NPF Avatars 5 - The Universe, Breaking Us Down

[Nikose Tyris]

"...." Nikose stared at the Marmalade. "...brilliant."

Naked Nikose drew Nenyel out into longsword form.

Sunose did likewise.

"Hey, what happens when your shadow is smarter than you?" Sunose asked.

"...wait, are you saying your smarter than me?" Nik asked.

"...Look! Hats!" Sunose cried out and pointed.

While Nikose was looking around frantically suddenly, Sunose dropped a cloak over his shoulders made of shadow energy that could wrap around him. "There, that's one problem solved..."

"Thanks!" Nikose said cheerfully, still looking for the hats.

"...Now go be a hero." Sunose grabbed Nikose by the new cloak, whirled him around HARD, and flung him at the Marmalade, leaping atop the now flying Nikose like a human surfboard.

Nikose was still looking for the hats, and Sunose was just greatful he had a shadowblade in the shape of a longsword and not something stupid like an umbrella.

[Fenris]

Fenris drew Irium. 'I'm going to have to use you as a very sharp whip; you think you can handle that for me?'

'Of course I can, Fenry!'

And so he did. Fenris twirled the whip around him, getting accustomed to Irium's newfound weight and weight distribution. Fenris cracked the whip in Marmalade's general direction and watched the whip lengthen to the extent where it sliced Marmalade cleanly in two. Irium retracted, and the Marmalade wibbled and wobbled for a brief second.

"Ha! I killed-" And then it reformed into one creature whose attention was on its attacker.

"...Well, fuck." Fenris began to run, waiting for the right moment to crack the whip again.

[Arhra]

Arhiyara riding Arhiyara had charged unaware into the temporal sinkhole around Raiden, perhaps the product of the collapsing pocket reality or because of some other enigmatic reason. Renee snatched to safety by herself, the dragon pair fell into the seething temporal slime, the sands of time and dust of moments ground down so far they became this fluidic mess. The Arhiyaras sunk without a trace, tainting it with their chaotic bodies.

Eternity crammed in a few seconds later, five heads burst to the surface, all tied to the same body and roaring defiance like a queen of dragons. The central head bent and coughed, a tiny pale shape falling into the tainted sludge. The others looked around in confusion, trying to tread time.

Then, at an unimaginable distance, the bubbling and seething sludge parted, a great rounded dome of land rising from it. Densely covered with thick ropes of shiny black, each trailing into the depths, fluid sluicing off them, it continued to rise. The sides fell away sharply, the long strands still reaching all the way to the water.

Higher than it was wide now, breaks in the dripping fringe of blackness revealing the pale substance of its form. Titled towards them it was, atop a narrower column that was slowly straightening. The breaks widened and then suddenly the trick was given away. Crimson eyes, mouth, nose. It was a head. Arhra's head to be precise. The tops of bare shoulders just barely out of the amoebic sea, it looked down at them, features composed in regal calm.

Arhiyararhiyara looked back in bafflement and then shuddered. Very suddenly she was growing very swiftly and the monstrously huge Arhra shrinking. As she did, extra limbs extruded themselves from her body, as though entire dragons were trying to escape from her. Some did, flapping frantically away from her expanding bulk only to be snapped up by ravenously hungry heads or reabsorbed as they were struck by a flailing limb. Arhiyararhiyara beat her myriad wings clumsily, freeing herself from the goop. Her heads swung to the only other real feature in this endless sea - Arhra. The titan was only twice her size now and seemed to be suffering from similar problems, hunched over, a tower of exotic forms springing from her back, some recognisable as older incarnations, many resembling her current shape. A straining mass of flesh, she suddenly tore apart, some of the flying tatters reshaping back into Arhras and then dissolving into light. Arhiyararhiyara dropped a dozen jaws in shock at the sight.

The dragoness found she didn't meet the same fate, instead growing even faster, heads sprouting and regarding each other with perplexity, a confused tangle of limbs trailing from her bloated body. Becoming enraged, Arhiyararhiyara tore at herself, sloughing off limbs and heads, only to find them growing back almost before she'd removed them.

A living mountain, Arhiyararhiyara gave up, a hundred brains chattering in confusion about what to do. Several decided all this growth was making her thirsty and started drinking the temporal sludge. She continued to swell at an ever faster rate, a fractal dragon in her ceaseless profusion of new limbs. Planet-sized, larger than a sun, then the size of a galaxy, Arhiyararhiyara could still see no end to the amoebic sea.

Finally it happened, she saw it curving around, diminishing. She held the globe in a claw, dismayed as it shrank away to nothing, vanishing past the point of perception. Body expanding outwards faster than the speed of light, Arhiyararhiyara felt cramped, confined and bored, running out of space to exist in. A moment of terrible pressure and then she felt the edges hedging her in suddenly give.

With a gasp, she burst through the surface of the temporal sludge and scrabbled at the edge of the temporal sinkhole, pulling herself out of the warped vortex and back into what passed for reality. While accounts would disagree on what had just happened, it was safe to say that both and neither had. Arhiyara was restored to her former form, back to regular numbers of limbs and two heads. But their relationship seemed to have become strained, one head lunging for the other, determined to be the only one. The other head came to the same idea, but too slow.

Teeth dug in, gritting against the pain, and then neatly ripped the head off. Already feeling it being to dissolve in her mouth, the dragoness tossed the disintegrating remains aside. The severed head melting into chaotic goop as it flew, the stuff melting off in messy globs to reveal a dazed, wingless Rhiya. She hit the ground with a splat and a cloud of dust, not entirely freed from the draconic remains.

Rhiya stood up dazedly, the last of the goop falling away. To her shock, she saw her familiar draconic shape in front of her. But it was not her. Glancing back, Rhiya found her wings gone too. She wasn't herself. But if that was her there in front of her and she wasn't herself, then was she no-one? A scary thought to contemplate.

The dragon undulated smoothly closer to Rhiya, hide darkly gleaming with an oily sheen. At some point in the temporal misadventures, there had been a shift in scale, the singular dragon much smaller than her fused antecedent. She remained large enough to dwarf Rhiya quite satisfactorily though. She raised a claw and looked at it introspectively, turning her gaze to Rhiya next. "How unexpected." the dragoness hissed with Arhra's voice.

This solved some of the identity crisis. The dragon that was her was, in fact, actually Arhra, meaning that instead of being no-one, Rhiya was herself. Just... not her normal self. Other problems were just beginning though.

"Still, it brings to memory grievances left unaired." the draconic Arhra hissed, definately playing up the sinister air. Rhiya had been involved in circumstances leading to Arhra's death several times in the past. Arhra looked at her claw again, flexing the razor edged digits experimentally, imagining the damage they could cause. She seemed to find it fascinating. Rhiya was just standing around, looking confused. Arhra looked up, lips drawing back in a toothy smile and then she lashed out, aiming to swat Rhiya with her claw.

[Wizardcat]

A swirl of twilight filled the already glowing air near the newly formed gel monster. It formed together creating a portal through which something was coming. A purple-clad figure which most could probably recognize from the first round of the tournament stepped out to see Fenris with a newfound whip running away as the monster lashed out with multi-colored tendrils. "What the hell is that?!"

Without waiting for an answer, the newcomer leapt toward the tendrils, drawing all three blades as he did so, and slashed with all three. Wizzle was surprised as they went cleanly through the creature and the limbs fell to the floor. The cat mage landed as the severed pieces began to morph with the main body again. Okay, he thought. It seems to regenerate quickly against physical atatcks, let's try some magic! Quickly scanning for something he could use as a basis for the magic, he noticed the remains of ice attacks in the air and on several objects such as the wall. Sheathing the two blades in his paws and then drawing on the glacial energy, Wizzle generated a ball of icy magic and directed it towards the attacking mass.

"Anyone glad to see me?"

[Mesden]

"I thought I had made this perfectly clear in the first round with Mime," within all of the confusion and reality melding, stood Mesden. Her fists shook from infuriation and impending release, the gauntlets peeling from her hands in a thick mist, like dry ice in water, and began to swirl behind her, ripping apart the already misadjusted realities with. Her eyes regained their fiery glow, and all that saw her felt a wrenching recoil in the depths of their being, "Do Not," the second word echoed in the very being of all there, for her lips were no longer moving, and she was speaking in the native language to all of the spirits in the room.

The word caused a rumble -- not a trace of an earthquake nor a volcano -- but a heavy pressure that descended upon the group as cracks in the misaligned reality began to culminate with her reality. The heavy miasma of spiritual pressure seemed to crack away at her skin and pseudo-mortal coil, as small pieces of her body began to break away like glass and sift back into the spiritual plane -- the plane that was connecting to her body at this point.

"INTERRUPT," already her ethereal form began to take precedence in reality, her voice now part of the very existence of every being's life, and the powerful anger that drove her transition only intensified the soul shuddering words like shouting into a megaphone.

"MY FIGHT!" her final cry was not only a sinking command that no one could help but consider, no, it was a battle cry for her now. It was what many might call a 'warning', because as soon as the word had begun, her now barely tangible arm had reared back, soaking in the latent energy of her realm, and swung a massive swing. A pendulum of fury followed by a wave -- no, not a wave, but hundreds of smaller waves of caustic ethereal energy -- no less a tidal surge of soul evisceration, meant to eliminate the life of all it passed over, yet harmlessly passing through the nonliving. The almost depraved look of anger in her emerging form gave no solace as it had before, only arisen fury fortified by a power over sheer life, to give or take, to heal or maim, and she her resolve was to maim every being in this damned room.

[Fenris]

"Oh man, this is the worst Caturday ever!" Fenris moaned, having not noticed Wizzle's entrance. He ran, as the Marmalade launched globules at him which Irium, having curled up into a compact disk (not a CD, just realized the acronym), blocked. Fenris jumped and let Irium fly, slicing cleanly through the marmalade as he drew out his boomerhammer, and threw that too. The hammer got stuck in the marmalade, and did not return, the handle sticking out.

That was when he noticed Wizardcat launching an ice spell at the Marmalade. Catching Irium, he ran over to Wizardcat. "Cast lightning at my hammer! It'll conduct very well; it's made of silver!" Fenris then leaped backwards with a final shout of "Nice to see you again!" and ran in the opposite direction, guiding the Marmalade away from Wizardcat.

'How you holding up?'

'Very well, Fenry! Who was that?'

'His name is Wizardcat. He's a friend.'

'You'll have to introduce me to this Wizzly!'

Fenris smiled and held back a laugh, rolling to avoid being hit by a goo blobule.

[IHateMakingNames]

Originally Posted by FenrisWolf

"Oh man, this is the worst Caturday ever!"

Nearby Fenris, in the wall.

[Nikose Tyris]

Nikose and Sunose flew hard at the Marmalade, listening to the battle music playing in the background - Sunose found the whole situation quite ridiculous, and Nikose was thinking how yummy the marmalade would be on impact.

Sunose leapt off, lunging at the marmalade.

Nikose went poot.

From deep inside the marmalade, Nikose observed Sunose slashing and attacking on top of the marmalade, his legs stuck in it while he was slashing away.

Nikose, meanwhile, started swallowing. go ahead, I'm waiting for the jokes.

[PyrosNine]

Pyros did not like the way things were going. He was lying near unconscious underneath a pile of candy. It had meant two things: His flare for the dramatic had cost him a second NPF tournament victory. Damn!

Secondly, this wasn't a bad way to lose. Candy!

Still near unconscious, Pyros ate the candy in mouthfuls, hoping to get back up sooner.

***

Pyros (Alternate Dimensional Pyros) took Phoenixbot by the arm. "I am sure your mother is very proud of you. You are a fine nonhuman defender of justice. But you still have work to do. I presume that you are not the only one here who does not originate from this warped bit of space/time, and that therefore there are others who are in danger of suffering this place's collapse. We must gather them all, and then find a way to escape. Quickly!"

As if to stress the importance, Pyros pointed up to the sky with his other hand. It was a darkened sky, yet there were specks of "not sky" that were windows into the other areas of this bubble, where differing landscapes and creatures could be seen. Even WORSE, through one pocket of "not sky", Pyros pointing upwards could be seen from an angle, proving the instability of the area.

"Do you understand?"
***
Ecurt sighed. This was where it got messy. He felt like he'd been squeezed through bottle, much like the evil fruit preserves attacking at present.

When Marmalade made it's appearance, he immediately looked for his Plushies. There they were, safe beyond harm, except not doing anything important.

"Come on guys! Chop chop! Evil Mid Boss attacking! Can't you hear the music?"

"WE ON BREAK!!!"
"I have to take 'a break' at this time. Sorry."

Ecurt sighed. He guessed this was all up to him. In which case, he leapt for cover and started filming, even if it might end up being a snuff film.

[Sithdarth]

Sithdarth was gradually become used to his new perspective or maybe he was just stabilizing finally. The world and once been any ever shifting kaleidescope of events and images as he shifted position spatially and temporally. The experience of sensing reality from several viewpoints neigh simultaneously was as might be expected disorienting. Now that he was coming back to himself Sith say the need to help.

After much contemplation he could only thing of one possible avenue. Physically attacking the thing wasn't going to work. He didn't have access to magic so that option was out. Even if he had access to it the Point Singularity Pistol was just a tad bit of overkill; he couldn't really justify sacrificing the planet to kill this thing. Noting the seeming over abundance of electrical energy one last possibility came to mind.

Tapping into the nearest source of electricity, and with great concentration rearranging his internal structure, Sith yelled a shortish warning. "Those that in contact with metal that don't like heat or electricity better drop it or shield themselves from EM radiation now." With that he began to hum a rather familiar hum. Something everyone with a microwave has heard while waiting for a late night snack. The metal in the room began to sizzle, crack, and even pop a little as electricity began to arc at random. Leaving black char marks and a fair amount of heat where it hit the mini lightening bolts concentrated mostly on the Marmalade in the center. Of course due it its semi-liquid nature the Marmalade was also suffering semi-intense heating from having its atoms accelerated by the radiation.