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Post by Deleted on Mar 12, 2014 15:44:54 GMT -5
Ajax - That's okay, thanks for participating when you could! And thanks! This section is probably going to have quite a bit of it, at least in the beginning. Hopefully it'll ease into a less character-immersed narrative smoothly enough.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 12, 2014 16:02:11 GMT -5
I goofed off. Not as much as I could have but then again... My Ogrin, bless him, shucked me out of the mud hole, but it made me stagger, sending me this way and that while I fought to regain my balance. Splat! I fell into another Bagguss patch, but the Bagguss burst beneath me.
It was almost as if my weight had triggered a bomb that would knock out even The Drenched in the Battledome. Tears pricked my eyelids as Protector helped me up. Kristy grabbed my other arm, but held her nose as she did so. Such a supportive girl, she was.
"Thanks," I mumbled, coughing from the stench. My clothes were muddy, I felt lightheaded, Kristy was definitely lightheaded, but we were all stable. We, unfortunately, could move on.
After several minutes of moss-observing and near-electrocution, we reached a stone platform. My feet cheered, glad to be temporarily rid of fickle flooring. "I remember my research..." I recalled fondly of the books I'd read and games I'd played. "Sir Tormund made his way to Kastraliss on this very platform." I stared at nothing but my thoughts, practically watching the words come out of my mouth and enter my head again. "Sir Tormund himself!" I exclaimed, eyeing the ground for muddy footprints. There were none but ours, as I suspected. He had vanquished Kastraliss long ago, so logically, there was enough time for the great poison serpent to get his breath back--so to speak.
"You're excited now, aren't you?" Kristy laughed at my bubbling enthusiasm for Sir Tormund's escapades. "Come on, now, who wouldn't be?" I retorted.
Protector purred thoughtfully. "You have made mention of him to me once," he droned. "He was a most interesting knight, but had no robots on his team. That, I think, says something about the knight."
I was stunned.
"Come on, you two!" Kristy practically dragged us by the arm and leg to get us closer to my doom. "All right, we're coming," I sighed, taking one last look at the delightful solid ground. "Psst. Protector." The Ogrin leaned his ear my way. "You have every right to electrocute her when you see fit." He nodded. "I will do what I can to protect you." He beeped loudly. I struck my face with my palm. There had been a reason I'd whispered! Why did he have to be so dense?
"Shhh." Kristy held a finger to her lips after we'd used several logs. Protector and I bumped into her as she'd turned around, nearly making her fall into the filthy water. "Look there," she whispered in awe.
There in front of me lay the most beautiful, the most purple, the most regal of all winged serpents, Kastraliss himself.
I wanted to scream and run.
"Kastraliss." I stepped into the water. Green algae floated on top of most of it, but I saw no other way to approach him. "We're not here for your berries. We just want to see you." I cursed my inept voice for not ceasing to shake.
The great serpent opened one (COLOR!!!) eye. "Hmm?" He murmured, shaking the water's surface. He raised his head from his stony bed and uncoiled himself, approaching my face with several fangs, opened wide enough to bite my head off. I squeaked. "You are so handsome up close!" I gasped more out of fear than out of genuine awe.
"Wait just a moment! We really do like you!" Kristy held up a notepad and paper. "We just want to talk to you so even more people can know about you!" Kastraliss tilted his head, bemused by the interruption. He hissed and reared up once more to snap at her. I knew everything he did to attack, so I knew he was going to lunge at her. Frankly, a disembodied Kristy would be better than one being slowly poisoned, but I wanted nobody's blood on my hands or Protector's robot paws. "Look out!" I screamed, shoving her into a nearby rock bench.
Kastraliss lunged.
I covered my head with my arms, as though that would offer any sort of protection. I braced myself for inevitable death.
I felt a gentle tug on my shirt, lifting me out of the water and into the sultry air. "What?" I gasped, opening my eyes again. Kastraliss had plucked me up and sat me right next to him! Frantically, I looked around. The water was too murky to properly gauge its depth. I could sink to my death and not even know it! There was no escaping him. "So, I have admirers, eh?" He turned away and huffed green poison clouds in quick succession. Was he laughing?
"Yeah. I mean, I wrote the first article that ever had anything to do with you as far as I know." Kastraliss blinked his great (COLOR!) eyes. "You?" A thin film slid across his eyeballs and then back. "What did you write?"
"Oh, I have it right here." Kristy rummaged in her bag and pulled out my article, the same article with irrefutable proof I was afraid of him! She held it up, grinning as if she'd just won her 200th Neopian Times trophy.
Kastraliss squinted. "The print is quite small," he mused. He squinted more and leaned towards Kristy, who held the article up for him with inhuman patience. "Sorry. They're not really written for giant poison serpents, you know." Kastraliss nodded, a strange gesture: his head bobbed up and down at the end of his long scaly neck. "Understandable. But why is that line circled in red--" Kastraliss drew back as if ready to strike again.
He reared up once more, and I feared the worst. I buried my face in my hands, too upset for Kristy's sake. I didn't know which was worse: the possibility of attacking Kristy or Protector, or his finding out why I'd been so reluctant to come here in the first place.
Strange noises came from my captor. I raised my head to see Kastraliss breathing and huffing and wheezing thick clouds of smoke wildly. The edges of his mouth were turned up! He was laughing! But he was laughing at me! I put my head back into my hands and tried to wait him out.
A strange scent wafted through the air. It smelled of danger and rotten Bagguss. I coughed, but found it slightly more difficult to breathe than I did with the breath before it.
I looked over at Kristy. She was facing a laughing Kastraliss and was coughing much harder than I was. Furthermore, she was leaning on Protector! "Kristy, your phial!" I whispered, too constricted to scream.
Kastraliss, having recovered, wiped a tear away from his eye with his tail. "That is just too funny." He sighed contentedly, the whole of his serpent body shaking with it.
Kristy, with shaking hands, swallowed a drop of the liquid in the phial, and threw it to me with more strength than she looked like she had. "Catch it!" I did, by Fyora's grace. Without hesitating, I placed one drop on my tongue and immediately fought the urge to cool it with the filthy water surrounding me and Kastraliss. Why didn't Kristy know I didn't take kindly to anything spicy?
Yep, this is definitely going into the NT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 12, 2014 16:02:48 GMT -5
520! Not bad at all! Realizing she was on a hard surface of some sort, Terra rolled herself onto her back and sat up, kicking out with her legs. They moved freely. Perfect. Whoever thought it was only necessary to bind her hands would soon discover otherwise. She just had to keep herself from falling into a blubbering pile of panic at having her face covered, first.
Quickly, she kicked off her hiking boots and pulled off her socks with her toes. Then, she leaned her torso forward and brought her feet upward, grasping the offending source of her terror and tugging. It seemed to be a cloth bag, put over her head but not cinched tightly enough, as with a little wriggling she got it off.
She let out a loud gasp of relief, taking a few seconds to just sit and breathe unobstructed fresh air. Well, “fresh” was relative. Wherever she was, the air carried the musk of old wood, brine, and a dozen other scents mingled together so her human nose couldn’t discern any of them in specific. She tossed the hateful bag away with one foot and thanked the Faeries the cinching wasn’t tighter. Having something over her face was bad enough, but something around her neck might have thrown her into genuine hysterics.
It was still dark, but a few metres away she could see a thin, horizontal line of flickering orange. Her brain made the connection quickly enough: firelight under a doorway. The dim illumination cast the sparsest twilight on angular stacks between her and the door, not enough for her to see any details. But she still had her glasses on. There were a lot of ways this could have gone worse.
“… Terra?” a familiar voice asked groggily, surprisingly close to her.
“Pharazon!” Terra reached out with her feet toward the source of the voice and felt smooth scales. “Are you okay?” she asked in a hushed tone. Until he spoke, she thought she was the only one in here, so it was probable they were the only occupants of the room. But she didn’t want to alert anyone outside to their waking. Not yet, at least.
“Yeah, just… tired, and… what’s on my face? And my arms—!” The Draik let out a panicked whimper.
“Do you feel my feet on you? Move your head to them,” Terra instructed in the calmest tone she could muster. She felt rough cloth brush up against the insides of her feet, and she carefully grabbed and tugged. Once the bag was off, she flung it aside.
“Where are we?!” Pharazon blurted, his ears flapping as he shook his head. “What happened?! One moment we were wading through a crowd trying to reach Hyren and Blynn, and then—“
“Shh!” Terra replied. “Not so loud. Keep calm, okay? We’re still alive, and we can work with that. We need to approach this calmly and rationally.”
“I don’t understand what just happened,” Pharazon repeated.
“Pretty sure we’ve been kidnapped,” Terra said. “Abducted. Shanghaied.” She used her knee to awkwardly push her glasses back up her nose. Her face was clammy with sweat from being in a stuffy bag for who knew how long, and she tried to wipe it off on the shoulders of her flannel shirt as best as she could.
“’Shanghaied’?”
“It’s a term from an old Shenkuuvian folktale about the infamous sky pirate Shang Hai… never mind,” Terra muttered. I have been waiting so long to write this scene. Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) - D'awww Kastraliss. Ironically enough, I'm actually at that part in TDF right now. I've been playing through it again as research for this story. But for other things besides Kastraliss.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 12, 2014 16:09:39 GMT -5
PFF HAHA xD Her explanation of shanghaied. I do love especially the "fresh" scents as soon as she used her feet. c:
Oh are you?
When I was little it took me AGES to beat him!
And I wasn't kidding about one part in the story: if you go through the NT and search Kastraliss, not many results pop up. It's quite sad, really.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 12, 2014 16:10:14 GMT -5
I think I'm done for now, but thanks for the warring! I may be back later tonight. Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) - I wanted to work in that alternate origin of the verb so bad. xD I have a ridiculous sense of humor sometimes. Yep! It's really slow going, though, as I only play when the rest of my family isn't home. xD But I don't think I will need the relevant information any time soon, anyway. It's a few more parts before what I'm researching shows up.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 12, 2014 16:18:59 GMT -5
I'm done too. I don't want to write for now xD;
No, no, it's perfect!
Aww, play in the mornings?
I'll be back if anyone wants to try again c:
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Post by Deleted on Mar 12, 2014 16:24:02 GMT -5
Well, most of them are home in the mornings, too, so I play when they're all out running errands or something. xD But it's fine. I don't feel under a whole lot of pressure.
Do you think this scene overall is an okay balance of humor and seriousness? I don't want it to sound completely farcical, but at the same time I feel like this is a situation Terra would approach with snark, there's a lot of humor value in Pharazon being a scaredy-cat (scaredy-Kadoatie?), and I definitely don't want to turn it into an angsty dramafest. I just want to make sure it still gels while having measures of both humor and drama.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 13, 2014 13:57:38 GMT -5
Anybody up for a war in an hour or so? I should be free for the rest of the day.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 14, 2014 11:03:24 GMT -5
Word war, anyone? I'm going to run errands this evening, but I have the whole morning and afternoon to putter around.
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 16, 2014 14:38:16 GMT -5
Yeah I'm up for it--I have a nice idea for a beginning. ^^
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Post by Deleted on Mar 16, 2014 16:33:57 GMT -5
I wish I could, but Sundays are my days off from stuff. ^^; Maybe tomorrow. Plus I seem to have come down with something that's impairing my ability to sit up for long periods of time, much less write. Blah.
On the plus side, being stuck in bed sick gives one plenty of time to come up with story ideas. I now have lots and lots of notes for this NT series I've been working on during these word wars. Mweeheeheeheehee. *steeples fingers* I drafted up a timeline for the plot because (as you can see) it employs a split narrative, and I want to make sure the passage of time in the plot threads stays consistent. I have three pages of outline. This is glorious.
Anyway, I hope to be feeling better tomorrow and then I'll be available for warring again!
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2014 12:58:17 GMT -5
Feeling better! Anyone up for a word war or several today?
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Word War!
Mar 17, 2014 13:02:12 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 17, 2014 13:02:12 GMT -5
Feeling better! Anyone up for a word war or several today? *zombie groan but raises hand*
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2014 13:06:09 GMT -5
Feeling better! Anyone up for a word war or several today? *zombie groan but raises hand* ^^; You feeling okay? When would you like to start?
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Post by Mostly Harmless (flufflepuff) on Mar 17, 2014 14:30:27 GMT -5
*zombie groan but raises hand* ^^; You feeling okay? When would you like to start? Not really. Soon would be okay but please, not for so long. I don't feel as though I have much strength today.
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