Guild Wars III Roleplay (Rated T)

[Kiddo]

<<Tower of Strife>>

Kiddo opened her eyes and in an instant took in the damage. Not bad. She took stock and made a decision in another instant. There wasn't time to think. Too many people, too much destruction. And she felt in her gut that something bad was going on and that it was time to find the source and make it stop, one way or another. Time to use some intuition and hope for luck.

"C'mon!" Kiddo cried to the people around her, her katana in one hand, Draco's in the other, "Forget Draco. Those shadow beasts are going to be back and we need to MOVE. Stay with me, we're going to move fast. Cause something is keeping this tower floating... and we're going to find it... and then we're going to smash it."

And Kiddo bolted for the door, skidding out into the hallway and barely noting Gelquie's presence.

"If you're not with the Underdeep," the ninja called out to her, "Than keep up!"

Okay, it wasn't the greatest of plans. But reducing the tower to a heap of rubble would certainly upset whoever had levitated it in the first place and hopefully drag them out of hiding and force an open confrontation. Enough of this cat and mouse stuff. She'd find the tallest point - evil maniacs liked that. And then stuff would be smashed.

Course, they had to survive the crash. It was possible. Maybe. Kiddo didn't think on that very long. She had a shadow beast in front of her and it needed to be cut into two with Draco's sword. These were the things she focused on in her mad dash through the tower.

[Draco]

<<Some Random Room>>

Underdeep!Draco stands up and shakes his once damaged leg a bit. Moving it. Tapping it. Testing it.

"It looks healed now... Now I just need to think of a new plan... And stop talking out loud to myself."

"But you are kind of talking to me."

"Silence."

"Just saying."

U!Draco growls a little, and begins to dig through the pockets of his jacket.

"There's got to be a weapon I can use until I get the sword back."

"You left the majority of them at Mage Manor. I had enough in there to last me several battles. The rest would be back at the Dojo or needs to be created."

Staring out a window, U!Draco slams a fist into the wall. The cracks and breaks a little around the spot punched. He breaths slowly and begins to think.

"Strife's dashing. I can do a similar dash, but not as fast... I did it before."

He pulls out a few items from his pocket.

"I have a idea... But first."

A nightmare creature appears in front of U!Draco and moans a few times.

"So they blinded and dissolved some of your brothers, and wish to drop the building? Kukuku... Let them. Not my problem."

U!Draco steps out of the room, and walks in the opposite direction of Kiddo and the rest.

---

<<Former Battle Room>>

The light clears, and almost as fast as it appeared Kiddo states her plan and runs off. Toshiro gets up and dashes after Kiddo.

"I am unsure how to drop this building from the sky, but I will assist you in anyway I can."

Gil stands up, dusts himself off, and sighs to himself before chasing after the two ninjas. He retracts his katars before he catches up with them.

"This plan is insane. But it would be interesting to see how it flies."971

[Ian Wolf-Park]

Strife's Manor
Lupehunter was momentarily blinded when the ninja threw a light bomb on the ground, but he quickly shook it off. After he recovered, he noticed that the shadow creatures were gone. Then the ninja explained what they were going to do.

"If you're not with the Underdeep, than keep up!"she shouted as she headed out

He did not need to be told twice, so he followed her. Several shadow creatures attempted to attack them from the sides, but he drove his daggers into them. This was going to take a while, but he did not mind as long as they had a plan of some sort.

[Gelquie]

((Floating Manor))

Gelquie didn't do much in the short period after the light dissipated other than let her eyes adjust before she heard Kiddo's new command. Her eyes went open at the last part, and she wondered not briefly whether this woman was absolutely suicidal. Before she could say anything, the ninja had started running.

"If you're not with the Underdeep, than keep up!" Kiddo called out to her.

Gelquie briefly looked confused. Underdeep? She knew enough about it from books and legends, and that it occasionally did some weird stuff, but... this? Admittedly, it did make some degree of sense, with the nightmarish creatures, but she didn't think that'd it ever lash out like this. Maybe the Underdeep was involved... But she still had no answers on what was happening.

Whatever it was, she decided that since she didn't know about its involvement, she probably wasn't with it. Still, as much as she wanted to have a real fighter on her side, she did not like this plan at all. She began to run after Kiddo and was about to shout something when she heard the others.

"This plan is insane. But it would be interesting to see how it flies."

Gelquie pondered the insanity of the others, and tried to take in enough air so that she could run and shout. "Am I the only one who's not--The crash will kill us all! And we can't escape from the drop!"

She was about to say something else, but she was sure that now wasn't the right time to go on about what one could do with a floating citadel after it was purged of the creatures, and after the problem of trapped on it was solved. Now was especially not the time when she was running as fast as possible to keep up.

[Draco]

<<Somewhere in the floating hall of doom>>

Gil laughs to himself lightly.

"If the building does begin to fall, we can just run to my air ship. It's enough for us to get off safely."

---

<<Somewhere else in the floating hall of doom>>

U!Draco continues to walk the halls, humming to himself.

"Total slaughter. Total slaughter. I won't leave a single man alive..."

More nightmare creatures begin to spawn in the halls throughout the building. Their mouths open, showing their rows of teeth, long tongues, and dripping drool.

"La de da de dide. Genocide. La de da de dud. An ocean of blood..."

The creatures spines begin to shake lightly and their nightmare mist begins to spread through the halls.

"Let's begin the killing time."

If the creatures had multi-digit hands or legs, they would have clawed into the ground about now, instead they could only use their one digit to do it. They lower themselves, and charge forward to find and attack their prey. Crawling with great speed on the floor, walls, and ceilings.

U!Draco continues to hum to himself.971

[Kiddo]

<<Tower of Strife>>

"Thought of that already!" Kiddo yelled back, "Well, kinda. Basically, we get to whatever is keeping this tower up and see if the master minds us... damaging... it. If so, we force his hand and then beat the ever-living daylights out of him."

She grimaced at the suddenly increased amount of mist and accompanying creatures.

"That is, if we get there alive. Keep moving! Don't stop! And if the master of this place doesn't want to play, then we'll offload some timed explosions - I really do hope we've got at least one mage in this mess - and bring it down anyway! Once we're out. Because we can."

Kiddo grinned wickedly at that last part and slogged into the fray, heading for a stairwell. Her fighting was almost absent-minded, going through the routine combination of duel-swords. She refused to acknowledge the existence of the shadow creatures, picturing them in her minds eye as nothing more than a pell and her swords nothing mroe than the practice ones back at the Dojo. More than anything, she had to keep moving up through the tower and keep everyone focused. If her lack of focused defense was costing her a bite or a cut there... it had to be.

A moment of doubt or pause could give way to panic and from what she knew of the Underdeep - they'd all be doomed then.

((pell - wooden post set in the ground used to practice swords on))

[Ikkin]

It was amazing how much could happen in a split-second in the heat of battle. If Ikkin had just been a little bit faster - maybe, if she hadn't been so caught off-guard by her opponent's incredible ability to reverse dismemberment - she could have taken advantage of his unnecessarily-large movements to turn the tides in her favor.

As it was, she had a knee backed by all of the weight of a highly-armored man pressed firmly into her stomach, and very little to work with. The spells on her clothing had managed to protect her well enough to keep her ribcage and internal organs from becoming a shattered mess, but all of the air had been knocked out of her, and what little air she could take in pained her so severely that she was sure something must have been broken.

She barely had time to process the fact that she was somehow on the ground when something struck her hard on her right cheek, so forcefully that it felt like that entire side of her head had been crushed in. Her mind was reeling. Where she was, who she was fighting, she could hardly tell anymore.

But she was fighting. And that's what mattered the most. She wasn't just going to give up and die, even if it felt like she should have already been dead. Her right eye was squeezed closed from the pain radiating through that side of her face, and her legs were effectively useless, but she could still see, and her arms weren't pinned down yet. And she wasn't about to give up any of that.

She saw the strike towards her right shoulder with the kind of clarity that only comes with being in a do-or-die situation, and shifted her weight so that most of the force was deflected off to the side by her enchanted shirt, and did the same when he brought the other fist around to strike at her left shoulder.

There wasn't much she could do to avoid the punch to her chest, though, and she lost every bit of ground she might have gained as the air left her once again. Before she could react, she was grabbed by the shoulders, pulled upwards, then slammed back down to the ground with back-breaking force, managing to keep her head from striking hard rock through nothing more than instinct.

Her assailant didn't seem to be put off by her attempts to mitigate the damage at all, though. In fact, she thought fuzzily, as he grabbed the sides of her head and forced her to look directly into his weirdly staticky eyes, he probably preferred it that way. It just gave him more time to "play," no matter how much he huffed and puffed about drinking tears and bathing in blood.

An internal snark track, she found, didn't exactly help much when the bad guy slammed your head into the ground. It especially didn't help when you weren't sure whether the darkness creeping in on you was unconsciousness, death, or pure nightmare being forced directly into your mind.

But she was far beyond despair now, and all the way into pure kamikaze fury. If she was going to go down, well, she'd just have to go down fighting. The Commander might have had every advantage on her, but he was far more interested in savoring his victory than in making sure he kept it, and that just might be enough to allow her last attack to be worth something.

Besides, he probably didn't realize her arms still hadn't been fully neutralized, and they were just about long enough to put her hands on his face.

So, that's exactly what she did. Moving with the kind of speed provided by an all-out, last-ditch effort, she grabbed onto his face in much the same way as he had hers, then clawed in as deeply as she could go and converted every bit of reserve energy she had left into pure fire that sprang up around her hands, searing her opponent and her own flesh alike.

The pain was basically irrelevant at this point - she almost felt as if she was outside of her body already, looking on from the outside as her body put all it had into taking the enemy down with it.


***

It quickly became apparent to Sev that melee combat was far more taxing on his opponent than it was to him. He'd sustained dozens of gashes and stabs and burn marks from his doppelganger's talons and beak and flames, but had mostly managed to avoid the more severe sort of injuries, while his opponent's feathers and body continued to melt away until his very bones were visible.

Continuing the fight, in any case, was definitely not worth it. He had far more pressing matters at hand, namely the rapid crash in Ikkin's magic, followed by a very unnatural increase in power that reminded him of his own death throes.

The doppelganger hardly had any feathers or flesh left, anyway. Surely someone else could finish him off.

So, as soon as he found an opening, he pushed his opponent away bodily with his talons, using the split-second in which they weren't connected to teleport away without being followed. If he was lucky, the flames into which he'd disappeared would do more damage even after he was gone.

[Zylaa]

((Ship!))

Perhaps it was the effect of actually having some anti-Underdeep protection that gave Zylaa the sudden uplifting feeling. So when Jina said "So, err... what do we do next, exactly?", her immediate thought-- PANIC!-- had been replaced with determination.

"We obliterate the megapowered manifestation of a force made up of all our worst nightmares," she said with a slightly manic grin. "Should be fun!"

At this point she noticed that the ship was surrounded by rock spires growing like... like something growing very fast. Zylaa paled. As she had white fur, this wasn't exactly noticeable, but she paled, alright.

Off in the distance she spotted a fiery red blob that could be Sev... locked in a fight, which wasn't surprising. She'd never seen the opponent before, but assumed it was yet another Underdeep creation. Everything seemed to be these days.

[Ian Wolf-Park]

Strife's Manor


"That is, if we get there alive. Keep moving! Don't stop! And if the master of this place doesn't want to play, then we'll offload some timed explosions - I really do hope we've got at least one mage in this mess - and bring it down anyway! Once we're out. Because we can."


"You're talking to one, Miss Ninja," Lupehunter shouted towards the ninja leading the group.

As more and more shadow creatures appeared to cut off their route, Lupehunter knew that they needed to be cleared. Quickly, he sheathed his daggers and slammed one of his hands onto the floor. A few seconds later, a wall of light arose from the spot where he slammed his hand and rapidly expanded, protecting his allies while obliterating the shadow creatures. The route was cleared, if only temporary.

[Gelquie]

((In Strife's Place. Running in the Hallways. We never listened to our teachers.))

Gelquie gave a very confused look as Gil laughed at her statement about everyone dying a horrible death by crashing. It was when he talked about the possibility of going back that Gelquie gulped, and she went silent for a long time.

"Er... Um, well... I didn-- Actually... Well, aside from it being too far away, and that stuff may have happened..." Gelquie stopped herself. Lying about something this important in a life-or-death situation was inherently stupid. "No we can't. Something bad happened to the ship while you left it out there alone... I hope you're wonderful at both piloting and engineering."

Then she shook her head and focused on what Kiddo said. "I'm all for stopping whatever's causing this... If we even can. But we need to consider a different escape option."

Gelquie just managed to dodge an attack by an Underdeep thing, deciding not to use her dagger on them. Then she took another look at it and her eyes went wide. They were getting more fearsome, more horrifying... They were getting stronger, and so was her fear... She slowed down just long enough for an Underdeep thing to pince her leg. She let out a small gasp from the resulting pain before kicking it away just in time for Lupehunter to cast his spell, obliterating the creature and all those around it.

"Excellent! ...Well, maybe I can't blow anything up, but can you?" Gelquie asked, as she went back to running at her top speed.

[Speck]

The Goose Juggler finally came to a halt, barely fitting through the hole in the manor. There was enough room for someone on the roof to lie down flat and not get injured. Nadine didn't know; she was paying more attention to flying than a mystery person banging on the roof. Even for a slightly damaged ship, the Goose had moved too slow. Maybe it had been caught in a pocket of space that moved slower than everything around it. Who knows.

Nadine commanded the hatches to open and unbuckled herself, grabbing the plasma rifle that Speck had fired earlier. Speck and the mismatched Spacefleet crew hopped off the ship. Not fifty feet away, dark creatures were circling around them. They didn't move any closer; they just waited.

Speck turned to Hunty, "Um... where do we go from here?"

[Kiddo]

<<Inside the Tower>>

The spell went racing past Kiddo and she grinned to herself. Good, very good. Up ahead the hallway turned and she risked a look back, pleased to see that they were following her, even if she really didn't have a concrete - or very good - plan in mind.

"Good!" she called back, "A mage. We need that."

She rounded the corner and skidded to a halt. The hallway was wide and a pair of double-doors stood at the end. They were open and she could see into the room beyond. It looked important. The windows covered the walls and she could even see the scenery beyond, all turned to stone. There were statues in this room, all of people, frozen in place. She swallowed hard. Like they were doing something and just... stopped. But it wasn't the statues that worried her the most.

It was the sheer volume of Underdeep monsters between her and the surprisingly empty room.

"Right," Kiddo said, dropping into stance with both swords, "Someone is expending a lot of energy to keep throwing these at us. Let's force that someone to keep it up. Destroy as many as you can. We advance, get into that room, and then inform the owner of this tower that the neighborhood welcoming committee is here and we don't approve of his choice of decor. And by inform I mean 'stab'. Lots."

And the ninja threw herself at the beasts, turning her swords into a dervish of steel.

[Huntress]

((Strife's floaty city hall))

"Um... where do we go from here?"

Hunty stepped out of the ship, looking around suspiciously. Then she turned around to look at Zagora and raised a questioning eyebrow. The witch shot an indifferent glance back at her.

"Ze powa source of zis building is down zere," she said, nodding vaguely towards the floor where Strife was presumably fighting Ikkin a few hundred yards below. "If he dies, zis place crashes and ve probably die as vell. If I vas to get close to him, my amulet vould expel ze Underdeep from him, but zat is not likely as long as ve all sit up here. So don't look at me, girl, I have no idea vhy ve came up here."

"Fate brought us back together," said a slender figure in the bright doorway.

"Oh crap," Bloody Mary said with feeling. Hunty turned around.

Kassandra had style, she had to admit. Sues were good at that. The elf stood there in the doorway, her hair whipping around in the wind, her sword poised, and most probably with fierce determination in her eyes, although since she had her back to the light, it wasn't really possible to see.

"Is now really the time?" Hunty asked with a sigh.

"Yes." The elf stepped forward, into the dim hall. "You." She raised her sword slowly and menacingly until it pointed at the captain's chest. "You invaded my home, humiliated me, defeated me, stole my sword, and for that," there was a small pause, probably for effect, "you will pay."

Silence reigned. From Kassandra's part, because she was allowing her words some time to sink in, and from Hunty's part because she was thinking fast. Something skittered across the floor in a farther dark corner of the vast room.

"Well, fair enough," Hunty then said with a shrug. "But you'd rather actually make me pay for it, am I right? You want to fight me."

The elf seemed a bit confused. "That's what I just said."

"Lovely, lovely. But the problem here is, we're currently in the middle of the Apocalypse." Hunty made a broad gesture with her sword to encompass the dark, crumbling city hall, the frozen city outside it and the battle for life and death that was going on somewhere out there. "As you probably heard, we might drop to our deaths any minute here. And that, I daresay, would kill even you. You could fight me now, possibly kill me now, possibly survive my crew's revenge, and then still perish as the Underdeep consumes the entire world. What use will that be?"

"Why do I care?" Kassandra asked back. "I've lived in the Underdeep. I can survive this new world. Especially if you won't."

"Ouch, cold," Hunty said with a small grin as something flashed in her eyes. There was a plan in there somewhere. "You're bluffing. I know you Sues. You're human-geared demons. We're the ones who respond to your stories. We admire you, and love you, and want to help and protect you, and avenge you when you're wronged. What will you be without the human world? Just another demon, roaming the cutthroat world of demons."

"You deceptive wormtongue," Kassandra snapped. She was too far away for her story to actually affect the spaceship party, but Hunty could nevertheless feel some angry thoughts lashing at her mind. But they were weak and didn't affect her thinking much. She shrugged. "Tell me that I'm lying and I'll admit it."

Silence reigned again. There were sounds barely audible farther away, some outside and some elsewhere in the city hall, but it didn't matter right now. An alliance was at stake.

"If we fail and die, I'll never get my revenge," Kassandra then said grumpily.

"How likely is it that we die?" Hunty asked rather sharply. "You said that you've lived in the Underdeep. You should know that place."

Silence was beginning to think of investing in a nice summer cottage because things looked like it'd be sticking around for quite some time. Kassandra lowered her sword.

"Truth be told, you should've been able to come to this conclusion yourself," she said with a hint of disapproval in her voice. "The Underdeep is this world's oldest and most powerful manifestation of fear. You humans have used many different tactics to deal with fear, but the oldest and most powerful of those tactics is..." She paused, then her shoulders sagged. "No, this isn't really the kind of scenery for proper striking pauses. I'm talking about fire."

Hunty scowled. "This sounds awfully simple."

"The first people to come up with it had just about gotten down from the trees, how elaborate did you expect it to be?" the Sue retorted. "Well, there is a catch. It needs to be applied with a human hand and human mind. The firebird out there is good, but he's not human, he won't work against a human-centric force."

Hunty grinned. Bloody Mary shot a concerned sideways glance up at her face and sank lower on her shoulder. He knew this look. It meant that things would very soon become very unfunny for a whole lot of other people involved.

"So what you're saying is," she said, "that we need to get out there and burn that sucker."

"Rarely fails," Kassandra said matter-of-factly. "Come, have a look."

The captain stepped outside, blinking in the bright daylight and trying hard to suppress a shudder as the Sue's story-nest slid across her mind. Kassandra seemed to be sticking to her promise, though; it was a passive nest this time, more of an uncomfortable feeling like someone was drawing a finger across the surface of her brain rather than an active sue-esque mindbending. The elf stepped aside and pointed at the horizon. "That."

At first, Hunty couldn't see anything. The world was still petrified, the sky was still inappropriately blue and cheerful, the sun was still shining, and clouds seemed to be... gathering on the horizon?

"It's coming," said Kassandra. "The personified Underdeep. Conveniently also the thing you need to attack in order to save this world. At any other time you'd have had to travel for forty days and forty nights within the Underdeep to get to the core. I'm not sure why it's come out."

Hunty breathed in with a hiss. Her eyes narrowed into slits. Then she leaned against a rock, still keeping an eye on Kassandra who smiled smugly, seeing her precaution measures, and bent forward to look down. There was Strife, fighting Ikkin, and the blarf's fuzzy black back could be seen much farther away, guarding Haggoth's spaceship with another anti-Underdeep amulet, preventing it from turning to stone.

A plan was forming. Hunty turned around and looked up, towards the roof of the city hall, then strode back inside.

"Mkay," she said. "Since we're already conveniently up here, might as well go see who else is here and whether they're willing to assist us in blowing the Underdeep up. Don't do anything stupid, don't let any of those Underdeep-infested buggers fool you, and most importantly, do. Not. Die. That's an order. Are we quite clear here? Good. Let's move out. Anyone with better ears and senses than me, where the lifeforms at?"

[Draco]

<<The Halls of the Floating City Hall of Strife>>

Staring out a window U!Draco sighs.

"This is getting boring."

A nightmare creature crawls over to the possessed ninja and groans a few times.

"Oh? The Pirates are here now? Perhaps I should pay them a visit."

He dashes through the halls, being directed by his creatures as he makes his way through the maze of hallways. After some time, the Pirates were in sight. He begins to walk to the group, but stops in his tracks. A sort of wave felt. A bad feeling. He hides around a corner.

"What the heck was that? It feel fine, but I also had a bad feeling walking to them... What does it mean? I didn't feel anything. How could you miss it? No matter..."

He steps out from around the corner, and begins to walk forward. He notices in the shadows some of his creatures are close to the group, but stay hidden in the shadows. He takes a few steps closer and raises a arm up.

"Well if it isn't the pirates."

[Strife]

((Floating Hall of Strife))

Dark Sev continued to wrestle with his brother, tearing holes in the phoenix's body whenever he had the chance. Despite the fact that he was suffering more damage than he was inflicting, he continued pushing his body to its absolute limit, getting in as many hits as he possibly could.

At some point, Sev pushed his body away from Dark Sev and teleported away in a burst of fire. The force of the blast was enough to push Dark Sev into a nearby column. After slamming into the column, he let out a loud scream - more of frustration than of pain - and floated gently to the ground in a skeletal heap. Spirals of black smoke poured out of his body like a smouldering crater.

Dark Sev remained motionless on the floor, allowing the Underdeep to regenerate his wounds before he chased after his brother. His feathers grew back rapidly like a parasitic plant, while his eyes darted around in every direction, scanning the room for other intruders.

His senses detected Draco's signature in the far distance, along with a cluster of unfamiliar signatures right next to him. He would wait and see how the situation played out before confronting this group.


((Streets of Tabloid Town))

The kitsune had slipped into a near-death state, in which only her most primal thoughts - namely, the need to fight for survival - were guiding her actions. Strife had neglected to lock her arms in place, and in an act of pure desperation and adrenaline, Ikkin threw her arms upwards, dug her hands into Strife's face, and ignited them in a burst of flames.

Strife's heat shield immediately flickered on, but given the fact that her hands were touching his skin, the shield didn't do much to protect him from the burns. The fire scorched every inch of his face and consumed every strand of hair on his head, taking away the only thing left that made him resemble a human being other than his body shape. His head, now scarred, burned, and completely bald, was as monsterous as his personality.

Strife let go of Ikkin's head, forcefully pried her hands away from his face, and stood up. His hands pawed his face feverishly, and he immediately realized the absence of hair. She had burned everything off.

He screamed out of sheer anger while clenching his fists as tightly as he could, and threw himself into another bloodthirsty frenzy. He wanted his opponent dead now.

Strife clenched his fists together, rose them high in the air, and slammed them down hard on Ikkin's stomach, causing the ground to shake momentarily. He lifted his fists into the air and prepared to do it a second time, when suddenly, out of nowhere, a burst of flames appeared directly in front of him. He stood frozen in place, gazing at the creature that had teleported in just now.

It was Sev.

Strife's pause was more out of sheer surprise than of fear, as he currently had no concept of fear other than what the Underdeep provided him with. He grinded his charred teeth together and stood up, driving his large boot into Ikkin's stomach as he did so.

He remained silent, locking eyes with the beast. His expression, he figured, combined with the kitsune that was now very likely dead beneath his feet, told Sev everything he needed to know.