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It was the season of mist in the Heaven of the Moon, when the ghost rivers ran thick through the bottomless canyons. Two strangers each came upon the gypsy with his dirigible and, after being assured that neither meant harm to the other, arranged to share transport to the arbiter's grounds at the summit of Solemuri.

"My name's Jacko," said the imp, his voice a bare squeak making ripples in the still fog. He offered a fey, slender limb: "Jacko Sore."

The boy was quiet, having spent his childhood in the Heaven of the Moon, where Sore Jacko Sicks-Pence, despite the unnatural condition inherent to the Heavens, remained an odd sight. No fraction of his face was visible underneath a stone helm, its face beating like a heart, that seemed likely to crush Jacko's wispy body. "Ruziel Antoneiro," said the young man, "or that's what would have been my name." Ruziel was the soul of an unborn child, killed in circumstances that to him remain unknown. He has only the knowledge that his mother planned his name. Banded round his temples was a halo that shimmered, coincisic dimming and shining, like the face of the sun on the water.

"What would have been your name, you say?" Jacko cackled, but somehow out of friendship. "Now, that would mean, when I do this--" a large blunderbuss appeared from beneath his blood cloak, his entire arm big enough only to fit the trigger; he fired once in Ruziel's face, which was shredded for an instant, but the wounds burned a moment and then healed with a discharge of smoke. Neither was at all taken aback. "Why yes, that's what I expected. Well, I suppose, since you've been dead all your life, you don't have much of a story... am I right?"

"I'm just trying to get to Earth," Ruziel said, and craned his neck over the rail. He could see the lights of the human cities in the mists.

"I can't imagine why," Jacko said. "Look at you, you're chocolate-skinned with a big blonde Afro--that's exactly what they'd call you down there, chocolate-skin, like it was something bad. And then the other dark skin people, they'll resent you for the color of your hair, even if it is more like African wool. And those," continued Mr. Sicks-Pence, gesturing to Ruziel's large wings; they were ghostly now, like wings of sacrificial smoke, but Jacko could see the feathers there: gold flecked with ruby intensity. "Trust me, you don't want to lose those."

It made Ruziel self-conscious to be talked down to, though Jacko was right and Ruziel could not point to the origin of his intense desire to incarnate on Earth. Desire had always existed in a pair with himself, with his self-awareness.

"Both of you to the Arbiter's Grounds?" questioned the gypsy from the cockpit, unsure himself of the words. Jacko answered in the affirmative for both of them. There was short, delightful silence, but Mr. Sicks-Pence soon decided it deserved destruction.

"Well my young friend, you've done well to come to the Arbiter's Grounds, perhaps you'll prove yourself worthy to incarnate. It's a great honor I'm sure, because the soul that flows to Earth through the Arbiter's Grounds becomes a paladin, in the service of the Most High--though how one bestows honors from an absent throne, hahah, welllll...."

Ruziel said nothing that would encourage Jacko, but the imp continued; however his tone became more serious, trying to entice Ruziel to attention. "Let me tell you... Uriel, was it?"

"Ruziel." (Complete lack of care.)

"Ruziel. I was incarnated on earth once. Last time, I was a dog named Jacko. My owner kidnapped a little girl, but he couldn't get any money on the ransom. So he fed her to me, and because of that someone murdered both of us.

"Now, my good lord Morning Star, he decided that I shouldn't have to suffer, so I got incarnated as a demon. He needed a bloodhound," Sore broke into cackle again, but Ruziel offered nothing, and finally Mr. Sicks-Pence was obliged to silence. The dirigible came to rest on a jag just below the Solemuri summit jutting into the sky, and Ruziel disembarked without a word. Sight of his halo was snuffed under the hood of his long black coat, and consequently his wings evaporated. He kicked off his sandals, humbling himself to walk on the hallowed ground, and disappeared into the fog for his final ascent to the Arbiter's Grounds.

Jacko Sore, the diminutive imp, gave Ruziel's back a dirty look. He then pointed his blunderbuss at the temple of his stone mask, and sprayed his neon green brain matter all over the side of the dirigible.

The gypsy began shouting in surprise, but the body of Mr. Sicks-Pence was suddenly consumed in a dark fire that cast no light, a crackle and burn like a witch at the stake, and Jacko's body was lifted into the air. The licks of flame became shadows turning like air, and then a pestilent swarm of locusts that milled for a moment before shedding from Jacko's fresh incarnation.

"Whoo, that's REFRESHING," sad Sore said, his voice a contained, resonant echo from within his hollow pumpkin head. His face was drawn sloppily on the pumpkin with dye and make-up and ash, and its withered vine hung from his crown like the thin hair of the aged. His pumpkin was stuck on a possessed scarecrow, dressed in elegant clothes of medieval artistocracy; riding clothes, for hunting in the woods, but armored in case of ambush from rebel peasants. Jacko drew his rapier from its lodge in his left eye, and produced a whip from his belt; there were holstered several blunderbuss. "Well, now I'm on the hunt," he said, and Mr. Sore Jacko Sicks-Pence walked off toward the Arbiter's Grounds.

Sshk-!

The scrape of stone on steel rang clearly inside the domed chamber. Sparks flaked like match-heads with every muscular movement of his arm. There was little need to sharpen Arm – the runeblade's effective gestated upon a different source of power – but he went through the motions with ritualised practice. It lightened his brooding, somewhat, to wear as a mantle the guise of normality.

Sshk-!

His hair fell straight and black like crow feather's across his brow and elegantly down the nape of his neck, spilling over his steadied, dark gorget. I would not spare so much time on his description, only, he is perhaps the last of his race and warrants a portrait. His ears tapered regally to long points from below the temples of his skull and his eyes were moody, deep-det, oriental in their sockets and forested with a cartography of veins which unhealthily burst beneath the flesh in dark nests.

Sshk-!

When he chanced a glance upward from his calm (which settled on him like black ice on a stretch of road) he flashed vicious eyes foreign to mankind and its neighbour races, a kind of violet-mauve within itself which shifted to a grey and red, and even black beneath the intonations of light. His weapon was a wicked a thing as they, the iron straight with the barest of curves at the spine in the likeness of the war-blades of Kithai. It had a gnarled, crooked quality, and the steel was black like forge-stoked coals, dead-looking. His silks did not stir – what little breeze breathed through the halls of the colliseum seemed incapable of affecting his countenance – but clung to the frame-work of his body smooth as oil. He was mailed, and armoured, but sashed and robed in a black likeness of Arabian royalty – atlantean, almost.

Sshk-!

He pulled the whetstone from Arm's razor edge. His boots dipped – barely – in the water which flowed and ebbed across the rocky floor of the stone chambre, forced upwards through fissure in the earth from its buried arteries and pushed down the facets and bluffs of the hallowed mountain to the streams and rivers below. Rune carvings and man-worked stone made an altar of the chambre's epicentre and history on its walls, although these were obscured by burst curtains of foilage which grew thick and langorious enough that air smelled of mist, humidity, soil. Fruits hung in clusters, heavy enough to simply burst, and flowers dotted the vine-worked chandeliers of ferns and creepers like candles. He could feel the... life of this place, like a heart-throb which resonnated up from the ground, that he could taste...

“This place stinks of priests,” Belmont snarled, sitting splayed across the steps of the central altar, surrounded by runes and hieroglyphics and statuettes. His fedora was pulled roguishly over his eyes, and he was grinning in a way that was not conductive to tranquility. “You know what I mean, that ****ing... church smell. This dump smells like it thinks its better than me.”

Realm did not answer him. He wrapped Arm in wound cloth, pulling it tight with a gloved hand. Belmont rolled to sitting position, his corded arms hanging between his knees, long and apeish and heavily muscular like two lenghts of knotted rope. His flesh was almost invisible beneath his body-hair, which was absurdly thick and coarse, his throat and jaw bristling thickly up his cheeks under his eyes. He seemed to exhude a kind of hypermasculinity that was feral, uncharming. He was only skirted in a Greco-Roman garb which hid of his unmentionables what his fur might not entirely.

“And the two approaching?”

Belmont broke out into an even wider grin, and his incisors raked his lower teeth. “Oh they smell alot worst, prince. They don't even smell real.” Realm didn't bother to ask him what he meant, he merely stood, sending concentric ripples across the shallows.

The figures who stood in the doorway were obscured by the fading sunlight which bled into the ruins. The fact that one him seemed to be wearing a pumpkin on his head warranted that this would be... interesting, to say the least.

OoC: I think, if this is going to be two on two, it should be a real two on two, and actually have the both of them fighting the both of them as opposed to two seperate duels. In accordance with the limited space, it seems more appropriate, and makes more sense anyway.

OoC: I just want to pay respect to VGF's excellent set-up for topic review in the posting screen.

At the peak of Solemuri there was a shrine, like a pagoda carved from the mountain. From the roof of the shrine waterfalls ran in sheets that most often fell undisturbed. Owing to the atmospheric density, the water was a perfect mirror; but when Ruziel stalked the cliff and into the stream itself, an immense zephyr blew against Solemuri, and sustained. The polished glass of the dew-drops swept into the void, and looked like fireflies in the twilight before falling softly into the crepuscular fog. They revealed mythic figures like carved from priests of an ancient long-dead religion, carved into the wall of the shrine made of black jade. In a mouth was a door and Ruziel walked through.

Sore Jacko Sicks-Pence trotted the cliff behind him. "Buddy, I hope you know there's gonna be two," he said, and followed Ruziel into the shrine.

Rainforest flora found root in the jade, and bloomed in the ethereal mists. The water was thinner than glass. Ruziel was first to enter the inner chamber: Realm and Belmont, ready for him. "You chose the wrong day to be in this room," he said, and advanced on his adversaries.

Ruziel's being first collided with Belmont, and knocked back the beast. Ruziel took one step back himself, and blocked Belmont's claw with his left arm, locked Belmont's elbow and drew close and followed through with his right fist at Belmont's collarbone. His hands effused gray smoke and burned to the touch; around his fist the smoke gathered into the head of a Chinese dragon. Ruziel sidestepped around the staggering werewolf.

Realm circled around Belmont. "Oy!" Jacko Sore yelled, and cracked his whip in Realm's direction. "Now wait just one minute, God damn it God damn it God damn it! My Lord Morningstar sent me here for your debt, Realm!"

"Why no, actually," Realm began, light on his feet under threat of a whip. "I brought you here for me. I love pumpkin pie."

Mr. Sicks-Pence scratched at his disembodied throat, pursed his velvet gloves around his gentleman's ruffles. His whip burst with dark flame, like shadows colliding in tide, that at once solidified into a swarm of locusts. With a flick of his wrist Jacko slashed the air and cut Realm's pallid portrait at the cheek, and when Realm's hand went to the blood he found a locust there he had to snatch from digging in his skin. "Now what was that, Buttercup?"

Jacko advanced on Realm with his locust whip, the grin painted on his pumpkin face looking even more crazed in the strange light, and passing Belmont he stabbed at the monster's toes like with a long needle. The wolfman distracted, Ruziel rolled backwards, almost on his shoulder and the side of his face, into a handstand, fetal with his feet ready to launch kicks from his chest: the queda de rins, in reverse. "One thing you should keep track of," Ruziel said as he sprung into a long-spine handstand, and his shin swept Belmont's leg with a trail of smoke, and his other foot snapped at the werewolf's knee in smoke like a dragon's jaw, "is that besides my hands and feet, I never touch the floor."

Belmont fell to all fours. Ruziel felt an itch under his halo; instinctively his hand caught Belmont's jaw, and Ruziel pressed all his weight onto the snout of the beast, and as he cartwheeled off his hands Ruziel's foot hammered into Belmont's throat like stone. Ruziel saw a distant chance, with Mr. Sicks-Pence distracting the dark prince, to bring this fight to an early conclusion. "Hail Krsn Krsn Krsn," Ruziel said, and tore off his right sleeve. A coiled snake, alive yet substantiated from an olive branch, constricted his forearm, its small eyes glowing with dim awareness. Bringing his fist into his left hand caused the snake to combust in violet flame, and in his right hand a wraithblade did ignite, effusing the same holy smoke as his wings and burning chaotically in the colors of a storm on the sunset. Ruziel did not need to think; the hood of his long black coat hiding his impassive face, Ruziel plunged his crimson wraithblade into Belmont's stomach. The beast howled in pain and Ruziel removed his brand and stepped off his body.

"NO Jacko," he said, holding his sword like a lightsaber. "Find issue with the wolf man, because in my life ever shall I stand against men with swords," Ruziel said, and cut between them in his advance on Realm.

OoC: Again, sorry I originally went for Belmont being already transformed

I'm telling you man, I'll just right on double-post and totally warp everything, I don't care :P

You might as awell man. I currently barracksed without Internet and only have sparse connectivity.