2020-04-04: The Gang Watch A World Burn
- 'Log: The Gang Watch A World Burn
- Cast: Zed, Gwen Whitlock, Lily Keil, Ratatoskr, Ida Everstead-Rey, Hiro
- Where: Under Traffic
- Date: April 07, 2020
- Summary: At the bottom of the Billion Blade Barrow, the team found that their journey wasn't over just yet. Zed's trusty sword, Doom Bringer, stabbed everyone in the back when it decided to draw he and his friends into a world of memory, where nightmares are real and trauma is actively trying to hurt you.
Thrills! Violence! Atrocities on a planetary scale! An unexpectedly adorable twist before the ending!
Read and enjoy!
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
LAST TIME ON DREAM CHASERS
Where do you go when you have a cursed sword that you need to cleanse? Clearly not the local Granasian cathedral, as Zed found out. In search of something a little more powerful than a church bereft of its holy relic, Zed uncovered the location of an ancient tomb for legendary swords. But one does not simply walk into a ruin unaccompanied-- and so he sent out a message to those he hoped would be willing to brave near-certain danger on the behalf of a certain silly swordsman with a chronic heroic impulse.
To Zed's surprise and elation, his call did not go unanswered...
At the end of a subterrannean sojourn through a long-forgotten shrine, Zed and his companions found themselves at the mercy of a shadow-manifestation of the Sword Guardian itself. Through sheer grit and tenacity, and more than a little bit of teamwork, the party successfully completed the Guardian's final trial. But what was waiting for them when the lights finally winked out was not the panacaea they were searching for.
RIGHT NOW
Zed's cursed blade, consumed by Equites' shadow-avatar in the course of the battle, has been stripped of its protective seals. Its curse manifested in full, tearing a yawning hole in the fabric of space itself. The darkness swirls around it like water flooding into a drain, drawing you inward toward the event horizon. It looms larger with every moment as if being wedged wider by some unseen force... Or perhaps it's you who are shrinking, becoming so infinitesimally small as the void sucks you in...!
And then there's Zed, whose scarf is only briefly visible as a pair of orange streaks lit up by a flash of Hawking radiation as the Metal Demon leaps bodily into the yawning scar in reality.
Don't worry. You all join him soon enough.
It feels as though everything has gone... Grey. A fog devoid of color robs the world of even the barest hint of definition. All sensation is stripped away. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste-- everything is robbed of you, until all that's left is the vague notion of 'I' that is the root of all consciousness, and even that seems to be growing insubstantial...
And then, in an instant, it call comes flooding back. You snap back into the here-and-now, filled with the distinct sense of gravity pulling you down toward a featureless sea of colorless mist. But there-- rushing by the corner of your eye, a floating landmass, a shock of reality in the haze of confused space and time. There are more. Dozens. Hundreds. They drift together, interlocking like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle... But not quickly enough. If you don't pull yourself toward one of those islands, you might slip through the cracks and fall, tumbling, into the abyss...!
"This place--" Zed murmurs, whirling his scarf up toward his fellow friends, "--What's a place like this doing inside Doom Bringer...!? It's almost... Almost like some kind of... Are these... Its memories...?"
DG: Claude C. Kenny has left your party. DG: Hiro has left your party. DG: A party led by Zed is now entering Item World - Doom Bringer. DG: Party formation is now over. An Entry Challenge will now be drawn and displayed to the party.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
===================<* CHALLENGE - Let Us Cling Together *>====================
|Type: Entry |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
It begins with a lurching, gut-churning inversion. Gravity seems to come
undone as you are drawn inward, falling toward an expanding event horizon.
An orb of writhing murk has swallowed up the cursed sword, surging outward
in an all-consuming wave. Colorless fog fills your senses, as if you are
falling through a cloud. Light and shadow lose all meaning, heat and cold
are stripped of their definition, time itself seems to become confused...
And then, just like that, the haze tears away from your senses. You find
yourselves falling. Confused memories float like islands amid the
featureless expanse, brief flashes of color that break through the endless
grey. They're fractured and indistinct, but they are also the only semblance
of solid ground you can spot. Guide yourselves towards one of those floating
isles, else risk tumbling eternally through a meandering haze of fractured
memory.
=Dungeon Conditions: Fright===================================================
DG: Zed has used his Tool Grapple Scarf toward his party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
There is nothing. The barest hint of a Gwen.
A doll, drifting away.
It's remarkably peaceful here, that small part of Gwen thinks. It wouldn't be a bad way to go, really.
Another part of Gwen, both centuries old and years young at the same time, suddenly clutches at one of the pieces of land that ring around the spot where Zed is, that right hand latching onto a piece of land, fingers carving shallow rivets as the rest of her body drifts along. The courier hauls herself onto this mass and continues inward, towards the yellow scarf.
When Gwen gets close, the face that looks at Zed, for a moment, is physically hers, but the expression is not quite one that would usually be on Gwen's features. Something primal, a glint of pyrite yellow glowing behind those grey-blue eyes.
And then, like a rubber band, the rest of Gwen.... snaps back.
This might sabotage all of part!Gwen's efforts, however, as whole!Gwen includes the fact that she's trying to comprehend where the hell she is on top of falling into the void. It's a sort of 'walk and chew gum problem', except the 'chew gum' part has more to do with 'falling into a dark gash in the fabric of time-space-something', and less about a piece of tasty gum.
DG: Gwen Whitlock has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Lily answered, and now she listens to a different call through the hole in space, through the darkness wedging wider. She listens to it--and in what she finds, she does not leave. She steps towards it. "Malice, but not only..."
Lily looks a little blank as they all reappear. Her gold eyes open, and cast about the landmasses, then to Zed as he speaks. She answers, "There is emotion here. I sensed it. Regrets, among other things." She pauses. "Look to the sky, when you have the chance."
The moment sees her having to find an island, though. She cannot quite find the purchase up here to adjust gravity, so instead she puts out a hand. Fire happens. Lily shifts through the air closer to one of the islands coming up towards them. "...Right!" she answers. "Time to move, think when we're on something like the ground!"
She thinks about it though, and points another blast to take her closer to Gwen. "From what I sensed, memories seem like a good bet!"
DG: Lily Keil has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
There is an aberration in the void of sensory deprivation. It is not a sense being returned to be noted as an aberration, it is just a thing. A blip that can exist only within the moment, unable to be translated into memory of any measurable length. It is one of those things that just is, in the sense that it shouldn't. Not that it can't exist, but that it is strictly inadvisable even by the thorough vetting of seven year olds who just saw a cool and dangerous thing on television that they are intending to recreate at home.
The image of a crimson red something-or-another with splotches of glowy solid yellow blink, shimmer, twist, contort, fracture, and otherwise paint a lively picture and may even cause Lily's advice to look to the sky in a more humorous light. Then, moments later, discharges of energy that struggle to register on the visual spectrum surround a horned squirrel-like alien soldier who is clutching a molten-hot crystalline teleportation device. The hand that holds it is smoking backwards (somehow it is drawing in the smoke that it should be physically generating).
"...Huh." Ratatoskr free-falls as he once more flirts with the concept of introspection and consideration of the consequences of permanent irreversible dislocation in time, space, sense, and reason. He has the natural ability to glide, so when the call comes to start trying to drift towards an island...
"Over there? Over there!" He grins a bit wider. Those clawed fingers of his clutch a little more tightly at the teleportation thing and maybe someone should slap him on the wrist before he befriends a colossal worm or something.
DG: Ratatoskr has used his Tool Teleporter Fragment toward his party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Whatever Ida was expecting at the end of the trial, it was not this.
The martial artist stares at the... the hole that Doom Bringer has become, eyes wide with shock and horror. The rest of her body has gone completely rigid--her arms are raised to shield her face, as if she could protect herself with so simple a gesture. Zed strides forwards. "Zed?!" Ida cries. In her heart, she knows there is no stopping her friend once he's made up his mind, but she feels compelled to do so anyway. "What are you doing?! We have to--"
It's too late. Zed blurs and shifts and twists in ways that hurt her eyes--and then, he's gone. Ida grits her teeth. This is lunacy, she thinks--no, suicide. Both. Even then, as the rift expands, she feels she can do nothing else. "ZED!" Ida cries. She leaps forwards. Her body hits the event horizon. Reality turns itself inside-out.
- - -
First, there is mist. Ida feels sensation trickling back to her, slow and steady--something like fog in the air, and something like wind rushing past her face. The aura of her life-force burns hot around her, as if trying to drive off the deathly, soul-numbing chill of this place. It trails behind her like a comet's tail, an inner core of phantasmal flame surrounded by a golden-white gleam.
There is no true wind in this place, but something starts to move, regardless. Green motes of light join the glow around her as she summons up the wind, redirecting herself towards the others.
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has used her Tool Zephyr Boots toward her party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
Hiro's reflexive reaction is to stab his sword into the ground, reaching out to grab a shrieking Ruby in mid-flight. As if this curse were some physical thing that can be defeated. A gravity well whose pull could be resisted.
More fool him.
One moment he's here, and the next he's circling a drain in reality - watching the fading vestige of Zed's scarf. "Zed wa-!"
When he reappears again, he's clutching Ruby to his chest, in this monochrome grey, the two shivering a little.
"Ruby - you okay?"
"I'm scared now. I don't like this place."
The once pink now grey dragonet mumbles to him.
"Wanna know a secret?"
"Always do."
"I feel the same way."
For just a few moments in time, it brought him back to that most helpless, vulnerable moment in his life, and he felt that little crack in his courage too.
That seems to perk her up some. "Ha - well - guess I have to be brave for you."
"Really? I'd appreciate that." Hiro whispers back with a smile, as the two float.
"What would you do without me? Anyhow! You got a rope?"
Ruby takes a rope in her mouth, more cheerful, as she swims into the void with little grey wingsies, tugging Hiro along as she starts towards one of the island memories, and as she flaps by, he tries to drift out just enough to gather more people on the line and pull them along.
"All aboard the Ruby express!"
As Zed comments on Memory, and Lily follows up, he comments back, "A sword with a memory has to have a long story to it... it reminds me of the Sword Dancer a little..." He looks up, down, and all around. "But... this is different too. I can't make out any of those memories."
DG: Hiro has used his Tool Ruby Being Helpful toward his party's challenge, Let Us Cling Together.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
===================<* CHALLENGE - Let Us Cling Together *>====================
|Type: Entry |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
It begins with a lurching, gut-churning inversion. Gravity seems to come
undone as you are drawn inward, falling toward an expanding event horizon.
An orb of writhing murk has swallowed up the cursed sword, surging outward
in an all-consuming wave. Colorless fog fills your senses, as if you are
falling through a cloud. Light and shadow lose all meaning, heat and cold
are stripped of their definition, time itself seems to become confused...
And then, just like that, the haze tears away from your senses. You find
yourselves falling. Confused memories float like islands amid the
featureless expanse, brief flashes of color that break through the endless
grey. They're fractured and indistinct, but they are also the only semblance
of solid ground you can spot. Guide yourselves towards one of those floating
isles, else risk tumbling eternally through a meandering haze of fractured
memory.
=Dungeon Conditions: Fright===================================================
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
===================<* CHALLENGE - Let Us Cling Together *>====================
|Type: Entry |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
It begins with a lurching, gut-churning inversion. Gravity seems to come
undone as you are drawn inward, falling toward an expanding event horizon.
An orb of writhing murk has swallowed up the cursed sword, surging outward
in an all-consuming wave. Colorless fog fills your senses, as if you are
falling through a cloud. Light and shadow lose all meaning, heat and cold
are stripped of their definition, time itself seems to become confused...
And then, just like that, the haze tears away from your senses. You find
yourselves falling. Confused memories float like islands amid the
featureless expanse, brief flashes of color that break through the endless
grey. They're fractured and indistinct, but they are also the only semblance
of solid ground you can spot. Guide yourselves towards one of those floating
isles, else risk tumbling eternally through a meandering haze of fractured
memory.
=Dungeon Conditions: Fright===================================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 1 *>=================== =====================< Results - Let Us Cling Together >====================== Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Grapple Scarf 2 Agility Effects: Quicken ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Zephyr Boots 2 Agility Effects: Quicken ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 0 --(0)--> 0 Fail Rush 0 Agility Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Rush 0 Agility Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Teleporter Fragment 2 Agility Effects: Stalwart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Ruby Being Helpful 2 Agility Effects: Resilient ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 0 --(20)--> 20 Pass Conditions: Fright(2) Effects: Quicken(1)|Resilient(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: The party led by Zed 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. DG: Zed has drawn a new Challenge.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - Fleeting Triumph *>======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
And here I thought they were invincible, but if we could kill one...!
The beast's jaws yawn open, power gathering in its grotesque maw. You roar,
plunging your loyal blade deep into the baleful light-- and feel as its
deadly edge bites through its palate and up into its cruel and calculating
brain. Its vile blood comes rushing out in a vast stream, flash-boiling
instantaneously as it bursts into the burgeoning protostar. All at once, the
light flickers and flares, conducted into the monster's flesh by your fatal
blow. It convulses as if struck by lightning, then finally topples over
dead.
You stand, panting, atop its corpse. Its emerald hide slowly turns to ash,
corroded by its own vile energies. Your pulse quickens with hope and the
exhilaration of victory as, all around you, your allies go up in a terrific
cheer. One of the four generals, slain! There IS a way to kill them after
all! But-- their faces, you can't make out their faces. Who are these
people...? Can you even remember...?
Do they know how futile their hope truly is...?
=Dungeon Conditions: Save Point===============================================
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
Memories... Indeed, memories. They're funny things, memories. No matter how visceral they may feel, not matter how vividly they appear in the mind's eye, they are... Ultimately fleeting, immaterial things. We like to talk about our memories, to steep ourselves in the familiar and the comfortable-- but rarely are they truly relived. Little details always change, shifting over the long march of time.
Zed's topaz eyes flash in surprised uncertainty at the look in Gwen's eyes. What was that-- that burst of unfamiliar color? It passes in an instant, and Gwen is suddenly back to being... Gwen. "Hold on!" Zed calls, lassoing his scarf around her waist as her flailing nearly has her slip and fall into the rapidly closing crevasses of memory.
Lily senses emotion within this place. The sky, she says-- look toward the sky. Zed does, eyes flicking upward for the briefest of instants. Immediately, he recoils. An unfamiliar emotion surges through him-- and through anyone else who dares to look up. The stars are not as they should be, appearing as the fog clears overhead to reveal an endless, night's sky. The constellations are all wrong, all... unfamiliar. But more than that, their light is not a pleasant one. They are ominous, baleful, and even looking at them, making this place remember them, sends a bolt of fear and hate through the soul.
But Lily manages to draw close, pushed near by her fiery magics. She's joined by Ratatoskr, who spends... Perhaps a little too long being slingshotted around the world by that teleporter shard--
And for a terrible, instantaneous eternity, he feels himself scattered across a tapestry of sorrow and guilt, images of those he dearly loves being ripped away--
And then he is back again. Just in time to see Ida gliding in, channeling the wind-- or perhaps the idea of wind-- to draw closer in. She manages it, but there's a pulse of... something from her arm, like a gnawing anxiety...
But it's what Hiro brings that summons genuine distress onto Zed's face. A terribly grey Ruby approaches on monochrome wings. "No..." He murmurs, staring horrified at the little dragon, "Ruby... What happened to you...?
But they are all together, at least. All in one place. And they're all falling, together, toward an island of memory...
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
The ground approaches too quickly. The force of their landing stirs a cloud of dust and grit. It's hard to see...
A beam of light turns the dust to rivulets of molten ooze in an instant. Beads of glass rain down on parched earth. Even being in mere proximity of that lance of hateful light causes your skin to blister and boil. You grit your teeth as the beast roars, slamming a monstrous claw through the ruinous haze. Someone screams in a familiar voice-- they're pinned, lodged beneath the monster's hand. Power boils in its maw, no-- not again! You won't be too late ever again!
With a visceral scream, you leap, plunging your loyal sword up and into the protostar forming in the creature's jaws. H&**t*&g cuts through the flame, the heat scorches your hand, burns your arm, but you press through the pain and feel its corrupt flesh give way. With a surprised shudder, the light flickers, fades and dissolves. The beast convulses, strength leaving its limbs...
It lays there, bleeding and dying. Silence reigns... For only a moment, before the world erupts in cheers. Your friends wear expressions of relief and joy, the euphoric rush races through your veins. They can be killed, they can die! This changes... everything...!
this changes nothing
You feel the memory intruding onto your own. Conjuring memories of a similar situation, so long ago. But... It's wrong. So wrong. The faces are different. The people who you know were there... Aren't. Their features are blurry, faded things, a mixed mishmash of things you know and things you know you don't. Remember-- you have to remember. Separate the foreign and the familiar. Wake up and find your footing...!
((OOC Note: This card is conjuring memories of a triumphant moment in your characters' past, a moment when you were able to turn certain loss into hard-won victory... But this place is encroaching upon that memory, and the details are uncertain. Detail your memories, and in determining what should and shouldn't belong there, you can also create an outline of one of this person's compatriots...!))
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
The memory is terribly vivid; Lily recognizes the power boiling, can smell the way it burns even the air. Her hand scorches, and burns, as she recalls, and she remembers...
Yes, Lily remembers another time, burning. It was near the Kislev/Aveh border, on the Kislev side. She'd used a tree to conceal herself for the moment, but it wasn't quite enough. Alone, Lily was able to stop one of the men, but another overpowered her. Her rifle down, they struggled hand to hand, his more powerful form bringing a blade down straight towards her. He kicked her loose, knocked her backward. His blade came down, and she knew--that could be the end.
...But the face is different. The face is a woman's, and she is backlit, her features hard to make out but her jeweled helmet distinctive nevertheless. Grim-faced with a flash of green at her eyes, she drives down her blade for Lily's heart--No.
What happened next? No, the blade did not bite into her chest. Lily recalls; she lifted a hand to defend herself, and caught the sword even as it bit into her hand, stopping short against bone after easily passing through flesh. No... it wasn't only that; her hand burned, not simply hurt. It...
Ah, yes. It was after that. The man's face is right again, a fresh-faced Avehan boy just a little younger than her. Lily's hand, back then, had suddenly blazed; circuit-markings lit up around her arms, and her hand sailed straight for his heart. Burning, burning, a firebrand spilling over, and spill over she did. The flame overtaking her hand burned a hole straight through him, until she closed fingers around his heart with that awful smell all around her...
She had to push the body off of her where she fell, but of course Lily remembers, as she blinks and starts to look around. It was, after all, the first time she'd ever killed with her magic.
DG: Zed has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph.
DG: Lily Keil has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
Roughly, like a stone wedged out of the earth, a weird fragment of a memory(?) emerges(?).
It is a soldier. It is a thief. It is another soldier, with a different uniform. It is a nomad. It is a soldier. It is a warrior. It is a mercenary.
A line of faces, so indistinct that they lack features, blurring together. Whatever their memories were, who they were, what they strove for, how they met their end...
It changes nothing. It was never important. The fossil held no wants nor cares.
What was important was the beating life force that was within, the wearer drawing out more and more power and the fossil sipping at those veins, replenishing what stores it could not generate on its own.
And then, it is a girl. It had a heart. It had dreams. It made a heart. It yearned for a sky, even if it never knew what a sky was, until then. It saw dragons, and it yearned, even if it never could yearn.
It is she.
She was Gwen.
And then she was stabbed through by a blue-eyed assassin and died. And then she was stabbed through by Janus and died. And then she was stabbed through by Janus and died. And then she fell off a train and died. And then she died after the surgery. And the Frea attached the Mockingbird, but Gwen died during the surgery. And then she met Frea, but her heart gave out before Frea could attach the Mockingbird. And then Gwen never met Frea, and collapsed one day, her heart having given out. And then Gwen succumbed to her burns. And then a man in a tattered coat never saved Gwen from that burning house.
A man in a tattered cloak, charred and blackened, a sad smile.
Wasn't there others?
` Who is she?
Who is Gwen, again?
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
When Ratatoskr appears, there is a stillness in his body language that is entirely unlike him. None of the errant twitches. His grin has narrowed closer to a smile than has ever been seen prior. The solid yellow of his eyes is a duller, dimmer hue. His arms are crossed, and he is standing upright - a posture he commonly uses when sizing up people he feels like fighting, making use of his full natural height that towers over the vast majority of the people of the two worlds.
There's an aspect about him that feels more physically detached than he's ever been, compared to the seeming surface level of loosened emotional grasp he has of the tolls of war and battle. Others are around him, as he is around others. For eyes that are a solid color, some quality of a distant gaze could be apt.
They won... they won... the thought repeats, battered from a desperate melee by those who stand closer than appears logical for the end result of their efforts. The world shudders under the dying throes of the beast heard and felt but not seen. Was it the cheers? Was it the encroaching red in the sky?
He was overjoyed... and then met with something he did not understand what he was feeling. Something that went beyond the logical grasp of what their victory would have entailed. The fall of...
...Mother.
Several approached. Weary, but not winded. One grabbed... me? Me? Up by one arm. The other, by a shoulder... I didn't have?
It is over. Will you stay like you planned? The red in the sky draws near. The hope and joy was discordant under the red. They paid the setting unknowable indomitable destructive force no heed, facing him with one hopeful query. Will you leave it behind? Will you be willing to forget them?
Ratatoskr's tail stands on end, segmented metal plates flaring out like it has decided that today it is a cactus. That red, that descended upon the Photosphere after Mother fell...
...I stood, alive. I saw history today. I kept today. I walked slowly towards tomorrow, a cursed traitor given only gratitude of the presen--
Ratatoskr did not walk away slowly from the red terror. He ran like hell. He ran like hell, his aimlessness further distorted by the road of memories.
DG: Ratatoskr has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph. DG: Gwen Whitlock has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida twists in mid-air, angling downwards towards that spot of solid ground. She can see the others ahead--blurs of color and feeling and life in this vast, seething abyss. She squints into the wind, craning her neck back so she can see if anyone's following her--
The sight of that alien sky hurts her eyes, and her heart. A tide of rage and gut-churning fear washes through her mind, followed by nameless dread. Her right hand clenches into a claw, the fingers locking into place. A frisson of deep anxiety settles into the back of her brain, a finishing note to the cocktail of awful emotions. But at last she can make the others out. They're falling together, towards that pool of memory. "Don't lose sight of each other!" Ida screams, above the roaring wind. The ground rushes up to meet them.
Ida slams into the dirt shoulder-first, and skids. She trails a cloud of dust and smoke; something strange and fetid clings to them, and to her. Ida lies there in the dirt, watching mutely as visions flash before her eyes. They're not...
...hers?
* * *
The Decaying Labyrinth is somehow even more grotesque in the light of memory. The air is thick and stale, and it reeks of a thousand different kinds of putrescence. The structure itself is positively cyclopean in size--the walls loom large, and the rifts in the floor feel like canyons. Ida and the others make their way towards the light, bearing with them a ring. Whatever it is, it's the source of the taint in this place, and only the touch of the sun will rid Filgaia of its curse. The others...
Who were the others?
A woman with claws? Yes. Yes, that has to be one of them. Everything beyond that is blurry. There's a tall woman, military, with a face that never healed. Another is a man with an infectious laugh and a--
None of that matters. What matters is that each time Ida looked away, one of them was gone. Each time she turned her back, one of them was simply lost, or holding back some slavering monstrosity with all their strength. The ring's miasma hangs over Ida's body. They plead with her to keep going. Run, they beg of her. The Statue must be sealed. When the last one is gone, Ida keeps running, desperation driving her. She can't let this be in vain. She sees light up ahead, and runs towards it, even as the ring's necrotic energies sap her strength. She can do nothing else. They must be
S T O P P E D
The light hits her face. Her legs give way, and she collapses at long last--despite all her training, her body can run no more. She lies there, in the dirt, and the light of an alien sun plays off the silver filigree on her skin. She knows the symbols intimately, but she cannot recognize a single one of them. Neither does she recognize the uniform. A monk's outfit? Civilian clothes? Her hands are studded with steel, as if bearing thousands of metal callouses. One of them holds a thin sliver of crystal, pure and bright.
No. It's--it's the multitool. It's what Kalve gave her, her Kalve, her beloved. But who...
who was that again?
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has used her Tool ARMS Meister's Field Kit toward her party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - Fleeting Triumph *>======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
And here I thought they were invincible, but if we could kill one...!
The beast's jaws yawn open, power gathering in its grotesque maw. You roar,
plunging your loyal blade deep into the baleful light-- and feel as its
deadly edge bites through its palate and up into its cruel and calculating
brain. Its vile blood comes rushing out in a vast stream, flash-boiling
instantaneously as it bursts into the burgeoning protostar. All at once, the
light flickers and flares, conducted into the monster's flesh by your fatal
blow. It convulses as if struck by lightning, then finally topples over
dead.
You stand, panting, atop its corpse. Its emerald hide slowly turns to ash,
corroded by its own vile energies. Your pulse quickens with hope and the
exhilaration of victory as, all around you, your allies go up in a terrific
cheer. One of the four generals, slain! There IS a way to kill them after
all! But-- their faces, you can't make out their faces. Who are these
people...? Can you even remember...?
Do they know how futile their hope truly is...?
=Dungeon Conditions: Save Point===============================================
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
"Don't worry about it! This isn't the first place I've been to that's like this! Let's just worry about getting out of here!"
As the island is reached, Hiro tries to touch down in a roll and-
The Armored Figure spits, as his split open chest fires a beam at a Regal figure. A woman stands in his way.
The beam pierces her. And not long after in a fit of rage - a dark spear pierces him - and he falls too.
A Knight rises and wings of flame set the sky aflame. There is time enough to cry out before it all turns to ash.
A monster stakes his claim upon a world. A blast of malevolent flame hurtles his way. And something in him begins to-
Wriggling on the bayonet of a seasoned drifter. the man sneers as he cocks the gun. He can't miss. His finger squeezes the trigger.
A strange thought occurs. Did it really happen this way?
His sword reaches through the Blue Warrior's chest, sliding through so far that his arm reaches in as well. The figure he hated so much crumples.
And as it does - it flickers into a knight and a a monster and an outlaw.
He can't remember it at all. He had the thought of writing it down to tell it to someone some day - that's all he knows.
Such an unusual thought - that perhaps - not a single one of those fights were won. The triumph was found in survival.
DG: Hiro has used his Tool Grandpa Gwyn's Notebook toward his party's challenge, Fleeting Triumph.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - Fleeting Triumph *>======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
And here I thought they were invincible, but if we could kill one...!
The beast's jaws yawn open, power gathering in its grotesque maw. You roar,
plunging your loyal blade deep into the baleful light-- and feel as its
deadly edge bites through its palate and up into its cruel and calculating
brain. Its vile blood comes rushing out in a vast stream, flash-boiling
instantaneously as it bursts into the burgeoning protostar. All at once, the
light flickers and flares, conducted into the monster's flesh by your fatal
blow. It convulses as if struck by lightning, then finally topples over
dead.
You stand, panting, atop its corpse. Its emerald hide slowly turns to ash,
corroded by its own vile energies. Your pulse quickens with hope and the
exhilaration of victory as, all around you, your allies go up in a terrific
cheer. One of the four generals, slain! There IS a way to kill them after
all! But-- their faces, you can't make out their faces. Who are these
people...? Can you even remember...?
Do they know how futile their hope truly is...?
=Dungeon Conditions: Save Point===============================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 2 *>=================== ========================< Results - Fleeting Triumph >======================== Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 0 --(0)--> 0 Fail Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass ARMS Meister's Field Kit 2 Wits Effects: Enlighten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 0 --(0)--> 0 Fail Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 0 --(0)--> 0 Pass Grandpa Gwyn's Notebook 2 Wits Effects: Enlighten ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 20 --(20)--> 40 Pass Conditions: Fright(1)|Save Point(1) Effects: Enlighten(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: The party led by Zed 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> Zed has posed.
How long has it been? It feels like it was a lifetime ago. The fear is visceral, unmistakable, unforgettable. The rage left embers that continue to smolder, even now. Emotion burns bright, a star more brilliant even than the sun. The sun. The sun is what grants power to worlds, and his heart in that moment was stronger even than that.
He remembers. He walks along the trail of memories leading up to that singular, fateful instant. And yet-- and yet-- why can't he make out the shapes? Why can't he recognize the faces? He should remember. He should know... The one who was always there when he needed a shoulder to support him.
The one who finally understood him, who he found brotherhood with.
The one who was way over her head, but who he watched rise to the challenge time and time again.
The one who first made him jealous of something besides strength.
But... But the faces are indistinct. Why can't he remember-- why can't he remember. He struggles to focus, mind and soul wandering through the maze of memory. The sky cracked, the world set ablaze. He remembers running through the streets, desperate with fear... No-- he was the pursuer. The monster stalking the alleyways and ravaging the carnival square. He remembers-- he remembers the fall of that fortress, clutching hatred and rage in his heart as the stones collapse all around him--
No.
No, he was one of them. One of the monsters sieging the walls.
He remembers... Why? Why was he always just going along with the flow? Why didn't he stand on his own two feet? He was scared. So scared. Scared of being rejected, of being alone... Until--
Ah.
There.
An anchor. A face that he could never forget. A grimacing, grinning hateful face. A monster that tried to crush the warmth and kindness out of his heart, to replace it with calloud fury and brutal power, only to find that a different kind of strength ran through his quicksilver veins. How could he ever have hoped to forget that face!? How could he ever forget... That moment, when finally anger overpowered fear.
H13*t0#g's edge lodges in the horror's spine. With a singular roar, he pushes through. He carves through chitin and bone and heaven only knows what else. The creature spasms and screams in a gurgling, alien noise. His heart beats, hammering out a frantic rhythm. Her name is on his lips as he breaks into a run, where is she-- where is she--
Turn the corner. No, don't! Don't look! Your heart is breaking, it's breaking, the walls are painted silver.
No! That's not right. That hasn't happened. His lips pull into a snarl, clinging to that face, that face. Damn you. Damn you! He will never let that face fade from his memory! Not when it represents everything in the world that he hates! Not when it helped him define so much of what he is by trying to be what it was not. But is it enough-- is it enough? He lost something too, didn't he. The guilt, what did he feel so guilty for...?
Was it... The streets... That ran red with blood?
Yes.
The betrayal, the knife in the back, the look on his friend's face.
Yes.
And then, at the very end...
The one who he could not save... Whose greatest sin was loving his mother too much.
Yes.
Zed takes a breath... He remembers that moment. It would never absolve him of his guilt, but it was the moment where he finally decided to live for himself. To strive to embody the strength that he so envied. To become more than a monster-- to become a traitor twice over, to realize that the only side he could have ever take was the one that didn't make his heart ache!
He remembers the moment he took his sword and stabbed it into that hateful face...
...And the one he hy,couldn't save...)
...And the one where his heart shattered like glass.
No.
That last one... Wasn't his. Who... Whose pain was this...?
Zed's eyes open. The world fades through the roiling fog. Suddenly, he realizes he has a voice again. "Everyone-- Is everyone alright? Where are we...?"
He doesn't realize yet, but the others have been awake for a while, having pulled themselves from the memory several minutes ago. It was only he who remained trapped... He... And Ratatoskr.
+Dungeon/draw
DG: Zed has drawn a new Challenge.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - Bathed In Blood *>=======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Brute |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
We'll be together, always...!
The blasted earth runs silver with blood under smoldering skies. Every
footfall treads upon the corpse of another friend, another comrade, another
beloved companion. Dead. All dead. All because you were not strong enough.
Because you were not there to protect them. They are dead and gone, and you
are here and you are alone.
But you must carry on.
Even when every step is heavier than the next. Even though the future seems
to grow darker by the moment. Even when the blood of the fallen binds your
limbs and chokes your lungs, you must still carry on.
Such is your penance.
=Dungeon Conditions: Weaken===================================================
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
What he wakes to... Is nothing short of nauseating. This island of memory-- it's covered in bodies. Corpses stacked one on top of another cover the landscape. Zed staggers back-- and nearly trips over a body whose skin still carries those familiar patterns. He catches himself, shaking the lingering cobwebs out of his head. In this place, memory is as physical as the ground underfoot-- but memories can be twisted, contorted. They can flow in a terrible cascade, linked by chains of emotion... Connected, for instance, by guilt and rage.
"...All this..." Zed murmurs as he takes a step forward-- he winces as something goes *crunch* underfoot. A body, broken, leaks silvery fluid. Zed doesn't make the connection, not immediately. "Doom Bringer... What have you been carrying with you, all this time? What... What is this...?" He can only keep walking forward, unable to bring himself to look down, but unable to stop himself.
What he sees seizes around his heart. He remembers-- that one. She was there in Adlehyde. One of the people at the festival-- she gave him a caramel apple. His first. She died when the demons arrived. He winces and looks away, only to find another face he knows--
Too well.
Too well.
Siegfried is there, eyes staring blankly into the sky, empty and bereft of the hope and ambition and pain that always burned in his gaze. He could have lived. He should have lived. If he was faster-- if he wasn't so tired, after all that happened in the belly of the Photosphere...
Again, he looks away. He has to. Everything about this place is telling him that he can't remain here. He can't let himself get lost in the guilt and the memories. It's hard, it's so hard--
Yaro.
Zed wipes his eyes dry. Why is all this happening now--? Why does he have to remember the hurt, the pain? Zed clutches at his heart as if to push back the pain...
...No. He has to remember, doesn't he? That's why-- that's why he carries that memento with him. The weight of Berserk's very own flail is always there to remind him of those days, of all that went wrong... All that he could have made right...
To forget what you've lost is to lose it all forever, isn't it? But still, to move on, to keep walking even while the weight of all that blood drags you into the corpse-bog where you belong is... Exhausting.
But they have to keep going.
They have to.
DG: Zed has used his Tool Berserk Hammer toward his party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Lily does not speak this time, of the faces that go through her memory. She does not identify any of the many people she has left behind. She does not name Jann, or Roanie, or Greta, or any of them, as she sees. As she walks through blood.
She does not name the fresh-faced Avehan boy whose heart cooked in her hand.
She does not name the Crimson Wolf whose body disintegrated under the onslaught of her magic. She doesn't name the forms she saw dragged away from battles, though she remembers their faces and sees them.
Some Lily cannot name. But all she doesn't. Se walks through the corpse-bog and the blood in near-silence, as she hears Zed's question. What...?
"Guilt. Self-loathing. Regret. ...Bringing doom means..."
"You're there with it, too."
She does not name Gryndille, her enemy-child. And she does not name her own innocence, long gone.
"But they're just phantoms. None of this is real. ...I should destroy all of it. Show this place that we won't be bound by less than ghosts."
She thinks about it. She does. She pulls a metal plate, looks over its writing. Equations, constants... a perfect reference for destruction. How much of this could she do away with? Would it all burn the same way bodies do? Would it smell of them?
Stopping, Lily looks out at everyone... and shakes her head. "...No. If any of us don't know what that's like... I won't be the one to change it."
Lily just trudges forward, and puts away the plate.
She does not name the owner of a bookstore in Adlehyde. She does not name an Al Bhed who left the salvage ships for Operation Mi'ihen.
DG: Lily Keil has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
Hiro lurches upright, holding onto Ruby, who cries out, "Gah! Why was I thinking about that!?" Hiro pants for a moment, breathing quickly, then tries to slow it down as he concentrates on his breathing, as he trudges onward.
And nearly running into a woman. Her karate gi dark, covering her head. There's no life in her eyes. And he swears he can see a tuft of green hair.
Rubbing his hand over his eyes, he takes a deep breath.
It's not real.
... and looks again. A man lies facedown in the mud not far from there. Such that he can't see his features at all - and yet he swears he can see his fist clenched around something precious. And he gets the feeling he knows what it is.
It's not real.
Another woman nearby, blonde hair matted until she might as well be a brunette in death.
It's not real.
Another blue haired woman with eyes wide open. Her body still smoldering in blue flame, consuming it unto purplish smoke.
He can hear Lily confirming it's not real. But he just stands still.
You're a child - who can't make hard choices.
It's not that it doesn't occur to him that she's right. It's just that the possibility that this could happen is so horrible. That he can do nothing but stand still.
And try as he might - he feels like he can't hold back the inevitable where he falls to pieces on the spot.
-=-=-
Ruby meanwhile is staring upon her own field of headstones that are all faded to the point where one can barely read the words. Much less the year they died.
Does it matter though? All she can hear is a sad careworn chuckle, and hears a whisper in her ear.
Told you.
DG: Hiro has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
Ratatoskr, thanks to blending muddy past historical fiction(?) with present situation scarce notices when the quality of the ground - or some plane of consensus where matter does not pass willy-nilly through it - until he loses his footing, fails to catch himself with an arm he has and always had, and finds himself face down with... who is this? This is someone Ratatoskr knows for sure he's never met, as he rises from crimson-stained snow.
Crimson, the color the young of his people were trained to recognize as desirable, a sign of success. Crimson, the color of the lifeblood of the humans that were spilled. Blood he never got to spill. Blood that his kin, left, right, front, and back, were all braying for in pursuit of their Mother. All lumped into one whole - walking bags of softer flesh filled with red. Nothing about the individuals.
They had names and combat designations. Ratatoskr, Rapid Attacker. What of the ones they fought? He wanted to know their names. Their designations.
He never met this one.
The face is uncomfortably clear for something in which there is no context. So blood-stained and charred the armor, he cannot identify what they were.
The environs shift incredulously with every step. To the Drifters he never got to meet who set foot into the Photosphere - he never got the name of the guy whose speed-loading technique he was fascinated by. He doesn't know that he's even alive, but he can recognize the blur of colors as how he looked from a certain angle.
Ratatoskr, down on all fours, finds himself frantically trying to turn bodies over. He has put in more research in his short years than some scholars do their entire lives - a byproduct of hyper-efficient, no-wasted-time training regimens and daily schedules among the Metal Demons of Mother. Your function, your means, that's everything you need to care about.
It's not real.
"They existed!!" Ratatoskr exclaims, in defiance of what common sense he is is trying to tell him. They did exist! He was too late to meet them. Too late to fight them. It can't be too late to remember them... and yet, a spiraling wave of faces of gruesome fates continue to build, as he digs into memory. Frantic. Manic. He wants to know who they were!
But there is no longer a 'they' there, is there?
DG: Ratatoskr has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
"Yeah, I think... this place is having some weird effects on us." Understatement of the year from Super Detective Gwen Whitlock. "We woke up here. Just been waiting for you to wake up."
In the distance, as they move on, Gwen already has a sense of what she'll see.
It's Janus. Of course it's Janus. But it's Janus without the sneering smile, the glint in his eyes, the sense that he's just about to poison you for the chance at a precious bounty, or stab you through with a bayonet, because you dared to protect a friend.
Because he's dead.
He looks peaceful, an expression that could only exist on his face because Gwen's mind is forcing it to be.
There are others. People Gwen has grown up with, faces not familar to others here. Children. A woman of stunning beauty, with long wavy hair like fields of grain spilling over the corpses.
And there is Frea. Pale-faced, sleeping.
Frea is alive and well, in reality. But it in this space, it's the eventuality of her death than finally bares its fangs.
Like Hiro, Gwen struggles to hold her wits about her, tears stumbling down her red, freckled cheers. "... I was supposed to die first, not you." She was supposed to die. She wasn't going to have to deal with anyone else dying before her. That was the gift, of dying young. There was no need to think about a future, or what you wanted to do. Tomorrow could be your last day, while everyone else would still be able to move on.
But she's the one who's alive.
Gwen's fingers touch the fabric over her mechanical, thrumming heart.
"... If anyone has any trouble moving, hold onto me." Her eyes look towards Hiro and Ruby, and the familiar faces beyond them in the corpses around them. To Lily. Ratatoskr. To all the others. "All you can do is keep going. To linger on them is to give them pain." Her gaze is suddenly impossibly calm, the turquoise earrings swinging as she turns, and manually shoves away a path for people to move forward. The blue-eyed boy's warping on her psyche was a thing that existed in its own vaccum of morality, and in this space... it was a mercy. "Let them sleep. It's not a place for us."
She will bring mercy, to this field of death.
"They existed. We exist. We will keep going."
DG: Gwen Whitlock has used her Tool ARM-ored Fist toward her party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida drags herself out of the morass of alien memories, inch by inch. Layna was there. Talise. Rosaline. Good friends of hers, all of whom lived to see another day--people who are still waiting her, in the world beyond this abyss. She opens her eyes, blinking blearily as the world returns around her. The first thing she notices is the pain in her right hand. She looks down, unfolds her fingers from the small metal object clenched within them. The blade of the multitool bit into her palm, drawing rivulets of crimson and quicksilver. "Lily?" she whispers. "Hiro? Ruby? Gwen?" She picks herself up, rolls her shoulders, and tries to breathe. It doesn't help.
Ida takes a step, and the ground gives way ever-so-slightly. The coppery scent of blood wafts upwards.
Ida recoils in horror. Brother Mathius lies on the ground before her, a hole clean through his chest--a hole that Ida put there with her bare hand. His Etone's uniform is drenched with blood, and tendrils of Malevolence boil off his body, dissipating into the air. Ida's foot rests on his thigh. He was the first person that Ida killed. He wasn't the last.
"Granas!" Ida cries. As if He could help you.
The gory tableau spreads outwards from where Ida stands--more bodies, many friend, some foe. The three bandits who took Gwen hostage in the ruins of Lost July. More bandits, these ones Lunarians who'd been kidnapping innocents and selling them to a Hellion. That same Hellion, a nightmarish pastiche of human and insectile features. Two bodies lie on either side of him, dripping red. One wears a bloodied Etone's uniform, and clutches the stock of a shotgun. The other still holds an Arctican blade in a death-grip.
'Doom Bringer...'
Ida looks across the field, at Zed. "We have... we have to keep going." The others can see the grief and terror and guilt in her eyes. Many of these wounds are still fresh and raw.
Ida steps forwards. She wades through the dead, stepping over a body with a massive claymore strapped to its back and blood-matted hair. She passes a mass of ruined iron, fused into an unrecognizable lump by unthinkable heat. A green ribbon, splattered with blood, rests atop it. The one constant is the color crimson, and even that begins to change as the anxiety wells up in her. Three broken bodies in the uniforms issued to Photosphere neonates a thousand years ago. The ruined carcass of a Metal Dragon, Dragonslayer bolts still protruding from its chest. A blonde man wearing an eerily pristine coat, even though the rest of his corpse is a burned ruin. A young elven woman, lying face-down before a pile of spilled Crest Graphs--her neck bitten open by vicious fangs. A big man lying next to her, half-covering her--as if he'd tried to shield her with his body in their final moments.
Ida walks onwards. Blood stains her boots, coating them in crimson and quicksilver. She steps over the bodies of men and women in old Hyadean uniforms--clothing she recognizes from the digs, with the same logo she saw on Blackrock Island. The sigil of the Ash Legion. "Gwen," Ida whispers, "can you--" Her voice breaks. "Carry me." She sags forwards, her strength failing her. The resonance of this place has struck a chord with something deep within her, something she herself cannot name. She cannot keep treading on the dead, even though he put them there, and for what, for lies.
Ida makes the mistake of looking down again. A pair of bodies lie before her, twisted together in a pool of silver. Kalve's body is covered with burns; his ARMs lie around him, broken. Next to him lies a broad-shouldered blonde woman, gripping a rod of fused metal that was once a spear.
"This isn't real," Ida whispers.
But that doesn't matter. They're still dead. They're dead because you killed them.
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Bathed In Blood.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - Bathed In Blood *>=======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Brute |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
We'll be together, always...!
The blasted earth runs silver with blood under smoldering skies. Every
footfall treads upon the corpse of another friend, another comrade, another
beloved companion. Dead. All dead. All because you were not strong enough.
Because you were not there to protect them. They are dead and gone, and you
are here and you are alone.
But you must carry on.
Even when every step is heavier than the next. Even though the future seems
to grow darker by the moment. Even when the blood of the fallen binds your
limbs and chokes your lungs, you must still carry on.
Such is your penance.
=Dungeon Conditions: Weaken===================================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 3 *>=================== ========================< Results - Bathed In Blood >========================= Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 0 --(10)--> 10 Pass Berserk Hammer 3 Brute Effects: Strengthen and Sacrif ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 0 --(15)--> 15 Fail Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 0 --(10)--> 10 Pass ARM-ored Fist 2 Brute Effects: Strengthen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 0 --(10)--> 10 Pass Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 0 --(10)--> 10 Pass Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 0 --(10)--> 10 Pass Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 40 --(20)--> 60 Pass Conditions: Weaken(2) Effects: Strengthen(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: The party led by Zed 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> Zed has posed.
Bringing doom means... You're there with it, too.
Zed is tellingly silent at Lily's answer. No matter how much sense it makes, no matter how truthfully it rings in his ears... Is this his fault? All this time together, and he never realized... But a sword is made to fight with, isn't it? Then why does it carry all this guilt?
What would a sword feel guilty for...?
"They're... Not real?" Zed asks over his shoulder, even as he takes another step over another body-- a knight of Arctica, who fought so bravely against a force he knew he could never hope to defeat. "It's real enough, though, isn't it? It's... All of us, in one way or another, brought these bodies here ourselves. So we had to be carrying them with us, right?"
"But..." The Metal Demon smiles, even as he's trying to fight back the tears. "Thanks. Not for me, but... For them."
For Hiro, who just can't take another step. For Gwen, whose heart is bigger than he could have ever dreamed. For Ratatoskr, who wishes so badly that he could just be a <good demon> but who doesn't realize what that really means.
Zed takes in a breath. The scent of the blood and the gore is familiar to him. Too familiar. How long have his hands been stained?
...Someone needs him.
He finds himself looking into another familiar face. He hasn't seen her in a while, has he? Maybe he should go back and visit St. Centour soon. But first...
He sees other faces in the mounds. Other people he knows-- people he knows aren't dead. People whose deaths would destroy someone he cares for. This place, this malice, the wounds it's opening... Why? What is it trying to do, making them suffer this way?
Hiro... Needs a hug. Badly.
And so he gets one.
"You care about them a lot, don't you...? You know, I was jealous of that. You and me, we were both strangers on Filgaia, but you... Had those friends of yours. I didn't know what it was at the time, but... I wanted to be part of that, too. But they're still alive, you still have them. This fear is real too, but... There are things stronger than fear."
"They existed," he echoes to Ratatoskr as he shifts to help walk Hiro forward, step by step through the corpseyard. "They did, but there are more people... There are more out there, Ratatoskr. People who you haven't met yet. Who you can still talk to, who you can learn about. Everything here... This is a place for the dead, and the ones we fear might die, I think... You won't learn anything here."
'This isn't real,' Ida whispers.
But it has to be. For someone, it has to be. Or it wouldn't be here, would it...?
But who... Who was carrying a world full of corpses in their memories...?
+dungeon/draw
DG: Zed has drawn a new Challenge.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - The Burning Sky *>=======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Someday, when all this is over, let's go down to the cafe just like old
times...
It begins with the sound of shattering glass. Fire falls from the sky like
rain. The old thoroughfares are all ablaze before the monsters even begin
their descent. The only thing on your mind is escape-- to find safety, as
all of the world seems to come apart around you. You find someone's hand
clasped in your own, their face is familiar and comforting. Someone you
recognize, but you can't remember, you can't--
It doesn't matter. You need to escape. Above and beyond everything else, you
must break through this living hell and find shelter before all is lost.
High above the city, a red balloon drifts into bloodstained clouds.
=Dungeon Conditions: Vault====================================================
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
Gwen made her offer, and when Ida asks, the courier obliges.
When Ida falls forward, it's into Gwen's arms, which sag gently with the full weight of Ida's body, a soft look of worry breaking the courier's calm face. "Of course I will."
Hefting Ida up carefully, some part of the courier seems to regain her footing, now that it'd been given something else to focus on. "Hold on tight, Ida. We're moving ahead."
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
The field of corpses gives way to a place that is at once familiar and foreign. Idyllic cottages are set up along a flagstone thoroughfare in the shadow of a mighty castle. A cozy tavern advertises its daily specials on a cheerfully decorated sign. The cheerful sounds of a festive carnival rises in the distance...
...Spires rise into an unfamiliar sky. Passages of light and metal hang overhead like gossamer webs. Strange vehicles sail through the air between towers of glass and steel...
A single red balloon drifts toward the clouds...
And in that instant, when eyes turn to the skies, do the heavens turn to fire.
It happens quickly. Too quickly. Meteoroids fall, burn, disappear, and then blossom open. Flechettes filled with nightmarish monsters fall into the streets. A tower erupts in a blossoming fireball and topples into its neighbour. Chaos. Everything is chaos. Your pulse pounds against the inside of your skull. Someone grabs your hand-- their face is a blur you want to remember but you can't they were important why can't you remember--
It doesn't matter. You need to run. You need to escape. You grab her hand, you turn and you run. That was the first day. The day everything went wrong. It was the beginning of the end.
In an instant, the sky burns. Adlehyde. It's Adlehyde all over again. Zed stands in stunned silence as fire pours down in a deluge. People rush by, desperate to escape. But... This is wrong. He was there when Adlehyde burned, but he certainly wasn't running. The familiar pang in his heart is an undeniable reminder. But one thing's for certain, if they're in the streets, then...
A nearby house explodes as a familiar silhouette tears through the rubble. Zed's blood runs cold, but not nearly as cold as when something else leaps out after it. It's... It shouldn't be there. It shouldn't be. It's a hole punched through the world. A skittering, twitching shadow as if the graphics engine running the universe-simulation had suffered a critical fault. Reality stutters and jerks in its presence. Without mercy, it leaps and drives its blade through the monster's heart.
"Run," Zed whispers as the Wrong Shadow rises, quicksilver dripping from its sword. "Run!" Zed screams, hurling his scarf around his nearest friend as the shadow turns its gaze upon them.
Not just from the fire raining from the sky. Not just from the swarm of demons falling upon the streets in forms both familiar and foreign. Run... From that thing. Run, before it catches you. Run, as the memory burns and dissolves in its wake with every step it takes...!
DG: Zed has used his Tool Grapple Scarf toward his party's challenge, The Burning Sky.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
It surprises Lily how calm Gwen is. She looks Gwen over, thoughtfully, before she resumes her own path. Lily expects some of them to be better at handling this than others; Ratatoskr and his memories, Hiro standing still...
But with everyone walking forward, so does Lily. She doesn't lean on the others here. She makes a path.
And once there, with cottages, a cozy tavern... The sky remains unfamiliar, and yet--There is the fire. Lily sees it once again; it is not the first time. She remembers, though--remembers someone...
Lily sees a hole punched through the world, and her ability to do it does not render her immune from such a thing's touch. She books it at Zed's word, blasting through demons falling on the street in the way, ruined buildings from flames...
It is one more way to make it different from the memory. Maybe that's why.
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
Hiro stands still.
And then suddenly, he receives a hug. It's surprising enough that it startles him out of dwelling on his thoughts. He knows its not real. And yet that doesn't matter at all. As Zed hugs him, he puts his arm around him, and shudders. Simply nodding once to the idea he cares, his eyes welling up with droplets of water, but he manages to force it back.
"I had no idea you felt that way." He says, taking a deep breath, "Sorry that I didn't." It's a frequent thing for him, isn't it? Him having no idea how someone he cares about is feeling. "But..."
Hiro looks over his shoulder as Zed carries him away. Taking one last look at a smoldering Lucia. And as his gaze sweeps the battlefield, he sees countless more he's sure he knows...
... how tunnel visioned can a guy get? It's embarrassing.
"... you've got nothing to be jealous about."
Hiro says as he allows a faint smile and looks back, continuing to allow himself to be led.
"After all. We're all here for you."
As he walks by Gwen. He reaches out and taps the shoulder of her metal ARM as she carries Ida. "Coming." He says, as if he were following her, looking up to Ida as well after a moment. Though he then corrects himself apologetically, as if he were apologizing for his sudden inaction. "Well - Zed had to come get me."
Ruby flies back after a while - she needed a minute, and she does not want to talk about it.
Yet then - spires rise, a single red balloon drifts towards the clouds.
And suddenly - a precious gray pawsie makes contact with his hand.
And five fingers curl into his palm, squeezing tightly. He doesn't know who she is. Though she's familiar - that feeling. A childhood friend? A little sister? She's looking at him the same way, like she doesn't know who he is either.
He looks up on high, and the world starts to fall down around him. She gasps, and suddenly he's pulling her forward.
Right now they run, hand in hand. Each inspiring the other to run faster. Because... it's not for their own life they must run for. If they wish the other to see the next dawn - then run they must.
And if anyone strays off - well, two sets of eyes can catch someone familiar to them better than one...
... and reach out a hand to them.
DG: Hiro has used his Tool Ruby Being Helpful toward his party's challenge, The Burning Sky.
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
Ratatoskr is among the last to be able to leave the field of the dead, because he doesn't want to. The grin the sharp-toothed Hyadean remnant gives isn't a particularly friendly one as Gwen discusses how lingering on them is to give them pain. "You'd want for them to be forgotten? You'd want for them to be forgotten!" It's accusatory, angry. Livid. It takes words from his (much) older brother(-ish? Hyadean lineages get weird in the age of Mother and their abominable genetic tinkering) to get him to, if not calm down, cease verbal escalation. He can't learn anything here.
Everything is too soiled. Too damaged. No left-over weapons or spent ammunition, no scraps of the Crest Sorcery symbols he always enjoys seeing, or anything of the sort. Just death, and the eternally silent. It is difficult for him to want to look away.
As if not held by memories that exist, but the memories he wants but has yet to create. He does not like what he sees next so much - the quiet, idyllic countryside of a place that would sting at the hearts of so many of the gathered.
It says a lot about how the Metal Demons treated this place that, at first, he simply does not recognize what he's looking at despite the cues. Adlehyde has changed so much. He never got to see it before the event. So little about the specifics of the place were said after the fact. It's only when the sky goes to fire that he catches something of a hint, standing erect with the tail twitching inquisitively.
"...Is that a--" Committing the entirety of Ratatoskr's question to written word is a waste. Most the gathered here already knew. Fire. Metal Beasts. Someone he recognizes takes him out of his daze of surprise by grabbing his hand. He starts to speak, but can't find the words - as if he's forgotten how they should be addressed. Wait, who is this?
Why are we leaving? He thinks to ask moments before he can see the Wrong Shadow. His will fractures. He is seeing a Metal Demon conquest, and a part of him wants to see proof - anything, anything at all! - that it was not as one-sided a battle as it truly was. And yet, the deeply-set primal fear in any living creature's core existence cannot think anything else as reality collapses around something that shoudn't be there, as Zed yells to run.
He feels he is being pulled in two opposing directions even as the one with his hand seems intent to be dragging him away. Someone of much smaller height, slight of build, who shouldn't have the strength to pull him.
Someone else remembers being pulled forward this way. Who?
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida is heavier than she looks. Nevertheless, she's grateful--and it shows in her eyes when she meets Gwen's gaze. "Thank you," she whispers. Her face is bloodied and tear-stained, but she manages a smile nevertheless.
The field of corpses gives way to a very familiar street. Ida eases herself out of Gwen's arms, setting bloodied boots on the flagstones of Adlehyde. Her heart hammers against her ribs. Dread grips her heart. "Adlehyde," she whispers. "But not... not just Adlehyde." The spires are unlike anything she's ever seen. The closest reference she has are the old fantastical renditions of Zeboim buildings. "Was this..." Ida looks at Zed. He wouldn't know, she realizes, a moment later.
The sky cracks open, just as Ida knew it would. Memories flash through her mind, rapid-fire--she clenches her fists, digging fingernails into the gouge in her hand in hopes it will help. "I suspected," she whispers. "Cecilia knew. And yet--neither of us could--could--"
Ida starts to run. She feels someone familiar behind her, but when she turns to look, she can't see their face. Is it Father? Mother? Edward or Sylvie? Kalve? Someone else entirely? Her teeth clench as a familiar silhouette punches clean through a building. She saw that person die. She broke his neck. What she isn't prepared for is the thing that follows. Ida stares a moment, even as its presence burns her eyes, and makes the space between them ache.
And then she runs, the wind at her back.
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has used her Tool Zephyr Boots toward her party's challenge, The Burning Sky. DG: Ratatoskr has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward his party's challenge, The Burning Sky. DG: Lily Keil has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, The Burning Sky.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
A hand taps at Gwen's shoulder. She turns, and seeing Hiro and Ruby, lets out a warm grin. ".... We're pretty lucky, eh? To have a swell guy like that keeping an eye out for us."
That smile disappears when Gwen looks at Ratatoskr, and lets out a nervous laugh. "N-no, I didn't mean that-"
A red balloon flies into the sky, against the stone streets of Adlehyde City.
There's a voice, clear as a bell, sharp as a cactus spine.
"He's dealing with all this his own way." It's a smaller, shorter, younger, grumpier looking Gwen, dressed in something that could be seen as a sort of home-spun medical gown, reaching out her right hand towards the taller courier.
The younger girl's right hand, as the left arm is conspicuously absent, the sleeve pinned to the shoulder to keep from fluttering around conspicuously. Her feet are bare, the callused soles padding on the stones. Her eyes-
They're the same blue-grey as Gwen's, but possess an intensity no average human being should have. That same stare, that looked at Zed earlier, when they first fell in.
A right hand claspes Gwen's own. "This way. Or do you want to die?" The eyes focus, strangely, towards Ida next. "... You're coming too. You're not dying here."
DG: Gwen Whitlock has contributed a Agility Basic Action toward her party's challenge, The Burning Sky.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - The Burning Sky *>=======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Someday, when all this is over, let's go down to the cafe just like old
times...
It begins with the sound of shattering glass. Fire falls from the sky like
rain. The old thoroughfares are all ablaze before the monsters even begin
their descent. The only thing on your mind is escape-- to find safety, as
all of the world seems to come apart around you. You find someone's hand
clasped in your own, their face is familiar and comforting. Someone you
recognize, but you can't remember, you can't--
It doesn't matter. You need to escape. Above and beyond everything else, you
must break through this living hell and find shelter before all is lost.
High above the city, a red balloon drifts into bloodstained clouds.
=Dungeon Conditions: Vault====================================================
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
======================<* CHALLENGE - The Burning Sky *>=======================
|Type: Exploration |Dungeon Ability: Agility |Challenge Rating: 2 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Someday, when all this is over, let's go down to the cafe just like old
times...
It begins with the sound of shattering glass. Fire falls from the sky like
rain. The old thoroughfares are all ablaze before the monsters even begin
their descent. The only thing on your mind is escape-- to find safety, as
all of the world seems to come apart around you. You find someone's hand
clasped in your own, their face is familiar and comforting. Someone you
recognize, but you can't remember, you can't--
It doesn't matter. You need to escape. Above and beyond everything else, you
must break through this living hell and find shelter before all is lost.
High above the city, a red balloon drifts into bloodstained clouds.
=Dungeon Conditions: Vault====================================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 4 *>=================== ========================< Results - The Burning Sky >========================= Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 10 --(0)--> 10 Pass Grapple Scarf 2 Agility Effects: Quicken ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 15 --(0)--> 15 Pass Zephyr Boots 2 Agility Effects: Quicken ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 10 --(5)--> 15 Fail Rush 0 Agility Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 10 --(5)--> 15 Fail Rush 0 Agility Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 10 --(0)--> 10 Pass Rush 0 Agility Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 10 --(0)--> 10 Pass Ruby Being Helpful 2 Agility Effects: Resilient ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 60 --(30)--> 90 Pass Conditions: Vault(1)|Weaken(1) Effects: Quicken(1)|Resilient(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: The party led by Zed has passed this challenge! The party gained 30 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> Zed has posed.
Hiro answers, and Zed smiles. It's something warm, genuine and tired, something bereft of the usual bombast and showmanship. A real smile. "Hah, don't worry about that. That's why we have words, right? To tell people things that they might not know, and to remind them of the things they do, and a lot of other things."
He and Gwen double-team poor, uncharacteristically caring Zed, "G-guys, you're going to make me tear up again-- nyahahaha~"
Laughter seems so... Alien to this place. There's so much suffering here, so much guilt and sorrow. Memories... Are not supposed to be like this. There's no warmth except when it's about to be lost-- there's no victory that isn't soon turned to ash.
And it all began here. Right here. Where the fire falls from the heavens. Where so many memories connect and intersect. A tower groans as it topples onto the thoroughfare, shattering a dozen pathways in its collapse. They are fortunate only that it had done so at their backs. But the demons still come. Lily tears a path through the flames, paving it with the broken bodies of the invaders, but it makes her into a target, too. The monsters come for her--
--H21*t#$g cuts cleanly through the beast. Alien flesh falls apart at its touch. You try to forget what you saw when its armor fell away. You try to forget that its face looked more similar to your own than different.
--But she tears them apart regardless. Onward they run, faster than the avalanche of carnage can follow. Maybe some more willingly than others. But Ratatoskr runs, too. Maybe not of his own volition, but--
The tower that had fallen behind them explodes. A towering figure cloaked in azure strides out from the wreckage. Its gaze turns as it raises what could be a lance, or a great sword, and fires...
Gwen sees it coming. That awful, inverted light. She sees it coming, but not for her--
--it happens too quickly to react. One moment, she's there. The next, half of her is gone. Torn asunder at the most basic level, her eyes are so scared as she looks to you for help, but you have none to give. All you can do is cry her name and hold her close as silver blood drains away, and the life leaves her face--
Someone is there. Someone with far too much experience dealing with things like this. Zed snarls as he interposes Berserk's familiar steel ball between the courier and the cascade of light, "Gwen! Go! I've got this--"
He does.
For the half second that there is something to get.
The azure figure shudders as something that shouldn't be there pierces its heart. Its helm crumples, collapsing inward, imploding into the shade of wrongness piercing its core. Zed pushes her ahead, then turns to intercept the monster at their heels.
He's struck dumb, the battlecry dies in his throat, as the shade runs past him...
+Dungeon/draw
DG: Zed has drawn a new Challenge.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
=======================<* CHALLENGE - Final Fantasy *>========================
|Type: Climax |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Children. My good children. Come to my embrace. I shall render unto you the
paradise you are owed...
Half-formed nightmares and aborted dream twist by in a hurricane of torments
and memories. Finally, the haze clears and you open your weary eyes to
see... her. The monster. The demon-mother whose grotesque flesh has grown
bloated and vile with unnatural growth. Who gorged herself first on the
lifeblood of the world, then upon her own children, who had exulted in their
mothers' victory.
Hate boils in your blood. Anger throbs in your veins. Your vision grows
sharp and clear, your limbs ache with barely restrained power. You can do
this. You can end this monster here and now. Destroy her here! Destroy her
NOW! With a roar, you charge forward, thrilling in the raw, primal joy of
battle. H__n__ng dances in your hands, her keen edge singing through the air
as you dive for the heart of the beast that took everything from you, your
wrath demands it. Your wrath can accept nothing less! Cut open her belly!
Tear out her beating heart and feed it to the dying world! Rage! Rage until
it is DONE!
But--
No, this is wrong, isn't it? It didn't happen like this. You're seeing
someone else. Somewhen else. This isn't right. Pull back. Pull back...!
Or suffer as I have...!
=Dungeon Conditions: Reckless, Madness========================================
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
The ruined city falls away, burnt to cinders by the passage of the unright figure and the unceasing deluge of fire. As powerful memories so often do when recalled, the beginning so rapidly transitions to the end. Like a bolt of lightning splitting the sky, you sail through a slideshow of halfway-intimate images and alien vistas. You find yourselves swept along a lifetime of hope and struggle and heartbreak and complete and utter defeat. But in the instant before context dissolves completely, you see... Her.
She is a loathsome and intensely familiar sight for all who have ever seen her. A monster wearing a beautiful mask, a facade of porcelein chitin overlaying a grotesquely bloated body. Her hideous core has burst the seams of its angelic charade, her ossious exoskeleton linked by thick cables of red and black sinew and viscous mucous. A golden halo shines like the sun around a crown of horns, as a disgusting thorax drags across the fetid earth, supported by an army of skittering limbs.
It is the Mother. It can only be her, resplendant and bloated with the essence of a dead world.
It was her, the Demon Mother. The ancient parasite. The last of her 'children' are pinned beneath her claws, their forms squirming and writhing as their lifeblood is drained up and into the monster called Mother. All around her, your home, turned to ash. The land splits as the world withers, crust splitting like the skin of a dried prune, split by chasms of glowing magma as the last dregs of life bleed from its broken husk.
But.
You are still here.
How long have you walked the world, watching with an empty gaze as it shriveled and died? Too long. Far too long. But now, you are here and you can finish this.
Charge forth! Scream your rage! Spit your fury at the hateful sky and the parasite that devoured all you loved! H__n__ng is featherlight in your hands, your anger and battle-lust burn in your blood. This is what you have waited for, what you have searched for all these years! It is for THIS reason that you have turned yourself into the weapon that you are! To kill Her!
If you could not save Hyades then you will at least avenge it!
But-- This is wrong. This is wrong. As the Demon Mother takes notice of your presence, as her grotesque form unfolds into ever more nightmarish horrors, as she fills the sky with fire born from the lifeblood of your fallen world, as her body blazes with hateful light...!
This is wrong-- This is NOT how it happened. This is NOT Filgaia. This is not the heart of the Photosphere, though it looms large on the horizon. This is not your moment of triumph. How did it happen, again? What were you doing, that day? It was not this-- it could not be this.
Remember. Remember before you are swept away. Remember, before you are ravaged by the Demon Mother's fatal mercy!
Look
DG: Zed has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Another battle is all too easy to imagine; on the heels of wrecking a path through, Lily turns, and stares at the Demon Mother present. At first she simply lifts her hands to begin to fight; an enemy is an enemy, and enemies must be destroyed. But--Wait--
As Lily throws a bolt of raw darkness, she recognizes that she does not know this world, that this is not how it looked. No--she was not there for the earliest parts of the battle regardless, was elsewhere...
...Was coming from far away.
Lily jumps back, and in the mindscape already she is changing; words in an ancient language spill from her mouth, but it is a tongue that was never spoken on this other world.
Lily Keil rises, prismatic-winged, hovering over the battlefield, rising and rising until--
Yes. Yes, she remembers... And as she takes hold of a strange pendant from the old ruin Rujm el-Hiri, never once here, a blue sphere erupts from her. Reality fractures within the dream, Lily herself visible as if ten women all in one position, each taking different motions, limbs whirling.
Golem Sado crashes up from nothingness into existence once again, the Elw monstrosity recoiling its roar against its ancestral foe. Darkness surges from it as Lily channels her magic straight into the terrible weapon, and this is how Lily knows that she was not present, because there is a price that must be paid...
And it is not here.
DG: Lily Keil has used her Tool Impure Pendant toward her party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
The city dissolves. Fingers leave his palm, and there's only the featherlight touch of a precious grey pawsie leaving contact with his hand.
Hiro and Ruby catch their breath. "You okay Ruby?" "Y-Yeah...!" They still don't know what they were running from. Just that it was horrible.
And then above they see something just as horrible, perhaps even moreso. Mother.
Even the mere sight of her causes him to draw his sword in an instinct. To Annihilate her - as vengeance for the world that she ruined.
"YOU-!"
He lurches forward, suddenly feeling that anger he felt when he faced that Knight again.
And skids to a stop.
In the Name of the Blue Star - I will see you banished!
Wait this isn't right. Where's...
I am a World Eater, little princess! I scavenge the stars and nebulae, while your ephemeral kind hides in rock and metal until I drink the marrow from your bones!"
... Where's Lucia?
Hiro's eyes blink, and he rubs them with a hand, as if trying to wake up for something - and then eyes Gwen sidelong.
Gwen was fighting for her beautiful... flawed world. Where is that world now?
This is when he realizes they're not on the Blue Star.
Where... are... we?
Hiro remembers fighting alongside many of them Ida was there too for example - but there too much missing. The Shepherd isn't here - in the first time they were able to put aside their differences and fight together. Ragnell isn't here. Fei isn't here... even those who were there - aren't here in the same way.
We won this right?
He has the feeling - remembers, that he wrote this down, their victory, make sure the tale was known back on his world.
DG: Hiro has used his Tool Grandpa Gwyn's Notebook toward his party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
The end of everything. Today, this moment, the final, bloody end. Ratatoskr feels himself stalk along the scorched, spent star. No breeze of wind would bear witness. Even the lights of the night sky were as silent. An overwhelming, sickening feeling the likes of which he is simply not equipped to process. The Metal Demons were, by their (re)design, meant to be extensions of Mother's will - extra pairs of hands to do her bidding in preparing for that grand feast. He closed in fast, faster than the use of just two legs as he kept his well-worn blade at his side. A snarl of boiling emotion for those he could no longer save. Those in Mother's grasp are lost. After today, he could be the last survivor of this very star - a pyrrhic victory at best.
The blade is raised... and there is a reflection that does not show the solid yellow of his eyes, and Ratatoskr seizes up. Why is he holding this sword? It's not--
Mother does not question what is before them, as the form unfolds into something ever more terrible. A form that dwarfs even the horror of the skies themselves, its atmosphere slowly burning away.
Ratatoskr backs away as sound and sight go swirly, his footing coming shy of having him tumble into an open fissure with gushing magma. Compressed air stored within said leg expands and bursts out the opening within his foot, along with a steady trickle of Hyadean blood. Questions fill Ratatoskr's mind that he can't put words to, a primal 'why' ever purer than what the concept of word could ever capture.
He hops haphazardly on one leg before falling to one knee, his free hand slapping against craggy earth. Claws grasp and scratch at dry, lifeless rock. This stone is nothing like the Photosphere... they aren't... in the Photosphere...
...Ratatoskr's gaze sweeps around to see others coming in and out of coherence between what he knows of them and how they're acting now, and in that, his eyes light up. They did defeat Mother, didn't they...? But he didn't get to see them do it.
Excitedly, another's rage and sorrow give way to a more youthful enthusiasm that lacks the maturity to grasp the scope of what he is experiencing, and the excess emotion starts to spill and siphon off. As he draws that old Hyadean datapad before his gaze, as if displacing himself physically from the encroaching death of another's experiences... he may find himself disappointed the moment he lowers it down to see what is(n't) before him.
DG: Ratatoskr has used his Tool Corrupted Records toward his party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
They run. The wind speeding Ida's passage picks things up as it howls at her back. Plumes of ash stream past her. Sparks flicker and dance before winking out. A curtain of dust begins to fall like snow. Even as she runs, Ida's brain pulls the two separate memories apart. Half of it is her memories of Adlehyde, of course. The other half is something wholly alien. Deep, soul-churning dread sinks into the pit of her stomach. These are not Fafnir's memories. These must be more of Doom Bringer's. If she's right, then...
"Hyades," Ida chokes out, as she staggers to a halt. "This--this is Hyades." An all-too-familiar sensation washes up through her mind--a sickening tide of rage, helplessness and grief. Whatever--whomever--left these memories felt it, too. She wants to scream. After a moment, she draws breath to speak.
An all-too-familiar voice cuts her off.
Ida sees red. A sort of sickening tunnel-vision overwhelms her, as the blade's memories war against her own, and a feeling she cannot put into words.
She did this. She did this, and she must die for it. For everyone she ever used. Ida's aura ignites around her once again, the inner core of flame almost overwhelming the pale golden-white. She blinks, and when she opens her right eye, it's bright green. Blood-red lines trace their way from that eye down her face, disappearing beneath her collar. Hyadean exoskeleton erupts from both hands, enfolding her arms. She's suddenly holding a pair of blades, all red and gold and elegant Hyadean steel.
Ida(?) screams, and throws herself at Mother, just as the memories bid her to. She flies through the air, trailing flame like a comet's tail; a roar of transcendant rage tears free from her lips. Mother's mask looms large before her. That angelic mask, concealing such horror. She remembers. She remembers--!
No. No, it didn't happen like this. It didn't--
The dream shudders around her. In a heartbeat, Ida is no longer holding the swords. In their place, her right hand clasps something tightly--the multitool that Kalve forged for her. She did not have it in her hand then, but its weight is a comfort. Ida draws back her fist, and strikes. She feels Mother's mask give way, as it did then. That beatific visage shatters, revealing what lies beneath: enormous, lidless eyes, a mouth like a gaping slash-wound studded with razor-sharp teeth.
"FOR HYADES!" Ida howls. "FOR FILGAIA!"
A second strike. Ida's right arm is a blur as she lashes out again, driving her fist through straight into--and through--Mother's exposed throat. She alone did not shatter that mask--that was the work of many, including one of Mother's own wayward children. But Ida keenly remembers how it felt to strike that monstrous flesh. She remembers that gurgling scream. Sometimes she still hears it in her nightmares.
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has used her Tool ARMS Meister's Field Kit toward her party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
Tragedy. Eyes pleading, silver blood, breath and life seeping away as Gwen holds her.
Gwen's left hand clutches at her chest, her mind stuck between a memory and something bordering at a thread being roughly jerked from the center of her identity.
It's strange, just how familiar that pain was...
No, that's not what happened. Because she's still here, in one piece.
"Zed!" Disaster is averted by one selfless Hyadean's actions, one steel ball placed between them and something corrupted, stained, corroded. Gwen is pushed forther, the stone steps falling away with every step she takes forward, until she sees-
The urge is primal, urgent, a feeling condensed down into a single concept: -Destroy.-
It is intercepted by a calmer, seemingly rational thought: She is not Her. This is just a fragment, a piece of an entity that had long departed this coil. It must be taken care of.
Gwen's freckled face grows calm as she walks forward, her bootsteps feeling like they echo with _a purpose_. Duty calls her, as someone who was left behind. For Her sake-
Her approach stops when she sees Hiro, screaming with naked anger.
That's right. Gwen was there, with Hiro. She felt guilt, in Rudy's words. She fell unconscious, even, needing to be hauled back to safety like a sack of potatoes.
".... Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?" she murmurs, her voice coming out as a tired croak. "Like I was a different person then. But you, Hiro, Ruby... I'm grateful for the fact that you're still the same, in the ways that're important."
It provides an anchor, this thought. Something the courier could find her way towards, in order to regain her spot in time and space.
"I'm glad you've both grown, too, since then. You two, and Zed, and Lily. Ratatoskr, I mean, he came, didn't he? And Ida..."
And Ida...
"WAIT! IDA!" Gwen runs forward, trailing after Ida, making an attempt to tear her away. "This is different, this ain't real!!"
DG: Gwen Whitlock has contributed a Wits Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Final Fantasy.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
=======================<* CHALLENGE - Final Fantasy *>========================
|Type: Climax |Dungeon Ability: Wits |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Children. My good children. Come to my embrace. I shall render unto you the
paradise you are owed...
Half-formed nightmares and aborted dream twist by in a hurricane of torments
and memories. Finally, the haze clears and you open your weary eyes to
see... her. The monster. The demon-mother whose grotesque flesh has grown
bloated and vile with unnatural growth. Who gorged herself first on the
lifeblood of the world, then upon her own children, who had exulted in their
mothers' victory.
Hate boils in your blood. Anger throbs in your veins. Your vision grows
sharp and clear, your limbs ache with barely restrained power. You can do
this. You can end this monster here and now. Destroy her here! Destroy her
NOW! With a roar, you charge forward, thrilling in the raw, primal joy of
battle. H__n__ng dances in your hands, her keen edge singing through the air
as you dive for the heart of the beast that took everything from you, your
wrath demands it. Your wrath can accept nothing less! Cut open her belly!
Tear out her beating heart and feed it to the dying world! Rage! Rage until
it is DONE!
But--
No, this is wrong, isn't it? It didn't happen like this. You're seeing
someone else. Somewhen else. This isn't right. Pull back. Pull back...!
Or suffer as I have...!
=Dungeon Conditions: Reckless, Madness========================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 5 *>=================== =========================< Results - Final Fantasy >========================== Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 10 --(0)--> 10 Fail Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 15 --(0)--> 15 Pass ARMS Meister's Field Kit 2 Wits Effects: Enlighten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 15 --(0)--> 15 Fail Investigate 0 Wits Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 15 --(0)--> 15 Pass Impure Pendant 3 Wits Effects: Rally ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 10 --(0)--> 10 Fail Corrupted Records 2 Wits Effects: Stalwart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 10 --(0)--> 10 Pass Grandpa Gwyn's Notebook 2 Wits Effects: Enlighten ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 90 --(0)--> 90 Pass Conditions: Madness|Reckless(2) Effects: Enlighten(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: The party led by Zed has passed this challenge! The party gained 0 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> Zed has posed.
This isn't right. This isn't right. The day Mother fell, he wasn't anywhere near her throne. He was as far from it as you could get within the Photosphere, down in the depths of the Gutter. And yet, and yet--
The sight of that bloated monster, the revelation of this world's name, the fury bursting his heart at the seams. How could he deny them? Those feelings of rage and hate, hopelessness and desperation, he knows them too well. They were old friends, hidden behind a defiant grin and a cheerful mien. The world falls apart all around them, what little remains of its life-force burning away in great gouts of magma. Tephra rains from a dwindling sky.
Hyades. Hyades. He had never seen Hyades. Never again will see Hyades. But here, now, in this moment, he has the opportunity to avenge the home he would never know.
In this moment, there is no way for Zed the Warrior to deny the call of his blood.
His voice splits in a catastrophic scream as he surges forward. The unright shade flickers and fades, overlaying across the young Hyadean's form like the corona of an anti-sun, a wrathful counter-nirvana that ensconces his body and ensnares his soul. In this moment, the two become one. Zed, wreathed in blood-red void, screams in rage and then in pain. As he strikes the Mother's bloated form, she reciprocates with rays of scorching light and blows of eschatological might.
He is not alone in this nightmare, though he scant recognizes it. Ratatoskr is there, striking at the Mother's horrifying form at the end of the world. Even as he recognizes that this is not as it should be and backs away at the last moment, Zed is of dissimilar mind. Perhaps it's because of how long Doom Bringer had remained in his possession, but he does not pull away. He plunges in deeper, alien blood gushing from the wound his blade carves into the Mother's carapace...
But that is not how this story ends.
He is pinned as the beast bleeds, a mere flesh-wound cannot stop a god in its moment of advent. He is trapped in her arms, deadly claws slowly crushing around him. He screams and thrashes, as he feels his bones pop and dislodge. The Mother looms, glistening mandibles unfolding from underneath her mask, ready to finish what she began--
And then a fist slams hard into her face.
Ida's hand cracks the porcelein facade, revealing the monster underneath. The goddess recoils and Ida follows up, driving another blow into the Mother's unprotected flesh. Again, that nightmarish scream gurgles out of the alien monster's gullet as-- for the briefest of moments-- they are back again in the Photosphere's heart. It does not last long enough, the image burns away as the Mother resurges...
...Only for her natural enemy to explode suddenly out of the ruined world. Golem Sado, burning with a darkness foreign to this distant and dying star, slams into the monster it was created to destroy. Again, the Photosphere flickers back into being, pinned there by great lances of dark crystal.
Zed falls, then crumples to the ground, quicksilver blood leaking from crippling wounds. He looks up with burning, red eyes-- this... is not how this happened. This is not-- how this came to pass. He should be dead. Should be dead like the world he failed. How... How...
We won this right?
The unright shade freezes at the words, as Sado continues to wrestle with the apocalypse. Alone, it could never hope to match the might of the Mother grown fat on Hyades' essence. But it is not alone. They are not alone. The shade flickers and distorts, Zed- himself again- falls out from within it. "Hiro," he coughs, the shade staggering away. "Gwen, you... We won, didn't we? We won, in our memories, on our world--"
The shade stands as if dumbfounded, the swirling void that serves as its face staring in disbelief. Zed, clinging to the here and now, forces himself to his feet. As Sado is waylaid by the Mother's alien might, as Lily and Ida push back, and Hiro and Gwen anchor the truth of their world, as Ratatoskr buries himself in his own world to insulate himself from the cataclysm unfolding around them... Zed looks to the shade, wincing through the sensation of fire burning in his eyes. "This... This is how it happened," he says to the shadow, "Not on Hyades, but on our world. On Filgaia. We won. We won. We avenged it--" The shade flickers in and out of reality, its maw distending in a rictus scream as it staggers back as if in denial. It slips away, and before Zed can cry 'wait!', it is gone.
...And so is the Mother, as Golem Sado lands the final blow. The illusion dissolves around them, but...
+Dungeon/draw
DG: Zed has drawn a new Challenge.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
=====================<* CHALLENGE - Alone In The World *>=====================
|Type: Final |Dungeon Ability: Brute |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Hyades... Is dying...
This is the last memory of a dying man as his lifeless gaze stares
mindlessly at the blasted husk of a world. His mind turns to what it used to
be. To the towns and cities, to the people who lived there, loved there. He
can hardly remember it the way it was, anymore. Not anymore.
He is alone.
He dies alone.
His mind wanders the wasteland that his body cannot. He relives them over
and over again; The monsters' arrival, the destruction they reaped, the pain
of loss, the fleeting joy of victory, the crush of defeat. Again, repeating
eternally, wandering endlessly. Every time, he forgets more. Why he fought
so hard. Why he struggled so mightily. Why, until the end, did he never give
up...?
Was it always hatred? Was it always anger? Who was he? Who were all of those
people...?
There has to be something, beyond the anger and the sorrow, at the edge of
memory, almost forgotten. Maybe if he walks through his memory again, he can
find it?
It begins again, a journey of countless agonies in search of a single mote
of purpose. Perhaps this time... You can help him find it...?
=Dungeon Conditions: Suffer===================================================
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
...not yet.
Not yet.
The burning sky retreats, the death throes of a ruined world are all but spent. Hyades unfolds around them, but not as a world full of life, not as a place where a people thrived, where a culture grew and flourished. It is a withered world, a lifeless land. This is what he saw when his life was finally spent. Futile. It was all futile. After all the pain, after all the tears, after wandering alone for so long, after cutting away all that made him weak, he was still... not strong enough.
There were once lush plains here, though they are lost to memory, the swirling sands that they became remain. That used to be a city, now a ruin falling into a wounded, cold earth. There, the place where they promised to meet again. The cafe that they visited every week, just to talk about the ordinary hardship of an ordinary life.
Gone.
All gone.
The world wavers, fading away as consciousness disintegrates, the last thing he sees is the night sky.
Zed picks himself up off the ash-covered ground, the wistful chill of a lifeless star prickling at his skin. "Is-- is everyone alright? That-- I don't want to ever feel like that again. I--"
He shakes his head, dislodging the lingering ghosts of memory. But something-- sticks in his mind. "He fought... hard," Zed says to the barren land. "So hard. There was so much pain there, so much-- anger. But..." he asks, as he looks to the edge of the world. "There had to be a reason, right? I mean... It was all so painful. How could he-- how could anyone last for so long on just... Hatred? Even Sieg had a reason--"
There has to be a reason.
"...I'm going to look some more," Zed says, walking over to where Berserk's old steel ball had been left in the ash. He hefts it over his shoulder, the familiar weight tethering him to his own memories, "...I don't want to leave here and just... Not know. You know? Doom Bringer has been carrying him for so long. I don't want to think it was just... Out of spite. Why would anyone relive such painful memories for so long if there were no reason...?"
He shakes his head, and keeps walking toward the edge of the world.
It plays, over and over again. The memories rewind from the beginning, fragmented and fractured from aeons of recollection. The day the world began to burn, the moment they learned they could kill the mightiest of the monsters-- only to discover that they just couldn't last long enough. The days when he lost them, one at a time, his friends fading into memory, and only the silver bloodstains of their ends still burning bright in his mind. The moment the last hope fell to ash-- because they trusted one of the enemy. Because she didn't realize that she was a Trojan Horse. All the images in between are mere fragments, ground to dust by time and hate and guilt. But...
There has to be something...
There has to be a reason he held on for so long, but why--
Maybe if they look for long enough, if they can keep a hold on themselves for long enough, if they can break out of the cycle of tortured memory and find something beyond it... Does Zed just want to learn more-- to satisfy his curiosity-- or... Maybe if they remind this soul of something outside his anger, maybe then he could... move on?
But where would he go? This lost son of Hyades...?
DG: Zed has used his Tool Berserk Hammer toward his party's challenge, Alone In The World. <Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
"...You wouldn't," Lilhy agrees. "After a certain point if all you have is anger, it can't keep you going."
"I'll clear a path," Lily says, pulling that metal card from her things againt. "Wherever it is in this place... We'll find what's beyond it. Or you can, at least--I know you will. Just let me clear some space for you to bring it in."
Sometimes, destruction is part of the answer... but Lily knows full well it can't be the whole answer.
DG: Lily Keil has used her Tool Demolition Formula toward her party's challenge, Alone In The World.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida does not hear Gwen. As Mother's presence fades into nothingness, she sinks to the ground, planting both hands on the barren earth. Her whole body shudders with each breath; tears fog her eyes as the raw emotional exertion of this ordeal presses down on her. There is a part of her that desperately wishes she could go numb to all this, but as Zed undoubtedly knows, Ida's heart is too big to just shut down, even when witnessing horror of this scale. This man--this warrior--suffered as she did. As they both did. She wishes she could tell him that his people survived. He wishes he could tell him how humbled he is.
"Zed," Ida whispers, her voice a dry creak. She looks up at him. Mother's blood drips from her hands. Fafnir's tattoos still mark her face. "I--I'm sorry. God, I--I can't..." Her voice breaks. "Seeing it makes me..." Zed hefts Berserk's old weapon. Ida rises to her feet, shakily. "We just witnessed the murder of a world," she breathes. "Everything, everyone." Her left eye is blue and bloodshot; her right eye is green and streaked with quicksilver. She's still crying.
The images start to repeat. It's a pattern of self-flagellation that Ida knows all too well--something she's one to herself, countless times. She can't look at it. "Zed," she whispers. "I--I can't watch. Please..." She extends a hand to her old friend, wordlessly asking him to lead her.
DG: Ida Everstead-Rey has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward her party's challenge, Alone In The World.
<Pose Tracker> Ratatoskr has posed.
Just like that... they are there, on a ruined world with nothing of it left to glean... or the memory of one. Ratatoskr limps a ways across the jagged, rocky ground. He doesn't feel the breeze trying to push him around, or the chill of winter attempting to sap him, or the drenching of water that would smother him. When he was assigned to at last scour the surface of Filgaia, he grew to love how it felt like every facet of the environment was trying to 'fight' him, internalizing every sensory input through the filter of a persistent opponent against him. How he got that first early thought that, once Mother won, they wouldn't be there to do that with him any more.
There is nothing left here. Zed asks if he's all right, and the loud-mouthed eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old doesn't have an answer. It's chilling to think, in some ways, how the Photosphere felt a lot like where he's standing now. Cold, empty, having things that fill space like 'the ground,' 'walls,' 'stuff that does things when you touch it,' but... in no way could anyone ever call it 'home' unless that was the only 'home' they could know. As if a tiny (...huge) slice of a preview of a dead world, albeit with more blinking lights and tubes that would give one the bare necessities.
The hand that previously touched Doom Bringer flinches against the (lack of) air as Zed continues to talk, find the resolve to pick up the mace of Berserk - a quiet sore spot between them - as the horror of what Hyades became replays every so often with images of what happened to it. He watches Ida break down, seeming weak in a way he's never seen her be. She's one of the strongest people he knows. She's one of his favorite war heroes of the modern day! As it so happens, they stand on opposite sides of the current history-upending conflict on Filgaia and he will not want for being fought by her.
He has no idea what to make of it, as evidenced by a lack of his usual boisterous, laugh-heavy, question-and-then-repeat-as-exclamation antics. He's seeing the history of a world near and dear to someone who survives only as some phantom of cursed hatred fall apart, over and over, powerless to what transpired. In a way, now, they can be remembered... but when he touched that blade...
...
Ratatoskr holds up the relic gun-blade ARM thing he keeps toting around. He knows it doesn't have anything like what resides within the Doom Bringer, but he wonders. What if whoever wielded it didn't want to be known?
...
DG: Ratatoskr has used his Tool Derelict Relic toward his party's challenge, Alone In The World.
<Pose Tracker> Gwen Whitlock has posed.
In the end, Gwen couldn't do much to keep Ida from entering into that rage, but Ida herself is the one to stop, no intervention needed, much to Gwen's relief.
"Yeah. We won." Gwen looks to Hiro and Ruby again, using them to recenter herself. Closing her eyes, she shifts to redirect her attention back to Zed and his burning eyes. "We wouldn't be here if we lost."
Such a statement could be enough, if this was the physical plane. Here, it threatens to tear at the tapestry of negative emotions, unbuckling the revenant from the group's presence.
But it isn't enough to banish themselves from this plane. Though, as Zed speaks, it's clear: the purpose now isn't to merely purge the sword of this entity's presence, but to give this entity something he never was able to receive in all these years since his end.
So. This is what a dead world looks like.
"... I wonder if this person knows that this is maybe one of the only records of what life was even life, on the Hydean planet." Gwen idly wonders that as she looks at Zed's back, looking to the side at Ratatoskr's oddly quiet manner. "... You guys... don't remember the planet you're from at all, right? I wonder if there's anyone out there who still does."
It leads to another thought, of a bandaged scrawny girl in a small Badlands town, looking at all the books for stories she knew she could never experience for herself.
Gwen remembers that frustration. "Y'know, sometimes, growing up, when I was at my worst, I'd wonder what it was all even for, knowin' that I could die tomorrow. I didn't plan for a future, or even havin' one. Death wasn't somethin' that was scary to me, just certain. But." The landscape changes again, memories bleeding through like watercolor across a wet page. "Some days, I wanted someone to acknowledge I existed- no, I wanted to scream at the whole world that I existed."
She holds up her right hand, glancing at it, turning it over as she considers the ways it had changed her life's course. "This person is carrying their memories of all those people and places. Tons of things that want to scream 'i existed', 'I fought like hell', 'I had things I wanted to protect'. If they went, who would remember? It'd be like they had died, all over again. This fight of his, maybe, the one thing we can give him is the notion that he was able to pass some of these memories on. A lot of it is sad, but those things we see between the lines, that's a culture you guys can take back from Mother."
DG: Gwen Whitlock has used her Tool ARM-ored Fist toward her party's challenge, Alone In The World.
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
"Aha... it's been what - two years?" Hiro says as Gwen brings it up, as if he's regaining some sense of the time it's been. "Sure feels like a lifetime. I'd like to think I've changed some since then." "Little bit." "But - the part of me that's honored to be your friend isn't going to. Promise."
The atmosphere though becomes more somber in short order. "Yeah Zed." Hiro says with a sense of melancholy - sadness. Like he's starting to realize what this place is, understanding truly the gravity of Mother in this graveyard that was once a world. "We won. She's gone now."
Hiro starts walking to Zed like he intends to try to comfort him, even if he doesn't fully understand everything Zed is feeling - could feel, in this moment - with memories of someone else encroaching upon them. Yet he intends to try anyhow. As Zed said earlier. That's what words are for.
And then its gone.
"I don't blame you. This is..."
How could anyone last for so long on just... Hatred? Even Sieg had a reason--
Hiro suddenly stops, as if contemplating that. He really hated Siegfried, and it was only at the end that perhaps he realized that he shouldn't have. Yet... what Zed is saying is true, and its just another example of ancient hatred surviving this long. He's asking a lot for them to keep going but...
"Okay Zed." He says, less cheerful and more - resolved, willing to face something he knows will be unpleasant for the sake of the reason Zed gave. "Let's keep going - until we know the answer."
What Lily says though - brings this small shiver down his spine. Ida is crying - needing Zed to lead her on.
A thought occurs to him, is this something that could happen to his world - if they fail in Lucia's mission? Is this something that could happen to him? He remembers that Drifter he fought back in Lacour, who was terrified of him. Terrified of what becomes of idealists when the world breaks them. And so he's scared to move on - but not so scared that he won't.
The memories assault him as he follows. An endless cycle on repeat. Anger - hatred. It hurts to experience them. He decides he must keep going anyhow. So instead he just focuses on what Gwen is saying as they move on, like this is a side of her that maybe he knew was there - but like he's never realized the depth of it before now. "If we keep going then - endure this long enough - maybe we can tell them." And then as he drops the volume of his voice, adds, "Tell them that we hear them. That... someone did."
DG: Hiro has contributed a Brute Basic Action toward his party's challenge, Alone In The World.
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
=====================<* CHALLENGE - Alone In The World *>=====================
|Type: Final |Dungeon Ability: Brute |Challenge Rating: 3 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
Hyades... Is dying...
This is the last memory of a dying man as his lifeless gaze stares
mindlessly at the blasted husk of a world. His mind turns to what it used to
be. To the towns and cities, to the people who lived there, loved there. He
can hardly remember it the way it was, anymore. Not anymore.
He is alone.
He dies alone.
His mind wanders the wasteland that his body cannot. He relives them over
and over again; The monsters' arrival, the destruction they reaped, the pain
of loss, the fleeting joy of victory, the crush of defeat. Again, repeating
eternally, wandering endlessly. Every time, he forgets more. Why he fought
so hard. Why he struggled so mightily. Why, until the end, did he never give
up...?
Was it always hatred? Was it always anger? Who was he? Who were all of those
people...?
There has to be something, beyond the anger and the sorrow, at the edge of
memory, almost forgotten. Maybe if he walks through his memory again, he can
find it?
It begins again, a journey of countless agonies in search of a single mote
of purpose. Perhaps this time... You can help him find it...?
=Dungeon Conditions: Suffer===================================================
==================<* Item World - Doom Bringer - Round 6 *>=================== =======================< Results - Alone In The World >======================= Player Exhaustion Pass/Fail ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Zed 10 --(15)--> 25 Pass Berserk Hammer 3 Brute Effects: Strengthen and Sacrif ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ida Everstead-Rey 15 --(15)--> 30 Pass Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gwen Whitlock 15 --(15)--> 30 Pass ARM-ored Fist 2 Brute Effects: Strengthen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lily Keil 15 --(15)--> 30 Pass Demolition Formula 3 Brute Effects: Rally ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ratatoskr 10 --(15)--> 25 Pass Derelict Relic 2 Brute Effects: Stalwart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hiro 10 --(15)--> 25 Pass Force 0 Brute Effects: BASIC ----------------------------------< Party >----------------------------------- Leader: Zed 90 --(30)--> 120 Pass Conditions: Madness|Reckless(1)|Suffer(1) Effects: Strengthen(1) ==============================< Dream Chasers >===============================
DG: You have overcome the dungeon's trials! This run is a success! DG: The party led by Zed has successfully explored Item World - Doom Bringer!
=======================<* Item World - Doom Bringer *>========================
=====================<* CHALLENGE - A Ray of Sunshine *>======================
|Type: Discovery |Dungeon Ability: Conclusion|Challenge Rating: 1 |
--------------------------< Challenge Information: >--------------------------
I love you...
How many times has it been? A dozen? A hundred? How many times has this
repeated, over and over and over and over. Searching high and low, searching
for what little remained. You don't know how long it's been, how long you've
wandered, but finally, your hand turns around an unfamiliar doorknob, and
you push it open--
You remember... Her face, smiling with enough warmth to light up a sterile
hospital room. It's the same smile you fell in love with, that starlit
night. You hear the doctors chatter amongst themselves, but it doesn't
matter. It doesn't matter, because she's holding that little bundle,
swaddled in cloth. He has her eyes, and your nose.
You remember. You remember. Life, the answer was life. A life you had, once.
A life that was stripped from you, taken away. The warmest place in the
world was right here.
And they took it from you.
The pain surges again, the hate, the rage, it sweeps the memory away. It
sweeps the world away. Suddenly you are yourselves again, and the world
inverts, spitting you back into the chamber where this had all begun. The
sword surges with tenebrous energies, disgorging a tangible darkness that
begins coalescing into a familiar shape. The shade grasps the blade's
shadow... And turns its hateful eyes upon you.
And yet, you feel a warmth blossom within your heart. A sensation that
wasn't there before... You remember the answer. Life...!
((OOC Note: You found an important discovery! By recovering the shade's
forgotten memory, you have been granted a portion of the strength that had
sustained it long ago. This manifests as a TEMPORARY BUFF at the start of
the boss fight...!))
=Dungeon Conditions: Secret===================================================
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
After a certain point, if all you have is anger, it can't keep you going.
Even Berserk, as loathsome as he was, wasn't motivated entirely by rage. Zed can remember that day when Mother began to stir, how Berserk bent at the knee before her. How he seemed so tranquil and calm in her presence. Even that hatred-fueled fury-engine knew hope and love. But everything that they've seen so far, it's all been... So painful. At times, the suffering would become too much to bear. Destruction, then, was the answer. They may be observers in this place, but these memories encroached upon their own when they were at their strongest-- so why would they be unable to fight back?
And so Lily clears the way.
But that doesn't change how painful the memories could be. It doesn't erase the sorrow and the anguish. For Ida-- someone who is intimately familiar with this self-destructive spiral of self-loathing-- it's too much. Too much. She reaches out for help, for someone to guide her.
She feels a hand close around hers. "Don't worry. You don't have to," Zed answers as he pulls her along. "You're here. You're all here with me. That would have been enough by itself. I won't ask you to open your eyes, remembering all this-- it's our duty. Ratatoskr's, and especially mine. I'm just glad for whatever you all can take with you."
Even Ratatoskr's childlike exuberance is quelled by the apocalypse on repeat. He has always been one who felt left out, felt like he was denied an irreplacable experience. But now, faced with something that only they would be able to remember, something that-- for better or worse-- is being entrusted to these drifters from a faraway world... Perhaps the weight of it all is getting to him? But Zed knows that he'd remember, or at least, he'd try to remember as best he could. And in this sepulchre-world, that is something meaningful.
Gwen knows it as well as anyone, how important it is to be remembered. Zed looks at her with wide, surprised eyes during the brief lull in memory in which she takes the time to speak up. "...To give his world a chance to be remembered, huh...?" Zed smiles sadly, then nods. "...Yeah. None of us remember anything of Hyades. If there were records, they would have been on the Photosphere. This... This might be the last record of it anywhere. I won't forget. If I can't do anything else for him, then I'd like to... Carry these memories, at least. Our culture, our life before the Mother... Whatever he remembers of it, at least."
The record is damaged. How many years has it been playing on repeat? It's something Ida knows far too well; when you replay events like these for long enough, you lose track of all the good in them. All that's left is the pain and the guilt.
'I could have saved them.'
'I should have been stronger.'
'If only I was fast enough...'
'If only I was in the right place at the right time, then...'
"I'd like that," Zed says to Hiro as the memories play on. He wipes the tears from his face for the nth time as he answers. "It... It feels like this was someone who really loved his world. Who gave everything to protect it. It's just... Things went differently for him, than they did for us." How narrowly did they escape apocalypse? How close are they to it, even now? "...Everyone needs someone to remember them. Or else... It's like they never existed. Like none of this ever did."
Zed clutches his scarf tight as a memory unfolds around them. It's the metropolis again, that place that had been overlaid atop Adlehyde. But the skies are quiet. The city is a heap of ruins, picked over a dozen times by desperate souls in search of their loved ones. Zed stares out through a broken window set into a small home, its side blown through in the attack. The facade is shattered and falling apart... All except for one critical detail.
How many times had they wandered through this memory? Time is strange and mercurial in this place. Has it been an aeon? An instant? All that they know is that each time, there had been other details. As if looking in different places had forced the world to conjure memories to fill in the blanks. And now, in front of this ruined home, they find... A door, intact and whole. It sticks out like a sore thumb, pristine and unmarred as it is. Zed cants his head, never taking his eyes off the strange door as if afraid that looking away would make it disappear. He reaches out, and pushes it open...
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
Your heart is going absolutely crazy. How can anyone stand it? The stress blows anything else you can imagine out of the water! And you're not even there yet. You were out training with the rest of the guard, and someone suddenly rushes in and tells you that it's happening now. You ran as fast as you could, taking every possible means to get to the hospital in time. The trip was a blur, you can hardly remember it all. But it doesn't matter. The door's right there. Someone tries to stop you, but you push them aside, and then push it open...
She looks up as you enter. Her smile is as stunning as the day you fell in love with her. Really fell in love. Not just, 'wow she's pretty' or 'i think this lady could probably kick my butt.' Real, honest love. It was a starry evening, a meteor shower. You both loved the sky so much, and just had to make time to get out of the city when you'd heard that there was going to be a starstorm. You remember that she bumped into you in the middle of the biggest swarm, she was so excited. You looked over at her then, and couldn't find the strength to look back up again.
But this-- this is way better than that. You didn't even think that was possible-- but she's so... So happy. She looks like she's been through the fight of her life, but her smile is incredible. 'Come see,' you hear her say as you notice the little bundle in her arms for the first time. 'Look,' she says, gaze glittering with love, 'He has your nose.'
A son. You have a son. An incomparable feeling wells up inside you. You laugh, throwing your arms around your wife and child. The nurse tries to nudge the three of you apart, but that's not going to happen. For the first time in your life, you feel *purpose* like never before. You know that you'd give anything to protect that little life, and that ray of warmth that is his mother. 'I love you,' you say as you rest your cheek against hers, 'My sunshine...'
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
<poem>Zed is silent as the memory plays out. He... can't seem to find a way to put his thoughts into words. It's not just that they found... A memory, the memory, the most precious thing that tthe spirit had kept locked away, but... Children-- Hyadeans could have children? This was... This was how they did things, before Mother took them. Before they were twisted into killing machines. He had always thought that Hyadeans were... just made in pods, custom-built for slaughter from the very beginning.
But... That warmth, that love, is that what having a mother would have been like...? A real, actual mother? Zed wobbles a bit at the sight, so dumbstruck that he doesn't even notice...
That they're not alone.
Standing in the doorway as the memory plays on-- is the Shade. The Shade who forgot even his own name, who lost the faces of his comrades in the course of his endless suffering, who forgot so much of his world except what it had become. He stands there, the crackling unrightness of his form fizzling like static on a broken monitor. It... settles, quelling somewhat as features come back into focus. As he seems to regain something of his 'self' from the pit of agony that was his existence.
You remember coming home. You remember the ride. But you mostly remember all the plans you started to make. How are you going to celebrate his first nameday? Will he take after you or your sunshine when he grows up? You hope that the world will treat him right, and that his future will be bright.
Zed turnes toward the shade as it stands in silent recollection. "You..." He starts, fingertips reaching for the shade's shoulder in a gesture of quiet camaraderie, "I'm... I don't know how we can--"
There's going to be another meteor shower tonight. They say it'll be visible from the city. You hope you can take them to see it.
"--even begin... We'll remember it. We'll remember all of it, I promise! I--"
That was the night it all began.
It was that night. That night! You'd gone to town with her, and the meteors began. But they didn't stop! They wouldn't stop!
The shade's featureless face splits, angry red light pours out of its newly formed mouth as definition locks in. He screams, shadows pouring out in a massive flood. He remembers. He remembers...!
Fire poured down from the sky! They crashed into the city. You ran with her as fast as you could! But it wasn't fast enough! It wasn't... fast enough...
Zed yells as the dark sweeps him away, sweeps them all away. It surges without limit, as the world of memory dissolves. Gravity inverts. You feel as if you might be sick as everything goes sideways as the realness of everything hits you all at once. The stone floors. The chill, subterrannean air. The tablets, glowing in the dark all around you as if in vigil. And the dark keeps coming. It's a thick, tangible thing. Full of malice, full of anger and grief.
Zed reaches out, his hand seizes around something-- anything-- solid... And finds a familiar weight there. His sword, the source and the recepticle of all this wrath, is in his hands once more... But he's not the only one.
The shade is there too. His hand is closed around the self-same hilt. With a jolt of surprise, Zed pulls away-- and the shade reciprocates. The blade splits. One sword, material in its entirety. The other, a thing of shadow and memory.
The darkness all around you burns with malice. But... You feel something else, too. Something within, a fragment of that warmth, of that love that had survived countless aeons of pain.
This swordsman, this Shade of Hyades has suffered for so long... But now, perhaps with an understanding of its pain in your heart, you might be able to put an end to its nightmare at last.
...
It was always going to end this way.
It seems that, in the end, Hyadeans have always been creatures of battle...
Or at least, they always had the potential to be.