Avatar RP VIII: Chapter VII: Timing

[Arhra]

There was a Bard who was a summoner here. He had no knives to summon with.

There was a mage of mauve magic here. She was probably being too modest for her own good.

There was an imitation white mage here. Her consciousness had been swallowed by moral dilemmas and the darkness in her heart. It would be swallowed up by more things soon enough.

A cosplayer had decided to make herself scarce.

There was man with a box for a head here. The box was full of fatalism and low spirits, with a hint of gloating over possible immortality.

There was a glowing, dead Chaos sorceress here. Dead people were not permitted to interfere.

There was another sorceress here. She was so very tired. And possibly a crossdresser.

There was a dragon here, doing everything a dragon can. Except flying, breathing fire, challenging knights, demanding sacrifices or sleeping on a pile of gold.

There was a Time Knight here. He'd been peddling drugs.

There was a Pyrokitty here. He was looking in blocked rooms and trying to deal with timers.

The hallway went straight and then made an abrupt right angle turn.

It spiralled down, making a half revolution before making another right angle turn, coming to a smaller chamber several meters directly below the site of the battle. There was an ancient dais in the middle.

To the side of the dais, a large blue and pink ball of energy burned through the ceiling, plopped onto the floor and squatted there sullenly.

On top of the raised dais was a U shaped ring of machinery, halfway between pipe organ, ship bridge and Victorian-era supercomputer.

Screens were clustered around, all of them counting down what little time was left.

Tick.

0:20

Tick.

0:19

The controls had been thoroughly smashed up. A long lever had been thrust into the wreckage like a spear. A note was pinned to the panel with it.

You've met with a terrible fate,
haven't you?

Where had it all gone so wrong?

It was probably Pyros and slash or Steel's fault.

[Bard The 5th LW]

Geist

She just stole his pizza!

"HEY GET THE #Q(^$@#($%^)$BELGIUM BACK HERE!" he shouted as he chased after her, shouting some otherworldly obscenity.

Why was she doing this? There were only like 20 seconds, an with the intervals of Bard's posts, they would certainly be too late.

Bard

...It waorked? Holy fuck that just worked! A large rin appeared on Bard's face as Ahrha II collapsed! He did it! He was the one who finished her off! "BOOYAH!!" He was useful! He finished her off!

But why didn't the timer stop? What was it doing! NO NO NO! When you defeat the boss, everything is supposed to fix itself! Thats how this stuff works!

Bard looked around at the timer's. There was little he could do. No knife, no summons, no nothing. Just, like three low level useless spells. God, in hindsight all that summoning stuff was rather crippling an overspecialization.

You've met with a terrible fate,
haven't you?

He scuttled through his inventory. No instruments. He was just a Bard in name. The last true bard in his family came to NPF five generations ago of the Lightwarrior family.

"The only solution I can think of is to break everything everywhere" Bard admitted, "and that is too just sorta justify ourselves in the sense that we tried something."

[PyrosNine]

"Dammit BEN! Go hack someone else's Majora's Mask!" Kitty Pyros mewed furiously at the note.

Welp, he didn't have an ocarina, and there wasn't a howling stone (not that a kitty could howl), so they were pretty screwed, so it was time for Pyros to hit the lever with a weak kitty blast, and hope for the best, even if it just made things more broke.

"Kitty blast" Kitty Pyros said in digimon style, firing a blast of fire from his mouth, hitting the lever square on.

Pyros and Steel would probably reminisce about all this later, at Mime's bar with Cendy, and between pints, look back and say "Remember that one time, with that timer? And that one Evil Arhra? Totally my fault." and the other would go "No, no no, that one was all me!" and Mime would just listen in and mime drink out of an invisible mug, and become really tipsy because he forgot how much he'd drank previously, and couldn't see how many empties he'd left behind. Cendy would drink his fill, then leave during the argument because he knew he could dump his tab on his cousin with no one else the wiser.

Probably.

Kitty Pyros returned and found Mauve, and hopped on her hat. If he was going to die, he'd die somewhere comfortable.

[mauve]

"Who the hell is messing with my hat--- Oh, hi Pyros!" The firekitty was now perched on the brim of Mauve's hat. Hey. There was a cat on her hat. Mauve was tempted to do the rest of the post in Dr. Seuss-esque rhyme to accommodate this new turn of events, but then decided it was too much effort.

"Come on, Pyros." she said. "Let's go fix this. Or make it worse. I dunno which and at this point it probably doesn't really matter."

She reached down to the two knives at her belt.

"Bard." She drew one knife and tossed it to the summoner. "All yours." She wasn't sure if she was being helpful or being an enabler, seeing as how she was pretty sure he had to hurt himself in order to summon anything, but again, at this point it really didn't matter.

She knelt by the decimated control panel, eyeing it critically. She had no idea what she was looking at. Oh well.

"It's been fun," she said. She drew her remaining dagger and stabbed it into the side of the panel, wedging it between two connecting metal plates. The metal began to peel apart. "I have no regrets. Okay, well, yes I do, but it sounds better if I say that I don't. So for all intents and purposes, I have no regrets." The metal panel broke free. Mauve grabbed it with both hands, ripped it off the machine, and hurled it off to one side.

"Bingo." Underneath the panel was a variety of wires and important looking pieces of machinery. Mauve had no idea what they were but most movies involving explosives ended up with someone slicing apart wires and important pieces of machinery.

"Bard's plan of breaking stuff until something dies is officially underway!" Mauve declared.

She raised both hands, and the air around them crackled with purple sparks of raw magical energy. Cutting wires wasn't Mauve's style.

"Let's void some warranties." The purple sparks solidified into flames. She didn't have time to dramatically wonder whether to cut the blue wire or the red wire, so she'd just try and melt everything into slag in one go. It would either stop the timer or kill everyone, and given the fact that the very real threat of insta-death was already looming above them anyway, she didn't feel too bad about the possibility of failure. The mage pointed both open palms at the exposed machinery and yelled out a command. The control panel was about to be barbecued.

[Steel Shadow]

Originally Posted by Arhra

You've met with a terrible fate,
haven't you?

"Not yet we haven't!"

Time rolled forward.


0:18 0:17 0:160:150:13:12:765321-

Tick.

...Aparently Steel wanted to remnd everyone he was still in this RP.

[Arhra]

A lot can happen in eighteen seconds.



"HEY GET THE #Q(^$@#($%^)$BELGIUM BACK HERE!" Geist yelled at Gestalt Arhra as she ran off with his pizza.

"Run like a Kenyan if you want it back!" the chaos... thing shouted back gleefully as she ran down the street, sprinting towards the tower.

There was no way she could possibly make it but she didn't care.




In a lab far away from all the fuss and the fighting, a passive-aggressive war of dominance was entering its final stages. Jockeying for position and working on spaceships and such was far more important than some silly timer, after all.

"Mmmm-hm! I declare, this new piece of work combined with my operative designs, old refurbished space equipment, and my esteemed colleagues ideas stolen wholesale, I reckon I've built me a real beaut of a starship, with all the fixins'!" Dr Ethington proclaimed, treating herself to an ice-cream float to celebrate this triumph.

0:16

"Eeeethington."

Arhra V entered the room, staying barely ahead of a sea of hair. Reversing the polarity had fixed the pair's tangling issues for now, but how much longer? "I see you managed to get a little work done." she said dismissively, looking at the fruits of her labour.




There was a moment of quiet in the ash filled chamber where the NPFers had defeated Arhra II

Shyria had no idea what was going on and there wasn't exactly a lot of time to explain it. She'd been defeated an evil sorceress on the surface, found the others fighting the same sorceress down here, seen the battle end and the countdown not end. It was very complicated.

0:14

Rose had pulled a Fury ligament diverting her sorceress opponent's penultimate attack and was still recovering. Luckily for everyone, her taking a ridiculous number of pills at once had shown no side effects but a tendency towards redness.

0:13

Overcast was being a bit of a fatalistic ass, rubbing his possibly immortality in everyone's faces and telling them how he'd steal their stuff when they were dead. He was feeling a certain vibe and trying to fit in with it.

0:12

Arhra was both dead and incapable of doing anything for the moment.




Bard found himself instrument free. This countdown would be yet another problem that the NPFers had failed to resolve with the power of song.

"The only solution I can think of is to break everything everywhere" Bard admitted, "and that is to just sorta justify ourselves in the sense that we tried something."

The man spoke truth.

0:10

Mauve said she had no regrets, even though she did, and tried something. With a cat on her hat, she pried open a panel in the smashed up console in front of her.

"Bard's plan of breaking stuff until something dies is officially underway!" Mauve declared. "Let's void some warranties."

The console got more smashed up so magically!

0:09

Mauve knew the cat on her hat was the fine Pyros Nine. The cat on her cat wanted sleep and then twine.

0:08

Steel decided the only option was to skip to the end. He tried to bend time with his powers, adding the Fury red to make things go faster.

0:07

There was nothing else. There was no time.

0:06


You've


0:05



met



0:04




with




0:03





a





0:02






terrible






0:01







fate.








0:00









A pillar of fire stretched towards the heavens from the former site of the NPF.


The city had vanished from the face of the earth, a burning crater where it had once been.


The NPF was gone.

[Arhra]

Haven't you?










Blasting off into space with the whole NPF?






How could you?!



Atop the pillar of fire was the NPF, the vast engines built into its foundations going full-blast.

In ancient times, a traveller had come to where the NPF would be, carrying plans and bending all of his persuasion to convince the people of that time to build something very important.

Everyone had forgotten about it, even its instigators.

The NPFers picked themselves up, feeling a lessened burden of the city's upward acceleration after the monstrous thrust of the first few seconds.

In the chamber of the battle, a warning klaxon came on. The floor recessed and began sliding open like a hatchway, the control room occupied by Bard, Mauve, Pyros and Steel visible thorugh the widening gap.

The ceiling began opening in a similar manner, behind it another hatch. A series of them recessed away, a tiny circle of blue sky visible at the end of the chimney.

The floor in the battle chamber had just about completely vanished at this point.

In the control room, a lurch and a sensation of free fall was the only warning they got as clamps released and the platform shot straight up. They emerged into daylight and kept rising, the lift mechanism scaling the side of the Kurosen Tower.

It reached the top with a lurch and then the disk shaped platform pivoted on the climbing mechanism and settled into place so it was seated firmly in place as the new tower top.

From this new vantage point, they could see the ground falling away past the outskirts of the NPF as they rose ever higher into the sky.

Destination: Space?!

[Overcast]

"I did not see that coming."

Overcast stared over the edge of the end of the tower his Box an absolute blank. I mean it wasn't often that he was absolutely stunned, but he was absolutely STUNNED! This was awesome, beyond awesome. Whoever made this happen was the new word for awesome, as his Box began to slowly etch a smirk onto its front surface. And he began to laugh, falling back onto his back and staring at the stars they blasted toward. It was all so beautiful, and really after that mind numbing depression this was a real solid change,

"BACK TO SPACE!"

[Astral Harmony]

"What the hell just happened?!" Maya demanded. Maya was a muscular raven-haired catgirl engineer with a too-thin white tank top and thick black chainpants who beat the snot out of enemies with a very large adjustable wrench. Armored Bishoujo's spacecraft, the Azure Aesir, was in outer space above NPF, though it didn't remain above NPF for long since it seemed the place was rising up to meet them.

"Do you think the captain is alright?" Alucard asked with concern. Alucard was a pretty and slender girl with pink hair and holy powers who used a longstaff and healing powers to help the crew.
"Armored's vital signs are stable," Alean sad, barely glancing at the captain's console. "She is merely uncontious. She seems to have sustained some injury, but nothing debilitating."
Alean was something of a mentor for Armored, though it wasn't long that Armored surpassed Alean in overall potential. Alean wore a bizarre getup of belts criss-crossed over each other like some bizarre mesh, along with some leather gauntlets, boots and headgear, and swiftly dealt with her foes with an assault rifle.

Alucard looked out as the NPF continued to climb. "Should we...maybe hail them?"
"Sure, let's do that. Armored didn't want us involved in this NPF stuff, but we can't exactly ignore it when she's knocked out. Let's find out their frequency and lock onto it. I'd like to be in constant contact with them."

[Steel Shadow]

The sky rolled above and below them. Clouds swirled, and in their foolish frolicking, were smashed apart by the raising city. In the control room, situated at the very peak of it all, Steel leaned out and watched the world fall away.

"Heh."

His cape fluttered around his legs as the air rushed through it.

"Heh heh."

Fury energy glowed around him still, his rather massive dosage nowhere near expended.

"AhahahahahahhahahahhaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"

He was very happy!

"IT WORKED! MY PLAN WORKED!" Steel spun to face the others in the room, a hand pointing accusingly at them, while the other was raised into a fist of victory. "You all doubted me! 'Oh noooo Steel, you can't mess with tiiime, Steel, you can't do that noooo' Well bite me, you unbelieving bastards! I'm the freaking Time MASTER, you hear me?!?" Fury flowed around him as he smiled wide.

But then it settled, and he waved away his grievances. "Now, I'll admit, there were setbacks. Mostly I blame Bard and Arhra. One for being a Dirty communist for no real reason, and the other for trying to kill us all. But it's all worked out now. Who cares? We're flying into space to combat the evil Valker hordes. I think. It's been a while. And we have a flying city! Isn't that neat?" He folded his arms and turned back to look out the window again. "I think it's neat."



"...We probably shouldn't have smashed the controls quite so hard, though."