Guild Wars III Roleplay (Rated T)

[Strife]

((The Skies))

Strife's eyes caught a glimpse of his opponent moving out of the way as he spiraled towards her. Honestly, he didn't expect himself to have much luck in hitting her, as he was clearly at a speed disadvantage without any nearby earth to manipulate.

Right when he felt Ikkin's sword clash into his, he rocketed downwards. Her second strike hit the back side of his armor, which, again, was thick enough to deflect the blade.

As Strife descended from the sky, he turned around to face his opponent and immediately threw his sword at her again. This time, it soared towards her in an erratic pattern, as though it was being held by some invisible person who was twirling it in an unpredictable way.

In the meantime, he needed to figure out a way to pull his opponent to the ground level. Seeing how she could fly, it wouldn't be an easy task... but if he couldn't bring her to the ground, he would just have to bring the ground to her.

Strife tapped into the vast energy supply of the Underdeep coursing through his body. There was some resistance at first, seeing how he had previously disobeyed its orders, but after analyzing the current situation, it let him through.

While his sword kept Ikkin busy, Strife himself used the Underdeep energy to expand the range of his psionic powers. The ground far below the two of them started to rumble violently...

((Streets of Tabloid Town))

Within the lifeless streets of Tabloid Town, giant cracks appeared in the petrified ground and pavement. When the cracks were large enough, giant spires of black, shimmering stone erupted from beneath the earth like cannonballs, shooting themselves straight up into the air. The spires had sharpened edges on the top and bottom, giving them the vague shape of some kind of gemstone or diamond. Each one was roughly the size of a small ship, though their sizes varied to some degree.

The black rock spires continued ascending high into the sky, rapidly approaching the area where Strife and Ikkin were dueling.

((Hunty, Speck, and anyone else down there, it's up to you whether or not you notice this, or whether or not you're right in the middle of it.))

[Kiddo]

<Duel with Draco!>

"Draco, Draco, Draco," Kiddo sighed, "What's with the knives? We're NINJAS. That's what we DO. And I am sorry, but honor comes first. Don't leave yourself unguarded."

And while Draco was facing the no longer nameless ninja, Kiddo pivoted, putting all the strength of her legs and hips into a swing that brought the sword close to Draco's side, then snapped inwards, around his belly, and straight into a horizontal cut against his torso.

((among Scadian fighters, called a wrap shot because it goes around the body and hits from behind, usually in the back or lower-legs, which for someone short like me translates to the posterior. I've had some interesting bruises. Kiddo is just doing the same thing, but from behind, aiming for his front. And another interesting tidbit - females are able to have better flexibility on wrap and shots to the leg as our wrists twist further than a man's, giving us more reach to slip under someone's guard. Seriously. Find a friend and see.))

[Draco]

<<Four VS One Battle In Strife Hall>>

Underdeep!Draco moves with the blade, trying to avoid it the best he could. However he wasn't fast enough, allowing himself to be cut. Clenching his teeth, he pivots in place, bringing his sword upwards to try and knock the sword out of the way.

Toshiro took this time to make sure his wound was ok. When he was satisfied that he would live, he unsheaths a Ninjato from the back of his belt, along with a kunai. He readies both in hand and charges forward to enter the battle.

Gil stands in the back, ready to throw more knives.

<<Inside Draco's Head>>

Draco sits in the darkness, watching the battle unfold.

"They're going to kill me at this rate... Is it bad to cheer for the possession to win?"971

[Ikkin]

Ikkin had hoped, when the Commander started flying away from her, that she would finally get a chance to catch her breath - she still hadn't quite recovered from almost being strangled to death, and had been running on nothing more than sheer adrenaline up until now.

That clearly was not to be, however, as her opponent threw his sword at her (what was up with that, anyway?) and it proceeded to slash at her in a completely-random manner.

Such wild flailing would be the death of any person who attempted it against her, but was annoyingly effective when used by a sentient sword with no vital organs to leave unguarded. Ikkin managed to catch the first blow with the side of her blade and pushed in to lock it up, but it simply pulled away and tried to slash her once again, having nothing to protect. She stepped backwards to try to avoid it, but still ended up taking a slash across the chest, which would have left a nasty scratch if her magical clothes hadn't hardened to protect her. As it was, she still felt the force of the strike, which was painful enough.

Knowing she had to do something, and fast, she tried to figure out what, exactly, could hurt a sword. It clearly wasn't much affected by cutting. Its really creepy face might have been a weak point, but it didn't seem particularly easy to hit. The only other choice was fire - too much heat was very bad for any non-magical blade, so it would definitely be worth a shot.

The next time the sword came in for a strike, Ikkin stepped out of its range, then struck down on the back of the blade as it passed, setting her own blade ablaze just as it struck the other sword.

[Kiddo]

<Fight with Draco... do we have any phoenix down?>

Kiddo stepped back, putting herself at maximum range for her sword, allowing Draco to knock it up and out of the way, to her left and above her head. With his sword following her path, she pulled the sword in, hilt to her stomach, and lunged, aiming the point of the blade directly for the spot below the sternum that would lead into the lungs.

"Draco!" she called, "I'll give your possessed state this - it's made you a really bad fighter! You're in there, aren't you, and you know what to do, how to stop me? Then get your brain out here or whatever force possessing you is going to be missing a working body!"

[Speck]

Ze Skies

Once everyone was aboard the Goose Juggler, it closed its hatches and took off towards the floating city hall.

Speck rubbed the back of her head, turning towards everyone's favorite red-caped pirate, "Rider... ah... I'm sorry I'm such a lousy shot. The second I realized that you were Strife's captive, I had already p--"

She was cut off as something grazed the ship. There was a horrible crunch, and a second of screeching scraping, before the alarms in the ship started to go off. Speck winced. Nadine yelled a string of foul words that could be heard clearly through the closed cockpit door. The ship took a few seconds to right itself mid-air before continuing towards the tower.

The copilot stared at the sky battle outside before Nadine told him to pay attention to his job. Oh, if only the Goose Juggler had windows in its passenger area.

[Draco]

<<The Fight In The Room In The Flying City Hall>>

"You know... She's right. Your fighting does stink. Shut up!"

"Insulting my fighting style? I haven't even gotten started."

He takes a step back and melts into a shadow. A moment later he appears clear across the room, and next to Gil. He quickly swings at the Brassportian.

Gil's eyes widen at the attack. He quickly raises a arm in the air, catching the blade with the katar on his arm. When the sword hits his blade, he quickly twists his wrist and swings up and to the side, forcing the sword away and throwing Draco off balance.

Underdeep!Draco catches his balance, but not before a attack from Gil's other katar comes in his direction.

"Tsk. This is getting tiresome."

He stops the attack with his sword, but like before, Gil twists and swings, forcing him off balance again. He slides backwards a little and regains his balance again. He jumps back and away from the three attackers.

"Now for a attack I've been waiting to try."

He waves his hands a little and holds them outward.

"Now burn in the blue flames from the other world! Will o' the wisp!"

He turns his head, expecting blue flames to come flying out at his enemies... Instead, nothing happens.

"Draco... You didn't learn it?"

"Nope. Specialize in shadow magic. Never got around to advance fire magic."

"I hate you..."

He readies himself for another attack after looking like a idiot.971

[Kiddo]

<Duel with Draco>

Kiddo did not pursue when Draco shadow-stepped from one side of the room to the other. It was a ninja thing, after all. Instead, she quietly hooked her crossbow string on the belt catch, drew it back, and tucking her sword under one arm, loaded and took aim. She just had to wait for the right moment.

Which, apparently, was when he tried to set things on fairy fire? And now he was talking to himself? Perhaps he wasn't as in control as well as he thought.

"Could you pose any more dramatically," Kiddo said as she fired the crossbow, "We could take a break from fighting, you know. Give your possessed self time to make a little bullseye target and tape it to your chest. Cause right now, that's all whatever force has a hold of Draco's body is doing. Oh! If he dies, do you bring him back as a zombie? Cause that would be awesome."

[Strife]

((The Skies))

The moment Ikkin's fire-enhanced blade made impact with the voodoo sword, the air around her was filled with an inhuman shriek. The sword had literally screamed in pain from the taste of fire. It immediately began to spin around in the air in random directions, leaving a faint trail of embers in its wake.

Meanwhile, Strife was still pulling the rock spires up from the ground. He noticed the sword going crazy and resolved not to approach Ikkin again until it had calmed down. After what happened the last time it did this, he wasn't about to let it stab him in the back again. Until then, he would try and use ranged attacks.

At this point, the rock spires had reached the same elevation as Ikkin and Strife, surrounding them on all sides in a fairly even ring. Using his psionic powers, Strife quickly pulled himself to the nearest spire like a high-powered magnet, planting his boots firmly on its side.

Then, after channeling his power directly into the spire, bits and pieces of the shimmering black stone broke away and started crawling across the surface of his armor, gathering in the palm of his right hand. He stretched it out and began firing the small, sharp stones at Ikkin like bullets from an automatic weapon. He purposely fired them inaccurately, hoping that the unpredictability of the shots would make them harder to avoid. Some of the stones bounced off his still-panicking sword, creating brief sparks of light.

[Draco]

<<In a little room having a little big fight>>

Underdeep!Draco takes a step to the side to avoid the arrow, and poses for Kiddo.

"If he dies? If he dies, I stay in control. With him alive though, I have a bonus. Kukuku..."

He takes his sword, and throws it at Kiddo, and dashes forward after it. While moving forward he reaches into a pocket and takes out two kunai, both attached to strings. He throws one backwards at the wall, and continues forward with the other.

Gil lets several knives loose in the direction of Draco as he runs, each barely missing.

[Kiddo]

<Draco!>

Kiddo was unable to block the sword, as her own was tucked under one arm. Instead, she dropped the crossbow and turned to knock the sword out of its path with one bent arm, taking a deep cut into the muscle of the upper and forearm, but sending the blade spinning into the air instead. She caught it on the way down and by the time Draco reached her, she was just falling into guard with her sword in one hand, his in the other.

"You're better off while he's alive? That's pretty sad. I mean, real sad. Cause all this fighting and all you've managed is to give me a few stitches later. And now I have your sword. If the Spacefleet and whoever else is responsible for this disaster all fight like toothless dogs then it's going to be hardly a contest."

[Draco]

<<The Room>>

He lets the kunai drop from his hand, keep a hold of the string itself, and begins to swing the kunai around in a circle. Letting a little shadow aura into the string to make sure it wasn't cut easily, he swings the kunai at Kiddo.

"I still have a few tricks up my sleeves."

"That is if the Underdeep would help me out some!"

"You're doing fine. When you really need help, it will be decided if you deserve help or not."

"You better think I need help soon! Do I get a say in this? NO!"

Toshiro begins to slowly walk around the room, waiting for a good time to attack.

Meanwhile outside the room, the nightmare creatures begin to gather around the doors to the room.971

[Gelquie]

Gelquie could only stare throughout the whole battle/conversation, ignoring the fact that battles and conversations usually don't mix well. Possessed? That man, Draco? It seemed plausible; staticy eyes did not strike Gelquie as normal, and him talking about himself as a different personality definitely confirmed it.

She stopped herself from berating herself. She didn't know these people, so there was no way she could have guessed it. It still annoyed her that she didn't know what he was being possessed by, and why everything was happening. And of course no one would tell her; people don't generally explain things in gratuitous detail while they're fighting some... things. But it still annoyed her to no end.

Gelquie resisted a sigh. She knew she was stuck on this rock, and it looked like the crazed ninja was going to go after her next. It was then that she heard a scratching sound behind her. Before looking, she very quickly grabbed her dagger and summoned what seemed to be a small opaque rainbow right below Draco. The rainbow started moving very quickly around the ninja at very high speeds until it reached his face, where it proceeded to spin around his face in front of his eyes.

"That should distract them," Gelquie thought. Then she turned around to see... A swarm of the same type of creatures she saw earlier heading straight towards her. Her eyes went wide and she pulled out her dagger.

"Go away!" she cried out, creating the illusion of a stone wall between her and the creatures. She kept on eye on the "wall" she created; it'd only worked if they believed it.

[The Underdeep]

"Welcome."

He cleared his throat. It made a noise like thunder. "Welcome, mortals of the planet NTWF. I am the darkness which you cast aside for your own artificial light. I am the earth that you abandoned to take to the skies and the seas. I am the abyss of your ignorance which you cannot ever hope to fill.

"I have come to take what is most dear to you, whatever that might be. Your families? Your homes? Your freedom? Your lives? I will find it and hunt it to extinction.

I remember when you were still a young species, clad in the skins of the things you had killed. Every time you thought you had conquered this planet, I took your food and struck your homes with lightning that you thought to be the lightning of a wrathful god. If I had the means to smile, I would have. And now look at me, smiling! Me, smiling!" He bared his teeth in a hungry grin.

"Why should things change now that your species has moved into adolescence and adulthood? You believe you can sleep without the nightlight? You think you are immune to fear? No, your fears have simply evolved, as I have. And my messengers and I can make them all come true. Accept the fact that you are helpless. Cower before me like the animals you were at the dawn of time, too afraid of me to leave your caves and the fires that you thought would act as a ward against me."

He lowered a spiked tentacle to a tiny, doll-sized figure. "What do you think?"

The petrified human said nothing.

"Why do you not speak?"

Thunderclouds rolled in, oily and dark. The sun was just a memory now. The beast smiled as he made his way towards Tabloid Town. He was in no hurry. All would know he was coming.

[Huntress]

((The floating city hall. I was going to ask for Zylaa's permission for this post for plot-forwarding purposes, but then remembered that dude, Kassandra is in fact my character >>; Goes to show just how far my NPC problem reaches.))

Kassandra opened her eyes. Her head hurt like crazy.

She wasn't entirely sure what'd happened. They'd teleported in with the phoenix, except she wasn't sure just how many of all those people she'd seen at the mages' manor had come along, or moreover, what'd happened to them after they teleported. Or what'd happened to her after they teleported. There'd been someone talking about a person named Strife, and a kitsune had gone after Strife, and two phoenixes...

...oh hey, the phoenixes were still here. Fighting. In the dark, crumbling lobby of the city hall they were in. All right then. They didn't concern her right now, and she was conveniently lying behind a huge rock so she'd stayed out of view.

The air smelled like the space-time continuum had just been stretched out, fried, dried out and run through a pasta machine. Kassandra cursed under her breath. Was this what happened? Stories sometimes did this when something happened to the storyteller. When not controlled, they lashed around loosely and could suck people in a narrative vortex for an indeterminate amount of time...

Or maybe it'd been her own story cocoon that'd protected her when the phoenixes began their fight. In retrospect, who can tell?

Anyway, enough of that. She was here now and she had to do something. Anything. But for that, she needed to know what was going on, so she took a deep breath, let her protective story-nest wrap itself around her, waited until her heart stopped racing - such a brave girl, gathering her final shreds of- no, wait, this was stupid. The damsel in distress approach worked better with people around to leech protection off of. Right now she needed to stand for herself.

The demoness turned around, pressed herself against the floor and crawled off with speed and silence that would've surprised anyone who'd met her. The Sues' primary weapon is manipulation but it's not always their weapon of choice. She didn't want anything to do with phoenixes.

There were... things moving on the floor. Underdeep things. Kassandra barely wasted a glance on them. They moved out of the way when her story-nest lashed at them. She'd lived in the Underdeep, she'd seen worse.

The Sue made it to another room and got up. She could hear people fighting, some inside and some outside, but which was-

More memories surfaced. "He's out there fighting if you want to say hi." That's right. Kassandra turned to face a door that'd been ripped off, a bright rectangle of light in this gloomy room. She focused. The story-nest tightened, looking for the best angle for protection in this situation. Such a brave girl-

No. No, no no no no, none of this pat-on-the-head kind of crap. Pick another side to show. She had multiple. She needed the one that'd kept the entire blarf race cowering in fear under her power for years.

I'm your worst bloody nightmare.

Yes, this'd do quite nicely. She unsheathed her sword, tossed her head back and strode out into the sunlight where a gust of wind immediately caught her hair and sent it waving like a silvery battle flag.

((How can you read this? There's no pictures! And yes, I know some people use their imagination, but that way I wouldn't have an excuse to draw x3))



She had to admit that the view was nice up here. Just the right kind of rocky debris lying around to heroically pose on, too. And the right kind of wind to toss her hair around. She cast a look around. There was a flying spaceship, and two people fighting in the air... and one of them was the kitsune who'd gone to fight Strife. So the other person had to be, logically enough, Strife.

The Sue squinted down at them. Well, this was terribly inconvenient. There was just no way of getting down there without a flying horse or something similar, and she'd never heard of flying horses in this world.* So she did the only thing she could think of at this moment. She raised her head even higher and began to sing.

Sues, much like some other breeds of demon and the fair folk, are terrible at arts. They're creative in many ways but they can't create properly, it always turns out slightly wrong. But being demons, they still can put a whole lot of power in their song, and they always have beautiful voices. So the song that drifted across the petrified city and also pervaded the city hall itself consisted mostly of a drawn-out 'aa-aaa-aaaaa' type of wail, but as it spread out, it raveled Kassandra's story out along with it, wrapping everyone within hearing range in it, sending messages right into their spinal cords and relaying info back to the singing Sue at the same time.

You are my enemy, you shall know fear and defeat.

You are my friend, you shall be healed.

-and there was Strife, whose aura stuck out like a sore thumb in this sonar-like audiomagical picture Kassandra was now getting. Undead?!

Her lips curled in a small smile. You are my enemy, you shall be healed.

The wail died down for a moment, then picked up again as Kassandra chanted a generic small healing spell. It'd affect everyone within hearing range, enemies or no, so she didn't put a lot of power behind it, but it'd be noticeable all the same.

Down in the spaceship, Hunty, who'd just gotten hit with an eerie feeling of fear and an odd sense of refreshment pretty much at the same time, leaned her back against the wall with a confused scowl. "I swear, this tin can is driving me nuts. First the turbulence, now this. Any chance of getting out of here soon?"

*There are in fact several, but they're bred only by valkyries and cartel agreements are keeping the prices way up.