home to her, perhaps the only one that she could ever call as such. This is different. This is Kislev, and while she can be wild and reckless, deep down she knows the folly of being incapacitated here, in a place that, while not so alien, is crawling with enemies and her closest connections miles and miles away.
He doesn't make such an egress easy. As he alights on the other end of he catwalk, much like the corvids in which he places a strange affinity, she continues moving forward just as he does. Her lips split in a wide grin, to match the wild look in her eyes and the flush of battle causing those pale cheeks to glow in the shadows. Rejuvenated, in the end, by the prospect of her own Death - or perhaps yet another opportunity to tease it, taunt it.
She lies for a living; she tends to make noises about Luck, about how the spirits of Fortune favor her. It fits her mischievous persona, the face that she wants the world to know her by. But the dark truth of it manifests in the shadows; in the end, it is a different deity with which she dances, only one that she continues to torment, and lets herself be tormented by, because she never feels more alive than when she is about to die.
And here he comes, in the form of a man her age with burning, blue eyes, blade in hand.
Nothing else is real. She conditions her well-practiced brain to anchor to it, hold onto it. She ignores the roar of the serpent in the tunnel, that sharp stare separating the tangible from the constructs of his magic. He is forced to react to the batrats, rabid, smelly and persistent as they are, by the way he has to cut through a horde of them to get to her and so she knows that they, too, are real. She insists on using her gun, firing bullets, to silence as many of them as quickly as possible. It challenges her balance; their screams are more of a threat than the batrats themselves.
She is not sure whether what she sees next is real. An attack as an illusion, or an illusion as an attack, either way it causes alarm bells to ring inside of her skull and her breaths to shorten in time with the white-hot arcs of fear and adrenaline surging through her veins. She rips away all doubt when the revolver vanishes and she produces a grapple gun - the thing she used to scale the building she had jumped out of earlier, shooting it up at the ceiling, the wire pulling taut.
As the serpent crashes into the platform, she's already swinging away in a roundabout arc, to hurtle for the next one.
When she throws another projectile, it is not a grenade. It is slim and sharp and tipped with green mist, aimed unerringly for the back of his neck as she flies past, filled with poison.
"I'd love tae, lad," she says after landing, whipping the cord back to her and stowing it back where it belongs. "But sommat tells me you bite a little harder than I would prefer. Besides, it would nae be sporting, when you failed tae show me the contents of your own the last time."
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Batrats.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Anything Goes!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 20 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra takes a glancing hit from Cassidy Cain's Anything Goes for 98 hit points!
GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra!
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Sewage Turbines *>+++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
The sound of whirring, humming machinery echoes down the passage. Up ahead,
the corridor narrows, and in the dim light, you can see the forms of turning
turbines, designed to keep the sludge moving. Their edges are caked in rust
and sewage, but still sharp enough to maim.
In the darkness behind you, something lands in the sewage with a splash. A
bell jingles.
+Dungeon Conditions: Wound++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
She eludes him, just so.
The serpent shatters the access ledge that forms the platform they are on in a rush of ghostly scales and the grasping hands that compose them, forcing the killer to abandon his perch moments after Cassidy. As the serpent rushes through, grasping hands grip the grates upon which the platform was founded, ripping the iron free of its moorings. As the bats pass near, sonic shrieks are cut sickeningly short by hands that grip onto and pull the wings and throats out of each like so much flypaper.
He looks up at her, the black filth cascading across him.
The blade he holds is definitely different from before. It is a straight edge as opposed to the elaborate curve of a saber so advanced it may as well had been an ARM. He stands now at the foot of the deep, in the remains of the abominable thing that had been pulled to pieces by her blasphemed grenade moments ago, the hot steam of unimaginable gore surrounding him like the petals of a fetid orchid. His blue eyes search the bend of the junction, affixing to her.
She admits her disappointment.
"The fate of everyone who cannot please me," the Ra explains heartlessly. "They are destined to--!!"
His own heartbeat rings out of tune, and he realizes what has happened immediately, reaching back to find the small needle embedded in his neck. It takes only moments for him to realize when she threw it. ".... hmn," he remarks, sagging in his traces as if wilting. A creature with bat wings flaps ambiently near him, wing broken. As he staggers, he looks up and around himself, almost tripping over the thing. Around him -- he sees something. At every angle. At every case. With each travel of his glance, the collection of what he must see grows. "...."
"....bothersome."
He embeds the blade in the dog-like thing's head, and in a flash of the blade, severs its head, sending it sky-high. The head tumbles in a high, narrow arc, reaching its apex right in front of Cassidy's platform. In that spinning moment, it has bright blue eyes.
An instant later, Isiris spears it through the eye, in a rising thrust meant to go right through the platform and skewer the roguess through the hip, the destructiveness of his form inimiably Solarian, even if the blade is not of the peerless Etrenank manufacture of his old.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Geist Scything!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes 8 damage from Poison!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
DC: MISS! Cassidy Cain completely evades Sin Axiom from Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Flight and misdirection; in the end, words are still Cassidy's preferred weapons, and one so practiced with them would certainly have defenses for those, just as game in fencing verbally as she is dueling physically. He'd detect her laughter, more implied than outrightly heard, when the blonde trickster lands on the catwalk and stows away her gear. Glittering eyes find him across the way, they are nowhere as luminous as his, but the way she stands and looks at him, anyone with a heightened sense of perception would know that for as much as she reflects the colors of a sunlit glade, she is very much comfortable in the dark.
Something else too, present within the eyes; a glint that cuts just as sharply as her smiles.
"What are you trying tae tell me then, luv?" she murmurs. "That I satisfy you, or that I disappoint you? Ach, but those mixed signals again, when the first thing you told me was how pleased you are tae see me. Keep this up and you'll really shatter my wee, bloody heart."
She hurts. Somewhere in the black of her clothes, she bleeds, but the engines that keep her pushing forward run white-hot within the cage of her bones and that brilliant smile shears through the inky black once more, out of place in such a filthy arena. She turns towards the direction of the distant clanging at that, long legs and light steps sending her into the heart of Kislev's refuse-recycling machinery, large gears rolling against one another in a cacophonous clamor, liable to grind bones and bodies to bloody slush if one was not agile enough.
And yet, something moves after them. Something undeniably large splashes into the waters below, waiting for whoever is unfortunate enough to slip through the cracks.
She doesn't need to see him to know that he is following, and she does not hesitate.
She continues running towards the edge of the platform. Much like the way she lives her life, she doesn't look back, so quick to leave things behind, no matter how fast or slow her heart beats. And as he rises, suddenly, for even his speed seems supernatural, his blade finds naught but air when she leaps, throwing herself at the mercy of the rolling gears ahead of them.
She lands on a rotating platform, rolling underneath metallic teeth meant to crush. Hitching herself up with a firm grip, before the platform finishes its revolution, she's leaping for another. She is suddenly melting out of the shadows after yet another turn, her revolver up to aim.
Once she has him in her sights, she fires repeatedly.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Sewage Turbines.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Now Is The Hour!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra guards a hit from Cassidy Cain's Now Is The Hour for 81 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The blade heats up, as it shears through metal with acid force.
The blue eyed killer stops short when she leaps free, as if distracted, vexed. The form of attack is relentless, she would know. He is not stopping of his own choice, but for some other purpose, his blade dropping to his side as he alights on the platform, raising his free hand and fingers splaying outward to the grate beneath him, as to stabilize minute vibrations that only he can feel. His mouth is set in an annoyed line.
He is not a creature who readily engages in banter, and the schism between the two is not complicated to detect, if minute. He bears her no mind for quite some span. When he finally raises his head to look after her, following her wit and the only scent in the sewers that is not crushingly nauseating, he gives her his full attention. Like a dagger caressing the skin, he fixes her dancing form with rime-limned irises.
"It is simple, really," the agent remarks patiently.
"... need I explain the mechanics of failure to you?"
The schism is this: The man is truthful in what he says.
Even if the implication itself is endlessly cruel.
Reaching the end of the platform, the recycling turbine churns, her body disappearing amongst its gears. It is moments before a bullet grazes him. He raises that splayed hand, runes and lines crawling from the spaces between his fingernail, illuminating the sewer grime caked in them as the searing violet light lattices together, interlinking formulae sprouting full-fldged from it as her shot slams into the barrier, bullet torque draining away in the coruscating terror field, rendered into no more than impotent lumps of metal in front of him. He frowns.
"But I am kind. My forgiveness is never far away." he responds, before his form seems to shift irregularly, body flickering from one section to another, tension filling the huge space before finally the shadow of him flickers out of existence.
He shifts slowly down, amongst the killing gears. He hears the distant thing deep below, and steps along the fingers of crumpling wheels in slow, calm time. His movements are nowhere near the agility of length that his counterpart shows, so used to the dance that she knows nothing else. But his own are impossibly premeditated, supernaturally graceful. Even the slightest misstep will be enough for him to lose focus, to be crushed alive. But despite it, every step he makes is as if he were already attending her funeral. Such is the strength of 'memory.'
Motes of silver light crawl along his hand slowly, aligning like the lethal gears he walks amongst. He scans slowly. Even the faintest flash of goldspun hair amongst churning iron teeth is enough.
"You know what you must do."
He lifts his hand, and spears straight through iron and filth, an unstoppable white beam shearing out from its origin to impregnate her with the agonizing nightmares that can only be borne from staring overlong at the silver light of the moon.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has used his Tool Silver Ribbon toward his party's challenge, Sewage Turbines.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Demiselene!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes 5 damage from Poison!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Demiselene for 60 hit points!
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 20 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Broken Drone *>++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
A sewer maintainence drone sits by the side of the canal, powered down. The
reason for its shutdown state becomes apparent upon inspection--it sucked
something shiny and metallic into one of the cooling vents on its side. Can
you get it out? It might prove useful.
The sounds of your tinkering echo down the tunnel. Something green gleams in
the darkness.
+Dungeon Conditions: Secret+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
The annoyed expression on his features only brightens her smile, visible even from the distance she has planted between them. Through the painstaking grind of machinery above them, below them and surrounding them, she manages to maintain that carefree facade even as the hot rush of blood stains her clothing. She had worn black this evening for a reason, outside of her typical colors, but in choosing the ensemble, it provides her with the psychological balm that at least, this potently dangerous creature will not get to see her bleed.
At least, not yet.
Need I explain the mechanics of failure to you?
Cassidy laughs. She can't help it, tasting her amusement and the sudden shot of pure, unadulterated hatred that remark brings, because it reminds her of another shadow; tall, broad and perpetually waiting in the forbidden corners of her innermost thoughts. "Oh, ay. You might as well," she tells him. "At the rate you're going luv, you're liable tae keep me here all night and whatever verbal treatise on failure you have might be preferrable tae long awkward silences, or any stereotypical promises I would make about killing you. How do those go, do you remember? Should I shake my fist in the air and vow breathlessly that I'm going tae cut your heart out with a spoon? And tae think I only intended a verra quick..." And very destructive. "...visit. See the sights, get reacquainted with old friends. Yourself? Filleted anyone lately?"
But he mentions forgiveness and she smiles blithely at that. "Nae one tae forgive so easily, myself," she murmurs. "As someone I ken is so fond of telling me, I can hold a grudge. I dinnae ken how tae feel about this sudden revelation. You might actually be the better person between us."
Lashes tug lower, so much so that she almost looks sleepy, as if waking from a dream, or whatever fresh nightmare he intends to visit on her in a few moments. "How fast is your heart beating now, Ra?"
She sees the spell gleam into his fingers before he sends it arcing towards her, a single ripple of molten moonlight threatening to cleave her in half, or reduce her to ash. She doesn't know, but she does not stay to find out. She leaps again; the attack sears over flesh, and it burns with pain, but she is focused on a safe landing and she manages to find it. She slips past the mechanisms, on the lower platform, bouncing and tumbling on light feet before her trajectory rights herself up and sends her skidding lower.
She doesn't shoot him again. She doesn't aim. But he will find a split-second winking of another indicator light, of a grenade that she has wedged in the axles.
It explodes. Through the scream of grinding metal, gears lock and crash into another, moving to drop him, or crush him. It makes no difference to her, so long as he dies.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Blame It On My Youth!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
DC: MISS! Isiris Shango'Ra completely evades Blame It On My Youth from Cassidy Cain!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The Ether spear stabs through iron and filth to cut past the ambitious rogue. There is not a lot in the world capable of evading or eluding the beam of light he conjures, the respect a little like turning on a flashlight. One of his strongest penetrative magicks, the fact that it sears off of her is atypical for the killer's spells, the acid burn usually reserved for the abominable hands. Of course, this is a different time, a different place. There is no time for the production of a cognate, or the sacrifice of pawns to them. There is only the promise of death below, and a fate even fouler above.
He is not a creature particularly fastidious, and so navigating sludge-slick iron to cut into her is of no major consequence to him. Aside from the cuts on him from the grazes and trevails of bullets and explosions, his clothes are greyer and darker than ever from the accumulate of filth that clings to him like a funeral shroud. A blade which would shine in the dark is matte and filmy with the sort of things that people consign to the drain in a world governed by the sun.
The only thing governing here below is that splashing sound, and the promise of whatever remains.
"Do you imagine," the killer begins to suppose, "that you may be as amusing when you are helpless? When the world goes cold and dark, and there's nothing left but your own thoughts... I wonder if you would eat yourself alive?" He is navigating the gears quietly, forced to walk at a Wonderland's whim just to remain in his preferred place. She tries to hold conversation with him.
"I wonder," he continues, "if the dark does not frighten you, how you must feel about silence..."
The explosion is cacophonous. Gears slam and grind together as they come off their axles, torquing into great whirling scythes as the corpses of shattered mechanisms drop onto him, their shadow cutting off even the sepia green light that illuminates across his filthy coat, and leaving him in darkness. Only his eyes show, the faint light that only shows in the darkest corners of the world illuminating a cold, grim satisfaction.
Her arm where his spell landed will start to tingle.
The moment before Cassidy lands, the platform shifts, slamming her into a 180 degree spiral, her safe landing very much in question as the sewers shift and lurch around her, whirling her upside-down momentarily into a new stretch of pipe, where the gears of shattered mechanoids lay all about her, looking for all the while like dead bodies. One glimmers ominously, partially active, and pleading for release. The waters beneath her churn, the gentle flow only disturbed by the occaisional hand breaking the surface, reaching around and gripping for the edge frantically before being washed away. Other hands can be seen, just beneath the surface.
Most unnerving of all is the quiet.
There is no more gearwork, no more churning slosh of sludge. The mechanoid that begs for release emits no beep, no call. The silence is of the sort that rings in the ears, loud and painful. The ringing of it gets louder. It is a sharp absence of sound. Audibly sharp. Harsh. Chaotic, paralyzing. She cannot tell the direction from which the other, deeper, more unknown threat will come from anymore. Is it still here? Has it left? Or has she gone...
The idea of it distracts from the arrival of the killer, who surges in from the upper spaces, his blade poised to shear off her hand, and whatever weapon presents itself. He is trying to force her back, into the field of dead drones, or cut into her deeply enough that she joins them.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Broken Drone.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with A World Without!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes 4 damage from Poison!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A World Without for 74 hit points!
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 20 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Do you imagine that you may be as amusing when you are helpless?
A twitch lifts the left side of her mouth. "You got me," she tells him, lifting her chin. "One of my highest ambitions in life is tae end up as a verra entertaining corpse. I figured if I can manage tae pull that off that it'd be child's play tae be that, while helpless."
Really, it could be worse. The filth, the stench, how the waters are so full of questionable materials. In the thick of it, she is concerned with nothing but the fight; the air in the sewers could be the sweetest ever breathed with the difference it makes with her movements. But once she reaches her platform, it suddenly moves, and no mortal can react that quickly, recaliberate her brain to what is happening. She does manage to keep to her feet, however, ever light-footed. It tosses her to a new network of pipes, and she has no choice but to leap from her earlier plateau to land in a new one. Debris crunches under her feet, metal squeals against metal at her landing. She finds herself in the middle of a drone graveyard.
She swallows a curse, his later worlds pulsing in her brain, once again simmering in another sudden bullet of pure hatred at his words; too much about this reminds her of him and everything else that she has endured before she found herself on the surface. His quiet taunts about silence and the darkness, and how she supposedly doesn't fear it. Unconsciously, fingers ball at the side of her, triggered by the sudden wave of white-hot anger, embers burning at the back of her throat and the pit of her stomach.
Because it isn't like that. He couldn't be more wrong.
But she says nothing because at the moment, what she thinks, feels about it is immaterial. There is only the fight. There is only to live or to die. And if she doesn't gamble correctly, it can all end right here.
The thought of it rejuvenates her smile, a wicked slash of lips and teeth across her face.
She can't hear anything; maybe he has had enough of her prattling, and the thought of it lets loose a sudden laugh, muted by his spell. She knows that within the bounds of reality, it is as clear as crystal, as entertained as anything, but right now she thinks she cannot hear. "Ach," she says, a hand flattening against her stomach. She must be more injured than she thought, because it hurts to laugh. "You really are so verra scary."
But if she can't hear anything...
Her fingers roll out her lighter, flicking it to life. A single tongue of red-gold light pierces the darkness, and she sees his shadow move before the burning blue light in his eyes, the tip of his sword poised to take her head.
She leaps sideways. The blade cuts through black cloth, leaving bloodied streamers of it at his wake. Ripping a piece of it off, she soaks it in fluid and lights it, throwing the wad to the side and letting it burn. She has managed to stagger back enough that the winking bit of the drone catches her attention. She swipes it, and attempts to dig out the debris keeping it from functioning the way it should.
If successful, she presses the button, and hurls it forward, turning her head. If she manages to fix it, light suddenly explodes from its lenses aimed for the former Gebler agent. The gun spins out soon again after that, aimed for where the man's heart would be, and pulls the trigger.
DG: You use your Tool Pocket Lighter against your party's Challenge, Broken Drone!
DG: Cassidy Cain has used her Tool Pocket Lighter toward her party's challenge, Broken Drone.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Bye Bye Baby!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has passed this challenge! The party gained 20 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - The Bell *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Climax |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 2 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
The sound of a ringing bell echoes down the sewer, louder now than it's been
so far. If it's attached to something, then that something must be very
close, but tracking it down in the maze of corridors is going to be
difficult. On top of that, do you really want to find out what it is?
+Dungeon Conditions: Stupify++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
All is silent but for that winnowing sword. The Ra whirls, his body committing to the motion totally as his core and hands set onto the hilt of the heap-worthy blade, whirling into the scything motion meant to open the opposing rogue in a flash. His coat blooms into the attack, rippling soundlessly to offset the vicious hum of the mortal blade as he comes for her. The heat of battle and the water in the drains is enough that when Cassidy's revelation forces her to the side she is buffetted by hot, moist, foul winds to accompany the glint of eyes and steel that came much too close for comfort, the arc of crimson enough to hint at a fate much more terminal.
"What was that," he asks simply, coming around.
"I can't hear you..."
His voice is cut of the blackest honey, a deep and unnerved contrast to the foul air, and the painful song of the blade he wields, a reverberation that slowly builds in intensity as he pursues her, his blade scissoring air in lethal cuts.
If there is any external indication of her indignity, or the undercurrent in which he tramples, he doesn't outwardly appear to notice. To honest and whit, it may simply be that that is enough. There is something elemental and relentless in the way he pursues her, and the only thing he seems nascently aware of is exactly how much she hates him in that moment. He is instinctually aware of her anger, her hate, the suffering she endures with a bit in her mouth.
He cares about little else.
He cuts deeply after her, and with his stroke, leaves great rents in the iron beneath his feet, the ground's wound bubbles and boils up in black, partially submerging the dead humanoid drones. All around, where the black goes, veins of violet only a shade lighter than the absolute black pulse, fleshy lattices worming their way into the heads of the drones. The whole flood gives a fetid timer to her motions, her hurried movements backlit by his slow approach. Little more than a promise in the dark, he moves towards her with utter premeditation, the painful humming sound of that glimmering blade getting closer by the second.
One hand stabs out as the drone comes to life, bleaching out his form to white. His vicious grimace breaks the silence, and slowly, with one gunshot, the sound returns to the world.
The weight of sound is deafening at first, coalescing slow and painfully into virginal ears out of the peat of that vicious hum. THe pain of normalcy redoubles, making it almost easy to miss the way his body sags under the shot. The way his form seems to shiver and shift out of reality, blinking from the left to the right, out of time and out of step with his movements. He is still approaching. He is still slowly dragging that sword across the iron ground, slowly lifting it. Except in the interim of each step, he approaches the distance of four. Even when he stills, to fully lift the scythe, the nightmare spinner still blinks closer.
Lights spread to life all around Cassidy, even as the living drone hovers into the air, it labors under the fleshy tendrils infecting the others with the flood. Partially submerged, metal hands sprout from the blackwater, reaching for Cassidy, grasping for her.
As his blade swings, the entire tunnel is sheared, a horrific groan causing the slurry to flow. The river of the mind churns violently with his stroke. The entire path tilts on an axis, making each step a brutal climb. The grasping hands offer the only succor, offering to bring a swift end to the effort needed.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with Malediction Chaining!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Malediction Chaining for 54 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
I can't hear you.
Cassidy laughs. "You're a terrible liar. I'd say you oughtae stick tae what you're good at, but methinks that might hurt me more than amuse me."
A single gunshot rights what is wrong with her world, just as light flickers right next to her from the fluid-soaked wad she had stuck to the wall by virtue of the gunk and mess that perpetually coats it. The moment the world melts away in pure white, she's already moving, and it's that foresight that manages to save her when his blade swings for her once more, ripping more of her clothing and causing more blood to well, but she doesn't stop. She doesn't dare do too much of her acrobatics here; the walls are just as slick as the ground underneath him, and she is hurt too much to chance it.
The source of the light dies when the drone is shattered by a swing of his weapon, and like the relentless hunter that he is, Isiris moves, self-assured in his slow, deliberate pace. She has yet to draw her own sword, but unless she absolutely must, she has resolved not to do so - it is too telling of the things she doesn't want to come to light, things that have to remain in the shadows.
Her noisy footsteps tell him where she's headed, but she isn't bothering to hide it. But they are enough to mask the way more of her incendiary charges fall from her wake as she moves, and if anything, she wants him to follow her. The only problem is which direction. If she isn't careful, she, and he, could be stuck here, fighting it out until someone dies.
And then, she hears it. The distant sound of a bell.
I'll take it, she thinks, spinning around to rush for that direction, leaving her breadcrumbs and throwing herself further into the dark. Her lighter is out once more, flicking it to life, its wavering flame beckoning the eye as she attempts to move for a place where which she is more free to move. A place that plays to her advantages.
The ringing beckons. It could be her salvation, it could herald both of their destruction, but her smile widens and she can't help but laugh again, letting the sound echo in their dank, twisted surroundings as she surges forward. Her grapple gun is out, and she fires it towards the ceiling, letting it tug her upwards, and off the water just as her charges, set to dispense devastating arcs of electricity thrumming through black water, go off.
But it is in her nature to throw the dice, no matter what it could mean.
DG: Cassidy Cain has used her Tool Pocket Lighter toward her party's challenge, The Bell.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Now Is The Hour!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Now Is The Hour for 137 hit points!
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has failed this challenge! The party gained 10 exploration! If anyone needs to use party management commands, do so now. Otherwise, the next round's GM may begin the next round with +dungeon/draw.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
As the world tilts like a top that has started to lose momentum, she is already running.
The world evens out the further she runs from him, the tunnels smoothing out of their labyrinthine crumple and equilibrium restoring to the path. The nightmarish tilt of the world and the pressure on her chest eases, the sewers, as dark as they are, no longer seeming specifically out to murder the rogue. Even so, the cast of her lighter's light seems specifically to cast excesses of light in his direction, even long after it shouldn't, his shadowed form in the distance slowly stepping after her, his silhouette wrapping around tunnels in slow, stalking relief.
The fine hairs on the back of her neck, even buried in golden tresses as they are, can feel how close he is.
The area ahead of her lights up as electric thunderbolts leap across his form, branching arcs of the electricity seeping into his coat. At first, his blade, partially submerged, attracts the majority of the light, drawing his ice eyes to the submerged charges in annoyance. Then the number of branches redoubles, arcing across his fingers, and forcing him to take the knee. He snarls deeply, even the ugly sound seeming to resonate smoothly as he crumples, a net of electric force engulfing him, until he can feel it in the back of his eyes. For even the faintest of moments, she has peace to put the space between them, for moments free of the mind-cage.
Or is she?
That mark on her arm still tingles as she navigates.
It is an easy question to ask in the following minutes, of course, to question what direction the bell might be coming from. Is this tunnel not similar to the one that she saw only a moment or two ago? Left or right? It is easy for someone like her to stop, and just let him get a little closer. She teases, and she leads, toying with one of two edges of the blade. The closer he comes, the more what she sees will bend around on itself. The harder it will be to escape. The waters churn with promise as lithe forms pass, siren-like, beneath her. But with a Ra there, even dragons will bend to him.
By extension, would that mean they bend to her?
"Then. You like what it is I do to you, don't you.."
He whispers directly into her mind, before he comes.
The world drops out underneath them. The nightmare spinner cuts right through the iron of the wall to her side, a hissing acid sound curtaining from the side before the iron gives, an eyeblink's passage before the Ra bursts right through, the damned hum from his blade chittering staccato with his eruption. He will spear her right through and into the wall, which, the moment his blade finds purchase, her body will no longer feel any resistance. Iron will sluice around her like water. The stakes are high, because if she does not avoid his wallstroke, those hands will latch onto her beneath the surface, in the clearest black water one can imagine, thick not with the biological refuse of humans, but the ultimate depravity of their sin.
If she is tempted, even for a moment, he will drown her in her own sin.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Cassidy Cain with A Cruel Orisha!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, The Bell.
GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A Cruel Orisha for 92 hit points!
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - R E D R U M *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Final |Dungeon Ability: Combat |Challenge Rating: 3 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
Ring ring. Splash.
The beast of the sewer is on you at last. It's massive, and covered in
thick, red tendrils; its right arm is an enormous, skeletal claw-hand, and
its neck terminates in a fang-filled maw. It strikes with terrifying speed
and power, and spews more of that vile green ooze. It has no eyes, and no
way of communicating, but you know it is desperately hungry.
+Dungeon Conditions: Wound++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
And as usual, her mind's defenses are formidable, when she doesn't bat an eye at what is happening around her, too conditioned by her past to pay it any heed, though it isn't as if she is completely inured to it; her heart is racing and gooseflesh erupts on her skin, all the signs pointing to mistaken presumptions on his part regarding her relationship with darkness and the horrors that lurk within. It mingles with the ugly snarl she hears in the tunnel, the sound that lets her know that she has managed to hurt him, though she doubts that it would fell him for long. Still, she attempts to put distance between them, as much as she can. She is somewhat successful in the endeavor.
Somewhat.
The world spins around her and it becomes even more confusing when her legs leave the water just before dangerous electric current writhes through water like a dangerous serpent, seeking out all targets that could be lurking within - including herself. The effects fade away as her slender form arcs in the air and lands back on the water with a splash, the stench of it soaking into clothes and skin so thickly that she was certain she was going to need more than just a regular bath to get rid of it. Evergreen eyes flick left to right, but she continues moving in a straight line even as the world continues to spiral strangely around her, brows knitted in focus. She still hears the bell, ringing from a distance, and she uses it as a beacon to guide her forward.
Her arm burns strangely. It tends to every time it...
...wait.
Realization hits her with the force of a sledgehammer to the lungs just as the world warps again, when it feels as if the ground falls away underneath her feet and she's plummeting in the dark. She lands in a splash, everything around her engulfed in strangely clear black water, like liquefied obsidian, threatening to drown her...
It would be easy to, in these currents. Cassidy Cain has spent a lifetime accumulating many sins.
The water moves and she can smell him coming, from the ozone clinging to the folds of his gray coat, lingering traces of what she had done to him. She pulls herself from her position, and twists, moving fast in spite of her injuries, hands suddenly rising up from behind her and grabbing at her, only to come away with tatters of her black clothing. She meets the bladed edge of Isiris' sword seemingly head on. In fact, he would not be blamed if he believes that he has managed to spear through her, because he does cut through flesh.
Blood leaves her in a crimson slash. For a moment the length of his sword has pinned her into the wall - a deep cut, but nothing life threatening, pushing up through layers of skin and an inch or two of muscle...and through the mark that he had left on her person.
You like what it is that I do to you, don't you...?
Her head lifts, a single eye gleaming at him, burning with virid fire, the other buried under a pale gold tress. Her smile cuts like a knife.
"Dinnae ken, luv," she murmurs. "And you?" That visible eye narrows. "Do you feel real enough, yet?"
Brutally, savagely, she yanks her own arm away from the blade, swinging it. A fountain of her own blood sprays outward when she makes him finish cutting her, the wake of it thrown towards his eyes to hopefully blind him temporarily.
Her other arm comes up, fleet fingers reversing her grip on her revolver. Whipping it in a sharp arc, she attempts to crack it across his face. A leg lifts in rapid succession, to slam a boot into his solar plexus in an effort to send him away from her. Her functioning weapon hand returns the gun in a proper grip, finger on the trigger, firing a hail of bullets.
They are making too much noise. They've let too much blood, and that electrocution trick is clearly the last straw, because somewhere in the tunnel, the sewers' deadiest resident starts to emerge...
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Now Is The Hour!
GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Now Is The Hour for 120 hit points!
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Smouldering lines of black crawl from him as he pinions her to the wall by the bicep.
The black reaches for her, like a winnowing claw.
His force is rough, brutal as he pins her down, her heart racing with the excitement of the chase, even as the labyrinth of natures between them become more twisted. His stroke is not itself an act of killing, at least, not immediate. He moves to drown her in the wall, his blade driving her deeper into the depths. The sinned waters almost pour into her, as she grins. Line pressed tight with exertion, his coldly confident eyes are only inches from hers, bright and painful to look at. He is relaxed, as always. Anger is always a far thing from him, no matter how far the purchase of his imagery lands. If she were only to reflect for the barest moment, she would see the truth.
Do you feel real enough, yet?
His eyes wander, noticing that he has pierced through the mark his moonshot left on her. The revelation causes him to smile, cruelly. His lips are only a moment from her own, a cold invitation never to be realized.
"Are you asking if you've satisfied me, yet?"
Even now, the water slides around her, like the blocks to a tile puzzle. Hands that threaten to grip onto her throat flicker, growing further in distance by the eyeblink, and crawling out of iron to gain closer purchase. The imagery cripples in front of her, folding away, causing the crooks in the sewer path to straighten out. Layers of unreality peel away, revealing them to be at the precipice of a vertiginous drop, the fetid river emptying out into a lower access, marked along the edges with a network of access rungs and grates, forming more platforms.
He is blinded in a burst of blood, blue eyes hidden behind crimson as he is struck and thrown to the side. For a delirious moment, he is well acquainted with the particular scent her blood carries on the wind, a scent more powerful than anything else in the sewer. Being struck in the temple by a morning star of a pistol whip, the world seems to jump underneath him, crawling waves of hands creeping along the Ether killer's path, shadowy hands crawling from the soles of his boots in waves, and gripping onto the edge of the drop as if it were the only thing keeping them in this world. Nonsensical actions, absent his normal mastery, descend as he takes step away from her. Even blind and doubly drummed by her attack, his steps still align to some manual, some practiced guide. His blade drags across the ground as he leans back, breathing hard.
A hand goes to the Ether spinner's lips, clearing the blood from them, and tasting it. He runs his tongue across the line of his knuckles slyly, sampling the taste of iron, copper, sin and filth in equal measure. He can only open one eye, the opposite of her own.
"Aa. It is hard to tell who I am tasting," he admits.
"You've determined one of many secrets of my Nexus Hours Theory ability. Well. Even so.. I would never be satisfied by this much.... you know that, deep in your heart." Ragged and run to the limits of his strength, with explosions and bullets riddling him, the long chase has worn eager miles into him. He takes a step forward, slowly lifting his blade. The action seems to take much more deliberation than it did before.
"You know this, because we are -- "
The brief ringing of a bell reaches his ear, drawing his attention, just before an ear-splitting splash breaches the entirety of the sewer. Lunging from the deep of the drop beneath them, ooze sprays across Isiris. Mucus stretches into the tunnel, sticking to just about everything before stretching free. The Ether killer has just enough time to whip around, a look of deep annoyance cutting into his brow just before a skeletal hand that was very much not spawned by his own ability slams into him. It drives him into the iron, leaving a bloody imprint, before dragging him over the edge of the drop.
Where his body goes, it leaves a nightmarish streak of blood.
In the meantime, the ooze churns, blocking the pipe and slowly dragging everything caught in it over that precipice.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
Are you asking if you've satisfied me yet?
He leans in so close that all she sees are his eyes, the finer details of his face lost, luminescent, inhuman blue, as cold as northern glaciers. They are hypnotic enough to forget the pulsing throb of the blade wedged into her arm, skewering her against the wall - a hopelessly pinned fly in a spider's web. Pins and needles prick from underneath her skin, the pain downright indescribable at every twitch of those pale digits. Blood flows freely in red viscous fissures down her arm, visible now through shredded clothing, patches of darkness clawed, torn and ripped from her; an entire sleeve is missing, a chunk from her side, revealing the protection of a leather vest underneath, the side of one thigh.
Cassidy chuckles; pain suffocates the sound. "Nae," she tells him lowly. "I already ken the answer tae that."
Before she rips her arm away and reclaims enough of the distance she needs. It hurts to move it, her left weighed down by her heavy revolver. That combination of attacks unleashed, she is left breathing hard, but steady on her feet. Fingers twitch, in response to the overwhelming urge to dispense with the games. To stow away her projectiles and reach for the blade by her hip, no longer than a knife. But then again, he has seen it in action before - he, too, is privy to one of her secrets, discovered during battle, just as she has managed to discover one of his.
Her fingers tighten into the butt of her revolver to prevent herself from using it.
The way he tastes her blood, or his own, or a mixture of the two, has her smirking once. "Never did get a response from you when I asked you if you were a vampire in our first meeting," she tells him. "This is nae helping the joke, luv."
His Nexus Hours Theory. The blonde cants her head. "Was a lucky guess," she lies, as always one to downplay her own cleverness, nevermind that those who know her best, or have seen this side of her, are never fooled. But he tells her nothing that she doesn't already know, that he isn't satisfied. She knows, deep down, that he never will.
She told him in their first meeting that she is a perpetually hungry creature. The night has only confirmed that he is the same.
You know this, because we are...
Looking at him silently, with him half-blinded by blood, and one of her own eyes hidden by her hair, the expression she wears finishes the sentence for him.
Things move quickly, then. As the beast makes its presence known, the nightmare spinner grabbed and dragged into the depths by something - and honestly, the blood loss could be making her see things - a quiet 'tch' escapes her. Never one to leave something unfinished, going after Isiris is rendered impossible by the sight of what emerges on the other side of the pipe....and the sudden churning pull.
"Are you fookin' kidding me?!" She palms her face to the side, leaving a grubby print on her skin, having it within her to actually berate the thing that comes out of the sewers. "Really?! Now?! Where the fook were you while I was getting my arse kicked?!"
She has clearly tarried here long enough.
Pins removed, the clink-clink-clink of metal is drowned out by water, ripping their adhesive backs off and throwing them towards the beast in an attempt to wick them on its skin. Cassidy turns tail then, her one functioning arm using her grapple gun to fire upward, letting the gears and mechanisms pull her slender figure up and away, as fast as she can with what she has left, towards the precipice. This corridor is about to be engulfed in fire, and she does not want to be caught in it.
She is going to dive in, if she has to, in order to escape it.
But ugh, it's going to be so gross.
DG: Cassidy Cain has contributed a Combat Basic Action toward her party's challenge, R E D R U M.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The abomination -- very much real, very much flesh, blood and bone -- carts the body of the agent along with it, all pretenses of inhuman grace vacating the ragdoll form as it carts him away in a skeletal hand erupting from its back. Squirming tendrils churn through the blackwaters below, rilling venomously as it tracks the other tiny form whose vibrations stimulate the strips of rigid hair-like spines across the back of its neck. Its other claw, coated in knobby flesh, slams into the precipice after Cassidy, slowly worming its way up the wall, as if taking umbrage to her scolding.
Individual knobs of flesh secrete violently after Cassidy as she grapples away, reconstituted blackwater and mucus spraying out in thick ropy lines after the rogue, missed shots of ooze slamming into the grimy iron in thick piles of ooze. The weight of the lines sag, stretching membranous curtains of mucus after and head of her escape.
A mouthful of nothing but teeth and some vaguely hydrostatic organ lolling inside gnashes after Cassidy, as if threatening to make he the next meal.
It doesn't even notice the charges lobbed after it.
Explosions rip across the thing, methane pockets rippling across it, which is met with surprisingly little sound. The silence allows the roar of flame to cut across the ears more deeply than anything else in the corridor. The thing writhes under the flame, and splashes, water spraying across it at all angles. The firestorm flood-fills the corridor below, a competing and churning morass of smoke, flame and flesh rippling past far underneath Cassidy.
That is when a thousand mouths open, and finally begin to scream.
An arc of blacklight shears out from the waters beneath the creature, and the boiling flame above it bursts free in a tide of hundreds of shadowy hands, climbing the iron of the access, each spawning and replicating their own. Lights flash beneath Cassidy, flame, bone and sword dueling somewhere below in one great abominable soup. The hands cut from the stuff of nightmares reach high into the drop, farther and faster than anything else, far enough to snap impotently at Cassidy's heels. They grip at anything that makes itself available. Teeth, knobs, flesh, iron, bone. As the thing thrashes aflame, a huge, melting eye opens on it.
The eye is blue, and on fire.
Then slowly, with whatever they gain purchase on, thousands of hands begin to twist.
Even the iron of the pipe lurches, groaning beneath great pressure.
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra has used his Tool Eclipse Saver toward his party's challenge, R E D R U M.
DG: Cassidy Cain is too exhausted to continue!
DG: Isiris Shango'Ra is too exhausted to continue!
DG: You have overcome the dungeon's trials! This run is a success!
DG: The party led by Cassidy Cain has successfully explored Nortune Sewers!
<CARD>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* Nortune Sewers *>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++ <* CHALLENGE - Dead Drop *>++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|Type: Discovery |Dungeon Ability: Conclusion|Challenge Rating: 1 |
++++++++++ < Challenge Information: >++++++++++
Several bricks near a ladder poke out at strange angles, and if pushed,
reveal a small opening in the wall. Inside is a strongbox, small enough to
be carried out, and even smuggled into Kislev. What is it doing here? What's
inside?
You should send in a +request about this discovery!
+Dungeon Conditions: Treasure+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
As she swings away, the strangest sight manifests underneath her.
She isn't completely incapacitated; despite her injuries, the fight in her is endless, but now is the time to cut her losses and she swings away when the monster bears for her, teeth gritted in her desperate bid to get away far enough so as not to get caught up in the blast that she has set up. Sweat trickles from her temple as she flees, moving as fast as her battered body can allow in the sewers. Whatever happens now, the destruction must be complete - she is bleeding too much. She has noticed the thing has no eyes, meaning that its other senses are probably more acute. She knows the look of creatures that can scent a bleeding prey.
But something strange manifests below her. Eyes draw down, her pain-filled mind barely comprehending what she sees next, but what she recognizes as another nightmare come to life, the nine circles of Hell opening up at once to part underneath the monstrous creature bearing for her. The screams are deafening, so shrill that the resulting explosions barely mask it, shockwaves rippling out in a violent lash that rips the chord from which she is hanging.
In a heart-stopping moment, she finds nothing but air.
To her credit, Cassidy doesn't scream, pale-gold tresses and her disheveled state plummeting into the refuse waterfall waiting for her down below, a single, burning blue eye the last thing she sees before darkness envelopes her utterly.
...
The current takes her to the western parts of the labyrinthine sewers, her hair breaking out of the water and choking at the foul stench and taste of it, treading slickened waste until she finds a catwalk in which she could haul herself up. Nausea assails her senses, and while gifted with a strong stomach that can survive almost anything, she pauses to heave what had been forced into her throat by her fall, hiding the embarrassing display in the shadows as she coughs and hacks and gags her way to a clearer, less tainted windpipe. After a few minutes of wretching, she staggers to her feet, and fumbles for her lighter.
Her carton of cigarettes is ruined, now. With a disgusted chuff, she tosses it side, flicking the flint until a single tongue of flame illuminates her current path. Holding her bleeding arm close to her side, she shuffles forward.
In the darkness, she would have missed it. But with her single light, she finds the ladder, a hand reaching out to rest against it, stayed momentarily by a sudden coughing fit, spine bowing and leaning her weight in...
...and shifts it sideways.
The lockbox lies there in the hidden alcove once revealed. Emerald eyes veined with gold blink once.
"What the bloody hell?" she murmurs, extending her wounded arm to retrieve it.
Too tired, really, to wonder about its contents, she tucks it under her arm and makes her long-delayed traverse to the surface.
She doesn't look back.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Somewhere far away from that ascent, the creature smoulders.
It is somewhere still deep in the dark. Even after all the methane has burned away, the thing still exists as a titanic hulking mass of charred flesh. It is not bisected, vaporized or broken, and for all of the world looks like it was simply cooked where it lay. For those unprivileged few familiar with the abominable's biology, the primary difference is that it has been bodily twisted in half at its middle, the skin stretching in obscene ways to accomodate the stress. Here and there, tiger stripes of gashes can be seen where the charred skin finally broke, and pain was introduced to it in new and devastating ways.
"...."
Still hip-deep in sludge, a form rises from the foot of the corpse, lurching slowly as his coat, once grey, is now born black with soot and filth. Weak hands hold up a Kislevi blade, shattered and leaving no more than four inches of blunted, fractured steel left. A slow sigh rakes from him. Cheap, useless steel.
He discards it into the sludge.
'you haven't found her yet,' she reminds him.
"aa."
what will you do.
"...as always. the pilgrimage must continue."