04-12-2010, 09:38 AM
“There’s... there’s people down there!” Sage exclaimed.
Before he could stop her from following through with her idiotic impulse, the beleaguered woman wrenched clear of his prohibiting grasp and rushed fervently towards the monstrosity laying waste to the desert prison. Ander reached out towards her in a useless gesture as a long, eloquent string of confused and helpless grunts escaped his throat in place of words.
God, what is wrong with you?!
Her recent healing endeavor left her completely wiped out, she didn’t have the faintest clue of what the creature was capable of, she didn’t know which people were in trouble or even if they were friends, and she had no plan whatsoever. Either Sage was packing some serious reserve energy, or she really was as crazy as he suspected she might be.
Well you can go get yourself stomped on by that thing, but don’t expect me to come save you. I’m not stupid, Ander resolved.
The thief stared the monster down, watching it completely obliterate everything in its path. He shook his head and rolled his eyes, glancing up towards the top of the mansion. Glistening, slick ice still coated the exterior, but it could not deter his Adhesive technique, so long as he concentrated. At the very least, someone wasn’t waiting at the bottom with a handful of icy claws this time. With swift skill and grace, Ander scaled the building and perched on top of the roof to get a better view of this creature. He squinted his steely blue eyes, noticing two women fleeing – one with a suspiciously familiar blue jumpsuit – and a lone figure approaching the monster all by her itty-bitty self. Had none of the other prisoners noticed the gargantuan beast terrorizing their enclosure?
The creature stamped along the desert, crushing shanties underfoot and whipping its spined, lizard-like tail to take care of any structures it scarcely managed to miss in its maddened march. It opened its enormous jaws and let loose a mighty bellow, revealing crooked rows of sharp, yellowed teeth that probably grew to the size of a tall man’s body. Large, wicked talons scraped deep burrows into the earth, one tiny flick enough to slice a person in two.
Even the sight of the monster would be enough to scare a battle-hardened warrior away. Maybe the other inhabitants elected to do what any sane person would do, and that was to wait out the attack or just plain haul ass out of there.
Ander watched as the mammoth being changed its attention towards the lone girl standing in its path, its watery blue eyes seemingly coming alight with sadistic pleasure now that it had something that could fight back. The nomad sat patiently, unmoving, and watched Sage activate the remnants of her ice powers, sending a blast full in the creature’s face… and it didn’t even flinch. Ander’s brow twitched in surprise. It was one thing not to cause a whole lot of damage, but it was an entirely different matter when you didn’t cause any at all. She swayed, and stumbled as the monster took a giant swipe at her with one of its semi-truck-sized claws. She dropped to the ground, barely getting out of the way in time as it passed cleanly over her fallen body, a surefire decapitation had the cryomancer not dodged.
Ander studied the beast’s armor, almost like thick plating, and had trouble identifying any weak points. It certainly had plenty of natural weapons at its disposal, and thus far, had not demonstrated an ability to hurl any kind of breath attack or shoot lasers from its eyes or something entirely horrifying like that. No, instead, it preferred the up close and personal approach. And out of everyone, the least likely person to actually be able to do anything about it was going toe-to-toe. The thief ground his teeth together; if Sage couldn’t hurt it, what hope did he have?
If this was the bonus round, the desert dweller doubted they would be given a third chance. They were both dead. Screwed and dead.
For one brief moment, Ander contemplated simply leaving. He hadn’t yet found a way out of Kill Town – if indeed this prison associated with Kill Town – and he wasn’t about to play the fall man a second time. He didn’t care about “Gamer” or vengeance or raging against their cage like everybody else did, but he did care about not dying, and he did care about getting out of this tragic and bewildering mess. “Fun,” as Mixie had so articulately put, had run out as soon as he lost the Pac-Man event.
And then he remembered something about time travel and future and all of that babbling nonsense, and as completely ridiculous as it sounded – and even worse that he would even for one second buy into it as possibility or truth – he determined he might have had something to profit from it. Sage, whatever she was to him, was also a potential investment, and when an opportunity lingered in front of him, he had a hard time saying no. When you had investments… you protected those investments.
Ander reached into his capsule pouch, and pulled out a smooth cylinder of katchin, materializing a halberd into his awaiting palm. He drew in a deep breath, recollecting as many details about their building-sized antagonist as he could imprint into his brain.
Then he exhaled.
I’m a fool.
He grunted loudly as he sprung off the roof like a grasshopper on nitrous oxide, sailing far and wide into the cloudless cerulean skies. He couldn’t clear the gap between them, and added that into his calculations as he dropped halfway, springing up once more from coiled legs. Ander felt the wind rush along his skin as the monster approached closer and closer, consuming his horizon. He readied the halberd as he beheld his eventual landing location.
Sage looked up as the thief soared over her head, letting out a mighty yell and narrowly avoiding the twin horns atop the beast’s head. Ander slammed the halberd downward as if it were a pole vault, jabbing it into a hopefully soft spot on the thing’s neck. The raven-haired boy’s face blanched in surprise as the weapon shattered upon striking the dirty brown carapace, sending a painful shock through his hands with the force of resistance. The beast barely reacted, almost as if Ander’s attack had been no more painful than a mere bee sting. It bucked gleefully, causing the thief to lose his balance before being violently ejected off like a cannon blast.
Ander yelped helplessly as he tumbled through the air, landing roughly on his back and forcefully losing all the air in his lungs. He choked in a breath as he felt somebody grabbing at his shoulders.
“A-are you okay?!” Sage asked. Her efforts to help him up faltered weakly.
“Oh yeah, I’m great,” Ander coughed with his best attempt at a smile. “Having fun without me?”
They didn’t have time for cute pleasantries as the thief noticed the beast looming over them, casting a rather large shadow on where they stood. That spurred Ander’s adrenaline, and he burst to his feet, fumbling for Sage’s hand as he dragged them both out of the path of a large foot bearing down on them. The resulting shockwave from the step caused them both to stumble and fall over in their escape, preventing them from making it very far.
“The weapons! The weapons!” somebody cried.
Ander looked up from his sprawled position, seeing a strange little elf man frantically jumping up and down and waving his arms madly to attract their attention. He didn’t have much time to contemplate this otherwise amusing oddity as the monster dipped its head down, pelting them with its hot, putrid breath.
“Come on!” Ander cried, eyes wide with panic. He jerked to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried the bedraggled woman before either of them could be scooped up into the creature’s mouth for a little pre-apocalypse snack.
Oh Jesus, that thing just tried to eat us!
“For God’s sake, use the weapons!” the elf man shouted.
“Over there!” Sage pointed breathlessly.
Ander followed her finger and spied a rather large pile of every possible armament imaginable. They both raced towards it, Sage able to move of her own accord. Ander carefully picked out a rather appealing rocket launcher, figuring he couldn’t do much better than this unless there was an atomic bomb buried somewhere under that heap. He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at Sage, mounting the weapon on his shoulder and standing clear of her while turning towards the creature.
“Open wide, fatty!” Ander smirked.
The beast roared in response, and as soon as it did, Ander pressed the release, the rocket bursting forth from its cylindrical holding and shooting directly into behemoth’s open maw. The rocket slid down its throat, exploding. It looked at though it hiccupped for a moment, before it belched a stream of fire and smoke from its nostrils. Other than that, it was fairly unperturbed.
“Well that’s no good,” Ander winced. He glanced over to Sage, flashing her a toothy grin. “This is all your fault, you know. The dragons always come to capture the princesses.”
“Ander, please…” Sage groaned. “Not now.”
“I’m serious. Next you know it’s going to be a barrel-throwing ape or an evil wizard who wants him some princess…”
He didn’t get to finish the thought as he felt a powerful blast of ice hit him in the back, coating his torso in an encasement of frost and pummeling him forward. He grunted in pain, feeling the icy burn of the cold on his flesh. The thief struggled to get up, and glared accusingly at Sage.
“What was that for?” he growled.
She looked just as surprised as he did. “I… I didn’t…”
“No, I did,” a flat, emotionless voice answered.
Sage followed the voice, beholding a tall man coated in cold sweat with a dark trench coat. Her coral eyes narrowed dangerously in venomous familiarity. “You!”
“Yes. Me,” Magnus stated matter-of-factly.
Ander staggered to his feet, turning to face their latest adversary.
“Magnus!” the elf man glowered accusingly.
“Kepler,” the hacker replied calmly in turn.
“This is the guy that killed the kid?” Ander asked, brushing off the bits of frost.
Sage nodded quietly, her entire body noticeably tensed up.
The beast had seemingly lost interest in them, moving on to other buildings to destroy whilst Magnus stared them down in a thickly heated confrontation.
“I won’t forgive you for what you’ve done!” Sage cried, a pair of Chillrends menacingly forming along her delicate fingertips. Magnus responded in turn by perfectly duplicating the attack, a motion that Ander did not miss. He should have suspected that the hacker could have done more than simply punch Sage in the face, and if she had come up short the last time, there was a good chance they were going to this time. Except last time, Ander wasn’t there…
“Nice trick, but you can’t beat the two of us,” Ander smirked. He grabbed a pair of swords from the pile, twirling them pointedly in his hands.
“Do you really want to fight me?” Magnus asked flatly. “Or do you want to stop the tarrasque before he destroys Yuffith’s mansion and all of your dear old friends?”
He spoke so emotionlessly, so devoid of any feeling whatsoever.
Ander glanced towards Sage. He didn’t much care about the others, but her actions greatly influenced his own.
“Let me make the choice easy for you,” Magnus said, interrupting their brief deliberations. “You were no challenge to me last time, so for now, the tarrasque can have you.”
With that, he vanished. The thief looked towards the blue-haired girl, waiting patiently for her to respond, but she seethed in quiet fury.
“Sage,” Ander said.
She looked towards him, almost as if remembering he was still there.
“What do you want to do?”
Sage looked towards the ravaging tarrasque, its impending presence drawing closer and closer to the mansion. Then she looked back towards the thief, needing no further time to reach her conclusion. “We have to save them!”
“Okay, but first, we need a plan,” the nomad pointed out. “I don’t have any other way to attack it except directly, so I will try to go for the eyes and keep him off your back. In the meantime, you give me some cover fire and do your thing with your ice, alright? We’ll stand a much better chance if we coordinate our attacks.”
The girl nodded. “O-okay.”
He paused. He’d already made his choice, and he had no recourse but to rely on her during the fight, because he very much doubted his ability to take down the tarrasque by himself. Ander painfully recalled his grievous weakness to anything cold, and didn’t feel very confident that he wouldn’t somehow get caught in her attacks and suffer right along with the beast. Despite this, hesitantly, he added, “I trust you.”
Even though he didn’t. He wanted to… but he couldn’t.
A moment of silence passed, and a roar broke the moment.
Ander flashed a smile, shaking his head once with vigor. “Let’s go.”
Before he could stop her from following through with her idiotic impulse, the beleaguered woman wrenched clear of his prohibiting grasp and rushed fervently towards the monstrosity laying waste to the desert prison. Ander reached out towards her in a useless gesture as a long, eloquent string of confused and helpless grunts escaped his throat in place of words.
God, what is wrong with you?!
Her recent healing endeavor left her completely wiped out, she didn’t have the faintest clue of what the creature was capable of, she didn’t know which people were in trouble or even if they were friends, and she had no plan whatsoever. Either Sage was packing some serious reserve energy, or she really was as crazy as he suspected she might be.
Well you can go get yourself stomped on by that thing, but don’t expect me to come save you. I’m not stupid, Ander resolved.
The thief stared the monster down, watching it completely obliterate everything in its path. He shook his head and rolled his eyes, glancing up towards the top of the mansion. Glistening, slick ice still coated the exterior, but it could not deter his Adhesive technique, so long as he concentrated. At the very least, someone wasn’t waiting at the bottom with a handful of icy claws this time. With swift skill and grace, Ander scaled the building and perched on top of the roof to get a better view of this creature. He squinted his steely blue eyes, noticing two women fleeing – one with a suspiciously familiar blue jumpsuit – and a lone figure approaching the monster all by her itty-bitty self. Had none of the other prisoners noticed the gargantuan beast terrorizing their enclosure?
The creature stamped along the desert, crushing shanties underfoot and whipping its spined, lizard-like tail to take care of any structures it scarcely managed to miss in its maddened march. It opened its enormous jaws and let loose a mighty bellow, revealing crooked rows of sharp, yellowed teeth that probably grew to the size of a tall man’s body. Large, wicked talons scraped deep burrows into the earth, one tiny flick enough to slice a person in two.
Even the sight of the monster would be enough to scare a battle-hardened warrior away. Maybe the other inhabitants elected to do what any sane person would do, and that was to wait out the attack or just plain haul ass out of there.
Ander watched as the mammoth being changed its attention towards the lone girl standing in its path, its watery blue eyes seemingly coming alight with sadistic pleasure now that it had something that could fight back. The nomad sat patiently, unmoving, and watched Sage activate the remnants of her ice powers, sending a blast full in the creature’s face… and it didn’t even flinch. Ander’s brow twitched in surprise. It was one thing not to cause a whole lot of damage, but it was an entirely different matter when you didn’t cause any at all. She swayed, and stumbled as the monster took a giant swipe at her with one of its semi-truck-sized claws. She dropped to the ground, barely getting out of the way in time as it passed cleanly over her fallen body, a surefire decapitation had the cryomancer not dodged.
Ander studied the beast’s armor, almost like thick plating, and had trouble identifying any weak points. It certainly had plenty of natural weapons at its disposal, and thus far, had not demonstrated an ability to hurl any kind of breath attack or shoot lasers from its eyes or something entirely horrifying like that. No, instead, it preferred the up close and personal approach. And out of everyone, the least likely person to actually be able to do anything about it was going toe-to-toe. The thief ground his teeth together; if Sage couldn’t hurt it, what hope did he have?
If this was the bonus round, the desert dweller doubted they would be given a third chance. They were both dead. Screwed and dead.
For one brief moment, Ander contemplated simply leaving. He hadn’t yet found a way out of Kill Town – if indeed this prison associated with Kill Town – and he wasn’t about to play the fall man a second time. He didn’t care about “Gamer” or vengeance or raging against their cage like everybody else did, but he did care about not dying, and he did care about getting out of this tragic and bewildering mess. “Fun,” as Mixie had so articulately put, had run out as soon as he lost the Pac-Man event.
And then he remembered something about time travel and future and all of that babbling nonsense, and as completely ridiculous as it sounded – and even worse that he would even for one second buy into it as possibility or truth – he determined he might have had something to profit from it. Sage, whatever she was to him, was also a potential investment, and when an opportunity lingered in front of him, he had a hard time saying no. When you had investments… you protected those investments.
Ander reached into his capsule pouch, and pulled out a smooth cylinder of katchin, materializing a halberd into his awaiting palm. He drew in a deep breath, recollecting as many details about their building-sized antagonist as he could imprint into his brain.
Then he exhaled.
I’m a fool.
He grunted loudly as he sprung off the roof like a grasshopper on nitrous oxide, sailing far and wide into the cloudless cerulean skies. He couldn’t clear the gap between them, and added that into his calculations as he dropped halfway, springing up once more from coiled legs. Ander felt the wind rush along his skin as the monster approached closer and closer, consuming his horizon. He readied the halberd as he beheld his eventual landing location.
Sage looked up as the thief soared over her head, letting out a mighty yell and narrowly avoiding the twin horns atop the beast’s head. Ander slammed the halberd downward as if it were a pole vault, jabbing it into a hopefully soft spot on the thing’s neck. The raven-haired boy’s face blanched in surprise as the weapon shattered upon striking the dirty brown carapace, sending a painful shock through his hands with the force of resistance. The beast barely reacted, almost as if Ander’s attack had been no more painful than a mere bee sting. It bucked gleefully, causing the thief to lose his balance before being violently ejected off like a cannon blast.
Ander yelped helplessly as he tumbled through the air, landing roughly on his back and forcefully losing all the air in his lungs. He choked in a breath as he felt somebody grabbing at his shoulders.
“A-are you okay?!” Sage asked. Her efforts to help him up faltered weakly.
“Oh yeah, I’m great,” Ander coughed with his best attempt at a smile. “Having fun without me?”
They didn’t have time for cute pleasantries as the thief noticed the beast looming over them, casting a rather large shadow on where they stood. That spurred Ander’s adrenaline, and he burst to his feet, fumbling for Sage’s hand as he dragged them both out of the path of a large foot bearing down on them. The resulting shockwave from the step caused them both to stumble and fall over in their escape, preventing them from making it very far.
“The weapons! The weapons!” somebody cried.
Ander looked up from his sprawled position, seeing a strange little elf man frantically jumping up and down and waving his arms madly to attract their attention. He didn’t have much time to contemplate this otherwise amusing oddity as the monster dipped its head down, pelting them with its hot, putrid breath.
“Come on!” Ander cried, eyes wide with panic. He jerked to his feet and half-dragged, half-carried the bedraggled woman before either of them could be scooped up into the creature’s mouth for a little pre-apocalypse snack.
Oh Jesus, that thing just tried to eat us!
“For God’s sake, use the weapons!” the elf man shouted.
“Over there!” Sage pointed breathlessly.
Ander followed her finger and spied a rather large pile of every possible armament imaginable. They both raced towards it, Sage able to move of her own accord. Ander carefully picked out a rather appealing rocket launcher, figuring he couldn’t do much better than this unless there was an atomic bomb buried somewhere under that heap. He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at Sage, mounting the weapon on his shoulder and standing clear of her while turning towards the creature.
“Open wide, fatty!” Ander smirked.
The beast roared in response, and as soon as it did, Ander pressed the release, the rocket bursting forth from its cylindrical holding and shooting directly into behemoth’s open maw. The rocket slid down its throat, exploding. It looked at though it hiccupped for a moment, before it belched a stream of fire and smoke from its nostrils. Other than that, it was fairly unperturbed.
“Well that’s no good,” Ander winced. He glanced over to Sage, flashing her a toothy grin. “This is all your fault, you know. The dragons always come to capture the princesses.”
“Ander, please…” Sage groaned. “Not now.”
“I’m serious. Next you know it’s going to be a barrel-throwing ape or an evil wizard who wants him some princess…”
He didn’t get to finish the thought as he felt a powerful blast of ice hit him in the back, coating his torso in an encasement of frost and pummeling him forward. He grunted in pain, feeling the icy burn of the cold on his flesh. The thief struggled to get up, and glared accusingly at Sage.
“What was that for?” he growled.
She looked just as surprised as he did. “I… I didn’t…”
“No, I did,” a flat, emotionless voice answered.
Sage followed the voice, beholding a tall man coated in cold sweat with a dark trench coat. Her coral eyes narrowed dangerously in venomous familiarity. “You!”
“Yes. Me,” Magnus stated matter-of-factly.
Ander staggered to his feet, turning to face their latest adversary.
“Magnus!” the elf man glowered accusingly.
“Kepler,” the hacker replied calmly in turn.
“This is the guy that killed the kid?” Ander asked, brushing off the bits of frost.
Sage nodded quietly, her entire body noticeably tensed up.
The beast had seemingly lost interest in them, moving on to other buildings to destroy whilst Magnus stared them down in a thickly heated confrontation.
“I won’t forgive you for what you’ve done!” Sage cried, a pair of Chillrends menacingly forming along her delicate fingertips. Magnus responded in turn by perfectly duplicating the attack, a motion that Ander did not miss. He should have suspected that the hacker could have done more than simply punch Sage in the face, and if she had come up short the last time, there was a good chance they were going to this time. Except last time, Ander wasn’t there…
“Nice trick, but you can’t beat the two of us,” Ander smirked. He grabbed a pair of swords from the pile, twirling them pointedly in his hands.
“Do you really want to fight me?” Magnus asked flatly. “Or do you want to stop the tarrasque before he destroys Yuffith’s mansion and all of your dear old friends?”
He spoke so emotionlessly, so devoid of any feeling whatsoever.
Ander glanced towards Sage. He didn’t much care about the others, but her actions greatly influenced his own.
“Let me make the choice easy for you,” Magnus said, interrupting their brief deliberations. “You were no challenge to me last time, so for now, the tarrasque can have you.”
With that, he vanished. The thief looked towards the blue-haired girl, waiting patiently for her to respond, but she seethed in quiet fury.
“Sage,” Ander said.
She looked towards him, almost as if remembering he was still there.
“What do you want to do?”
Sage looked towards the ravaging tarrasque, its impending presence drawing closer and closer to the mansion. Then she looked back towards the thief, needing no further time to reach her conclusion. “We have to save them!”
“Okay, but first, we need a plan,” the nomad pointed out. “I don’t have any other way to attack it except directly, so I will try to go for the eyes and keep him off your back. In the meantime, you give me some cover fire and do your thing with your ice, alright? We’ll stand a much better chance if we coordinate our attacks.”
The girl nodded. “O-okay.”
He paused. He’d already made his choice, and he had no recourse but to rely on her during the fight, because he very much doubted his ability to take down the tarrasque by himself. Ander painfully recalled his grievous weakness to anything cold, and didn’t feel very confident that he wouldn’t somehow get caught in her attacks and suffer right along with the beast. Despite this, hesitantly, he added, “I trust you.”
Even though he didn’t. He wanted to… but he couldn’t.
A moment of silence passed, and a roar broke the moment.
Ander flashed a smile, shaking his head once with vigor. “Let’s go.”
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
_=So wake me when it's through
I don't want to feel the things that you do
Don't worry, I'll be fine
I just don't want this dream, wake me up inside=_
I don't want to feel the things that you do
Don't worry, I'll be fine
I just don't want this dream, wake me up inside=_