04-25-2009, 03:13 AM
"Tired words of a broken man," Ashe spoke softly.
The mastermind leered at her before they all began to feel the ground trembling once more beneath them. The four girls exchanged looks before Sophia said what they were all thinking. "I destroyed it, unless he's got another one!"
Looking back in the direction of the man proved that this was not something he had caused himself, however, as he turned and looked into the variety of crevices that surrounded them. "Perfect... perfect!" he mumbled wildly, growing excited. "Even without the device, the volcano has grown unstable. It's going to blow soon, and when it does it will take this entire island with it!" His hysterical cries had pierced the ears of all of the girls.
Unable to contain herself, the fiery haired medic began to approach him. "You fucking piece of shit!" she began, paying no heed to the streams of molten fury rushing beneath her.
"There's a city still here, with hundreds of citizens!" the restorative priestess cried out, vainly hoping to appeal to any scrap of humanity that the man had left.
Sage was finding the heat to be vastly unbearable, wiping the pouring sweat from her brow as she trembled in compassionate rage. "They don't even know what's going on here and you... are happy to see them die?"
Kai gave a disdainful laugh as his arm casually dismissed the numbers in the air. "That, ladies, is what creates the greatest television," he reminded them, as if this somehow justified his actions.
Brilliant blue passion enveloped Ashe entirely, her eyes no longer showing any sign of humanity as they burned like stars. "You are a monster, Kai."
He simply smiled at her without a care. "I know," he answered simply. "But aren't we all?"
Ashe had fallen into step behind Piper as the four woman fanned out in a cone shape before the man, a deep flaming gulch separating them. "The people back in the city..." she began, remembering their courtesy and normalcy when they had eaten at the restaurant and replaced their clothing at the shops.
"Ashe, you should all realize by now the truth of the matter."
"What truth?" Piper demanded.
He laughed maniacally at their ignorance, bringing his graceful fingertips up to hold his pained cheekbones. "I didn't specifically seek all of these contestants out. I randomly chose you all." He paused for a moment to let the words sink in before continuing. "Of course, I did my research afterwards to make sure that my investment wasn't a folly. In the end, I just went with it, interested in what sort of entertainment ordinary people could provide."
With a great turn, he gestured at everything around them. "The four of you have become so interesting. I have already shown you how each of you could become that which you hate. Each of you having great potential for letting a single bad day send you directly into my direction," he chortled, his eyes falling directly onto Ashe's frenzied orbs. "Do you delude yourself into thinking that each and every one of those people in that city could not equally become just like me? That they too do not share the potential to do what you four have realized you are capable of?"
Not one of them said a word, leaving the man to continue into the silence as the liquid hatred flowed beneath them at a steadily increasing pace. "Sage, how did it feel to take the life of another living person?" he taunted.
"Sage, you are not responsible for those lives," Ashe snapped, trying to make sense and defend her from the madman's accusations. "There is a difference in a need for survival and killing for entertainment."
"I could have..." the girl began, leaving the pink haired girl to immediately cut in again as Kai grinned from ear to ear in victory.
"You think you could have, but Kai has made sure that we have been placed into situations where the choices are not really choices. Yeah, we could have let them kill us instead. We could have run in terror. We could have hidden until we starved. Kai would still have continued taking the lives that he's taken, and we would still be moving at the hand of the puppeteer."
Amused, Gregory Rogers held up one finger. "But I've taken no lives," he explained.
"A life taken by proxy would still count. At least, that's what you wish for us to believe. You want us to feel responsible for deaths caused based on our choices, even if we were not directly responsible, by claiming that our decisions may as well have been pulling the trigger ourselves," the gathering storm known as Ashe recouped. "And yet you wish to deny having any influence on the eliminations of both those at your command and the innocent contestants that you forced into this game."
He paced from one side of the ravine to another, his gaze falling upon the lava in glee. "You still believe that someone could be innocent?" He opened his mouth to continue another poetic story about the dark demons that every man held within, but Piper didn't give him the opportunity to respond.
"They were far more innocent than you, Kai Demolic!" she growled.
The blond haired priestess clasped her hands tightly before her as she looked at him in melancholy directness. "Some sins can be forgiven," she explained.
"Yes, I really want to be judged by a priestess that has betrayed her God and desired the death of one of her fellow contestants even after he had publically declared her to be a friend," he snapped sarcastically, the words cutting deeply into the woman. "I think the fact that you could wish for his death only as long as someone else's hands were stained with the blood speaks wonders for your hypocrisy."
"Shut up!" Piper screamed at him, teleporting quickly over the flowing tide to physically bring about her demand.
As soon as she appeared, Kai's hand clasped around her throat in a vice grip with amazing speed, squeezing strongly so that her eyes bulged from her head. She dangled within his one arm's grasp as he glowed a fierce red, turning and holding his trophy tall before walking over to the torrential vent at his feet. "Piper, why don't you tell them about how bad your little drug habit is? Why don't you explain to Sage what she is getting herself into with her dependence on chemical intervention?" He slowly lowered the struggling woman down until her feet were just barely shy of the hottest portion of the stream. It was only her raging aura itself that kept her feet from igniting into flames.
None of them knew what to say. Ashe tried her luck by begging him to return Piper to them, carefully avoiding the phrase 'release her'. He spun around, still holding her writhingly in the air, waiting to drop her into the fluid. "What about you, Ashe? Mommy and daddy wish the world for you and implant you with a very powerful relic that is capable of doing so many things. You can see the flows of energy through each and every one of us and sense when we are near. You have a well of latent power within you that most people struggle for. The entire world is at your feet, and yet you cast such power aside and instead cut your wrists and fuck more boys than the number of concerts you've been to."
"Leave her alone!" Sage cried out surprisingly, having heard enough. She attempted once more to freeze over the top of the volcano to keep the enormous shaking of the rocks at bay, but the heat was too overpowering, leaving her to fall forward to her knees as if dehydrated.
Sophia pulled her to her feet and glared at Kai, knowing that he had cut each of them deeply. Kai's laughter was so victorious and boastful, however, as he turned his assault to Sage once more. "You are nearly as bad. You know deep down that your sister has done horrible things to many people, things that make me look like a saint, and yet you are willing to always overlook these things if she is the one that has done them. It's ok to kill your close teacher, because precious big sister Zena would never do it through an act of pure selfishness, would she? No, of course not, even if she can give you no good reason why it was necessary, you are willing to let the subject drop because you are too weak and drug dependant to fight for yourself. I'm only slightly surprised that you are not having a seizure right now from just how many toxic chemicals you are imagining enter your body from the ash in the air right now," he finished darkly, leaving the girl to turn pale in response.
"Each of you think of yourself as ordinary and pure, and yet you ignore that you are too stained to be pure. And," he continued, motioning once more at the suffocating figure within his grasp. "Ordinary is nothing more than a phrased used by those of us in power to demean the weak. Everyone in that city is ordinary, yes. Because everyone in that city shelters their own hidden demons. Honestly, they are all just as fucked up as you are. I've done the research," he concluded.
"And now," he announced, stepping forward to the precipice at his feet. "I cast the first stone into the lake of fire as an offering. Perhaps Piper's sacrifice will appease the infernal fires enough that they not see fit to cleanse this entire island from the face of the planet!"
As if answering the man, the steam vents all around them suddenly burst into a tremendous fury of pressurized air, the quaking rock being strong enough to take all of their legs from beneath them until Kai lost his grip by slamming his head painfully into the burning rocks beneath him. Piper rolled painfully to a stop, gasping through ragged breaths to sort the oxygen from the sooty vapors before Sophia made her way to her.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!" she cried over the roaring from beneath them. She gestured feebly at the lava spilling angrily over the top of the caldera around them.
"I will not let you leave here alive!" the madman declared from within the thickening smoke. They couldn't see him, but there was no mistaking the desperate voice contained within. "No one on this island will live through this!"
Ashe slowly walked forward, swallowing down her fear to kneel down at the edge by the closest stream of passionate fury. She was going to lose her friends, one way or another. She couldn't let this happen. No, these people deserved to live, to correct the mistakes that they had made in their lives and to continue on. These were good people. As were those in the city.
"Go! NOW!" Ashe cried out, her voice echoing across the caldera to the others. She didn't wait to see if they had listened or not. She would need them off of the top of the lake of fire. But... how?
An image flashed through her mind, moving from person to person of all the people that she had met on this island. Those distinct and those unfamiliar. Everyone had a reason to live. Everyone. The people in the city... She couldn't just let them all die while entirely unaware of what was going to happen to them!
She would have killed Kai Demolic if it would have solved this problem. She could picture herself standing before him, her gun pointing directly against his pulsing temple as he slept, ready to take the shot herself. Her arm would be shaking, fear and panic gripping her tightly in realization of the moment that she was experiencing.
She could see herself so easily with her finger on the trigger, ready to kill the man that had caused all of this strife and torment. And yet... She still couldn't actually do it. Was she not strong enough? A hand gently placed itself onto her shaking arm and pushed it down, removing the gun from its target. "No, Ashe," an image of Kaden said to her, arriving at her side to be her emotional support. She could see herself looking up at him pleadingly, hoping for an answer to his comment. He simply ran his fingers through his dirty hair in his normal manner before looking back at the unmoving image of Kai Demolic. "You won't do it because you are strong. Strength is what prevents us from falling to the level of people like Gregory... Kai Demolic. We need to protect those we love and keep people like this from doing what they do, but if we are to do that..." the vision trailed off, searching for the words. "It isn't difficult to stop the monsters from doing what they do. The difficult part," he explained as if it were a simple fact of life. "is keeping your humanity and not joining them. If everyone took the easy route and took justice into their own hands, then this world would have no hope."
It was something, she realized, that she remember him telling her one day in the alternate future that Kai had shown her. She had asked him once why he came home so pained over a killer escaping him when he had had the man within a direct line to eliminate him. Kaden's words held true.
She would protect them all.
I need your help.
Her thoughts went into her soul, the guards that kept her Star's Tear from overflowing into her body unlocking themselves. She could feel it, as the entire world turned a bright shade of blue through her fiery eyes. She could feel everyone around her, in a great moment of overwhelming awareness, as they ran for the edge of the caldera. She could feel Kai seeking them out. She could feel each and every person in the town below the ruins as they went about their business, seeking shelter from the volcanic eruption that they had realized was to come.
The dark blue energy that ripped through her body left lines etched deeply into her skin, as if runes had been tattooed upon her, designating to her spiritual power the best way for her chakra to flow. Her dyed pink hair had found its coloring diminished, replaced by the sapphire hue of a super nova. She kneeled down as her clothing shredded away, placing her hands to the raging earth as if able to calm the land itself.
She had unlocked her deep well of power, ascending herself into something that was entirely unordinary.
Energy spread from her fingertips to slowly cover the top of the volcano like a spiritual seal, moving along every bit of it in rapidly strengthening pulses as Ashe's chakra embedded itself into the seal that she was creating. Everyone would live, she hoped, as long as she prevented this cataclysm from taking place. Piper... Sophia... Sage... They could bring Kai to justice afterwards.
She had no illusions that she would survive what she was doing. Her own well being was the furthest thing from her mind. Her strength lay in her compassion.
The eruption began, welling up within the seal with such force that it expanded upwards, fighting desperately to contain the explosion while Ashe channeled more and more power to fight back against the natural disaster. Her seal slowly turned into a bubble of passionate blue energy, welling up until she could be seen by all, breaking through the smoke and soot, an Ashe of her own namesake, standing tall with all seeing eyes. Her naked form had been covered in each etch and mark of where her energy expanded and flowed, and her wild blue hair blew into a flurry above her.
She had no theatrical aura in representation, however. Everyone on the island could see her standing tall above the enormous dome of energy attempting to contain and quell the monster below her. All of her energy was being placed into doing so.
"Live."
The mastermind leered at her before they all began to feel the ground trembling once more beneath them. The four girls exchanged looks before Sophia said what they were all thinking. "I destroyed it, unless he's got another one!"
Looking back in the direction of the man proved that this was not something he had caused himself, however, as he turned and looked into the variety of crevices that surrounded them. "Perfect... perfect!" he mumbled wildly, growing excited. "Even without the device, the volcano has grown unstable. It's going to blow soon, and when it does it will take this entire island with it!" His hysterical cries had pierced the ears of all of the girls.
Unable to contain herself, the fiery haired medic began to approach him. "You fucking piece of shit!" she began, paying no heed to the streams of molten fury rushing beneath her.
"There's a city still here, with hundreds of citizens!" the restorative priestess cried out, vainly hoping to appeal to any scrap of humanity that the man had left.
Sage was finding the heat to be vastly unbearable, wiping the pouring sweat from her brow as she trembled in compassionate rage. "They don't even know what's going on here and you... are happy to see them die?"
Kai gave a disdainful laugh as his arm casually dismissed the numbers in the air. "That, ladies, is what creates the greatest television," he reminded them, as if this somehow justified his actions.
Brilliant blue passion enveloped Ashe entirely, her eyes no longer showing any sign of humanity as they burned like stars. "You are a monster, Kai."
He simply smiled at her without a care. "I know," he answered simply. "But aren't we all?"
Ashe had fallen into step behind Piper as the four woman fanned out in a cone shape before the man, a deep flaming gulch separating them. "The people back in the city..." she began, remembering their courtesy and normalcy when they had eaten at the restaurant and replaced their clothing at the shops.
"Ashe, you should all realize by now the truth of the matter."
"What truth?" Piper demanded.
He laughed maniacally at their ignorance, bringing his graceful fingertips up to hold his pained cheekbones. "I didn't specifically seek all of these contestants out. I randomly chose you all." He paused for a moment to let the words sink in before continuing. "Of course, I did my research afterwards to make sure that my investment wasn't a folly. In the end, I just went with it, interested in what sort of entertainment ordinary people could provide."
With a great turn, he gestured at everything around them. "The four of you have become so interesting. I have already shown you how each of you could become that which you hate. Each of you having great potential for letting a single bad day send you directly into my direction," he chortled, his eyes falling directly onto Ashe's frenzied orbs. "Do you delude yourself into thinking that each and every one of those people in that city could not equally become just like me? That they too do not share the potential to do what you four have realized you are capable of?"
Not one of them said a word, leaving the man to continue into the silence as the liquid hatred flowed beneath them at a steadily increasing pace. "Sage, how did it feel to take the life of another living person?" he taunted.
"Sage, you are not responsible for those lives," Ashe snapped, trying to make sense and defend her from the madman's accusations. "There is a difference in a need for survival and killing for entertainment."
"I could have..." the girl began, leaving the pink haired girl to immediately cut in again as Kai grinned from ear to ear in victory.
"You think you could have, but Kai has made sure that we have been placed into situations where the choices are not really choices. Yeah, we could have let them kill us instead. We could have run in terror. We could have hidden until we starved. Kai would still have continued taking the lives that he's taken, and we would still be moving at the hand of the puppeteer."
Amused, Gregory Rogers held up one finger. "But I've taken no lives," he explained.
"A life taken by proxy would still count. At least, that's what you wish for us to believe. You want us to feel responsible for deaths caused based on our choices, even if we were not directly responsible, by claiming that our decisions may as well have been pulling the trigger ourselves," the gathering storm known as Ashe recouped. "And yet you wish to deny having any influence on the eliminations of both those at your command and the innocent contestants that you forced into this game."
He paced from one side of the ravine to another, his gaze falling upon the lava in glee. "You still believe that someone could be innocent?" He opened his mouth to continue another poetic story about the dark demons that every man held within, but Piper didn't give him the opportunity to respond.
"They were far more innocent than you, Kai Demolic!" she growled.
The blond haired priestess clasped her hands tightly before her as she looked at him in melancholy directness. "Some sins can be forgiven," she explained.
"Yes, I really want to be judged by a priestess that has betrayed her God and desired the death of one of her fellow contestants even after he had publically declared her to be a friend," he snapped sarcastically, the words cutting deeply into the woman. "I think the fact that you could wish for his death only as long as someone else's hands were stained with the blood speaks wonders for your hypocrisy."
"Shut up!" Piper screamed at him, teleporting quickly over the flowing tide to physically bring about her demand.
As soon as she appeared, Kai's hand clasped around her throat in a vice grip with amazing speed, squeezing strongly so that her eyes bulged from her head. She dangled within his one arm's grasp as he glowed a fierce red, turning and holding his trophy tall before walking over to the torrential vent at his feet. "Piper, why don't you tell them about how bad your little drug habit is? Why don't you explain to Sage what she is getting herself into with her dependence on chemical intervention?" He slowly lowered the struggling woman down until her feet were just barely shy of the hottest portion of the stream. It was only her raging aura itself that kept her feet from igniting into flames.
None of them knew what to say. Ashe tried her luck by begging him to return Piper to them, carefully avoiding the phrase 'release her'. He spun around, still holding her writhingly in the air, waiting to drop her into the fluid. "What about you, Ashe? Mommy and daddy wish the world for you and implant you with a very powerful relic that is capable of doing so many things. You can see the flows of energy through each and every one of us and sense when we are near. You have a well of latent power within you that most people struggle for. The entire world is at your feet, and yet you cast such power aside and instead cut your wrists and fuck more boys than the number of concerts you've been to."
"Leave her alone!" Sage cried out surprisingly, having heard enough. She attempted once more to freeze over the top of the volcano to keep the enormous shaking of the rocks at bay, but the heat was too overpowering, leaving her to fall forward to her knees as if dehydrated.
Sophia pulled her to her feet and glared at Kai, knowing that he had cut each of them deeply. Kai's laughter was so victorious and boastful, however, as he turned his assault to Sage once more. "You are nearly as bad. You know deep down that your sister has done horrible things to many people, things that make me look like a saint, and yet you are willing to always overlook these things if she is the one that has done them. It's ok to kill your close teacher, because precious big sister Zena would never do it through an act of pure selfishness, would she? No, of course not, even if she can give you no good reason why it was necessary, you are willing to let the subject drop because you are too weak and drug dependant to fight for yourself. I'm only slightly surprised that you are not having a seizure right now from just how many toxic chemicals you are imagining enter your body from the ash in the air right now," he finished darkly, leaving the girl to turn pale in response.
"Each of you think of yourself as ordinary and pure, and yet you ignore that you are too stained to be pure. And," he continued, motioning once more at the suffocating figure within his grasp. "Ordinary is nothing more than a phrased used by those of us in power to demean the weak. Everyone in that city is ordinary, yes. Because everyone in that city shelters their own hidden demons. Honestly, they are all just as fucked up as you are. I've done the research," he concluded.
"And now," he announced, stepping forward to the precipice at his feet. "I cast the first stone into the lake of fire as an offering. Perhaps Piper's sacrifice will appease the infernal fires enough that they not see fit to cleanse this entire island from the face of the planet!"
As if answering the man, the steam vents all around them suddenly burst into a tremendous fury of pressurized air, the quaking rock being strong enough to take all of their legs from beneath them until Kai lost his grip by slamming his head painfully into the burning rocks beneath him. Piper rolled painfully to a stop, gasping through ragged breaths to sort the oxygen from the sooty vapors before Sophia made her way to her.
"Come on, we have to get out of here!" she cried over the roaring from beneath them. She gestured feebly at the lava spilling angrily over the top of the caldera around them.
"I will not let you leave here alive!" the madman declared from within the thickening smoke. They couldn't see him, but there was no mistaking the desperate voice contained within. "No one on this island will live through this!"
Ashe slowly walked forward, swallowing down her fear to kneel down at the edge by the closest stream of passionate fury. She was going to lose her friends, one way or another. She couldn't let this happen. No, these people deserved to live, to correct the mistakes that they had made in their lives and to continue on. These were good people. As were those in the city.
"Go! NOW!" Ashe cried out, her voice echoing across the caldera to the others. She didn't wait to see if they had listened or not. She would need them off of the top of the lake of fire. But... how?
An image flashed through her mind, moving from person to person of all the people that she had met on this island. Those distinct and those unfamiliar. Everyone had a reason to live. Everyone. The people in the city... She couldn't just let them all die while entirely unaware of what was going to happen to them!
She would have killed Kai Demolic if it would have solved this problem. She could picture herself standing before him, her gun pointing directly against his pulsing temple as he slept, ready to take the shot herself. Her arm would be shaking, fear and panic gripping her tightly in realization of the moment that she was experiencing.
She could see herself so easily with her finger on the trigger, ready to kill the man that had caused all of this strife and torment. And yet... She still couldn't actually do it. Was she not strong enough? A hand gently placed itself onto her shaking arm and pushed it down, removing the gun from its target. "No, Ashe," an image of Kaden said to her, arriving at her side to be her emotional support. She could see herself looking up at him pleadingly, hoping for an answer to his comment. He simply ran his fingers through his dirty hair in his normal manner before looking back at the unmoving image of Kai Demolic. "You won't do it because you are strong. Strength is what prevents us from falling to the level of people like Gregory... Kai Demolic. We need to protect those we love and keep people like this from doing what they do, but if we are to do that..." the vision trailed off, searching for the words. "It isn't difficult to stop the monsters from doing what they do. The difficult part," he explained as if it were a simple fact of life. "is keeping your humanity and not joining them. If everyone took the easy route and took justice into their own hands, then this world would have no hope."
It was something, she realized, that she remember him telling her one day in the alternate future that Kai had shown her. She had asked him once why he came home so pained over a killer escaping him when he had had the man within a direct line to eliminate him. Kaden's words held true.
She would protect them all.
I need your help.
Her thoughts went into her soul, the guards that kept her Star's Tear from overflowing into her body unlocking themselves. She could feel it, as the entire world turned a bright shade of blue through her fiery eyes. She could feel everyone around her, in a great moment of overwhelming awareness, as they ran for the edge of the caldera. She could feel Kai seeking them out. She could feel each and every person in the town below the ruins as they went about their business, seeking shelter from the volcanic eruption that they had realized was to come.
The dark blue energy that ripped through her body left lines etched deeply into her skin, as if runes had been tattooed upon her, designating to her spiritual power the best way for her chakra to flow. Her dyed pink hair had found its coloring diminished, replaced by the sapphire hue of a super nova. She kneeled down as her clothing shredded away, placing her hands to the raging earth as if able to calm the land itself.
She had unlocked her deep well of power, ascending herself into something that was entirely unordinary.
Energy spread from her fingertips to slowly cover the top of the volcano like a spiritual seal, moving along every bit of it in rapidly strengthening pulses as Ashe's chakra embedded itself into the seal that she was creating. Everyone would live, she hoped, as long as she prevented this cataclysm from taking place. Piper... Sophia... Sage... They could bring Kai to justice afterwards.
She had no illusions that she would survive what she was doing. Her own well being was the furthest thing from her mind. Her strength lay in her compassion.
The eruption began, welling up within the seal with such force that it expanded upwards, fighting desperately to contain the explosion while Ashe channeled more and more power to fight back against the natural disaster. Her seal slowly turned into a bubble of passionate blue energy, welling up until she could be seen by all, breaking through the smoke and soot, an Ashe of her own namesake, standing tall with all seeing eyes. Her naked form had been covered in each etch and mark of where her energy expanded and flowed, and her wild blue hair blew into a flurry above her.
She had no theatrical aura in representation, however. Everyone on the island could see her standing tall above the enormous dome of energy attempting to contain and quell the monster below her. All of her energy was being placed into doing so.
"Live."
![[Image: Ashe.jpg]](http://i1017.photobucket.com/albums/af298/symbiosychotic/Ashe.jpg)