Guild Wars III Roleplay (Rated T)

[Goosh]

((Tabloid Town))

The line outside the Saucy Elephant stretched down the street and around the corner. Bass-heavy music thumped out the door and into the streets. On the club's roof, a giant statue of an elephant leered down at the impatient crowd.

"How about here?" Zylaa asked, in between licks of her ice cream cone.

"Looks like quite a line," Goosh replied.

Zylaa grinned, pinching a bit of the Yurble's fur and watching how it caught the evening light like a diamond. "I had no intention of waiting in line."

"Oh. Right." Goosh sauntered up to the front of the line. The bouncer looked up to tell them off, but her expression changed when she caught sight of him.

"Uh. Name, please?"

"Well, we're not really on the list. But I think you should let us in anyway."

The bouncer furrowed her brow, but her eyes were pretty glazed. "I should. I should? Why?"

Goosh grinned, pouring on the sparkle a little more. "Because we asked politely, that's why."

The bartender smiled, glad the problem was solved. "You're right. Okay, go in. And have a nice night."

As soon as they were out of earshot, Zylaa started giggling. "I officially declare you my new fake ID."

Goosh turned the sparkle off and rolled his eyes. "Whatever."

The inside of the Saucy Elephant was pure chaos. The dancing horde had spilled over from the main floor to the stages and catwalks. Men in suits cheered on girl in colourful, fluffy dresses. A heavy intoxication had overtaken the crowd, unusual this early in the night. But, well, it was Tabloid Town.

Goosh and Zylaa danced for a while, but the noise in the room only grew louder and louder. The dancing wasn't really dancing anymore, just a massive, ongoing flail.

"At least in a dingy old tavern, it's fairly quiet!" Zylaa shouted.

Goosh nodded, glancing around for someplace even remotely quiet. A pair of guards blocked a metal door in the corner near the bar. The two made their way over there, stepping over those who had passed out on the floor, and passing Jina, who was at the bar.

"Can we go in there?" Zylaa asked the guards.

"No," they said in unison.

Five minutes and some sparkles later, they were in. Beyond the door was a tight spiral staircase. They scaled it quickly, the energy from the club still with them, and didn't stop until they reached the summit and pushed the door open.

Cool night air assaulted their faces. They were standing atop the titular saucy elephant. From up here, they had a view over all of Tabloid Town. The moon was starting to rise, and its pale light illuminated the Weewoo bobbing in the harbour. Up here, the noise of the city was lost to the wind, and a curious silence that Goosh had never heard in Tabloid Town before reigned.

"Pretty," Zylaa murmured. It was all that needed to be said. They carefully edged down the steps cut into the elephant's trunk. The light from a thousand lamps flickered across the view, and fireflies zipped through the air.

"What do you think the weasels would be playing here?"she asked.

In response, Goosh climbed out onto one of the tusks and perched on it, staring out over the city. "Love lift us up where we belong, where eagles fly, on a mountain high!"

Zylaa laughed and followed him out onto the other tusk. And there they sat.

[Angie]

[ Outside Mercenary Base ]

The front door opened before Hawk had the chance to knock, and he nearly made a move to enter before realizing someone was already standing where the door had once been. In the second it took for the door to slide open, the familiar violet-haired girl in front of him had already tensed for her weapon and then relaxed on recognition. Reflexes. Hawk had long admired hers.

"Hello, Hawk. Nice earthquake, huh?"

"Sytra." He nodded in greeting to the smirking girl and ran a hand through disheveled dark hair, wondering if his expression looked as thoroughly unnerved by the recent disaster as he still felt. Creepy was the only word for it. That feeling... "And I've had better days, yes."

She didn't slide out of the doorway, or even wait for him to move, but simply teleported past him. She rematerialized a moment later a few feet behind him. "We're going off to look for some work. And food. Come if you want."

"Why not?" he said with a shrug. They could certainly do with the work. And the food, though at the rate it kept disappearing from the Mercs' kitchen, Hawk half wondered if it was even worth bothering.

At the same time his thoughts kept returning to the quake, that nagging feeling in the back of his mind.

He suddenly realized that part of why everything felt so wrong was that, disconcertingly, Hawk could see no sign of damage around him. Everything appeared as if nothing had happened. For those few terrible moments Earth had shook, and then land had slid like the opening of a great pair of jaws, and then he remembered images dreams nightmares flooding past the dam... but now nothing.

That changed quickly, however, as when he moved to follow Sytra, the land before them shook once more and opened up, swallowing a darkness with darkness and creating a chasm that sucked everything into its own depths: trees, air, earth.

With it came the stench of rotting flesh and the keening sound, like that of a tornado, of a thousand wailing deaths. Hawk looked into the depths and saw more than darkness, into the nothingness that stretched down — but it wasn't nothing, it was definitely something even though he couldn't say what — before the realization hit him. Evil. He and the rest of the mercenaries were standing in the presence of true evil.

In other words, whatever had gone wrong earlier had now managed go even more wrong.

"Oh, hell," he said, and drew the light knives.

[Ikkin]

Ikkin quickly realized that leaving the Underdeep did nothing to clear up the fog in her head. She'd barely realized that someone - or maybe several someones - had responded to her question... and then the necromancer and the dragon (why couldn't she remember their names?) were being dragged down into the darkness, with all of the other mages using whatever kind of fire magic they could manage to try to stave off the tentacles that were doing the dragging.

She wasn't sure why, but she couldn't bring herself to believe it would work. Maybe the Underdeep had gotten to her more than she'd thought.

But, in any case, she had to do something... and all she could think to do was to dive right into the darkness after them.

Which, in retrospect, was a terrible idea, and she suspected it might not have been entirely hers.

Ikkin found it nearly impossible to describe what happened next. Images and sounds threatened to drown her, but they weren't particularly coherent - the only consistent thing was the feeling of loss and strained bonds and fire, as if Sev's soul was being forcibly torn away from her own.

She wasn't sure how long she fought against the images, desperately trying to do anything to keep them from breaking her entirely... and then she was back in Mage Manor again, right outside of the dark portal that she'd jumped into, with Sev by her side.

He didn't say anything, but the sad look that he gave made it clear that he had saved her again. She wondered how much longer he could keep doing that, with the corruption of the Underdeep closer than ever.

Once she finally calmed down a bit, she noticed that the door to the Underdeep was now covered by a shell of stone.

"Is that it, then?" she asked, her voice weaker than she would have liked.

[Nova]

Mage Manor - Basement

It all happpened so fast. Celestial and Rikku were dragged into the Underdeep, he quit attacking the tentacles as the door bridging the Basement and the Underdeep was blocked off by Omni. Celestial and Rikku were trapped.

"Is that it, then?"

Nova looked at the stone-covered door in grief. Everything had happened so quick... waking up in Mage Manor and having no idea what happened before that, as he can't remember a single solid memory of his past life besides remembering his room in the Manor, he met Fyren, and as he rushed in the basement he fought to save two of his fellow Mages but the rescue attempt had failed, and the only way to get them back was blocked and from seeing Ikkin... maybe it was a good idea? The mages had to get Celestial and Rikku back. They had to.

Looking around the dark room, he searched for something. Anything that could help the abducted mages. He picked up a thin white candle on the floor, but that was all he found. Clutching it, he asked, "Anyone have any ideas?"

[Rikku]

In The Shadows

Time was nothing, and time was everything, and time was measured by the beating of her heart.

Beat.

She was surrounded by shadows. Unless it was she who was the shadows, she who did the surrounding? She didn’t think so, but it was so hard to tell. Who was she? Was the person she was any more real than the other restrictions she tried to place on these shadows? For yes, she tried to make shapes out of them, strained her eyes to see something, anything, anything other than formless dark. But no. All was lost. She might as well just give up and –

‘Strained her eyes.’ She had eyes. Shadows didn’t have eyes.

Rikku opened her eyes, and immediately wished she hadn’t. This wasn’t just darkness. This was darkness with teeth. Also fangs, claws, and miscellaneous tentacles. And eyes, because it wasn’t just shadows any more. Far, far too many eyes. If Rikku had known the word ‘Lovecraftian’, she would probably have applied it to the creature/creatures/somewhat blobby entity in front of and surrounding her. As she didn’t, she settled for ‘creepy’, which worked more than adequately under the circumstances. While it couldn’t quite seem to decide what to be, and kept on shifting – now a spider, now a headless corpse, now a cold-eyed eagle, now a sheer cliff, random, disconnected images flashing and extinguishing – there was no doubting the fact that it was darkness with attitude.

“Boy, I wish I’d brought a torch,” Rikku said.

Beat.

The darkness grinned. How it managed it was unclear, but it was quite unmistakeably a grin. It reminded Rikku of the grin given by the man who’d once assured her that the no-wheeled cart he was trying to sell had only done twenty miles. It was a salesman’s grin.

That wasn’t right. The Underdeep was nowhere near sentient enough to be sleazy.

“Who are you?” asked Rikku softly. If she hadn’t been relieved at getting her voice back at last, she would’ve been annoyed at how frail and uncertain it sounded. Because of that unwise burst of magic, of course. Not because she was afraid. Rikku wasn’t afraid of anything.

“Little one,” the darkness whispered. It was the voice of despair. “So lost. So alone. I can show you your family.”

Rikku tried to hide her shiver. The voice felt like slime, dripping over her shoulders and into ears. It came from everywhere and nowhere. The grinning mouth moved, but in no connection with the words. “Nice try,” she said. “My family were all jerks.”

“There is no one that you would kill for, dark little one? No one that you love?”

“No one,” Rikku said, too quickly. It should not have been possible to blush in those circumstances, but she did, and changed the subject hastily. “Who are you? What do you want? Whatever it is, I’m not giving it to you. This is all inside my head, and I’m not particularly inclined to be obliging if you’re messing around in there. That’s happened …” Her voice dipped unexpectedly low and hoarse in remembered pain. “Too often. Way, way too often.”

Beat.

“Are you the Underdeep?” said the necromancer into the darkness. “You can’t be. The Underdeep feeds on fears. You’re far too elaborate. Besides which, you look like a used cart salesman.”

The shadows slipped over her skin, and then … into her head, through her ears and mouth and eyes, no, no, this couldn’t be happening, she couldn’t let –

She reached for her magic and found nothing, nothing at all.

“This is what you fear,” said the darkness and the shadows and the nightmares, and Rikku couldn’t respond, couldn’t fight back or answer back, because it was right, it was right, it was –

Inside her head. It was inside her head, messing with her head, changing things. And there wasn’t one thing she could do to stop it. It was worse than dying. Worse than anything.

Beat.

And then she found that she was in the real world again, albeit a real world that was shimmering and monster-strewn. The whole thing had taken … what, a few seconds? Between the beats of her heart, and that was certainly beating rapidly. She looked around. There was the basement doors. The wrong side of them. She had to be in the Underdeep itself.

But that bit just before had to have been her imagination. A quick glance showed no slime on her skin, none of the blood which would have come if the 'deep had really burrowed into her head.

Right. She was fine. Things were fine. All back to normal. She needed to get out, which would have been tricky on her own, but she could see Celestial, too, and the two of them could make it. Everything was fine.

Something felt a little … off, though, like there was something wrong, some slick slowness to her thinking. But she couldn’t put her finger on it.

Oh well. It probably wasn’t important.

[Jason]

~Mage Manor~

"They'll catch up," Jasor remarked, pulling the doors of the Manor open. Peaking outside, he began to pick his way towards the Dojo, looking out for any Ninjas that could be roaming around.

~Spacefleet~

Javerson rocked on his heals, a smile plastered on his face. Rubbing his hands together, he smiled at the other male. "It's not too important. Could you try using that thing of yours to call/track him?"

[Moonlight]

~Mage Manor~

Liyer padded silently into the room connecting the basement to the first floor, quietly cursing that he missed whatever important things just happened. Namely, the basement. Right now, it was tightly covered with stone, impenetrable. Seeing everyone's looks however, something, or someONE, more appropriately, was still in there.

"I don't have a clue what's going, so I won't ask." he sat down on his haunches and glanced around at everyone else. He didn't really expect anyone to acknowledge him, "But if it's a matter of getting back in the basement, I'm no expert."

This wouldn't be much use to him anyway. He was just a freeloader, to put it bluntly. Besides talking, Liyer wasn't very magical. What could he do besides wait for someone else to say something useful? He plodded to the woven vines of stone and scratched a small mark with one of his claws. "Ch."

~Mercenary Base~

Wilhelm watched Hawk, he presumed that was his name, not having got to know the other very well yet, draw his knives. That wouldn't be very good against a sinkhole/blackhole, but....Maybe the something inside COULD be.

That elusive name...

Deciding that he could at least try to be useful, he quickly returned to his room to grab the cane on the bedside; it was really the only weapon he had, save for a small knife he carried most times. It was basically a stave. Or a club. Pretty much, you hit things with it. But hey, definitions never do things full justice.

It was also just ornamentation. Wilhelm returned again to the entrance of the base, resting the staff on his shoulder and noting that the black hole was getting closer. Bigger.

You could cut the evil feeling it emanated with a knife.

[Draco]

<<Outside Ninja Dojo - Forest>>

As Draco reaches the outskirts of the forested area he is joined by three lesser ninjas.

"We are here to accompany you."

Draco does not stop and continues to run. "Do what you want, just don't get in the way."

The three nod their heads and chase after Draco in formation. Within a few more moments they reach the end of the forest and stop. "Where should we go first?" He looks off in the distance until he stares in one direction. "The Mercenaries."

The three following ninja run in front of Draco with wide eyes. One of the speaks out before another could speak. "The mercs?! I'm sorry sir, but are you nuts? We can't trust them! We..." He stops talking when he sees the glare he is getting from 'commanding officer.'

"I never said you had to follow me, only do what you want. I'm going to see how they are doing." He begins to run in the direction of the Merc. Base.

The three lesser ninja stand around and argue with each other for a few moments before following him.

---

<<In The Sky>>

"This sure isn't like back home. I mean, it's similar in the sense of the basic look of the world, but I would have all ready flown over the palace by now. So far I can still only see the castle of this world in the distance... Wait." He adjusts his goggles a little as if they had scopes in them, which they don't. "I think I see a large building a little closer than the castle. For some reason it is... Purple?"

He makes a few notes down on his map. Then he begins to fly towards the purple building.

[Deleted]

((Ah, right...editing this on Ro's profile, but as I forgot to mention, she's Aly's cousin. However, she has no magical abilities, except for some sensitivity to feeling magic. Dark magic, usually. I have no idea if the earthquake should actually affect her like that, but I went with it.))

<<Castle Kestrel>>
At watching the knight in front of her think, Ro bit back a sigh and waited for him to say something. She crossed her arms as she listened to Sarn finally speak, finding a spot in the doorway to lean her weight against and rub the back of one calf. she stopped and straightened slightly as she noticed the weakness in her legs, forcing them to stop shaking. She shouldn't be shaking, even after a quake like that. It had only lasted for a short time and nothing had fallen on or otherwise injured her.

"Right, if I caused this, I’ve got to help with the cleanup and make sure everyone is ok."

The Amaranth Knight raised a brow at this, eyes narrowed and irises shifting to a stormier shade. If he caused it? she thought, unable to ask the question as he continued musing. A guard came and went, and Sarn turned to look at her. “Lady Ro, I have flown far and require rest. Would you consent to wake me the moment the first messenger returns? Then we can assemble the Order of Dunburrow and decide how we can best help."

"I will," she said roughly, though her gaze wasn't quite so narrowed as it was. She looked after him as he went off, wondering exactly what the knight had done. Questions were useless right now, she could see that--he clearly had his mind focused elsewhere, though he had enough sense to take some stock of the situation. And Ro herself, she noted with a small amount of assurance, had pulled herself together into what she considered to 'normal'. It doesn't matter.

She went back to her own chambers, examining the scene and checking that everything was in order. A hanging on the wall needed straightening, and there were a few things that had fallen onto the floor, but the Amaranth Knight's room was spare and, barring the ceiling falling in, this was about the worst it could get. She straightened some things, gathered what she would need for travel in a bag, and was back down near the throne room to wait for a messenger within a few minutes.

***

<<Brassport>>

"Asta," the woman answered cheerfully. "Asta Moret. A...a chemist, or an alchemist, if you want to call it that. Though...you said you're an engineer?" She grinned. "That's great. I've always been interested in machines, especially of the flying variety."

The children caught her ears as they had Sarinon's, and Asta glanced back at them. "'Hanging man?'" she mused aloud. "Hopefully not with a noose..."

[PFA]

Ninja Dojo

Kovaran seemed not at all deterred by the thought of being accompanied by Cital and PFA. PFA was glad for this, but at the same time she had this strange feeling that hilarity was about to ensue was just a bit nervous. She told herself to snap out of it--she'd been on several dangerous missions before. This one was hardly any different.

"Well, we should probably get going, then," she stated. "Since you offered to be the leader, Kovaran, perhaps you should lead the way..."

---

Just outside Merc Base

"Well, I've seen several freaks of nature before, but can someone please tell me what that thing is?"

"If I knew, I would tell you," was Jernath's blunt reply. His eyes remained focussed on the void, noticing that it was getting bigger--getting closer. He again reached for a weapon instinctively, this time one of the daggers at his belt. "But if anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of it, now would be a good time to tell us."

[Ian Wolf-Park]

Mage Manor

As soon as the dark void swallowed up the fireball without any signs of it being damaged, the human stopped firing, knowing that it was going to be a complete waste of time. Soon after, a wall of vines came up and blocked off the entrance to whatever that thing was.

However, there was still the White Weewoo that was near the wall, weewooing the loss of its master. He went over to it and picked it up, stroking it to calm it down.

"Anyone have any ideas?" He looked up, wondering who it was, and saw that the speaker was a blue star.

"Well, you saw what that thing was as our attacks were useless against it. The only thing that I can think of is figuring out what its weakness is," he replied. "Are there any books in the library describing what that thing is?"

[Sq]

Outside Mercenary Base

The other mercenaries had caught up with Sytra now, all throwing panicked questions at each other. The girl blinked. Fear surged through her as she watched the darkness begin to expand. It was racing toward them, now. It would be here soon.

A deathly smell rose in the air. Putrid. She resisted the urge to hurl.

There was something terribly wrong.

"If anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of it, now would be a good time to tell us," Jernath said, quite too bluntly for Sytra's taste. The girl glowered at him and the rest of the group. She was beginning to panic.

The only weapons she had on her were her kris and daggers. She would have tried to get rid of it, but that would involve her having to stab it… which would've been a little hard, considering it didn’t have a body.

Really, she would have loved to do something, but that would probably result in being sucked into the void, along with everything else that had been in its path.

Sytra frowned helplessly. She wanted to be brave, but her courage had fled. She had been filled with an ominous and unsettling fear. The darkness was advancing.

Since being eaten alive wasn’t really on her agenda today, she offered the most logical solution she could think of at the moment:

"Um. Run?"

[Angie]

[ Outside Mercenary Base ]

In the corner of his eye Hawk saw the newest recruit - Wil, was it? - disappear back into the Mercenary Base and rejoin them swiftly with a cane.

A voice came up on Hawk's left as the darkness began to expand. Jernath. "If anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of it, now would be a good time to tell us."

"Um," said Sytra. "Run?"

For a wild moment Hawk himself stood uncertain, caught in the tension and that great gaping maw of darkness, electrified by the presence of something with more power than anyone ever could've imagined; he found himself paralyzed by both the horror and the same terrifying possibility that had seized him the first time when the earthquake came.

Then something strange happened.

There were distant echoing screams, and the sides of the chasm collapsed and it opened wider in on itself as if the heavy, pregnant darkness within were alive, thrashing like an ocean at war - or like a wild and screeching animal, Hawk thought, bending the confines of a cage that was far too small to have ever contained it.

And then from the darkness came fire.

It arrived swiftly and without warning. Hawk cried out in surprise and staggered back. Where the flattened grass of a mortal world met the footsteps of evil, flames now licked the edge of the opening and fireballs burned greedily at the oxygen around them - they arrived from seemingly nowhere, plucked from this blackness yet strangely out of place all the same, as if they'd come from the blackness but they hadn't begun in the blackness either.

In fact, the fires brought with them the startlingly uncanny scent of magic - of mage work, even - or so Hawk thought, but he himself was no mage and couldn't say for sure and the idea was impossible anyhow. The truly disturbing feeling came from the way that magic felt corrupted somehow, the way the various fires sucked at the earth with their black-tipped tendrils of flame. Because the kind of fire that rose from the ground was alive, but not in the way most fires were alive. This was truly alive.

It gathered at the edges of the dark hole and began to spread outward, but Hawk found himself inexplicably rooted in place. Because the flames, he suddenly realized, carried with them more than heat; they also carried the half-imagined currents of faraway whispers, and if he listened closely those whispers turned to nonsense screams:

"Help me!"

"Lika!

"Eat this!"

"Die, beast, DIE!"

"Get out of my head!"

A jumble, all echoing and bouncing against one another and twisting into warped, unrecognizable syllables as they came into contact with the air. Hawk could hardly understand much of it, could hardly distinguish words from one another but he understood that they were real words somehow, and also that they weren't quite the same as the way they'd started, now plunged through a distorting lens and tilted just a little bit off so that everything came out wrong.

Then, without warning, a girl's scream tore through the darkness, sharp and ringing and completely untouched:

"You...won't...get me with...torture!"

But swiftly like a shushing mother the darkness swallowed the words, swallowed everything so that the flames fell silent and the whole darkness collapsed in on itself into the void, leaving behind nothing but an empty chasm and the fires.

The fires.

The impossibly black-tipped, impossibly wrong fires, still impossibly in front of them, sucking like predators at the air. And Hawk had no idea what in the world was going on, but he did know that those fires were hungry.

[Omni]

Mage Manor - near basement

"I don't have a clue what's going, so I won't ask." said a talking cat. "But if it's a matter of getting back in the basement, I'm no expert."

"Anyone have any ideas?" asked Nova.

"I don't think that's a good idea," Omni said, her voice shaking. "We tried to do something to stop it, but nothing worked on it. It's like it's completely immune. And it was reaching through the door, breaching the safety of the Manor. I don't think we'd stand a chance, and I really don't want those things in the Manor." Her thoughts didn't come out quite as coherently as she would have liked, but that's what happens when one's shaken or nervous. "Why did you think I would trap them? The Mages? I don't want things to happen to them, but I thought I had to. This is supposed to be a safe place, and if it isn't, what do we do? And there are other ways into the Underdeep..."

"Well, you saw what that thing was as our attacks were useless against it. The only thing that I can think of is figuring out what its weakness is. Are there any books in the library describing what that thing is?"

"Knowing the Underdeep," Omni began, "it's something from fears. That's what the Underdeep does, it finds your fears and makes them real. And they're usually invulnerable. Even if we found a weakness, I wouldn't go in there without a mind shield..." She paused in realization. "Which I can make. Still, I don't want to go in unless we're sure, and probably not from here."

*****

Spacefleet - medical bay

"It's not too important. Could you try using that thing of yours to call/track him?"

"I sure can," Ethan replied.

He shifted his gaze just slightly. He didn't really need to focus to send a signal, but he still found it better not to be looking at someone else when he was talking wirelessly. He used the proper frequency and targeted Amneiger's communicator. The thing was, without a power boost, his range was limited, but there was a good side to that: If Ethan reached the communicator, then it was definitely nearby. If Amnei picked up, that meant he was, too.

[Amneiger]

((Tabloid Town))


Amneiger didn't notice anything unusual about Shade's dagger throw and its result; it made sense to him that the monster's eyes might be a weak point and that Shade would have the ability to accurately throw a dagger into them. When the monster dropped, he began to go over to see if Shade was all right, but stopped when he heard her question. He looked around; it was getting darker as the sun was setting.

"I have my dazzler, so we can trying flashing more light on it to see if it's dead, but that won't work very well with light bursts. If we had bows or guns or other ranged weapons we can trying shooting it and seeing if it reacts, but that'd depend on our being able to see it as well."

Amneiger looked at the lamps in the area; the nearest one was still too far from the creature to light it properly. "Can somebody climb one of the lamp posts, get the lamp, and bring it over here? If nobody can climb, I'll have to dig handholds into the lamppost with this," he said, holding up the vibroblade.


-----


Amneiger's communicator was on his desk in his lab. He'd intended to bring it with him, but he'd forgotten it. So when Ethan tried to contact Amneiger's communicator, he got a prerecorded message.

"Hello, this is Professor Amneiger. I can't talk right now; if you need me, I'm in Tabloid Town on personal business."