Avatar Arena: POS Industries vs. Arhra

[Arhra]

That fall had really, really hurt. Falling from a great height with the only thing to slow her down being the collapsing floors of building whose roof they had hit and various other rather painfully solid objects tended to be a reasonably traumatic experience. Having a capitalist land on you every step of the way didn't help either. Thankfully POS wasn't too much of a fat cat and thus it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Arhra also felt lucky that she had her splodomancer armour to protect her. If not for the protection the light armour - designed mainly for protecting splodomancers from their own splodomancy - had given, she'd have been in a whole new world of pain.

Then once hitting the ground, POS landed on her a final time and kicked her away. With her ears ringing and vision blurring in and out of focus, she tried to figure out what had just happened and then registered POS was speaking to her.

"So tell me," POS asked, ready to react to whatever move Arhra made, "Knowing all these fun facts, just what is it you expect you can do against me?"

Arhra crawled slowly to a more upright position, striving to conceal the movement of one hand grabbing a rock form the debris strewn floor and beginning to transmute it into another bomb. Her mind had raced over the options available to her. It seemed there was one best option for what to do. She resolved herself to carry through her decision.

Painfully, the splodomancer clambered to her feet, her new bomb clutched firmly in one hand. Every single shred of her body language spoke her intent - when she stood up, someone was going to die. "You'll be begging for the Lord's Trousers by the time I'm done with you!" Arhra muttered viciously as she began to straighten, beginning to spin around and hurl the explosive at POS.

POS however had seen this coming. A quick lunge and he planted his fist firmly in Arhra's gut, kicking the rock-bomb harmlessly out of Arhra's hand as she fell again.

"Do you really expect me to fall for a cheap trick like that?" the Negative Kamen asked. He was quite certain he'd have time to interrupt any spell she had time to cast.

"No Mr O'Sullivan, all I expect you to do is die. And have a very cheap funeral!" Arhra had a odd defiant edge to her tone, despite how bad the situation looked.

He saw Arhra concentrating and lunged forwards, kicking again. Arhra looked stunned, not moving out of the way but her hands seemed ot instinctively grab at POS's kicking leg. POS looked down at her, trying to shake her off, "Big words from someone who -"

He found himself suddenly interrupted by a massive explosion.

Arhra had used the classic feint. It was the purview of magicians to distract with one hand while the other pulled out rabbits. POS had been quite right that Arhra would be vulnerable to having her spells disrupted while she was trying to recover. However, that didn't stop her exerting control over spells already in effect.

The blazekite had still hovered high over where POS and Arhra currently stood, a dark orb with strange fires in its depths. Admittedly, Arhra could have dismissed it, stopping the effort of maintaining it from interfering with her spell casting. However, that would mean sacrificing the large amount of energy she had invested into it.

Arhra had a much more simple solution. The blazekite was a product of splodomancy and essentially a more complex utilisation of the same principles that created the blast globes she had used while riding the blazekite. However, while they had been the size of a grapefruit perhaps, the blazekite orb was much larger, over a meter across.

It was, in essence, a gigantic bomb.

Thus, Arhra had used her attempted spellcastings as a distraction and simply commanded the blazekite to stop hovering, arming it so it would explode on impact. The blazekite had simply fallen out of the sky, practically right on top of POS and Arhra.

With the arming command given, it instantly volatised on impact. The destructive forces contained within it were released, engineered by splodomancy to cause the maximum possible damage. It was quite a blockbuster. The noise and the shockwave were incredible, tearing the roofs off buildings and sending unsecured object tumbling away. At its center a pure white dome of devouring light swelled, lighting up the night sky.



That couldn't possibly be good.

[POS Industries]

And then there was Armageddon.

NPF's entertainment district was there one moment, only to be replaced in the next by a horrible, swirling hellstorm of fire, ripping through every building in sight in an instant, shredding and vaporizing the massive structures down to their very foundations and beyond. The destructive effect of the blazekite's detonation only lasted a few seconds, but it almost seemed as if time slowed down during the course of its explosion. As the conflagration died down, a very content looking (if charred, bruised, and bloodied) Arhra stood several stories down from her previous location from a few seconds before, chuckling a bit as she surveyed the smoldering debris around her, before collapsing to the ground.

Yes, with that attack it could only be assumed that the Negative Kamen was very cleanly vaporized. After all, his shadow portal powers can't allow him to magically exit a room that he's in, what with being line of sight. Granted, he'd managed to kick Arhra in the face with his other foot in order to get the splodomancer to release him, but there was no way that he could have possibly summoned enough power to defend against the awesome force of the blazekite's destruction.

Arhra was quite content in her clear victory.

It was then that Arhra vanished in a flash of blue light, teleporting her away from the post-apocalyptic nightmare that was the destroyed city. An instant later, the splodomancer found herself in what appeared to be the Mojave Desert. Looking up to catch a glimpse of the setting sun, Arhra suddenly felt a hand begin helping her up and a familier voice greeted her as she rose to her feet.

"Congratulations!"

Arhra had only a split second to react before the shadow puppet landed a sharp jab to her nose, knocking her backward to the four other puppets behind her who instantly swarmed the stunned splodomancer and throughly restrained her. The perpetually setting sun hovering on the horizon to her back, a long shadow was cast in front of her, from which Negative Kaman slowly rose into view, altogether undamaged.

"Howdy pardner," he greeted her, grinning and taking on a thick southern accent as he tipped his top hat to her, "I suppose yer wrackin' that pretty little brain o' yers, wondrin' just what in tarnation's goin' on 'round here, ain'tcha?"

Dropping the act, the Kamen continued his exposition, "You see, as I'm sure you're aware, we were each given a randomly assigned weapon for our fight. Yours were a pair of very lovely high-calibur handguns. Mine was something more... gamebreaking. My weapon was simply the one-time ability to change the field of battle to however I saw fit, a little gem that allowed me to teleport away just as you decided to go Hiroshima. Though I didn't quite get to see your masterpiece in action, I did manage to get away from it unscathed, though it appears I can't say the same for you...."

It was around this time that the five shadow puppets began brutally assaulting Arhra. If there was a prettier way to write such an ugly display, I would have done so.

[Rhiya Ravenwing]

"Awww, he used the ability so early on in the game too," Rhiya clucked as she and Raiden both materialized - wearing arab clothing to keep out the sand - a little distance away.

Raiden turned over to his fully-clad fellow judge.
"You're thinking about doing something mean to them, aren't you?"

"Mmmmmmmmmmmmaybe?" Rhiya made that into a question. Raiden rolled his eyes.

"Look, you've already interfered with two other arenas. This one's already screwed up as it is."

"Will screwing it up some more matter then?"

"Well... not technically--"

"Good! More screwing around coming up!" Rhiya grinned and clapped her hands. She sent a sharp, guttural bark of command into the howling desert wind.

A moment later, the ground beneath both Arhra and POS heaved and buckled, sending both attackers and attackee tumbling. From beneath the sands of the grainy desert rose...

Pillars. Massive, twisted shapes spiralling out of the earth, sand pouring off their surfaces as they writhed upwards. The earth grumbled and complained as the hard rocky surfaces took shape and became leviathan structures of twisted buildings - beautiful and dangerous in their individual ways.

Arhra and POS (and his minion of shadow ninjas) found themselves separated from each other by mile-deep chasms. Each clung onto their respective pillars as it shot upwards to halt them at such a height death would be certain should one step falter and plunge them down into the darkness below.

There was some luck though. As the two contestants tried to figure out how the HELL to continue fighting, they noticed links between the large pillars - brief bridges of sand that materialized between pillars and linked one from another.

What they also noticed was the fact that some pillars are higher than others, casting long silhouettes upon the selective earth.

~~

".... You're evil, you know that?" Raiden said after a small astonished interlude, "and how the FUCK did you manage that?"

Rhiya chuckled evilly, steepling her fingers conspiratorially, "Pact with the Earth Gods. Did a favour for them."

"Cleared out some wurm infestation, I take it?"

"Yeah. Dirty job, but it was worth it."

[OOC: the pillars are wide apart from each other enough so that jumping the gaps is a difficult feat, but not completely impossible. Later on, you'll see a respective pattern to the linking of the respective pillars, and use that to your (dis)advantage.

Oh, and... TWIST!]

[POS Industries]

"Goddammit!! You can never trust a god, I fucking tell you what.... Paid that blighter good money and he turns around and pulls this garbage! 'Ooh, look at me! I'm Raiden! I like to prance about with no shirt on because me socks keep getting stuck to it from all the static cling! Whoopdee-freakin-doo!!' Man, I am so signing up with Mesden when this is all over...."

The Negative Kamen cursed and ranted at the top of his lungs as he clawed and struggled to both hang on to the newly formed pillar and maneuver his way atop it. It should be noted that, along with what he could only assume was the entirety of his shadow puppet force, his top hat had fallen into the bottomless pit below, which upset him because, really, what's a Kamen without the trademark headgear? Just a maitre d' in a party mask, that's what. Nearing the peak of the earthen protrusion, the Negative one suddenly felt a hand grab his and hoist him to his feet at the top.

Taking a moment to get his footing, he looked to see one of his shadow puppets standing before him. Sadly, there was really only room for one up there, and the Kamen quickly shoved the puppet, making sure to grab the top hat from off its head and place it on his own as it fell backward into the abyss.

"I REGRET NOTHIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!"

Now more secure in his stance, the masked man decided to see why he was still there rather than being teleported to the winner's circle or something. "Hey Arhra," he called out, voice echoing throughout the chasm, "I'm guessing you're probably still alive, what with the fight not officially being over. Holla if ya hear me!"

[Arhra]

Arhra had been surprised, to say the least, to have two sudden changes of scenery occur so close together. Still, there was a bright side to this happening, she thought as she perched on top of a pillar that shot skywards. It would give her some time to devise a Cunning Plan.

Seeing her current spot was well shielded from sight from most directions, she considered her resources. Guns, splodomancy, chaos magic and what else... Ah, yes, the shapechanging. That fickle ability which had been nigh useless so far. An idea struck her, the thought of shapechanging slotting in as the one final dramatic touch. She turned the glittering thought over in her mind. It was risky but the potential benefits decided her. A synthesis of abilities would be the core of her plan.

Chaos magic was a fairly uncommon school of magic. It was capable of doing almost anything but its greatest flaw was the fact it might do anything. By its very nature it defied prediction and order. But Arhra was one favoured of Chaos and its magic was in her very blood. She understood its nature very clearly for she and it were of the same source.

Raw chaos was useless. Its infinite possibilities rendered it too unpredictable to be able to get any sort of useful result out of it. But perception shaped reality ad by retricting the possibilities, it could be encouraged to do things more useful. Most of Arhra's chaos magic worked with but a single word, that word setting out a general effect and the magic allowed to choose the exact form of its manifestation.

And now Arhra applied her magic again, weaving her splodomancy into every fibre of the spell. She choose to use a more traditional elemental transmutation. Air and earth she had in plenty, fire easily produced by her splodmancy. But for water she used blood, also knowing the affinities blood would give.

With that spell-form taking shape, she turned her attention inward, building up her own self image. She considered her armour, how it would have to be reshaped for what she intended and then carefully constructed her additions.

The splodmancer let her work come together, looking upon upon what she had wrought and finding it good. She smiled, feeling the silky smoothness as she ran her hand over the soft edge of a feather. Then she gathered up her chaos magic again and whispered one word, "Veil." to hide what she had done.

POS cried out for Arhra to make herself know and was surprised to find she did. No surprise attacks, no underhandedness, no shooting at him. However, when he saw her cry out in reply, dramatically atop a pillar he was surprised to see something different about her.

Wings, great feathery pinions were neatly folded upon her back. Her armour seemed to have been modified to fit them and thankfully she seemed to have lost her twin pistols at some point. Still, her mocking smile and the merry glint in her emerald eyes seemed to show she was certain of her victory. Certainly, with the perilous footing of this new battleground, flight would be a tremendous advantage.

Arhra's voice rang out as she spread her wings, pure white patterned with bloody red that matched her fiery mane of hair. "And now it is time to end this POS! Goodbye!" She leapt out into the void.

Arhra sailed gloriously across the empty expanse of air, her eyes focused on POS. But then her untested wings failed her. They buckled under the strain and Arhra plummeted. A single flash of surprise lanced over her features and then dissappeared. Arhra let out a single high cry, curiously devoid of fear, and then fell silent, becoming a speck in the stygian depths below. Then darkness swallowed her and she vanished from sight.

OOC: Sometimes I do have to wonder if I'm crazy.

[POS Industries]

"And now it is time to end this POS! Goodbye!"

A moment later, Arhra plunged screaming into the void below.

"Sometimes, I do have to wonder if she's crazy," Negative Kamen mused to himself as he stared down at the blackness into which his opponent had oh so gracefully disappeared. Shrugging to himself, he closed his eyes for a moment as a winged female figure swooped up and hovered behind him, swaying up and down gently in the canyon's breeze. Not opening his eyes, a warm smile crossed the Kamen's face as he addressed the visitor. "Hello, Arhra."

"Hello, master," the Arhra puppet replied as she grabbed him under the arms and hoisted him into the air, and carried him to a safe altitude overlooking the whole of the battlefield, the setting sun once more to his back. While whatever abilities the original Arhra had used to summon wings had failed, a shadow puppet's physiology was a tad bit more cohesive. All that was necessary for the masked man to create one was for Arhra to have cast a shadow on a surface while in flight, and she had effectively done so.

Once again, the Negative Kamen was still here, at this battlefield, meaning that the fight wasn't over just yet. Noting that the Shadow Arhra wouldn't be able to support his weight for much longer, the Kamen took the moment he had to summon 4 more shadow puppets of himself, which spread out among the pillars as best they could given the maneuverability of the current area. And with that, he had the Arhra puppet set him down atop the highest spire before it set off to patrol the area. His opponent was out there somewhere. Either she would show herself or he would find her anyway. Either way, it was all a matter of time.

The waiting game continued.

[Arhra]

A faint light appeared in the sucking darkness of the sandy ground far below, the diffuse radiance banishing shadows from within its area. Within this patch of whiteness was sprawled Arhra's supine form. Her wings were outstretched, the pure pale illumination ending a silvery tint to them. She looked like a fallen angel, perhaps ironically appropriate for one who had tried to fly. Barely moving, she looked utterly defeated.

The tower POS was standing on choose that moment to violently explode. At its base, an explosion went off, ripping out its supports and the splodomantic energies burrowing into the tower with a voracious rapacity. With a ponderous grace, the great, monolithic tower that strained at the heavens slowly, but with increasing speed, began its inevitable reunion with the earth it had risen from. While this happened, further detonations raced up along its length from the base, like the outbreak of some virulent plague.

Arhra had destroyed the tower POS stood upon, willingly taking the risk of exposing the part of her plan she had carefully hidden away. Appearances may decieve but it could only be taken so far. The splodmancer had chosen to gamble, salvaging what she could of her plan. A fall from a great height had not been part of it. Unable to fly, the wings had still been able to help slow the rate of fall and buffer the impact. Even so, the damage was considerable. But pain was something that could be ignored - Arhra would allow no broken and unwilling body to stop her.

[POS Industries]

This.... is unpleasant. Manageable, predictable, pretty much saw it coming from a mile away, but still quite unpleasant....

The Kamen gritted his teeth as the spire beneath him rocked and gave way, looking down to see a chain of explosions working its way up from the base. Taking the obvious approach, he jumped. There was nothing stable within reach to grab on to, but it also meant that he just managed to get far enough away from the tower's blast radius to remain unharmed. Still, looking down at the approaching abyss below, the Kamen had only one option available and focused his intent as much as he could given the sudden rush of adrenaline. This would need to be timed just right...

As the light from the final blast from the top of the monolith receded, Negative Kamen disappeared into the pitch blackness of the pit.

A split second later, he ascended from the same spot, carried upward by the redirected momentum of his fall. Using his shadow portal abilities, the masked man had created a portal in the same space, with the entrance and exit facing the same direction. Falling into the portal made him almost instantaneously fall out, but upward. He fell in, and out, and in, and out again, each time his ascension reduced by gravity's obvious decrease of his momentum.

Now immensely more safe than before, this current position left him more or less a sitting duck, and so he summoned the winged Arhra puppet to him, having it grab ahold of him during one of his ascensions and the two slowly rose into the air. While the Kamen had managed to better streamline the flight capabilities of the puppet over the original's, there were still limitations, most of which revolved around being able to fully support the weight of a passenger. Countering for this, the puppet and its master flew up to the nearest spire, where the Kamen grabbed the nearest handholds and footholds and combined it with the puppet's wing flapping to bound up to the top.

Finally on a stable base, the puppet released the Kamen and moved to take up a position overlooking the whole of the battlefied. If anything happened, the master would see it through his puppets eyes. Coincidentally, the four duplicates of himself that had been leaping around the different spires had allowed him to deduce the patterns and logistics between the sand bridges that linked the great earthen structures, and so he too began moving. He now knew the whole area like the back of his hand. In an instant, he went from sitting duck to wild goose, moving about the battlefield randomly and practically fully protected from surprise attacks.

Whatever his opponent was up to, she wouldn't catch him sleeping on the job.

******************************

Down at the bottom of the pit, Arhra remained laying in her fallen angelic position. Faint light from above reflected a dull silver glow from her wings, but the environment around her was pitch black, silent after the roar of explosions and falling debris. Silent but for the muffled scraping of something, or somethings, dragging down the spires before hitting the ground with a dull thud.

It was quiet again for a moment, until Arhra heard the sound of footsteps in the dark. Three sets of footsteps, in fact, approaching her from three different directions. All around her now, they suddenly went silent. It was deafeningly silent again, but only for a moment.

"It seems we've gotten to the..... 'bottom' of this," a voice to her left growled, then sighed, "Eh, that was a lousy pun. Oh well, they always say comedy is hard. Death, on the other hand..."

Arhra immediately felt a pair of hands wrap around her head and neck from the right, before suddenly twisting her head with a sharp jerk.

[Arhra]

Whatever Arhra was up to seemed to involve lying on the ground, barely moving. "Anticipated," Arhra murmered almost inaudibly to herself as the shadow puppets closed in. One puppet muttered a lame joke, another one wrapped its hands around her neck and then... burst into flames?

A pulse of heat came off Arhra, a serpentine tongue of fire leaping out of her and stabbing through the first puppet. The puppet jerked on it as the spear of flame continued through it before coiling around and neatly impaling the others upon its lengths, causing them to immolate. Seemed Arhra was too hot for the puppets to handle.

"I dearly wish that had been POS." the splodmancer murmured as the shadows disintegrated. The fire spell was hardly the most powerful of attack spells Arhra possessed, but it would have given POS a nasty surprise had he been the one to set the spell trigger off. Though it was likely it had insufficient power behind it to do any truely serious damage to him, it had been more than enough to deal with his puppets.

It was then Arhra seemed to call upon deep, untapped reserves and do something incredible. She stood up. Wobbling slightly, she said, "Now all I have to do is fight on with the strength of a thousand men." Arhra still had the energy for sarcasm at least.

Her wings hanging limply from her back, Arhra called upon splodmancy again, a tiny ball of energy appearing between her two cupped hands, energy crackling off her fingers and feeding into them. The pale diffuse light that scattered shadows to nothing still floated in the air around her, giving an otherworldly air to her. The light played curious tricks, its banishing of shade almost making it look as if Arhra glowed from within.

Time was to her advantage. Mana would regenerate with time and she felt confident of her chances against the puppets, despite the extensive injuries. The damage would not be worsened if she was careful and she still held her hopes of salvaging her scheme. But she couldn't be entirely passive.

She knew more about the battlefield then POS might have believed. Arhra had used the time not spent in battle well. And she knew there was one shadow unaccounted for in addition to any replacements for the ones she had destroyed Negative Kamen might create. She would not be caught off guard.

The ball of energy split off into half a dozen tiny globes, a tiny spark dancing in their hearts. Each was no larger than a grape. She opened the cage of her fingers and two of them streaked upwards while the other four adopted an orbit around her. They were not particularly powerful, but they would seek their targets unerringly. One for POS and one for the shadow copy of herself. That would give him something to think about.

[POS Industries]

"Well... that certainly is something to think about...."

The Shadow Arhra hovered high above the battlefield, noting the two tiny orbs of energy the came shooting out of the darkness of the pit below. Their faint glow was almost like that of fireflies in the light of the battlefield's perpetually setting sun, but the intent in their movement was much more sinister. The puppet watched as the two projectiles seperated, one moving toward it and the other toward Negative Kamen. Shadow Arhra took immediate evasive action, dropping altitude dramatically and ducking and weaving through the spires, doing everything possible to stave off the attack for just a little longer.

Elsewhere on the battlefied, the Kamen bounded from spire to spire across the tenuous sand bridges that formed only to degrade into nothingness mere seconds later. His connection with the Arhra puppet had alerted him to the approach of the deadly manifestations of today's splodomancer nemesis. He took a moment to create three new duplicates of himself as the sunlight caught him momentarily, two sliding down the nearby spires into the abyss while the third moved off in a completely different direction.

The orb nearly upon him, the Kamen landed upon the top of one of the obelisks and crouched down, springing forth from it as another figure somersaulted over his head, landing where he had been standing a split second before. The fourth Kamen duplicate held his hand out in front of him at the speeding projectile, not unlike a crossing guard, before authoritatively shouting, "Halt, sinner!"

The tiny globe collided squarely in the puppet's chest, enveloping it in a burst of flames. Despite the orb's size, the force of its explosion was enough to cause the Negative Kamen to nearly lose his balance on the sand bridge, but he was able to right himself before plummeting into the void below. Quickly forming a replacement puppet in the light of the explosion, the Kamen continued onward as his latest creation slid downward to join its brethren.

Meanwhile, the winged Arhra clone glanced behind her, seeing that she, too, was about to become quite intimate with an explosion quite shortly. A split second before impact, another shadow puppet leaped between the two with a blood-curdling, "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!"

As her savior was consumed by the fire, Shadow Arhra ascended sharply into the high altitude of the arena once more, continuing to survey the field in its entirety for her master.

*************************

Sliding down the spire to the bottom of the pit, one of the Kamen duplicates bounded of the rock and rolled on the sandy ground and rose to its feet, looking around at its surroundings. Two of its brothers were already down here, winding through the stone forest while he could feel a fourth one being born above at that very moment. He grinned and joined the other two, eventually spotting the target.

Arhra stood at the ready, orbited by the dim twinkle of four more of her deadly explosive charges. Yes, this wave would surely be no more than fodder for her little Orbs-O-Doom, but it was no matter. As each of these four would fall, one more would rise and, more aptly, descend upon her. For as long as she remained in this pit, the closer it would become to her grave.

At that moment, one of the puppets sprang from the darkness to her left, then another from behind, and another in a direct attack to her front, all doing their best to swarm their victim.

The grave was calling to her.