OoC: News flash. A larger font does not necessarily mean better credibility and you are tards for it.//
The Librarian was made to wait a long time. The womb of nightfall fell and the earth was obscure and frightening within its frigid confines. But it was then finally, as her breath made cool brushstrokes of vapor against the velvet and dematerialized into the lightless drab which made up the night air, that he came for her. She might have mistaken him for a ghost - because only such an apparition could possibly instill such unease, or convey through countenance alone such meandering void.
His boot-steps were silent, passing through the black mud and wet dirt without even the creaking of ligaments but despite all this, she heard him coming anyway. Saw him coming. Felt him coming. She turned her head in his direction and his existence marked itself in the darkness as an absence of things beyond the mere dearth of light. She reached out and felt a hole there, a hole that shouldn't have been and that brushed against her finger tips. When he revealed himself, she recoiled - her every muscle and thought simply rejected the idea of him and shied away of its own choosing.
The first thing thing was two red flashes - a pair of crimson lense catching moonlight and outlining themselves in cool circlets of scarlet glass. And the rest of him from that point on hardly required description, he was too well known on these fields to warrant any. Removed from his usual garb (that immense chapeau and silly trenchcoat that had struck fear and murder into so many over the years) he resembled more a straggler eloped from a battlefield or a scarecrow of a POW wandered too far from a Vietnamese holding cage, from his loose-brimmed tilly hat to his frayed and spread-eagled fatigues and the mud blackened soles of his magnum jungle boots. His skin was so pale it seemed light passed through it, and his glasses contrasted sharply to its pallour like droplets of blood against fresh snow. His face was roughly unshaven and his hair like macheted strips of oiled wire beneath the brim, his clothing darkly tiger-striped and fading in and out of the air as he shifted with movement.
He cradled over the anorexic thinness of his shoulders the heavy bulk of the Six, a platoon machine-gun, heavy and dark and silent a machine, smelling of oil and lubricant and spicy with the stink of powder, a sleeping giant. Looped around his neck and waist were brass necklaces of ammunition, glinting like copper nails as they jangled about his body. These would tear meat into quartered debris and leave their hosts unrecognizable as living organisms. Fitting a tool for the right sort of carpenter, and Richter's carpentry was always that of flesh, and blood.
He never said a word, but his breathing tittered (like the world had let him in on some kind of secret and he was pressed not to laugh), and he smiled. It was a slow, awful thing, sensuous lips pulling back to reveal tightly packed teeth like construction nails or graveyard stones and wide enough his gums were far too visible.
OoC: It has been far too long since a tournament has seen RIchter in action. And yes, I am returned from training.
11th Nintendoland Battlefield Tournament: Third Round Battles
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Erdawn Il Deus
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Metal Man
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Metal Man stood up again. Despite all the throwing and reality-warping, he seemed to be more or less in one piece. He stood up, patting out the last remnants of the useless fire, and surveyed the surroundings though his HUD. Indeed, reality had been compromised. Unfortunately for Cora, Metal Man had lived in a damaged reality such as this for many years of his life. He stood up. Reality flickered repeatedly, but he continued walking.
SKCL--
It attempted to send him somewhere. Metal Man concentrated all his fury and rage... and the film strip stopped its attempt, as if it had suddenly been grabbed by a massive hand. He laughed... it echoed through all corners of the surreal environment. He saw Cora walking out from some warehouse, and then crossed his arms. Even through the tinged oddness of this effect, he still saw LA, he still saw the clown Cora, and he still had a target. He had been trapped in a realm like this for most of his prime years, and it had twisted his mind to the strange and uncontrollable state it was today.
Part of him shuddered... but another felt like it had finally come home. He silently adjusted his scarf, as it changed colors suddenly. A truck crashed behind him and flew on by like some sort of burning, metallic tumbleweed. He ducked a flying cow--reality jumped again, but he was still walking towards the camera. He looked up, as in thought...
Reality jumped. Only this time, the Metal Man was in control. An unholy, dark aura came from him as reality nearly crumpled. One minute he was facing Cora; the next, his fist had hit her in the face with a satisfying crunch. It jumped again; he had expertly kicked her in the head. He head butted her so hard, she flew through several frames without being seen, before then crashing into a car which ceased to exist. Metal Man laughed in one frame, while in the other he suddenly was atop a light pole. Either way, within 30 more frames it crashed onto her and made a strange rubbery noise. It hurt like being hit by a titanic basketball.
Metal Man slid across the ground, moonwalking backwards. He eventually made it to a mailbox, which transfixed itself to his head. He ripped it off and hurled it off to the side, instead after something else--something more powerful than this non-reality. He grabbed that cup of coffee he had drunk quite a while ago, and drank some more. He then crumpled the cup, and faced his new foe: Unreality. It was neat, but it just wasn't the same. He remembered how fake it was from long ago, when he once led a team of warriors to fight unreality itself. It had taken nearly a week to defeat that thing, and its red eyes still burnt in his mind like unrelenting coals.
He thought of that, and then of reality; how he had lost his father, the thing which had done it, the scientists... the mental pain mounted. He thought of that robot ripping him apart; an insane cave-being being stabbed with his right arm; he even thought of fighting a being whose evil laugh simply would not leave his memory..
The fake reality rallied against him. It sent a small armada of bad things to befall this evil, wrong-thinking man. But before all 13 nail guns could somehow crash into his feet, he moved forward, making a ripping sound. Reality pooled in through the wound he made; the nail guns didn't exist there, so they flew at him and vanished, never to appear again.
The sound of a detuned organ was made as the surreal effect attempted to re-establish itself. Metal Man took out something perfectly real... his DVD launcher. He pointed at the nexus of confusion, right above Cora's head. He silently stared as he pulled the trigger mercilessly.
A thousand cartoon effects were heard as the DVDs clattered into the fake reality and hit its root; everything became sepia-toned for a moment, but it tried to come back with some magic duct tape. Metal Man bit his lip with disgust and walked over, leaping at this invisible root. He did no damage to Cora, instead grabbing some invisible.. thing... and tackling it to the ground. He rolled about the stage, strangling the bizarre perversion of reality and smashing it into things. Oh, it hurt--it hurled nail files, axes, and plastic cars at him. But he failed to believe in it. It would not hold him again. The mysterious thing hurled him away and stood up... it nearly got away, until Metal chucked another quarter at it.
Hell had no fury as George Washington had disdain for unreality. The Quarter morphed into the man himself, only this was a George Washington of steel; it ruthlessly pummeled unreality to death. After the two-hundredth punch, the surreality died. The quarter vanished with it, leaving a surprised Cora and a strangely jaded Metal Man.
The man turned to her, and spoke. "As appealing a fake reality is, it is unfair to fight you there. For my powers in unreality vastly exceed mine in reality--and the trade is not one I like so well. But... I can defeat both you and unreality. So if he comes back, don't be surprised if I throw him at you."
Metal then stood fast; as the clouds above finally conspired to rain. The streets filled with it... the endless pattering everywhere. Metal Man walked through it, towards his foe, who attempted to do something else that couldn't be done in reality.
The man didn't believe it. He punched the toe flying at his other eye so hard it flew across the street. He punted the thing into the wall of an apartment building with his furious kick. But that was not all; Cora had no time to get up before he came down on her like reality itself; a powerful punch that dug her into the concrete, a kick to the face, a sharpened elbow across her chin. Three hammer blows to the nose. It was all a grocery list to her. Metal Man individually cataloged his injuries, but they all seemed the same to her... the pain was not worth minding to her. But it was because of the man who felt every inch of pain and lived, breathed, and ate pain that she was in this situation. The man knew mere fists, no, nothing would simply kill this ball of existence but endless death and destruction.
He smashed at the girl once more, before finishing the spectacle of a one-armed bandit beating around an experiment like an old shopping bag. He stood back, lightning striking a building behind him. He had no fear, this time; he smelled the air. It smelled of blood, napalm, and steam... the water was actually evaporating as it hit him. The missile guiding chips found another target, and he walked off to the side; the girl followed quickly, intending to hit him in the midst of an attack.
The man came upon a massive statue; one of some angelic woman holding a sword. It was similar to others in the area, and it was at least 30 feet tall. Made of solid granite, it could be seen for quite a distance. He held a hand to it briefly... then was kicked away, savagely, by Cora. He crashed into a wall...
...But when he stood up, something unimaginable happened. The statue came to life... and, in mimicking his actions, tore loose from the base and stepped on Cora like a bug. He saw it... and knew his belief in magic had not been misplaced. There were miracles for him--and not fake, unreal ones. For his belief in magic had summoned this thing to obey his every command. He thought of moving his missing arm, and it moved for him... he walked around a bit, moving it off of the experiment, who, naturally, wondered what had stepped on her.
The massive, armed statue stared down at her with a strangely happy expression... indeed, that was the only expression the smoothly chiseled statue had. Metal Man made a violent gesture in his mind; one where his right arm was. The statue's massive sword came down on the girl before she had figured out what happened.
The man reflected on how things had gone so far... how wrong they were. In a way, he wished it didn't have to go like this. But he saw the scientists, and now he saw that this girl was a demon unto herself. This had to be finished, or else he would be finished instead.
SKCL--
It attempted to send him somewhere. Metal Man concentrated all his fury and rage... and the film strip stopped its attempt, as if it had suddenly been grabbed by a massive hand. He laughed... it echoed through all corners of the surreal environment. He saw Cora walking out from some warehouse, and then crossed his arms. Even through the tinged oddness of this effect, he still saw LA, he still saw the clown Cora, and he still had a target. He had been trapped in a realm like this for most of his prime years, and it had twisted his mind to the strange and uncontrollable state it was today.
Part of him shuddered... but another felt like it had finally come home. He silently adjusted his scarf, as it changed colors suddenly. A truck crashed behind him and flew on by like some sort of burning, metallic tumbleweed. He ducked a flying cow--reality jumped again, but he was still walking towards the camera. He looked up, as in thought...
Reality jumped. Only this time, the Metal Man was in control. An unholy, dark aura came from him as reality nearly crumpled. One minute he was facing Cora; the next, his fist had hit her in the face with a satisfying crunch. It jumped again; he had expertly kicked her in the head. He head butted her so hard, she flew through several frames without being seen, before then crashing into a car which ceased to exist. Metal Man laughed in one frame, while in the other he suddenly was atop a light pole. Either way, within 30 more frames it crashed onto her and made a strange rubbery noise. It hurt like being hit by a titanic basketball.
Metal Man slid across the ground, moonwalking backwards. He eventually made it to a mailbox, which transfixed itself to his head. He ripped it off and hurled it off to the side, instead after something else--something more powerful than this non-reality. He grabbed that cup of coffee he had drunk quite a while ago, and drank some more. He then crumpled the cup, and faced his new foe: Unreality. It was neat, but it just wasn't the same. He remembered how fake it was from long ago, when he once led a team of warriors to fight unreality itself. It had taken nearly a week to defeat that thing, and its red eyes still burnt in his mind like unrelenting coals.
He thought of that, and then of reality; how he had lost his father, the thing which had done it, the scientists... the mental pain mounted. He thought of that robot ripping him apart; an insane cave-being being stabbed with his right arm; he even thought of fighting a being whose evil laugh simply would not leave his memory..
The fake reality rallied against him. It sent a small armada of bad things to befall this evil, wrong-thinking man. But before all 13 nail guns could somehow crash into his feet, he moved forward, making a ripping sound. Reality pooled in through the wound he made; the nail guns didn't exist there, so they flew at him and vanished, never to appear again.
The sound of a detuned organ was made as the surreal effect attempted to re-establish itself. Metal Man took out something perfectly real... his DVD launcher. He pointed at the nexus of confusion, right above Cora's head. He silently stared as he pulled the trigger mercilessly.
A thousand cartoon effects were heard as the DVDs clattered into the fake reality and hit its root; everything became sepia-toned for a moment, but it tried to come back with some magic duct tape. Metal Man bit his lip with disgust and walked over, leaping at this invisible root. He did no damage to Cora, instead grabbing some invisible.. thing... and tackling it to the ground. He rolled about the stage, strangling the bizarre perversion of reality and smashing it into things. Oh, it hurt--it hurled nail files, axes, and plastic cars at him. But he failed to believe in it. It would not hold him again. The mysterious thing hurled him away and stood up... it nearly got away, until Metal chucked another quarter at it.
Hell had no fury as George Washington had disdain for unreality. The Quarter morphed into the man himself, only this was a George Washington of steel; it ruthlessly pummeled unreality to death. After the two-hundredth punch, the surreality died. The quarter vanished with it, leaving a surprised Cora and a strangely jaded Metal Man.
The man turned to her, and spoke. "As appealing a fake reality is, it is unfair to fight you there. For my powers in unreality vastly exceed mine in reality--and the trade is not one I like so well. But... I can defeat both you and unreality. So if he comes back, don't be surprised if I throw him at you."
Metal then stood fast; as the clouds above finally conspired to rain. The streets filled with it... the endless pattering everywhere. Metal Man walked through it, towards his foe, who attempted to do something else that couldn't be done in reality.
The man didn't believe it. He punched the toe flying at his other eye so hard it flew across the street. He punted the thing into the wall of an apartment building with his furious kick. But that was not all; Cora had no time to get up before he came down on her like reality itself; a powerful punch that dug her into the concrete, a kick to the face, a sharpened elbow across her chin. Three hammer blows to the nose. It was all a grocery list to her. Metal Man individually cataloged his injuries, but they all seemed the same to her... the pain was not worth minding to her. But it was because of the man who felt every inch of pain and lived, breathed, and ate pain that she was in this situation. The man knew mere fists, no, nothing would simply kill this ball of existence but endless death and destruction.
He smashed at the girl once more, before finishing the spectacle of a one-armed bandit beating around an experiment like an old shopping bag. He stood back, lightning striking a building behind him. He had no fear, this time; he smelled the air. It smelled of blood, napalm, and steam... the water was actually evaporating as it hit him. The missile guiding chips found another target, and he walked off to the side; the girl followed quickly, intending to hit him in the midst of an attack.
The man came upon a massive statue; one of some angelic woman holding a sword. It was similar to others in the area, and it was at least 30 feet tall. Made of solid granite, it could be seen for quite a distance. He held a hand to it briefly... then was kicked away, savagely, by Cora. He crashed into a wall...
...But when he stood up, something unimaginable happened. The statue came to life... and, in mimicking his actions, tore loose from the base and stepped on Cora like a bug. He saw it... and knew his belief in magic had not been misplaced. There were miracles for him--and not fake, unreal ones. For his belief in magic had summoned this thing to obey his every command. He thought of moving his missing arm, and it moved for him... he walked around a bit, moving it off of the experiment, who, naturally, wondered what had stepped on her.
The massive, armed statue stared down at her with a strangely happy expression... indeed, that was the only expression the smoothly chiseled statue had. Metal Man made a violent gesture in his mind; one where his right arm was. The statue's massive sword came down on the girl before she had figured out what happened.
The man reflected on how things had gone so far... how wrong they were. In a way, he wished it didn't have to go like this. But he saw the scientists, and now he saw that this girl was a demon unto herself. This had to be finished, or else he would be finished instead.
Super Smash Quest: Fighting evil since 2002.
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Galefore
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NintendoGod
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- Location: Somewhere far too hot.
He deals the cards as a meditation
1) Selene versus Metal Man (Mood: Randominity? Yes, I know it's not a word, but it's random. My spellchecker wants to say Condominiums. Which is also the last word said in Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving. Yay for random knowledge.)
After battles mostly consisting of killer robots, hardened mercenaries, guns, swords, and magic spells, having a fight where the potent weaponry is comprised of power tools, exploding coins, deadly DVDs, and anything else not bolted down (Though I believe the bolts were used at some point, too.) seemed surprisingly different. Both writers here display great quality in their writing and add some new motifs; Selene's use of songs to augment her writing was intriguing, and Metal Man added some nice background for his character. However, I think at times Metal Man attempted too much in certain posts, and thus some of his descriptions suffered. In all, a solid performance from both of them.
Metal Man: (8/10)
Selene: (9/10)
2) Erdawn versus Kargath (Mood: Suck)
Oh come on. I can't judge this. It was supposed to be one of the major fights here! Bah. Oh well! The both of them had nice, pretty introductory posts, but to rate them solely on that would be underwhelming! No no, instead I'll use the averages of their past fights to give a guesstimate of how this battle SHOULD have gone! I'll even add in a fake play by play. It'll have blood! Swords! Robots! LASERS! It'll be great.
(Warning: The above statement is a lie. There is no play by play here, fake or not. Nor sword-wielding laser blood robots.)
Erdawn's average: (8 + 10) / 2 = 9
Kargath's average: (6 + 8) / 2 = 7
Erdawn: (9/10)
Kargath: (7/10)
Unless someone demands a rematch or recount, that's how the scores fall.
1) Selene versus Metal Man (Mood: Randominity? Yes, I know it's not a word, but it's random. My spellchecker wants to say Condominiums. Which is also the last word said in Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving. Yay for random knowledge.)
After battles mostly consisting of killer robots, hardened mercenaries, guns, swords, and magic spells, having a fight where the potent weaponry is comprised of power tools, exploding coins, deadly DVDs, and anything else not bolted down (Though I believe the bolts were used at some point, too.) seemed surprisingly different. Both writers here display great quality in their writing and add some new motifs; Selene's use of songs to augment her writing was intriguing, and Metal Man added some nice background for his character. However, I think at times Metal Man attempted too much in certain posts, and thus some of his descriptions suffered. In all, a solid performance from both of them.
Metal Man: (8/10)
Selene: (9/10)
2) Erdawn versus Kargath (Mood: Suck)
Oh come on. I can't judge this. It was supposed to be one of the major fights here! Bah. Oh well! The both of them had nice, pretty introductory posts, but to rate them solely on that would be underwhelming! No no, instead I'll use the averages of their past fights to give a guesstimate of how this battle SHOULD have gone! I'll even add in a fake play by play. It'll have blood! Swords! Robots! LASERS! It'll be great.
(Warning: The above statement is a lie. There is no play by play here, fake or not. Nor sword-wielding laser blood robots.)
Erdawn's average: (8 + 10) / 2 = 9
Kargath's average: (6 + 8) / 2 = 7
Erdawn: (9/10)
Kargath: (7/10)
Unless someone demands a rematch or recount, that's how the scores fall.
\"Yesterday we obyed kings and bent our necks before emperors, but today we kneel only to the truth.\"
--Khalil Gibran
\"It is a good day to Pie!\"
--Khalil Gibran
\"It is a good day to Pie!\"
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t3hDarkness
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Since this is already late, I'll rush to finish. The other battle judgement will be added shortly.
Metal Man vs. Selene Starblade
Damn your fonts, damn them all to Norway.
It was difficult to stay away from this while the two of you were writing, and almost everything I could pull up as a misspelling was either onomatopoeia, an alternate spelling, or some odd word that was ‘verbed’ or compounded. The musical references were an interesting touch and the battle took more twists than any I have read before, but still by the end I was beating my head against the desk.
All in all through all the violence and walls of text, nothing really seemed to happen, no reason, no actual damage, and no end to bits of silliness.
Metal man
Is your character supposed to look like a cyborg ‘burlyman’.
You jumped the gun on this and started the battle before you actually had anything to go on, leaving a gap for her to fill or end up making you look stupid. She took the latter.
Before I have given you a point for well written flashbacks, now I take one away for one that didn’t work so well, if the gun and character need even more description, do it in due time, don’t step out of the flow for it.
Your inexperience with guns also shows a bit here, firing phosphorus (and repeat firing of any sort) from an old damask rifle would destroy the it within two or three shots. One more, don’t write to miss so often, if the character is a crack shot, then write at least a few of his early attacks actually hitting .
Gene Krupa really didn’t seem to fit the violence, maybe something with a faster beat.
You are now not allowed to poke fun at Inferno anymore for silly attacks.
Also, when was the opposing character introduced as Cora? EDIT: Found it in the chat topic.
Selene Starblade
Almost all of the actual spelling errors were yours but with none of the signs of being tricked by a spell checker.
Writing Wham eighteen times in a row is a bit excessive. It succeeded in breaking up the writing but created a wall in and of itself.
There were some added interest points, but they need a lot of explaining, such as the reality warping and the lack of response to damage.
Metal Man = 4
Selene Starblade = 6
Move to Strike the Erdwan vs. Kargath judgement or make them each add two posts before we continue. Nintendo God's score for that match is unacceptable as it has no actual connection to this round. If we must judge by one post each, then so be it, I have almost of two sentences of judgment that ended in a tie score.
Metal Man vs. Selene Starblade
Damn your fonts, damn them all to Norway.
It was difficult to stay away from this while the two of you were writing, and almost everything I could pull up as a misspelling was either onomatopoeia, an alternate spelling, or some odd word that was ‘verbed’ or compounded. The musical references were an interesting touch and the battle took more twists than any I have read before, but still by the end I was beating my head against the desk.
All in all through all the violence and walls of text, nothing really seemed to happen, no reason, no actual damage, and no end to bits of silliness.
Metal man
Is your character supposed to look like a cyborg ‘burlyman’.
You jumped the gun on this and started the battle before you actually had anything to go on, leaving a gap for her to fill or end up making you look stupid. She took the latter.
Before I have given you a point for well written flashbacks, now I take one away for one that didn’t work so well, if the gun and character need even more description, do it in due time, don’t step out of the flow for it.
Your inexperience with guns also shows a bit here, firing phosphorus (and repeat firing of any sort) from an old damask rifle would destroy the it within two or three shots. One more, don’t write to miss so often, if the character is a crack shot, then write at least a few of his early attacks actually hitting .
Gene Krupa really didn’t seem to fit the violence, maybe something with a faster beat.
You are now not allowed to poke fun at Inferno anymore for silly attacks.
Also, when was the opposing character introduced as Cora? EDIT: Found it in the chat topic.
Selene Starblade
Almost all of the actual spelling errors were yours but with none of the signs of being tricked by a spell checker.
Writing Wham eighteen times in a row is a bit excessive. It succeeded in breaking up the writing but created a wall in and of itself.
There were some added interest points, but they need a lot of explaining, such as the reality warping and the lack of response to damage.
Metal Man = 4
Selene Starblade = 6
Move to Strike the Erdwan vs. Kargath judgement or make them each add two posts before we continue. Nintendo God's score for that match is unacceptable as it has no actual connection to this round. If we must judge by one post each, then so be it, I have almost of two sentences of judgment that ended in a tie score.
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Erdawn Il Deus
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OoC: I really don't cre either way - I'm 3000k from home, have my apartment, and am stealing some poor sucker's wi-fi baha, so am able to post.
<i>\"We know how to sing but we don\'t know how to handle money or women. Do-wap, do do wop.\"</i>
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
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Heroine of the Dragon
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A gadzillion apologies and much gratefulness for the patience always shown...
Selene Starblade vs Metal Man
Selene
Great entrance and interesting choice of character. Your writing is still very enthralling and you use your words with extreme effectiveness. I only ask that you take care when repeating a word... it can detract from the flow you are creating. Overall, though, you are an extraordinary story teller. I loved the attacks and acknowledgement of counter-attacks from your foe.
Metal Man
Wonderful choice of battlefield. LA!!! I enjoyed your narration very much. You use such a wide variety of attacks and counter-attacks, and you acknowledge all damage inflicted very well. Fascinating description and nice attention to details. You had a couple of really sweet flashbacks!!
Selene 8
Metal Man 7.9
Kargath vs Erdawn
Fate is sometimes very interesting... this could have been so much more than sensational... oh well... we deal with what we get!!
Kargath
OHMYGOSH... what an awe-inspiring entrance!! I am seriously impressed... and deeply disappointed that the entire battle came to a crashing halt before you could continue. The imagery from your opening post lingers with me even a week after I have read it... and in re-reading it, I find minute details I missed the first time. This was incredibly eloquent. Well done!!!
Erdawn
You brought Richter back to play and then Time was called?! Bah!! I can but imagine what this battle would have been but for Fate. Your description, as always, is amazing. I love how you bring a character into being in my imagination.
Kargath 8.9
Erdawn 8
*keeps reading now that scoring is over with*
Hmmmmmmm... firstly, I feel that NintendoGod's method of scoring is unfair. To use previous information is not within the spirit of this competition. We have scored based on single posts beforehand. Usually though, one person is disqualified for breaching the Time Limit rule and so it's an easy choice. I guess it's not so easy with our Host making such gracious allowances.
Finally; I'd be happy to revise my scores for Kargath vs Erdawn in the event that something changes and more battling happens... or extra posting is required... or whatever. Please notify me in Antisocial's thread in the Misc should this occur. He's wonderful at getting my attention currently!!!
(And, thanks Selene for the reminder. You're very cool. I'd read everything by last week but then went to San Diego and was distracted and enchanted by Life. Faeries are easily distracted, you know!!) 
Selene Starblade vs Metal Man
Selene
Great entrance and interesting choice of character. Your writing is still very enthralling and you use your words with extreme effectiveness. I only ask that you take care when repeating a word... it can detract from the flow you are creating. Overall, though, you are an extraordinary story teller. I loved the attacks and acknowledgement of counter-attacks from your foe.
Metal Man
Wonderful choice of battlefield. LA!!! I enjoyed your narration very much. You use such a wide variety of attacks and counter-attacks, and you acknowledge all damage inflicted very well. Fascinating description and nice attention to details. You had a couple of really sweet flashbacks!!
Selene 8
Metal Man 7.9
Kargath vs Erdawn
Fate is sometimes very interesting... this could have been so much more than sensational... oh well... we deal with what we get!!
Kargath
OHMYGOSH... what an awe-inspiring entrance!! I am seriously impressed... and deeply disappointed that the entire battle came to a crashing halt before you could continue. The imagery from your opening post lingers with me even a week after I have read it... and in re-reading it, I find minute details I missed the first time. This was incredibly eloquent. Well done!!!
Erdawn
You brought Richter back to play and then Time was called?! Bah!! I can but imagine what this battle would have been but for Fate. Your description, as always, is amazing. I love how you bring a character into being in my imagination.
Kargath 8.9
Erdawn 8
*keeps reading now that scoring is over with*
Hmmmmmmm... firstly, I feel that NintendoGod's method of scoring is unfair. To use previous information is not within the spirit of this competition. We have scored based on single posts beforehand. Usually though, one person is disqualified for breaching the Time Limit rule and so it's an easy choice. I guess it's not so easy with our Host making such gracious allowances.
Finally; I'd be happy to revise my scores for Kargath vs Erdawn in the event that something changes and more battling happens... or extra posting is required... or whatever. Please notify me in Antisocial's thread in the Misc should this occur. He's wonderful at getting my attention currently!!!
(And, thanks Selene for the reminder. You're very cool. I'd read everything by last week but then went to San Diego and was distracted and enchanted by Life. Faeries are easily distracted, you know!!) She lives in the clouds and talks to the birds...
Happiest faerie of VGF.
Happiest faerie of VGF.
Spends hours in front of the bookcase/A beast with two paperbacks in bed
The moment Lucille felt Richter, she knew he was too far gone. That sense of horrible wrongness was all too palpable, and she knew all too well what it meant. Erasure.
An arbitrary second started its brief life, and Lucy looked through the dark at the gaunt figure in front of her. Her eyes slowly traced his stick-figure outline and the simple geometry of the bullet belts, ran over the tattered clothes he wore. Yet to simply describe what entered Lucille's eyes is to deny justice to what she saw, what she read. For to Lucille Richter was not a just a man but a character, a history, a system of interactions and a font of dialogue. She read his name, his history, the languages he spoke, the foods he chose, all those both innocent and twisted he had riddled with bullets. She saw him, he of bastardry, bullets and a broken mind, and in doing so knew him.
Lucille hated having to deal with people like the twisted gunman in front of her. Madmen with power, too much like the weather or deus ex machina than characters in their own right. They always seemed to be on the edge of taking their ordained chaos, their carefully arranged and ordered chaos, and unwittingly transforming it into real chaos.
Delacroix had ventured too far from his written path, had quite literally taken the wrong fork in the road two nights ago, and every moment he continued on his current state the world-story grew closer to fracture. Richter, the Six, his clothes, everyone and everything he had touched would have to be annulled, scraped from the surface of existence and replaced with the proper Richter, the proper environment, like a palimpsest comprising an entire world.
Her mind flitted over what she had read, and her hand almost began to flick to the pouch hanging by her side, but never started moving there. She knew she had to do this properly, like she did every time. So as that arbitrary second coughed on its deathbed and died, Lucille chose English and spoke.
"My name is Lucille, and I am here to fix this place, and all that exists here, including you. All you need to do is wait patiently and things will be back to how it should be. I promise you once I'm done you most definitely won't have noticed the time just fly by."
A melanin-starved eyebrow raised, and then Richter's grin spread even wider than it was before. He leaned forward whilst cocking his head to the side, so the starlight glinted off his rose red lenses to accentuate his already wild look.
"Now, you be waysting your time here, mi-seee Lui-seee, y'see? HAHAHAHAHA! I'm not broken, no-sir-EE! All moving parts in perFECT work'en order. Func-shunaliTIE right ... on ... target."
With that word, Richter's shoulder shrugged and dislodged its violent steel passenger, the Six, and it swung around to loving arms cupped below. It was almost like a mother and child, but Richter had given birth to nothing, and this child he cradled was a mortis-baby, an infant that had already learnt its first, best and only trick. Richter pulled the trigger, and the Six giggled mechanically, rhythmically.
"Gods, I LOOOOOOOVE me that sound! Yeah!"
A field machine-gun to the gut, from near on point-blank range. Enough to tear any living being to shreds, and if it didn't there would be the slow painful death from intestinal hemorrhaging. Richter grinned again, and looked down at his fallen victim.
Red covered the ground, flowed its way over Lucille's body, but it was not the red Richter lusted for, what he craved in his wretched soul. No, this red was smooth, shimmering and resoundingly fabric-based, broken only by the pink of Lucille's bountiful cleavage and the three score silver stains splattered on her belly.
A breath, then a heaving cough - then a glare directly from the eyes of knowledge to the rose-covered eyes of madness, the kind of glare a woman would give when her man casually informs her he's been having sex with her three best friends simultaneously. Lucy’s elbows pushed against the ground as she angled herself up. The flattened slugs slid off her bruised and battered stomach, off the dress, dual symbol and protector of her office. Her lips parted, her tongue moved and she spoke power.
There was no resistance, could be no resistance from Richter. It was not so much a spell as a Word, for magic applies forces, induces transformations, but there was no such graduated progress at that. Instead, Lucille willed change, spoke change, and it was so, had always been so..
The bullet belts wrapping Richter's torso like suspenders hung there on his body for a moment, then tinkled down to the ground in an anticlimactic patter. The chain links were gone - or in Reality’s current take on things, they simply had never existed and Gravity had only caught up to grasp her heavy hands on them now. The mortis-baby would have to be hand-fed now, or be left to starve.
"Neat trick, miss dee-eye-WHY, but I've got better for -"
Lucille's front foot lunged forward as she pushed against the ground. Richter was suddenly and painfully reminded of where 'stiletto' came from in 'stiletto heel' as the sharp point first crushed and then impaled the base of the basis of his masculinity. As Richter began to topple backwards from the force of the impact, Lucy's other foot left the ground and swept upwards, taking the front of her flowing red dress with it. Half a second passed as Richter fell, taking in view no man had seen in well over three hundred years. Then the ground and Lucille seemed to join forces, for at the exact moment his head thudded into the dry dirt underneath Lucille thrust down her foot into his face. Her foot did not just slam into his face, it slammed into his face, the ball shattering those distinctive lenses whilst the heel pulped the cartilage in his nose and came to rest halfway in his sinuses.
The dress billowed like a shimmering curtain around Lucy's legs as she leapt back, withdrawing the bloody daggers she wore from Richter's defaced face and mutilated member. Richter twitched, tentatively, hesitantly angling up his body, but Lucille opened her mouth and the book that had just appeared above him slammed into Richter's face with the force of a piano-sized anvil. Yet of course, to this world this book had not appeared but had always been falling towards this spot, a predestined literary missile.
Lucille looked down towards Richter's splayed, tome-topped body with contempt and just the tiniest iota of pity.
"You had to be difficult didn't you? Stay still, be quiet and read that while I finish my work."
The book's name?
The Things They Carried.
Hardcover, of course.
The moment Lucille felt Richter, she knew he was too far gone. That sense of horrible wrongness was all too palpable, and she knew all too well what it meant. Erasure.
An arbitrary second started its brief life, and Lucy looked through the dark at the gaunt figure in front of her. Her eyes slowly traced his stick-figure outline and the simple geometry of the bullet belts, ran over the tattered clothes he wore. Yet to simply describe what entered Lucille's eyes is to deny justice to what she saw, what she read. For to Lucille Richter was not a just a man but a character, a history, a system of interactions and a font of dialogue. She read his name, his history, the languages he spoke, the foods he chose, all those both innocent and twisted he had riddled with bullets. She saw him, he of bastardry, bullets and a broken mind, and in doing so knew him.
Lucille hated having to deal with people like the twisted gunman in front of her. Madmen with power, too much like the weather or deus ex machina than characters in their own right. They always seemed to be on the edge of taking their ordained chaos, their carefully arranged and ordered chaos, and unwittingly transforming it into real chaos.
Delacroix had ventured too far from his written path, had quite literally taken the wrong fork in the road two nights ago, and every moment he continued on his current state the world-story grew closer to fracture. Richter, the Six, his clothes, everyone and everything he had touched would have to be annulled, scraped from the surface of existence and replaced with the proper Richter, the proper environment, like a palimpsest comprising an entire world.
Her mind flitted over what she had read, and her hand almost began to flick to the pouch hanging by her side, but never started moving there. She knew she had to do this properly, like she did every time. So as that arbitrary second coughed on its deathbed and died, Lucille chose English and spoke.
"My name is Lucille, and I am here to fix this place, and all that exists here, including you. All you need to do is wait patiently and things will be back to how it should be. I promise you once I'm done you most definitely won't have noticed the time just fly by."
A melanin-starved eyebrow raised, and then Richter's grin spread even wider than it was before. He leaned forward whilst cocking his head to the side, so the starlight glinted off his rose red lenses to accentuate his already wild look.
"Now, you be waysting your time here, mi-seee Lui-seee, y'see? HAHAHAHAHA! I'm not broken, no-sir-EE! All moving parts in perFECT work'en order. Func-shunaliTIE right ... on ... target."
With that word, Richter's shoulder shrugged and dislodged its violent steel passenger, the Six, and it swung around to loving arms cupped below. It was almost like a mother and child, but Richter had given birth to nothing, and this child he cradled was a mortis-baby, an infant that had already learnt its first, best and only trick. Richter pulled the trigger, and the Six giggled mechanically, rhythmically.
"Gods, I LOOOOOOOVE me that sound! Yeah!"
A field machine-gun to the gut, from near on point-blank range. Enough to tear any living being to shreds, and if it didn't there would be the slow painful death from intestinal hemorrhaging. Richter grinned again, and looked down at his fallen victim.
Red covered the ground, flowed its way over Lucille's body, but it was not the red Richter lusted for, what he craved in his wretched soul. No, this red was smooth, shimmering and resoundingly fabric-based, broken only by the pink of Lucille's bountiful cleavage and the three score silver stains splattered on her belly.
A breath, then a heaving cough - then a glare directly from the eyes of knowledge to the rose-covered eyes of madness, the kind of glare a woman would give when her man casually informs her he's been having sex with her three best friends simultaneously. Lucy’s elbows pushed against the ground as she angled herself up. The flattened slugs slid off her bruised and battered stomach, off the dress, dual symbol and protector of her office. Her lips parted, her tongue moved and she spoke power.
There was no resistance, could be no resistance from Richter. It was not so much a spell as a Word, for magic applies forces, induces transformations, but there was no such graduated progress at that. Instead, Lucille willed change, spoke change, and it was so, had always been so..
The bullet belts wrapping Richter's torso like suspenders hung there on his body for a moment, then tinkled down to the ground in an anticlimactic patter. The chain links were gone - or in Reality’s current take on things, they simply had never existed and Gravity had only caught up to grasp her heavy hands on them now. The mortis-baby would have to be hand-fed now, or be left to starve.
"Neat trick, miss dee-eye-WHY, but I've got better for -"
Lucille's front foot lunged forward as she pushed against the ground. Richter was suddenly and painfully reminded of where 'stiletto' came from in 'stiletto heel' as the sharp point first crushed and then impaled the base of the basis of his masculinity. As Richter began to topple backwards from the force of the impact, Lucy's other foot left the ground and swept upwards, taking the front of her flowing red dress with it. Half a second passed as Richter fell, taking in view no man had seen in well over three hundred years. Then the ground and Lucille seemed to join forces, for at the exact moment his head thudded into the dry dirt underneath Lucille thrust down her foot into his face. Her foot did not just slam into his face, it slammed into his face, the ball shattering those distinctive lenses whilst the heel pulped the cartilage in his nose and came to rest halfway in his sinuses.
The dress billowed like a shimmering curtain around Lucy's legs as she leapt back, withdrawing the bloody daggers she wore from Richter's defaced face and mutilated member. Richter twitched, tentatively, hesitantly angling up his body, but Lucille opened her mouth and the book that had just appeared above him slammed into Richter's face with the force of a piano-sized anvil. Yet of course, to this world this book had not appeared but had always been falling towards this spot, a predestined literary missile.
Lucille looked down towards Richter's splayed, tome-topped body with contempt and just the tiniest iota of pity.
"You had to be difficult didn't you? Stay still, be quiet and read that while I finish my work."
The book's name?
The Things They Carried.
Hardcover, of course.
Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?
-Clifford Stoll
-Clifford Stoll
-
Erdawn Il Deus
- Member
- Posts: 3036
- Joined: Wed May 21, 2003 1:00 am
- Location: Threading the jeweled thrones of earth under my sa
OoC: Richter calls for a little more research than Pandemonium.
There was a faint, low titter, lifting up from Richter’s body like an avenging spirit before falling eerily silent. Very slowly, in what must have been a deliberate lack of speed or effort, he sat up, and removed the volume from his face. He scanned it courteously, but beneath his broken red glasses the lower half of his face seemed frozen into a dead man’s rictus of a grin populated by cracked teeth and still like white dough.
”For ah, such an educated young woman,” he muttered, and beneath the formal intonations of his voice pattern lay that titter, always at the very brink of emerge, ready to break the surface like a corpse too full of its own gases. ”Your taste in war literature is pretty amateur. You should get your hands on some John Parrish. So many people cry tears of ink trying to understand Vietnam or explain it to other people, muddling through the politics and the experiences and the civil state …”
He looked up slightly. Lucille, despite whatever the hell it was she was doing exactly, turned away. It had been a reflex again – her flesh reacting to agony, another kind of agony altogether, her eyes squeezed shut to brush out the last recorded image – that of two shattered lenses barely hanging over… her mind was torn all at once over several differing opinions on what she had glimpsed, one of which being the mad idea that there had been no eyes there at all, only unbroken skin, and the more ludicrous idea that there had been eyes, which in itself opened the windows to possibilities that might have darkened the imaginings of God himself.
Richter’s head darted forward and his jaw snapped and in a mouthful he tore something like three quarters of the pages from the hardcover novel from their binding with a sharp, brief ripping of parchment, spitting them all out with just as much speed and letting them fall across the wind.
”When the answer to all of it is just too simple for all the educated minds of the world to bear, and they turn from it like Judeism turned from the teachings, the idea of Christ, and they turn from it like you seem so fond of turning away from face.” He chuckled again, louder. ”Am I so hideous, now? Should I put on more make up? I could paint myself up like that cosmic harlot Apostrifi and sit in the great god Cthulhu’s lap but m’am I am a man of wealth, and taste.”
“I’m quite uninterested in conversation with the likes of you,” Lucille snapped. “Again you resist – even passively – when –“
This time, when Richter laughed, his entire head lolled back on his shoulders and his lips pulled so far back from the enamel of his teeth his gums were plainly visible. He painted a horrible site – the crater where his slender nose had been openly bleeding onto the hard ground and roughly outlining his mouth with a clown’s lip-sticking of blood.
”Wee-ha-ha – AH! Lady, you are one frigid little Hoth concubine but I’ll be DAAAAAAA-YUMED if you’re bright at ALL for one.” He stood right up. “Ah think what you need, miss, is nothing other than a good, hot dicking. I’d offer my services but I was never an avid fan of hypothermia – too many run ins with Alastar the Mad-Hatter and his ilk, and, heh,” He gestured downwards. “I don’t think he likes you very much! DOWN, BOY!” He shut off his hysteria and spoke only through his smile. “I will, however, let you in on a little secret. Won’t even force you to guess although I am a fan of games.”
Very suddenly, he was in front of her. It isn’t to say at all that he had moved – physically there been no suggestion of displacement, he was merely there - as if he had been the whole time. His breath fell upon her, a black veil against her skin and so cold, and he spoke in an almost seductive whisper.
”Bookworm,” He exhaled, grabbing her by the chin with shocking force and speed. ”There has never been a novel written about me, or even with me as a supporting character, and there never will. Yggdrasil will burn first.”
Of course, Lucille was retaliating. Her palm rose up and came down like a sparrow in flight, striking into Richter’s face something like three times in rapid succession while moving down towards his Adam’s apple. Pain burst across his vision in dark stars but through it he laughed - even as his skull rocked back and forth on his shoulders and even as her fist came down against his windpipe – and especially when the bulge of his jugular vein cracked open of its own accord, revealing a second mouth like an alien, triangular abyss of shark-teeth concave in a way that shredded against one another downwards into some tenebrous gullet.
For some reason, that hadn’t at all been in Chapter One.
There was a wet exploding sound – too complex to be audible in any other way – according partnership with a rapid crackling like the immolating of dry twigs, as her hand was crushed, twisted, and obliterated into a thick vapour of meaty red and flecks of bone as Richter jerked his neck to one side. The sheer pressure fractured her fore-arm up to the elbow and when she withdrew everything above the wrist had been so thoroughly flayed there was hardly anything but stained bones. She shrieked at that point – losing a hand does that – but all the same her legs pistoned forward in quick, calculated thrusts, stiletto heels slamming into a wall of abdominals like pointy battering rams, doubling the lunatic (the term “mad man” seemed scarcely suitable, notably because “man” seemed out of place against this horror-show) over at the waist, so that his teeth gnashed and his mouth foamed with saliva. He backpedaled, the heels of his magnum combat boots rolling over the copper spines of live rounds which had been so un-thoroughly disconnected from his child of iron and wood.
He stomped once, and dust kicked up around his foot, and there was a chattering BRA-TT-BRATT as every – well, half of the - discarded rounds cooked off, tracers leaving quivering yellow-streaks of fire hissing like bacon fat through the air. Dirt kicked upwards in staccato sprays of earth and stone and fires lit where incendiary rounds ricocheted off stone of burrowed into the ground. Heartbeats of red flashed around the extremities of Lucille’s body – the random scattering of ammunition subtracting small amounts of meat from the make-up of her frame in dizzying red mists. She was calm despite it, despite the blood and pain and chaos and the sickening feeling of superficially opened flesh flapping against the breeze. This time she spared no mercy. Her foot came up and around towards Richter’s leering skull – pointed at his temple to cave in whatever dark mind he might of hand up there.
And she did connect – there was a heavy thunk, and everything above the scarecrow’s shoulders teetered left with the force of it, but as this happened one his free arm shot up and pinned the ankle to him, wrestling Lucille off one leg and throwing her off balance. He spat out a dark wad of red and darker red and it dribble between his lips. And he was smiling again. Lucille’s blood ran cold and something heavy sank into her bowels.
With his other arm, Richter was supporting the full weight of the six by the pistol-grip, hefting it easily despite an emancipated build, and shoving the machine-gun muzzle violently upwards along the inside of Lucille’s thigh until it met resistance in the crook beneath her pelvis. She pulled away but there was a rabid insanity to the pleasure he was taking in this and his grip was like steel.
”One round in the chamber, always, filly. And it seems you need a little warming up down there – I call this the Deschaine Abortion technique.”
He pulled the trigger. There was a single, heavy-calibre report. Blood ran down the barrel.
OoC: Now that there... pretty damn long for me. Next time I'll have him sing a song, even.
There was a faint, low titter, lifting up from Richter’s body like an avenging spirit before falling eerily silent. Very slowly, in what must have been a deliberate lack of speed or effort, he sat up, and removed the volume from his face. He scanned it courteously, but beneath his broken red glasses the lower half of his face seemed frozen into a dead man’s rictus of a grin populated by cracked teeth and still like white dough.
”For ah, such an educated young woman,” he muttered, and beneath the formal intonations of his voice pattern lay that titter, always at the very brink of emerge, ready to break the surface like a corpse too full of its own gases. ”Your taste in war literature is pretty amateur. You should get your hands on some John Parrish. So many people cry tears of ink trying to understand Vietnam or explain it to other people, muddling through the politics and the experiences and the civil state …”
He looked up slightly. Lucille, despite whatever the hell it was she was doing exactly, turned away. It had been a reflex again – her flesh reacting to agony, another kind of agony altogether, her eyes squeezed shut to brush out the last recorded image – that of two shattered lenses barely hanging over… her mind was torn all at once over several differing opinions on what she had glimpsed, one of which being the mad idea that there had been no eyes there at all, only unbroken skin, and the more ludicrous idea that there had been eyes, which in itself opened the windows to possibilities that might have darkened the imaginings of God himself.
Richter’s head darted forward and his jaw snapped and in a mouthful he tore something like three quarters of the pages from the hardcover novel from their binding with a sharp, brief ripping of parchment, spitting them all out with just as much speed and letting them fall across the wind.
”When the answer to all of it is just too simple for all the educated minds of the world to bear, and they turn from it like Judeism turned from the teachings, the idea of Christ, and they turn from it like you seem so fond of turning away from face.” He chuckled again, louder. ”Am I so hideous, now? Should I put on more make up? I could paint myself up like that cosmic harlot Apostrifi and sit in the great god Cthulhu’s lap but m’am I am a man of wealth, and taste.”
“I’m quite uninterested in conversation with the likes of you,” Lucille snapped. “Again you resist – even passively – when –“
This time, when Richter laughed, his entire head lolled back on his shoulders and his lips pulled so far back from the enamel of his teeth his gums were plainly visible. He painted a horrible site – the crater where his slender nose had been openly bleeding onto the hard ground and roughly outlining his mouth with a clown’s lip-sticking of blood.
”Wee-ha-ha – AH! Lady, you are one frigid little Hoth concubine but I’ll be DAAAAAAA-YUMED if you’re bright at ALL for one.” He stood right up. “Ah think what you need, miss, is nothing other than a good, hot dicking. I’d offer my services but I was never an avid fan of hypothermia – too many run ins with Alastar the Mad-Hatter and his ilk, and, heh,” He gestured downwards. “I don’t think he likes you very much! DOWN, BOY!” He shut off his hysteria and spoke only through his smile. “I will, however, let you in on a little secret. Won’t even force you to guess although I am a fan of games.”
Very suddenly, he was in front of her. It isn’t to say at all that he had moved – physically there been no suggestion of displacement, he was merely there - as if he had been the whole time. His breath fell upon her, a black veil against her skin and so cold, and he spoke in an almost seductive whisper.
”Bookworm,” He exhaled, grabbing her by the chin with shocking force and speed. ”There has never been a novel written about me, or even with me as a supporting character, and there never will. Yggdrasil will burn first.”
Of course, Lucille was retaliating. Her palm rose up and came down like a sparrow in flight, striking into Richter’s face something like three times in rapid succession while moving down towards his Adam’s apple. Pain burst across his vision in dark stars but through it he laughed - even as his skull rocked back and forth on his shoulders and even as her fist came down against his windpipe – and especially when the bulge of his jugular vein cracked open of its own accord, revealing a second mouth like an alien, triangular abyss of shark-teeth concave in a way that shredded against one another downwards into some tenebrous gullet.
For some reason, that hadn’t at all been in Chapter One.
There was a wet exploding sound – too complex to be audible in any other way – according partnership with a rapid crackling like the immolating of dry twigs, as her hand was crushed, twisted, and obliterated into a thick vapour of meaty red and flecks of bone as Richter jerked his neck to one side. The sheer pressure fractured her fore-arm up to the elbow and when she withdrew everything above the wrist had been so thoroughly flayed there was hardly anything but stained bones. She shrieked at that point – losing a hand does that – but all the same her legs pistoned forward in quick, calculated thrusts, stiletto heels slamming into a wall of abdominals like pointy battering rams, doubling the lunatic (the term “mad man” seemed scarcely suitable, notably because “man” seemed out of place against this horror-show) over at the waist, so that his teeth gnashed and his mouth foamed with saliva. He backpedaled, the heels of his magnum combat boots rolling over the copper spines of live rounds which had been so un-thoroughly disconnected from his child of iron and wood.
He stomped once, and dust kicked up around his foot, and there was a chattering BRA-TT-BRATT as every – well, half of the - discarded rounds cooked off, tracers leaving quivering yellow-streaks of fire hissing like bacon fat through the air. Dirt kicked upwards in staccato sprays of earth and stone and fires lit where incendiary rounds ricocheted off stone of burrowed into the ground. Heartbeats of red flashed around the extremities of Lucille’s body – the random scattering of ammunition subtracting small amounts of meat from the make-up of her frame in dizzying red mists. She was calm despite it, despite the blood and pain and chaos and the sickening feeling of superficially opened flesh flapping against the breeze. This time she spared no mercy. Her foot came up and around towards Richter’s leering skull – pointed at his temple to cave in whatever dark mind he might of hand up there.
And she did connect – there was a heavy thunk, and everything above the scarecrow’s shoulders teetered left with the force of it, but as this happened one his free arm shot up and pinned the ankle to him, wrestling Lucille off one leg and throwing her off balance. He spat out a dark wad of red and darker red and it dribble between his lips. And he was smiling again. Lucille’s blood ran cold and something heavy sank into her bowels.
With his other arm, Richter was supporting the full weight of the six by the pistol-grip, hefting it easily despite an emancipated build, and shoving the machine-gun muzzle violently upwards along the inside of Lucille’s thigh until it met resistance in the crook beneath her pelvis. She pulled away but there was a rabid insanity to the pleasure he was taking in this and his grip was like steel.
”One round in the chamber, always, filly. And it seems you need a little warming up down there – I call this the Deschaine Abortion technique.”
He pulled the trigger. There was a single, heavy-calibre report. Blood ran down the barrel.
OoC: Now that there... pretty damn long for me. Next time I'll have him sing a song, even.
<i>\"We know how to sing but we don\'t know how to handle money or women. Do-wap, do do wop.\"</i>
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
Sex and violence / makes the world go round
Pain. Lucille felt it through her, on her. Pain where there should be none. She should be whole, she should be finished here, but she was handless, bullet-bitten, violated by an idiot in a tilly hat. She felt it through her ... a tunnel of agony from her womanhood, through flesh and fat and capped by a silver splash against the impenetrable fabric at her lower back. There were so many words for pain, so many languages in which it could be expressed. One in particular appealed to Lucille in this moment of horrible intensity.
'Kazzat'.
This word was not just for pain in the language it came from. It was for debt, for discovery of adultery, for a fire burning around you, for visions of things to come. It meant, literally, impetus to move.
So Lucille did indeed move. Her good hand flew to that pouch still clinging desperately to her shoulder, and as her hand blurred to her leather cache her tongue found words again and spoke - and she felt no pain, had never felt pain. As she withdrew with sonic speed, her mouth formed a Word, and her stump no longer bled, for the blood flowed through its old capillaries and veins again. The sanguine liquid now flowed through vessels and tubes of air instead of flesh, like an anatomy diagram given form and colour and depth.
Richter moved as if to intercept, to swing that great black gun as a hot bludgeon, but a mere Word from Lucille and she was faster than him, faster than he could ever hope to be. In her hand, a quill, wielded as if it were a dagger, and when it plunged into his chest and heart, it was.
Still Richter kept grinning, a quill-dagger was nothing to him, and the arc of his gun-club came to its end across the librarian's back with a dull thud. It should have stopped her, broken her where she stood, but the dress shrugged off the bulk of the Six whilst Lucille's nervous system simply ignored the pain.
Then Richter did something even he did not expect. He let go of Lucille's leg. He fumbled and dropped the Six to the dark dirt ground.
That was about the time which his chest started to feel like the reactor core at Chernobyl.
As Lucille spun her leg to the ground, Richter grabbed the quill embedded in his chest as the wound spurted ink. He pulled at the quill, but as he drew it out it grew equally in size, so that the tip never left his flesh. He pulled more and more, and the quill grew and grew, until had grown greater than the down of a roc, long and sharp and full of death.
He could feel the ink pump where his blood should have gone, to his lungs and back, through arteries both major and minor. His crotch leaked ichor, whilst his fingers clubbed and nails fell to dead black. Richter longed to breathe, but his nose was now a hot, bubbling tar-pit of a wound. His mouth filled from behind with cloying black liquid. Desperately he tried to cough, but not a drop moved. A second passed, and Richter was drowning, drowning, and thenthe disgusting gullet-trap opened in his throat. Air came, but blood went, replaced by a merciless black invader, a thing that would stop at nothing until his body was its own.
Mercy did come - in a fashion. Lucille struck the end of the quill, driving the ink-stained instrument through Richter's body, slipping out of and past his heart, tearing through connective tissue, splintering the ribs in Richter's back and finally driving its way out through his fatigues on the other side. The pain was, to put it lightly, intense. Richter tried to move, but his ink-filled limbs could do naught but vaguely gesture. He needed time, a mere minute or two, but it was time he simply could not afford.
The pair looked a sight in the pale starlight. Richter, impaled on a critic's pen, a force of insanity temporarily bound by a vast internal stain. Lucy, every bit of her themed red, from her blood-imitation of a hand to her shredded wrist, from her shimmering dress to the slow drip on the ground between her legs. Lucy looked up and down at Richter, surveying the damage she had caused, radiating unbridled contempt for her opponent.
"I have been alive for over three billion years ... over thirty-six billion months. Do you think I have not bled before?"
Again Richter willed to move, to kill, and again his body failed him.
"What was that you said before? Yggdrasil will burn first before you are in a story? Heh ha hahaha"
That laugh, a laugh totally separate and distinct from the wild cackles that Richter made. It was a laugh full of intent and knowledge, from a princess, a queen, a god-empress of all the lands. A laugh belonging to a ruler at her balcony, watching the mob break down that flaming gate, and slay her guards where they stood. A laugh from behind a slender, bejewelled hand, a laugh that caused her body to quiver, because she knew everything and they knew nothing. They would run through the stone hallways and plush corridors and burst into her chambers, accusing her, demanding of her. Yet still she would talk, and they would yell defiance and bloodlust, and she would sigh and click her fingers ... and there would be screaming, panic, rending, maiming, there would be gore, and every single one of their dying wishes would be for time to go backwards so they could just do what they were told.
"Yggdrasil is already burning. Already the flames creep their way along its giant black roots."
A flicker of surprise, of confusion, of something other than that eternal grinning insanity moved across Richter's face. It was only there for a moment, but it was there. The terrible hole in his throat pulsed as he spoke, and it was a disgusting, gurgling voice he produced.
"You know ... what I think ... strumpet? You speak madness ... Yggdrasil can't burn ... will never burn ... I would KNOW."
"Yggdrasil has burnt. Rain nor hail nor snow nor sea could drown the flames, and now the great expanse of root and leaf and branch and flower is naught but ash."
This time, the flicker passed slower, was more visible, for the simple fact that the feeling stayed longer. Yet still Lucille continued.
"Yggdrasil will burn. The death-worshippers plan in secret, plan in silence. The time will come and the tree shall be severed from its roots, and space shall end."
Open confusion reigned on the face of Chaos. He had driven a multitude of men and women mad in his time, had toyed with their minds until they were nothing but spittle-spewing wrecks, but he had done nothing to this bitch. She had seen his eyes, and turned away, but he had done NOTHING to this bitch.
"Yggdrasil will never burn. The tree is eternal. The defenders are legion, power and numbers far greater than any foe. Yggdrasil's enemies are nothing, and it shall stand forever."
A dot of a thought appeared in that Bronwian hell of Richter's mind, that he should move, attack, shut this bitch up, but it and the rest of his mind froze as Lucille looked straight into his eyes.
She did not look away.
Now, for the first time, Richter truly looked into her eyes.
He saw fire, his fire, that primal power behind his eyes, reflected and displayed, but it couldn't be his fire, it beat with a period wholly apart from the warp and flare of his own. Yet behind that shadow of a fire lay something more, a horror he could not define or distinguish ... and again came that knowing laugh.
"World trees and mind disease, hahaha ... never been in a story, you say? I've seen you a thousand hundred times, and those trees even more. Yggdrasil, Richter Delacroix, just tropes, that's all you are. Tropes."
With that one word, the (couldn't be!) reflection dimmed and Richter did not see anything through her eyes, he felt it. He felt like a quark, a quark inside an electron, an electron locked between calcium and chloride, in a great lattice that stretched forever, but it was not forever, it was a mere millimetre, a grain inside a bowl of water, itself floating in an endless sea, but the sea not endless but a crater lake on a great island in the middle of an ocean planet, in a galaxy of perfectly spinning worlds and stars, and this galaxy was not a galaxy, but the tiniest speck of ink on a page. A page amongst uncountable other pages, all perfectly ordered from A to Z. It was then that Richter knew it truly was his fire he saw reflected in her eyes, but captured, arranged, Ordered.
He hated it. It made him want to kill her.
She blinked, the connection was broken, and now the light reflected in her eyes now came from stars instead of a pale-faced black hole. Richter no longer saw possibilities beyond his imagining. He saw simple green irises, black pupils. Most of all, he saw an opportunity.
A moment and he was no longer statue-Richter, modern-art-Richter, he was chaos-Richter again, speeding towards Lucille with nothing but killing intent in his mind.
Lucille saw this, saw Richter return to his true self, and spoke a single Word, a single syllable. A single step and a single rock brought a single stumble and a single fall for Richter - but not just a single injury. He fell and the quill struck the ground, sending a new spike of pain through his chest. His face struck the ground with such force it would have most certainly have broken his nose three times over, if he still had had one to break.
A whirl of fabric and Lucille stepped aside - she was a matador, a dancing matador, and the dress was her cape. Richter roared in pain and anger as he tumbled past, and the bones in his hand burst forth from their clubbed sheaths to claw at her feet, slicing deep, but he did not stop moving. Head over heels he went, the feathered stake in him overloading his nerves every time it moved. A pedestal and a book flashed past his vision as he slowed, finally coming to a stop a metre past it.
The librarian looked down upon her fallen foe, allowing herself a little pleasure at the sight of his missing legs. She could not remember any other time when she'd needed to force someone into the Book's defensive field, and congratulated herself for thinking of it. Richter would not waste her time any more.
Lucille strode towards the fallen warrior, one purpose repeating itself in her mind.
Erasure.
Erasure.
Erasure.
Pain. Lucille felt it through her, on her. Pain where there should be none. She should be whole, she should be finished here, but she was handless, bullet-bitten, violated by an idiot in a tilly hat. She felt it through her ... a tunnel of agony from her womanhood, through flesh and fat and capped by a silver splash against the impenetrable fabric at her lower back. There were so many words for pain, so many languages in which it could be expressed. One in particular appealed to Lucille in this moment of horrible intensity.
'Kazzat'.
This word was not just for pain in the language it came from. It was for debt, for discovery of adultery, for a fire burning around you, for visions of things to come. It meant, literally, impetus to move.
So Lucille did indeed move. Her good hand flew to that pouch still clinging desperately to her shoulder, and as her hand blurred to her leather cache her tongue found words again and spoke - and she felt no pain, had never felt pain. As she withdrew with sonic speed, her mouth formed a Word, and her stump no longer bled, for the blood flowed through its old capillaries and veins again. The sanguine liquid now flowed through vessels and tubes of air instead of flesh, like an anatomy diagram given form and colour and depth.
Richter moved as if to intercept, to swing that great black gun as a hot bludgeon, but a mere Word from Lucille and she was faster than him, faster than he could ever hope to be. In her hand, a quill, wielded as if it were a dagger, and when it plunged into his chest and heart, it was.
Still Richter kept grinning, a quill-dagger was nothing to him, and the arc of his gun-club came to its end across the librarian's back with a dull thud. It should have stopped her, broken her where she stood, but the dress shrugged off the bulk of the Six whilst Lucille's nervous system simply ignored the pain.
Then Richter did something even he did not expect. He let go of Lucille's leg. He fumbled and dropped the Six to the dark dirt ground.
That was about the time which his chest started to feel like the reactor core at Chernobyl.
As Lucille spun her leg to the ground, Richter grabbed the quill embedded in his chest as the wound spurted ink. He pulled at the quill, but as he drew it out it grew equally in size, so that the tip never left his flesh. He pulled more and more, and the quill grew and grew, until had grown greater than the down of a roc, long and sharp and full of death.
He could feel the ink pump where his blood should have gone, to his lungs and back, through arteries both major and minor. His crotch leaked ichor, whilst his fingers clubbed and nails fell to dead black. Richter longed to breathe, but his nose was now a hot, bubbling tar-pit of a wound. His mouth filled from behind with cloying black liquid. Desperately he tried to cough, but not a drop moved. A second passed, and Richter was drowning, drowning, and thenthe disgusting gullet-trap opened in his throat. Air came, but blood went, replaced by a merciless black invader, a thing that would stop at nothing until his body was its own.
Mercy did come - in a fashion. Lucille struck the end of the quill, driving the ink-stained instrument through Richter's body, slipping out of and past his heart, tearing through connective tissue, splintering the ribs in Richter's back and finally driving its way out through his fatigues on the other side. The pain was, to put it lightly, intense. Richter tried to move, but his ink-filled limbs could do naught but vaguely gesture. He needed time, a mere minute or two, but it was time he simply could not afford.
The pair looked a sight in the pale starlight. Richter, impaled on a critic's pen, a force of insanity temporarily bound by a vast internal stain. Lucy, every bit of her themed red, from her blood-imitation of a hand to her shredded wrist, from her shimmering dress to the slow drip on the ground between her legs. Lucy looked up and down at Richter, surveying the damage she had caused, radiating unbridled contempt for her opponent.
"I have been alive for over three billion years ... over thirty-six billion months. Do you think I have not bled before?"
Again Richter willed to move, to kill, and again his body failed him.
"What was that you said before? Yggdrasil will burn first before you are in a story? Heh ha hahaha"
That laugh, a laugh totally separate and distinct from the wild cackles that Richter made. It was a laugh full of intent and knowledge, from a princess, a queen, a god-empress of all the lands. A laugh belonging to a ruler at her balcony, watching the mob break down that flaming gate, and slay her guards where they stood. A laugh from behind a slender, bejewelled hand, a laugh that caused her body to quiver, because she knew everything and they knew nothing. They would run through the stone hallways and plush corridors and burst into her chambers, accusing her, demanding of her. Yet still she would talk, and they would yell defiance and bloodlust, and she would sigh and click her fingers ... and there would be screaming, panic, rending, maiming, there would be gore, and every single one of their dying wishes would be for time to go backwards so they could just do what they were told.
"Yggdrasil is already burning. Already the flames creep their way along its giant black roots."
A flicker of surprise, of confusion, of something other than that eternal grinning insanity moved across Richter's face. It was only there for a moment, but it was there. The terrible hole in his throat pulsed as he spoke, and it was a disgusting, gurgling voice he produced.
"You know ... what I think ... strumpet? You speak madness ... Yggdrasil can't burn ... will never burn ... I would KNOW."
"Yggdrasil has burnt. Rain nor hail nor snow nor sea could drown the flames, and now the great expanse of root and leaf and branch and flower is naught but ash."
This time, the flicker passed slower, was more visible, for the simple fact that the feeling stayed longer. Yet still Lucille continued.
"Yggdrasil will burn. The death-worshippers plan in secret, plan in silence. The time will come and the tree shall be severed from its roots, and space shall end."
Open confusion reigned on the face of Chaos. He had driven a multitude of men and women mad in his time, had toyed with their minds until they were nothing but spittle-spewing wrecks, but he had done nothing to this bitch. She had seen his eyes, and turned away, but he had done NOTHING to this bitch.
"Yggdrasil will never burn. The tree is eternal. The defenders are legion, power and numbers far greater than any foe. Yggdrasil's enemies are nothing, and it shall stand forever."
A dot of a thought appeared in that Bronwian hell of Richter's mind, that he should move, attack, shut this bitch up, but it and the rest of his mind froze as Lucille looked straight into his eyes.
She did not look away.
Now, for the first time, Richter truly looked into her eyes.
He saw fire, his fire, that primal power behind his eyes, reflected and displayed, but it couldn't be his fire, it beat with a period wholly apart from the warp and flare of his own. Yet behind that shadow of a fire lay something more, a horror he could not define or distinguish ... and again came that knowing laugh.
"World trees and mind disease, hahaha ... never been in a story, you say? I've seen you a thousand hundred times, and those trees even more. Yggdrasil, Richter Delacroix, just tropes, that's all you are. Tropes."
With that one word, the (couldn't be!) reflection dimmed and Richter did not see anything through her eyes, he felt it. He felt like a quark, a quark inside an electron, an electron locked between calcium and chloride, in a great lattice that stretched forever, but it was not forever, it was a mere millimetre, a grain inside a bowl of water, itself floating in an endless sea, but the sea not endless but a crater lake on a great island in the middle of an ocean planet, in a galaxy of perfectly spinning worlds and stars, and this galaxy was not a galaxy, but the tiniest speck of ink on a page. A page amongst uncountable other pages, all perfectly ordered from A to Z. It was then that Richter knew it truly was his fire he saw reflected in her eyes, but captured, arranged, Ordered.
He hated it. It made him want to kill her.
She blinked, the connection was broken, and now the light reflected in her eyes now came from stars instead of a pale-faced black hole. Richter no longer saw possibilities beyond his imagining. He saw simple green irises, black pupils. Most of all, he saw an opportunity.
A moment and he was no longer statue-Richter, modern-art-Richter, he was chaos-Richter again, speeding towards Lucille with nothing but killing intent in his mind.
Lucille saw this, saw Richter return to his true self, and spoke a single Word, a single syllable. A single step and a single rock brought a single stumble and a single fall for Richter - but not just a single injury. He fell and the quill struck the ground, sending a new spike of pain through his chest. His face struck the ground with such force it would have most certainly have broken his nose three times over, if he still had had one to break.
A whirl of fabric and Lucille stepped aside - she was a matador, a dancing matador, and the dress was her cape. Richter roared in pain and anger as he tumbled past, and the bones in his hand burst forth from their clubbed sheaths to claw at her feet, slicing deep, but he did not stop moving. Head over heels he went, the feathered stake in him overloading his nerves every time it moved. A pedestal and a book flashed past his vision as he slowed, finally coming to a stop a metre past it.
The librarian looked down upon her fallen foe, allowing herself a little pleasure at the sight of his missing legs. She could not remember any other time when she'd needed to force someone into the Book's defensive field, and congratulated herself for thinking of it. Richter would not waste her time any more.
Lucille strode towards the fallen warrior, one purpose repeating itself in her mind.
Erasure.
Erasure.
Erasure.
Why is it drug addicts and computer afficionados are both called users?
-Clifford Stoll
-Clifford Stoll
-
Erdawn Il Deus
- Member
- Posts: 3036
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- Location: Threading the jeweled thrones of earth under my sa
OoC: It strikes me that I haven’t the foggiest idea how Richter is missing his legs in your post, and thus will pretend it did happen/pretend I understand it did just because it really makes him more terrifying an entity anyway, like Wyborn in the advanced stages of his “Sacrifice” magic
What happened in the time between when Lucille had come within “he could reach out and grab you-****ed” distance of her victim, was enormous. In that, the space preserved within an eternal but seemingly measured time-frame of seconds, volumes could have been written – an encyclopedic account of events, theoretical mathematics beyond the comprehension of the human mindset, explanations, et cetera ad infinitum. The ink raced through Richter’s blood stream. It was possessed by material knowledge of things, it was symbolic, in essence it defeated the very purpose of Richter’s resistance only because there was nothing he could do to retaliate that had not already been factored in or calculated or just simply expected. Biologically, he should have been defeated by this thing. It asserted its control over his motor and bodily functions. His body was now its body.
Essentially, that is what defeated it. That is why when he stood up Lucille was perplexed. It shouldn’t have happened, but the knowledgeable have always been more easily confused.
The ink became Richter and became lost. It entered his body and found itself in the place of water rushing into an abyss. It pressed up against all sides of his being and found that there were no walls to support it. It filled the chambers of his heart and disappeared into yawning chasms that fell deeper and blacker than could even be imagined in the blackness between galaxies, ran itself so thin through the highways of his circulatory system there was nothing left to make up any significant mass. Very suddenly on the ground he flexed the fingers of his right hand, stiffly at first, and then again with ease – the pitch substance sloshing around the tendons of the structures, losing purchase on his corporality. That intent, that assimilating, colonizing intent of organic conquest echoed within the confines of his body – which was so many things, and so little – on and on into oblivion, its cries becoming only more obnoxious and less effective as it sank away. Effectively, the attack was never repelled – never countered or defended against, never even truly ineffective. It worked perfectly. Was seamless in its delivery, a proverbial check-mate.
But despite all this it was like sand tossed into the wind.
Richter shook himself off, stood up (I say stood up as a very loosely based term) – again moving with the gradual recession of stiffness which permeated his motor functions. He was a monstrous canvas of perpetrated violence which made up the wreckage of his visible self. Where the living quill had pierced him he was gored, and where it had ruptured through the physical boundaries of his flesh before falling away into the underworld of his body he was tored and ragged and bleeding, no more a man than a corpse.
His torso floated above the ground – he had effortlessly shifted himself to a position that would have been standing, had he the limbs, in a radical defiance of gravity which brought to mind the nature of reality. He wasn’t laughing. There was something awful about that. He seemed, rather, in a state of absolute pensiveness which hovered around him like some malign thunderhead pregnant with black rain, heralding a coming storm.
Rain black like ink. Carried on the wind. Carried and lost.
Lucille’s mind focused on that word again – erasure. “E – Ra – Sure”, [i-ray-sher]. The act, or instance, of being erased. The stateof being erased (what Lucille wholly believed Delacroix must have been immersed in), as in… "The powerful images of his work . . . punishment, mutilation, erasure" (Joyce Carol Oates). A place where something has been erased; a spot or mark left after erasing. The multiple, limitless definitions pronounced themselves within the encyclopedic nature of her mind, every aspect of its meaning pertaining the expected bleakness of Richter’s future.
But all that happened was the ruffling of Richter’s fatigues, which were dark, heavy and wet with blood, his guts slowly roping from him like wet tubules of stained spaghetti, repulsive. He turned and looked at her, and smiled, and this time – though his malice was clear – his smile was genuine, almost friendly – father;y, in a way that unsettled her. Again there was no laugh. This absolute change in countenance was paralyzing with shock.
”See “expuction”, tart. ‘a correction made by erasing; "there were many erasures in the typescript" , a surface area where something has been erased; "another word had been written over the erasure", he paused, lips spreading over shattered teeth which sliced them cleanly opened as surgically as enamel scalpels, so that he spoke and blood spilled from his chin in a hedonistic baptism. “’Deletion by an act of expunging or erasing.’”
”This is what you hope to accomplish, isn’t it? Your mastery of nomenclature and the linguistics is astonishing even to me. You say “erasure” and know the every nuance to its usage vast imploration – can conceive the nook and crannies and subtleties of its employment. But…” He looked up, looked up into a sky which had become darker since the descent of night, and darker still with his arrival. ”You do not understand it.
“It’s a precious thing, what power little gods think they hold. More precious still the actual power they hold. You’re knowledge is vast beyond imagining, and yet you have proved to me… an absolute lack of understanding. You take knowledge for granted. ‘Yggdrasil will burn. The death-worshippers plan in secret, plan in silence. The time will come and the tree shall be severed from its roots, and space shall end.’" He rolled the words around on the root of his tongue, as if they were unpleasant to him in the way grit is unpleasant to the flesh of most oysters, working it into a pearl.
“Yggdrasil will burn. I have seen to it,” His eyes drew distant. She saw in them another kind of reflection. A tortoise, sleeping, carrying on its back as a carapace a tree that seemed the embodiment of the flourishing of life itself, which twisted and knotted upwards along an immense trunk fatter than the greatest of redwoods or the most complex bodhi. She could not see its branches. At all. ”The secrets of the death-worshippers plan in secret only because it was my breathing which gave them inspiration. The dark cults of the world pray to sleeping aeons who lie dreaming dead beneath oceans because I have brushed shoulder with them on some dark avenue. Your life-span… billions of years signifying nothing. You admitted it yourself. A heartbeat in time, one of the thousands I have brooded, and plotted, and operated, until the day I can light the final match. Until the Tortoise can open its eyes and stare into mine. Your misunderstanding is monolithic.” His face was suddenly bifurcated by the terminal line of a grin once more, bloody and darkly humourous.
”Yggdrasil… will… burn… and I,” he strained to produce words, phonetically handicapped by his own hysteria, which seemed likely to burst at the seams like stuffing from a straw man, his body – what was left – shuddering. ”I… will reign SHRIEKING over the furnace fires of the chaos left in the embers of that fire, I will go mad in the desolation I have created, lost amidst megaliths of the Great Trees’s ashes, a labyrinthic wasteland of raw immolation, and then… I… will… finally… die… LAUGHING!”
And he laughed. Cackled, guffawed, unleashed his voice in a wavering torrent of vocal hysteria which sundered with the dark hilarity of absolute, reasonless purpose made rawly understood. Lucille shrank back. She repeated the word ‘erasure’. It tasted like impotence. It tasted like… like dead things. Like death. His laughter thundered outwards, a carpet of waves crashing against the shore of eternity, echoing back and forth across a rictus of the existential landscape, and in the farthest reaches of creation it was felt by every living thing, and every page in the book burst into flame with the stability of gelled napalm. The fires stoked high, carried on the winds of an infernal laughter, buffeted higher still into that black sky.
What happened in the time between when Lucille had come within “he could reach out and grab you-****ed” distance of her victim, was enormous. In that, the space preserved within an eternal but seemingly measured time-frame of seconds, volumes could have been written – an encyclopedic account of events, theoretical mathematics beyond the comprehension of the human mindset, explanations, et cetera ad infinitum. The ink raced through Richter’s blood stream. It was possessed by material knowledge of things, it was symbolic, in essence it defeated the very purpose of Richter’s resistance only because there was nothing he could do to retaliate that had not already been factored in or calculated or just simply expected. Biologically, he should have been defeated by this thing. It asserted its control over his motor and bodily functions. His body was now its body.
Essentially, that is what defeated it. That is why when he stood up Lucille was perplexed. It shouldn’t have happened, but the knowledgeable have always been more easily confused.
The ink became Richter and became lost. It entered his body and found itself in the place of water rushing into an abyss. It pressed up against all sides of his being and found that there were no walls to support it. It filled the chambers of his heart and disappeared into yawning chasms that fell deeper and blacker than could even be imagined in the blackness between galaxies, ran itself so thin through the highways of his circulatory system there was nothing left to make up any significant mass. Very suddenly on the ground he flexed the fingers of his right hand, stiffly at first, and then again with ease – the pitch substance sloshing around the tendons of the structures, losing purchase on his corporality. That intent, that assimilating, colonizing intent of organic conquest echoed within the confines of his body – which was so many things, and so little – on and on into oblivion, its cries becoming only more obnoxious and less effective as it sank away. Effectively, the attack was never repelled – never countered or defended against, never even truly ineffective. It worked perfectly. Was seamless in its delivery, a proverbial check-mate.
But despite all this it was like sand tossed into the wind.
Richter shook himself off, stood up (I say stood up as a very loosely based term) – again moving with the gradual recession of stiffness which permeated his motor functions. He was a monstrous canvas of perpetrated violence which made up the wreckage of his visible self. Where the living quill had pierced him he was gored, and where it had ruptured through the physical boundaries of his flesh before falling away into the underworld of his body he was tored and ragged and bleeding, no more a man than a corpse.
His torso floated above the ground – he had effortlessly shifted himself to a position that would have been standing, had he the limbs, in a radical defiance of gravity which brought to mind the nature of reality. He wasn’t laughing. There was something awful about that. He seemed, rather, in a state of absolute pensiveness which hovered around him like some malign thunderhead pregnant with black rain, heralding a coming storm.
Rain black like ink. Carried on the wind. Carried and lost.
Lucille’s mind focused on that word again – erasure. “E – Ra – Sure”, [i-ray-sher]. The act, or instance, of being erased. The stateof being erased (what Lucille wholly believed Delacroix must have been immersed in), as in… "The powerful images of his work . . . punishment, mutilation, erasure" (Joyce Carol Oates). A place where something has been erased; a spot or mark left after erasing. The multiple, limitless definitions pronounced themselves within the encyclopedic nature of her mind, every aspect of its meaning pertaining the expected bleakness of Richter’s future.
But all that happened was the ruffling of Richter’s fatigues, which were dark, heavy and wet with blood, his guts slowly roping from him like wet tubules of stained spaghetti, repulsive. He turned and looked at her, and smiled, and this time – though his malice was clear – his smile was genuine, almost friendly – father;y, in a way that unsettled her. Again there was no laugh. This absolute change in countenance was paralyzing with shock.
”See “expuction”, tart. ‘a correction made by erasing; "there were many erasures in the typescript" , a surface area where something has been erased; "another word had been written over the erasure", he paused, lips spreading over shattered teeth which sliced them cleanly opened as surgically as enamel scalpels, so that he spoke and blood spilled from his chin in a hedonistic baptism. “’Deletion by an act of expunging or erasing.’”
”This is what you hope to accomplish, isn’t it? Your mastery of nomenclature and the linguistics is astonishing even to me. You say “erasure” and know the every nuance to its usage vast imploration – can conceive the nook and crannies and subtleties of its employment. But…” He looked up, looked up into a sky which had become darker since the descent of night, and darker still with his arrival. ”You do not understand it.
“It’s a precious thing, what power little gods think they hold. More precious still the actual power they hold. You’re knowledge is vast beyond imagining, and yet you have proved to me… an absolute lack of understanding. You take knowledge for granted. ‘Yggdrasil will burn. The death-worshippers plan in secret, plan in silence. The time will come and the tree shall be severed from its roots, and space shall end.’" He rolled the words around on the root of his tongue, as if they were unpleasant to him in the way grit is unpleasant to the flesh of most oysters, working it into a pearl.
“Yggdrasil will burn. I have seen to it,” His eyes drew distant. She saw in them another kind of reflection. A tortoise, sleeping, carrying on its back as a carapace a tree that seemed the embodiment of the flourishing of life itself, which twisted and knotted upwards along an immense trunk fatter than the greatest of redwoods or the most complex bodhi. She could not see its branches. At all. ”The secrets of the death-worshippers plan in secret only because it was my breathing which gave them inspiration. The dark cults of the world pray to sleeping aeons who lie dreaming dead beneath oceans because I have brushed shoulder with them on some dark avenue. Your life-span… billions of years signifying nothing. You admitted it yourself. A heartbeat in time, one of the thousands I have brooded, and plotted, and operated, until the day I can light the final match. Until the Tortoise can open its eyes and stare into mine. Your misunderstanding is monolithic.” His face was suddenly bifurcated by the terminal line of a grin once more, bloody and darkly humourous.
”Yggdrasil… will… burn… and I,” he strained to produce words, phonetically handicapped by his own hysteria, which seemed likely to burst at the seams like stuffing from a straw man, his body – what was left – shuddering. ”I… will reign SHRIEKING over the furnace fires of the chaos left in the embers of that fire, I will go mad in the desolation I have created, lost amidst megaliths of the Great Trees’s ashes, a labyrinthic wasteland of raw immolation, and then… I… will… finally… die… LAUGHING!”
And he laughed. Cackled, guffawed, unleashed his voice in a wavering torrent of vocal hysteria which sundered with the dark hilarity of absolute, reasonless purpose made rawly understood. Lucille shrank back. She repeated the word ‘erasure’. It tasted like impotence. It tasted like… like dead things. Like death. His laughter thundered outwards, a carpet of waves crashing against the shore of eternity, echoing back and forth across a rictus of the existential landscape, and in the farthest reaches of creation it was felt by every living thing, and every page in the book burst into flame with the stability of gelled napalm. The fires stoked high, carried on the winds of an infernal laughter, buffeted higher still into that black sky.
<i>\"We know how to sing but we don\'t know how to handle money or women. Do-wap, do do wop.\"</i>
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-
Erdawn Il Deus
- Member
- Posts: 3036
- Joined: Wed May 21, 2003 1:00 am
- Location: Threading the jeweled thrones of earth under my sa
--- --- ---
Somewhere. There is only a lone rock. Its proximity is unimportant. The details, description… only the rock. It is immense in size, jutting from the ground, almost a cliff, its shape suggestion a small piece of debris from something so colossal its proportions could not easily be imagined. It tapered off into what could have been the largest stone shelf on the largest stone cupboard in existence, suspended so high over the ground the clouds drifted past at eye level. On the edge of this thing, he sat.
He was a massive creature, well over nine feet tall and immensely muscular – as were the tenants of the race which he held little in common with these days – and bore in general the countenance of a man, but with qualities lupine and a face more closely releated to a wolverine’s. The intelligence in that face, the shape of it, of course, reflected that humanity so easily perceived in sentient things – save for that physical resemblance to the wolverine. Its fur was jet black – so deep and rich a colour (or absence thereof) he might have been dipped in raw pitch. His blackness in fact was so impressive were he to be gazed upon by Ancient Greeks they would have feared him to be some facet of the Night Goddess, and his fur the very make-up of the night sky.
Oh, and another thing. His eyes, which flickered soullessly like coals in their sockets, were indigo.
There was a sudden shift in the air, and Terror stirred. Why he was here, suddenly, he couldn’t even remember. In fact, he realized at that moment how cold it was – but this thought was obscured by the more pressing sentiment that something had changed.
He thought he could hear something. Something on the wind.
His body – all 1000lbs of it - stiffened, with dawning realization… or perhaps an instinctual recognition. He shifted from sitting to standing, moving with a muscular grace and deftness which belied in absolute his size. He remained silent, for a moment, his eyes widening, before becoming cold and certain with the thought he shaped into words.
”Whoops, twig up your ass.” And he grinned, his teeth very shockingly white against the immaculate darkness of his fur, solid and white and full of teeth, Cheshire even. All at once the humanity disappeared, receded from his features like bathwater into a drain – were erased, one might say.
He chuckled madly, before lifting arms like writhing black tree trunks over his shoulders into the air, the boughs to the darkest tree conceivable, and when he brought them down against the face of the stone monolith on which he stood it shattered like clay beneath them, came apart like some massive play-thing in his hands with thunder and dust, and as the structure of it fractured he threw his head back and roared – even as he sank away into the chaos.
”YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-“
--- --- ---
”I realize you are beyond what I usually face,” Richter admitted, his voice carrying on without waver through the laughter which still rung in the air. ”I could tear you apart woman, but what good would it do? I could festoon your organs around this desert, hang you from them even, I could beat you to death with the hardcover of your own books but you are indestructible that way, aren’t you? With a word, why, you’d be alive. I’m sure you happen to know the definition, synonym, antonyms, and closest viable counterparts in every conceivable language to the word “reincarnation”, do you not?”
He was moving closer in a stride. Why couldn’t she see the branches? There was a tree, yes, But the branches… she couldn’t see them. They were there, they rose up-
”You have seen a hundred of me, a hundred trees. Of course you have. Again, you know, but fail to understand. You fail to understand why this battle is over, why I won’t fight you anymore, why there will be no more shedding of blood – even on MY part!”
Tortoise. Its eyes were closed but the lids fluttered – something frightened her, what was behind them? Eyes? Would it have eyes? Did Richter have eyes? What did he see? Why didn’t she want them to open? Erasure. Erasure, erasure but the words were scabrous and old in her mouth, she would retch them up as soon as say them.
He came closer.
His hands, raw, flayed things, the bones of them hatched from their shell of flesh and twitching spasmodically, reached towards her face. Any terror she might have had, ever, over the course of three billion years of sentient thought rose up in her like bile – the hands of a dead thing, or something beyond death. Words.
That is not dead which, eternal, lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
She heard them, deciphered them, but they were shapeless and meaningless things – coming out of a dark place, she couldn’t see them.
She spoke, recited anything – poems, lyrics, words, in language, words of power, incantations. Richter’s fatigues were lifted, ruffled, tore even. He bled. Cailarries burst like ripe grapes in his body. But every word did less. She couldn’t get the dead taste out of her mouth.
His lurid hands gripped her temples and his fingers, the wet flesh of them tickling, moved to her eye sockets and pulled, opening her eyes wide, forcing them wider. And Richter smiled.
Behind him he cast his shadow, and it seemed all the malevolence – the laughing – came out of him into that shadow, and she looked into it and was like a traveler standing on the edge of space, on the rim of the cosmos and staring into the darkness beyond. The blackness of the sky – she finally realized. It was him. He was everywhere. The night sky, the shadows on the ground – and she looked out, and saw oblivion, and standing there, made very small in that vacuum of starless space, stood a library floating, massive beyond imagining, ancient tomes covered in dust, winding shelves standing miles high and circling around forever, their pages untouched. Her heart pounded, accelerating, and her eyes rolled until their whites were visible and veined and quivering like hatching eggs in her skull. Blood burst from her nasal canal with such pressure it came in twin gouts, and trickled from her ears.
The branches. It wasn’t the branches. It was what lived there – trapped – bound by the endless boughs and foliage, almost hidden – almost, by the attempting grace of all that was sacred and good, something that went on forever. Something, whose eyes were open.
And Richter, from the darkness, laughed, and faded away, becoming a part of it, until all that was left were those two perfect circles of red in the shadows.
--- --- ---
She woke in darkness. There was nothing but black, pure and blameless and oppressive in depth. She could not see her own body, and her movement had become alien to her, the instinctive cohesion of her own functioning crushed beneath the blind eternity in which she found herself. All around her was the noise – a great roaring, like the waves of an ocean large beyond the imaginings of even a librarian, crashing against a great and lightless shore.
She could not speak. There was nothing to communicate with, nothing on which to base the subtleties of communication. There was only that, nothing.
She searched her mind, plumbed its depths, and in there, in the darkness which so exactly duplicated the abyss in which she found herself, found only one thing.
One shred of knowledge beyond the crashing of waves on a shore blacker than eternity by a sea which she failed absolutely to perceive.
The knowledge that she knew nothing. That there was nothing there to know.
In the darkness, naked and isolated on that shoreline, she screamed. And her screams were inaudible beneath the crashing of the waves, which went on forever.
--- --- ---
Somewhere, a petal fell. It fell with grace, noble even in that final act which meant death and the coming of winter, fluttering down from endless boughs of beauty, off a single flower of empyrean magnificence. It tumbled over itself, coloured with wilt, and fell for a long time. Longer than forever.
It landed, stuck almost indifferently to a rough surface which might have been in scape the proportions of the greatest desert in all creation, the same, featureless rough texture for worlds around. This shifted, slightly, as if motivated by some tectonic, geological shifting.
The tortoise’s eyelids fluttered, but did not open, and soon it had fallen back into the peace of its slumber. The petal was forgotten, And the knowledge that autumn was coming with it.
OoC: When I meant long, I meant that in recent history I have not been nearly so prolific or verbose in my posts. You inspire colour.
Somewhere. There is only a lone rock. Its proximity is unimportant. The details, description… only the rock. It is immense in size, jutting from the ground, almost a cliff, its shape suggestion a small piece of debris from something so colossal its proportions could not easily be imagined. It tapered off into what could have been the largest stone shelf on the largest stone cupboard in existence, suspended so high over the ground the clouds drifted past at eye level. On the edge of this thing, he sat.
He was a massive creature, well over nine feet tall and immensely muscular – as were the tenants of the race which he held little in common with these days – and bore in general the countenance of a man, but with qualities lupine and a face more closely releated to a wolverine’s. The intelligence in that face, the shape of it, of course, reflected that humanity so easily perceived in sentient things – save for that physical resemblance to the wolverine. Its fur was jet black – so deep and rich a colour (or absence thereof) he might have been dipped in raw pitch. His blackness in fact was so impressive were he to be gazed upon by Ancient Greeks they would have feared him to be some facet of the Night Goddess, and his fur the very make-up of the night sky.
Oh, and another thing. His eyes, which flickered soullessly like coals in their sockets, were indigo.
There was a sudden shift in the air, and Terror stirred. Why he was here, suddenly, he couldn’t even remember. In fact, he realized at that moment how cold it was – but this thought was obscured by the more pressing sentiment that something had changed.
He thought he could hear something. Something on the wind.
His body – all 1000lbs of it - stiffened, with dawning realization… or perhaps an instinctual recognition. He shifted from sitting to standing, moving with a muscular grace and deftness which belied in absolute his size. He remained silent, for a moment, his eyes widening, before becoming cold and certain with the thought he shaped into words.
”Whoops, twig up your ass.” And he grinned, his teeth very shockingly white against the immaculate darkness of his fur, solid and white and full of teeth, Cheshire even. All at once the humanity disappeared, receded from his features like bathwater into a drain – were erased, one might say.
He chuckled madly, before lifting arms like writhing black tree trunks over his shoulders into the air, the boughs to the darkest tree conceivable, and when he brought them down against the face of the stone monolith on which he stood it shattered like clay beneath them, came apart like some massive play-thing in his hands with thunder and dust, and as the structure of it fractured he threw his head back and roared – even as he sank away into the chaos.
”YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-“
--- --- ---
”I realize you are beyond what I usually face,” Richter admitted, his voice carrying on without waver through the laughter which still rung in the air. ”I could tear you apart woman, but what good would it do? I could festoon your organs around this desert, hang you from them even, I could beat you to death with the hardcover of your own books but you are indestructible that way, aren’t you? With a word, why, you’d be alive. I’m sure you happen to know the definition, synonym, antonyms, and closest viable counterparts in every conceivable language to the word “reincarnation”, do you not?”
He was moving closer in a stride. Why couldn’t she see the branches? There was a tree, yes, But the branches… she couldn’t see them. They were there, they rose up-
”You have seen a hundred of me, a hundred trees. Of course you have. Again, you know, but fail to understand. You fail to understand why this battle is over, why I won’t fight you anymore, why there will be no more shedding of blood – even on MY part!”
Tortoise. Its eyes were closed but the lids fluttered – something frightened her, what was behind them? Eyes? Would it have eyes? Did Richter have eyes? What did he see? Why didn’t she want them to open? Erasure. Erasure, erasure but the words were scabrous and old in her mouth, she would retch them up as soon as say them.
He came closer.
His hands, raw, flayed things, the bones of them hatched from their shell of flesh and twitching spasmodically, reached towards her face. Any terror she might have had, ever, over the course of three billion years of sentient thought rose up in her like bile – the hands of a dead thing, or something beyond death. Words.
That is not dead which, eternal, lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
She heard them, deciphered them, but they were shapeless and meaningless things – coming out of a dark place, she couldn’t see them.
She spoke, recited anything – poems, lyrics, words, in language, words of power, incantations. Richter’s fatigues were lifted, ruffled, tore even. He bled. Cailarries burst like ripe grapes in his body. But every word did less. She couldn’t get the dead taste out of her mouth.
His lurid hands gripped her temples and his fingers, the wet flesh of them tickling, moved to her eye sockets and pulled, opening her eyes wide, forcing them wider. And Richter smiled.
Behind him he cast his shadow, and it seemed all the malevolence – the laughing – came out of him into that shadow, and she looked into it and was like a traveler standing on the edge of space, on the rim of the cosmos and staring into the darkness beyond. The blackness of the sky – she finally realized. It was him. He was everywhere. The night sky, the shadows on the ground – and she looked out, and saw oblivion, and standing there, made very small in that vacuum of starless space, stood a library floating, massive beyond imagining, ancient tomes covered in dust, winding shelves standing miles high and circling around forever, their pages untouched. Her heart pounded, accelerating, and her eyes rolled until their whites were visible and veined and quivering like hatching eggs in her skull. Blood burst from her nasal canal with such pressure it came in twin gouts, and trickled from her ears.
The branches. It wasn’t the branches. It was what lived there – trapped – bound by the endless boughs and foliage, almost hidden – almost, by the attempting grace of all that was sacred and good, something that went on forever. Something, whose eyes were open.
And Richter, from the darkness, laughed, and faded away, becoming a part of it, until all that was left were those two perfect circles of red in the shadows.
--- --- ---
She woke in darkness. There was nothing but black, pure and blameless and oppressive in depth. She could not see her own body, and her movement had become alien to her, the instinctive cohesion of her own functioning crushed beneath the blind eternity in which she found herself. All around her was the noise – a great roaring, like the waves of an ocean large beyond the imaginings of even a librarian, crashing against a great and lightless shore.
She could not speak. There was nothing to communicate with, nothing on which to base the subtleties of communication. There was only that, nothing.
She searched her mind, plumbed its depths, and in there, in the darkness which so exactly duplicated the abyss in which she found herself, found only one thing.
One shred of knowledge beyond the crashing of waves on a shore blacker than eternity by a sea which she failed absolutely to perceive.
The knowledge that she knew nothing. That there was nothing there to know.
In the darkness, naked and isolated on that shoreline, she screamed. And her screams were inaudible beneath the crashing of the waves, which went on forever.
--- --- ---
Somewhere, a petal fell. It fell with grace, noble even in that final act which meant death and the coming of winter, fluttering down from endless boughs of beauty, off a single flower of empyrean magnificence. It tumbled over itself, coloured with wilt, and fell for a long time. Longer than forever.
It landed, stuck almost indifferently to a rough surface which might have been in scape the proportions of the greatest desert in all creation, the same, featureless rough texture for worlds around. This shifted, slightly, as if motivated by some tectonic, geological shifting.
The tortoise’s eyelids fluttered, but did not open, and soon it had fallen back into the peace of its slumber. The petal was forgotten, And the knowledge that autumn was coming with it.
OoC: When I meant long, I meant that in recent history I have not been nearly so prolific or verbose in my posts. You inspire colour.
<i>\"We know how to sing but we don\'t know how to handle money or women. Do-wap, do do wop.\"</i>
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-The Runaway Five
<i>Rx Prozach</i>: Toronto is one sucky Toronto. :P I can\'t imagine smoking enough pot to find a shoe museum interes
-
Galefore
- Member
- Posts: 9354
- Joined: Tue Jan 04, 2005 2:00 am
- Location: ur wildest dreems lol
-
NintendoGod
- Member
- Posts: 2754
- Joined: Sat Apr 15, 2000 1:00 am
- Location: Somewhere far too hot.
Apologies for the delay.
2) Erdawn vs. Kargath
This fight was interesting. Many stick to the simple factors, providing only the blow-by-blow details of combat. Yet this battle added in more than that, turning a simple affair into a complex battle of ideals and contrasting realities in addition to people. In terms of the nitty-gritty details, both fighters rise to the challenge. Lucille as a character is interesting to see in action, and the variety of detail and metaphor Kargath provides in his writing continue to impress. Similarly, Erdawn shows some intriguing leaps of insight into his opponent's attacks and how he responds to them, as well as setting a dramatic mood in each of his posts. However, as well written and interesting as it was, there was one issue that bothered me. Lucille's abilities are not abused, yet at times their usage is left without detail, in terms of explanation or description. At one point, her attack is given in such a sudden and convoluted manner that you have to double-take just to see where it actually happened. This lack of coherence hurts her at times, and is the sole flaw in an otherwise impeccable performance. Overall, both fighters proved their mettle in another very close match.
Kargath: (9.5/10)
Erdawn: (10/10)
2) Erdawn vs. Kargath
This fight was interesting. Many stick to the simple factors, providing only the blow-by-blow details of combat. Yet this battle added in more than that, turning a simple affair into a complex battle of ideals and contrasting realities in addition to people. In terms of the nitty-gritty details, both fighters rise to the challenge. Lucille as a character is interesting to see in action, and the variety of detail and metaphor Kargath provides in his writing continue to impress. Similarly, Erdawn shows some intriguing leaps of insight into his opponent's attacks and how he responds to them, as well as setting a dramatic mood in each of his posts. However, as well written and interesting as it was, there was one issue that bothered me. Lucille's abilities are not abused, yet at times their usage is left without detail, in terms of explanation or description. At one point, her attack is given in such a sudden and convoluted manner that you have to double-take just to see where it actually happened. This lack of coherence hurts her at times, and is the sole flaw in an otherwise impeccable performance. Overall, both fighters proved their mettle in another very close match.
Kargath: (9.5/10)
Erdawn: (10/10)
\"Yesterday we obyed kings and bent our necks before emperors, but today we kneel only to the truth.\"
--Khalil Gibran
\"It is a good day to Pie!\"
--Khalil Gibran
\"It is a good day to Pie!\"
-
Videospirit
- Member
- Posts: 56
- Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 5:03 am
Since this is a competition, I decided to go with a start with 5 points and award 7 points based on various facets system, capping off if anyone hits 10. I may add more categories for contested points if I think of them for the final battle, but keeping an odd number seems a good idea. I'd also consider penalizing really bad role playing making less than 5 points without breaking any rules possible, but I doubt that will be an issue in this tournament.
2) Erdawn vs. Kargath
The fight was excellent, much better than I was expecting after only reading the discussion of the battle in the chat thread. Lucille was an interesting character, not the type of character one usually expects in a tournament, and added a flavor to the battle that one usually doesn't find. Richter was a great match for her, almost an antagonist to her every ideal. Now, for the points.
Lucille's writing tended to be slightly choppy in parts, and broke up the flow of the battle so she could monologue which on occasion didn't suit the mood, while Richter's narrative flow kept things clean one point flowing into the other, Giving Richter the point for narrative flow. Unfortunately, Richter's posts had several missing words, spelling mistakes, and misused words, giving Lucille the point for spelling. Richter's portrayal of Lucille's character was excellent, while Lucille didn't seem to grasp the concept of Richter, possibly due to the complexity of the character, but that just means it's more creative, and so Richter gets the point for Good Portrayal. Unfortunately for Richter, since he was the one portraying both characters, he took a hit on the fight itself, Richter suffering far more damage than Lucille, so the single point awarded to Overall Damage goes Lucille's way. As for the point for most exciting actions, attacks, and overall coolness, Richter's attacks were creepy, bloodlusty, and quite intense, whereas Lucille's mostly consisted of talking to a book, or talking to Richter. The Action Hero point goes Richter's way. However, humor is a wonderful thing that makes anything better if done right, and anyone who can integrate it into their posts is going to be well liked by me indeed. While Richter's posts were gritty, ferocious, and quite exciting, Lucille's posts managed to make me laugh a few times, particularly in the way her breasts kept coming up at unexpected moments. The Humor point is Lucille's to claim. So, going into the final point, we're at a tie between Richter and Lucille. This alone means this was an excellent and well fought match between the two of you, and you should be proud of it even if you lost. The point for suspension of disbelief and interesting character goes to... Richter. Both Lucille and Richter managed to present interesting characters, but Lucille came across slightly awkward and didn't seem to mesh well, while Richter managed to flow with things quite nicely and came across as quite realistic.
That Brings the final Score to...
Erdawn: (8/10)
Kargath: (7/10)
Great Match you two.
2) Erdawn vs. Kargath
The fight was excellent, much better than I was expecting after only reading the discussion of the battle in the chat thread. Lucille was an interesting character, not the type of character one usually expects in a tournament, and added a flavor to the battle that one usually doesn't find. Richter was a great match for her, almost an antagonist to her every ideal. Now, for the points.
Lucille's writing tended to be slightly choppy in parts, and broke up the flow of the battle so she could monologue which on occasion didn't suit the mood, while Richter's narrative flow kept things clean one point flowing into the other, Giving Richter the point for narrative flow. Unfortunately, Richter's posts had several missing words, spelling mistakes, and misused words, giving Lucille the point for spelling. Richter's portrayal of Lucille's character was excellent, while Lucille didn't seem to grasp the concept of Richter, possibly due to the complexity of the character, but that just means it's more creative, and so Richter gets the point for Good Portrayal. Unfortunately for Richter, since he was the one portraying both characters, he took a hit on the fight itself, Richter suffering far more damage than Lucille, so the single point awarded to Overall Damage goes Lucille's way. As for the point for most exciting actions, attacks, and overall coolness, Richter's attacks were creepy, bloodlusty, and quite intense, whereas Lucille's mostly consisted of talking to a book, or talking to Richter. The Action Hero point goes Richter's way. However, humor is a wonderful thing that makes anything better if done right, and anyone who can integrate it into their posts is going to be well liked by me indeed. While Richter's posts were gritty, ferocious, and quite exciting, Lucille's posts managed to make me laugh a few times, particularly in the way her breasts kept coming up at unexpected moments. The Humor point is Lucille's to claim. So, going into the final point, we're at a tie between Richter and Lucille. This alone means this was an excellent and well fought match between the two of you, and you should be proud of it even if you lost. The point for suspension of disbelief and interesting character goes to... Richter. Both Lucille and Richter managed to present interesting characters, but Lucille came across slightly awkward and didn't seem to mesh well, while Richter managed to flow with things quite nicely and came across as quite realistic.
That Brings the final Score to...
Erdawn: (8/10)
Kargath: (7/10)
Great Match you two.