Avatar Arena: POS Industries vs. Arhra

[Raiden]

The two fighters stand in their arena. They were standing atop a series of rooftops, beams of light being shot up between the cracks and making countless shadows.

Raiden and Rhiya were many rooftops away, dressed as super heros. Why? Because we can, bitches. :P

(This is the City Rooftop arena. POS won Arena Advantage. Spotlights cause shadows for his use.)

[POS Industries]

Pedro O'Sullivan found himself on a rooftop, somewhere in downtown NPF city. Judging from the abundance of spotlights, he gathered that this had to be the entertainment district. He took in his surroundings as a cool breeze blew past him, causing his overcoat to billow a little. Looking up, he had just the right amount of moonlight to work in his favor. Yes, this would do just fine.

Stepping out of the light, POS crossed his arms and leaned against a wall, awaiting his opponent. That tournament official he paid off had informed him that his randomly selected opponent was Arhra of all people. He had to admit, the two of them made a hell of a team. He could only imagine what they could do as adversaries. This should be interesting...

Gazing out into the distance, he noted two heroically-dressed figures standing atop one of the other buildings a way down. A sly grin crossed his face upon the recognition of their presense, and he suddenly felt a song coming on.

"Somebody saaaaaaaave me.... I don't care how you do it, just saaaaaaaaave me......."

[Arhra]

It seemed someone didn't care for his singing as there was suddenly a symphony of gunfire. All around POS the tiles and roofing beams beneath suddenly burst apart in a storm of broken tile and splintered wood. Thankfully, not a single shot touched him. Aside from a few chance impacts from the flying debris, he was fine.

"Hmm, missed." the voice came.

Turning around to where the sound of the voice and the gunshots had come from, he could see Arhra dramatically silhouetted against the dark sky, spotlights conveniently lighting her up and glinting off the odd metal of her psuedo-armour. Seeing his eyes settle on her, she smiled, ejecting the two spent magazines from the pair of handguns she held. Her emerald eyes flashed wickedly as she continued.

"Have to reload too." Arhra said, a fake sulking tone in her voice, "What a pity. I was hoping to finish you off immediately, but it seems you had to be little Johnny Live-a-lot."

[POS Industries]

"What a pity. I was hoping to finish you off immediately, but it seems you had to be little Johnny Live-a-lot."

POS chuckled, "Gosh, I could say the same for you. How many times have you died and reincarnated since we've met? C'est la vie." He balled up his right fist and aimed the ring it bore at the would-be gunslinger. "HEAR--"

He stopped himself before he could finish the word, as a thought had occured to him. The heart ring's normal function is to fill the target with an irresistable urge to do as much good as possible. This, it should be noted, did not necessarily guarantee passifism, nor did it mean that he could manipulate the intended target's newfound nobler instincts as he would a common noob. No, with a person as intelligent as Arhra, the likelihood of them deciding that eliminating something as evil as Pedro O'Sullivan ultimately made the world a better place was high. It's also not too far out of the realm of probability to assume that the rest of the NPFers would react similarly.

Yes, it seems that the Heart ring is pretty much out of the question for this tournament.

As Arhra hurried to reload, POS reached into his coat and pulled out what appeared to be a magic wand, altered with advanced technology and illuminated with a bright violet glow, and raised it into the air while yelling, "NEGATIVE KAMEN POWER.... TRANSFORM!!!"

In a flash, Pedro was enveloped in darkness, initiating what appeared to be a long, drawn-out transformation sequence that, in reality, didn't last long enough for Arhra to react and ventilate him thoroughly. No, by the time she could take aim with her guns, the transformation into Negative Kamen was complete, and she was only able to catch a glimpse of the exquisitely dressed, white-haired, masked stranger before he seemed to sink into his own shadow on the ground beneath him.

"And now the fun begins," his voice announced, seemingly coming from several directions at once, "I guess you may have missed it the last time I used these powers, what with powering an energy absorbing shield and then being dead. Yuri might have seen it, but I guess that doesn't help you now...."

As Arhra did her best to keep Negative Kamen from getting the drop on her, the masked one arose from a dark portal in front of one of the spotlights several meters to her left. Quick to take aim, Arhra was just about to squeeze the trigger when the long shadow cast by the Kamen in the spotlight rose from its two-dimensional state and well into the third, taking on the form of its creator and knocking the weapons from her hands, one gun to either side. Fully formed into a humanoid shape, a nearly exact copy of the original in almost ink-black monochrome, the shadow puppet readied to attack Arhra as its master dropped back down into the portal at his feet.

"Ready for an appetizer?" the Kamen called out from the darkness as the shadow puppet pounced.

[Arhra]

"Oh dear, without my precious guns whatever am I to do?" Arhra's voice radiated such sarcasm that unshielded life forms would probably have died within seconds. This kind of thing was why nature, in its inifinite wisdom, had given most living things a resistance to sarcasm.

"Ready for an appetizer?" Negative Kamen yelled from the shadows as his puppet leapt to attack.

Arhra laughed, "Hah! I eat appetizers for breakfast!"

She flicked out her leg, kicking up a bunch of roof tiles that flew at the shadow puppet. If the puppet actually had a mind, it was probably a bit confused by that. Roofing tiles were hardly the most deadly of weapons Arhra might try and use against it.

The puppet nimbly twisted through the disparate cloud of tiles, a three dimensional maze that changed with each passing moment. One tile it couldn't quite dodge, it punched out at, a solid blow that would shatter the ceramic tile harmlessly.

The tile decided it would have none of this. It instead violently exploded.

While not a particularly large blast as these kinds of things go (it didn't even wipe out a city block! Probably grenade level at best), it did something else important. The other tiles, caught in the explosion, also detonated, turning the small cluster of flying pottery the puppet had been weaving through into an incandescent wall of fire.

"Explosions fix everything!" was Arhra's comment on her solution to the problem of POs's shadow puppet, now wiped off the face of the earth. Before taking her potshots at POS, the splodomancer had taken the precaution of transmuting several of the tiles on the roof in her immediate vicinity into bombs, giving her an unexpected attack that would be a nasty surprise for anyone trying to sneak up on her. Having your own personal mine field was always nice.

Spinning around with a low sweeping kick, she sent the rest of her bomb tiles flying merrily into the shadowed corners around her, guessing POS couldn't be too far away, and collected the pair of glocks that she had dropped.

[POS Industries]

Arhra was, of course, quite correct about Negative Kamen being close by. Attacking blindly into the darkness is never a terribly effective strategy, but you had to admire her spirit. As the splodomancer reached down to pick up the first of the Kryloguns, she looked up to see the Kamen appear from one of his portals a few feet in front of her, standing once more in front of one of the spotlights, his glowing red eyes locked with hers.

"Go ahead," he said calmly, "pick it up. I have no intention of stopping you. After all, your only real enemy here is yourself." At that, the masked figure grinned and glanced past her, behind her. Keeping the pistol trained on her opponent, Arhra cautiously looked back to see...

...herself. A darkened, colorless duplicate, wearing a faint grin and holding the second of the Skull Mod's pistols aimed straight at the original.

[Arhra]

"Hmm..." Arhra mused as she saw her monochrome mirror image behind her. "It appears I am going to be shot at with bullets. I think I will ha -"

"FLASH OF LIGHT!" Arhra suddenly yelled.

"Son of a...!" POS yelled. Surely Arhra hadn't just... The light was too bright, the female splodomancer a bright figure whose radiance stabbed at the eyes of anyone who let their gaze run over her. The shadow duplicate of Arhra instinctively flinched back from the blinding light, squeezing the trigger of the handgun as it jerked back. The shot went harmlessly high. Well, not harmlessly. A great distance way, by some freak chance as the bullet came back to earth, it hit a squirrel, blowing the little rodent's brains right out. But who cares about that? It was probably an evil squirrel anyway.

Arhra's flash having proven to be very effective, she rushed her duplicate. It stumbled clumsily, making some unintelligible noises as it tried to come to terms with the temporary loss of its eyesight. Arhra on the other hand was fine, covering the distance in seconds, a look of eager anticipation on her face.

Not being one to believe in being unnecessarily honourable, Arhra laid out the shadow puppet of her with a sucker punch. Slipping the second handgun back into the convenient holster at her waist, she grabbed the puppet and pressed her open palm over its face, calling up her splodomancy.

Brief streamers like lines of smoky fire momentarily flowed through its body from her hand and then vanished. With a neat action, Arhra spun on the spot to help get her some momentum, holding onto one of the puppet's arms. Spinning a half circle to slingshot it, Arhra then released, hurling her newly made puppet-bomb right at POS.

[POS Industries]

"Son of a....!"

Negative Kamen stumbled backward slightly as the blinding light hit his eyes, and yet, like an alzheimer's patient, he couldn't help but look back over and over again. Yes, it was horribly painful and potentially permanently damaging to his eyesight, but still... what a remarkable view!

Soon, however, the light began to fade and the Kamen squinted to notice the Shadow Arhra hurling toward him, and at the last possible instant he dodged to the left, just in time to get knocked into the air by the explosive force of the puppet's impact into the spot light behind him. Sparks and flames shot up from the point of the explosion, and drowned the immediate area in light once more.

Regaining his composure somwhat, the Kamen produced 4 more puppets from the array of his own shadows around him, though die to the light created by the spotlights explosion, each of these shadow puppets was far more faint than their predacessors, and therefore not as powerful. However, the quickly moved to surround Arhra as their master quickly ducked into the nearest creatable portal to safety. Standing around their prey, the pack of shadow puppets addressed the girl as the light in the area faded back to normal, sans one spotlight.

"That was a neat trick you pulled there, Arhra."

"Definately. I have to admit that I hadn't countered for such a brilliant... display."

"And pulling a Gambit with your own duplicate? Priceless!"

"To be honest, I was hoping I'd get a chance to finally start fighting you myself, but I suppose I'll have to toy around with you a bit longer while the skin grows back on my eyeballs. Pity..."

And with that, the four shadow puppets leapt upon their target from all directions, with full intention of spilling blood. Lots and lots and lots of lovely crimson blood.....

[Arhra]

"No, I think I'd rather fight the puppet's master." Arhra said cheerily as the puppets fanned out to surround her. She raised her arms out and energy suddenly crackled around her, several small orbs appearing out of the jagged streams like beads of dew. They seemed tethered to her by the lightning arcs, straining to lift her off the ground.

A kick off the ground and Arhra sailed into the air, rapidly slowing as gravity, her ancient foe, sought to drag her back down. It seemed gravity had made an unholy alliance with the shadow puppets as they watched her rapidly increasing rate of descent with a certain predatorial hunger.

But Arhra had foreseen this treachery. The spheres flowed together, swelling into a much larger orb even as Arhra generated more of them. The splodomancer did an impressive blackflip and landed neatly atop the orb, arms outstretched to help keep her balance. Nine small spheres orbited her at just above head height.

Her smile was very wide as she looked mockingly down at the four shadow puppets, hovering above the height they could jump to, even with Kamen powers. "Do you like my blazekite?" Arhra asked, blithely disregarding the fact it was nothing like a kite. It was a big ball of magic, easily a meter across with strange, half glimpsed patternings in the air around it.

"Anyway," she continued, "I think I'd better track down that Negative Kamen. You can go now." One of the spheres hovered out of the orbital ring and dropped where the shadow puppets stood. Arhra just smiled as the blazekite slowly drifted away from there, feeling the sudden rush of wind and the flare of light at her back as the dropped globe detonated, turning the rooftop into a smouldering ruin.

"POS, POS, POS" Arhra murmured to herself. "Where could you be?" Eyes alighting on a large open window where she thought perhaps she'd seen a movement, the splodomancer sent another of her orbiting blast globes hurtling in there. As fire plumed out of the gaping hole that had been the window, she muttered, "No, not in there."

[POS Industries]

As Arhra hovered in the air above atop her blazekite, looking down upon the wreckage she had just created, scouring the area meters below and searching for the first sign of movement on which to unleash her next blitzkrieg, suddenly one of the spotlights pointed directly at her, the bright light catching her in the eyes.

Moving to shield herself from the offending illumination, it was only a split second later that she was caught by a sharp elbow to the back of the neck, her vision whiting out and her body going momentarily limp as Negative Kamen emerged from the shadow cast behind her by the spotlight.

"You and your pretty little orbs... You're all just begging to face the moose!" the Kamen hissed into her ear as he locked the stunned splodomancer in a sleeper hold, pulling her away from the blazekite and down toward the blasted building below.

Down they fell, into the building through the crater caused by the latest explosive attack, Arhra struggling to maintain consciousness as she was used by her opponent as a meatshield, softening the impact for him as they seemed to hit every solid object on the way down. After a floor or two, their descent halted as he drove her into the floor, then jerked her up and, curiously, released the sleeper hold only to deliver a swift kick to her back an instant later, sending her back to the ground.

"Figured I should let you go before you got around to turning me into your own personal incendiary device," he growled, red eyes looking down upon her coldly, "You wanted to fight the puppet master? Well, here you go. I do hope you were enjoying your little light show while it lasted. I sure was. Looked just like the Fourth of July for a while. But all that's over now. Now, it's just you and me, and let me tell you something, this whole get-up I'm wearing? During our previous adventure, I designed this as a way for me to go up against a god and stand at least a halfway plausible chance of surviving. And I'd say it worked well enough, what with me standing here."

He noticed that Arhra was starting to recover from his last attack, which was good. She was as resilient as she was clever, which is why he was happy enough going up against her than any of those other brain trusts out there. Incidentally, he realized then that she had somehow managed to get him to start monologuing, the downfall of many a famous villain, but his curiousity had once again gotten the better of him and he was more than interested to see the extent of what this new form of hers could do. Just playing the role that suited him, he supposed. Either way, it was about time to wrap this up.

"So tell me," he said, readying himself to dodge, duck, dip, dive, or dodge however became immediately necessary, "Knowing all these fun facts, just what is it you expect you can do against me?"