Welcome to Gaia! ::

Description: A special star is in town and his name is Erin Karter, one of the most famous pop stars in the world of Gaia. Think a pretty boy with rocking white short hair who likes to wear open shirts to reveal his hot bod'. He has agreed to come to the GTB to stage one of the largest concerts in the world. The atmosphere is vibrant as thousands of fans crowd around the circular stage, bright lights swerving here and there to create a flashy, illuminated ring of adrenaline. There's even that fake fog surrounding the DJ platform. However, the singer and his band has decided to take a stand on the higher platform where his DJ is performing, allowing the fighters to jam it out in combat while he lets the performance of his teen voice excite the raging fans screaming all around. Several steel pillars that hold the many lights tower over the stage above up to forty feet, where more steel beams connect horizontally to create sort of a ceiling for the stage itself.

Field Measurements: The stage is a good fifty feet wide in diameter with the twenty foot tall DJ platform in its center. The base of the DJ platform is sloped. The height from the stage to the floor where the crowd is about three feet with stairs at each cardinal direction of the stage.

Ten Count Boundary: Being knocked off stage starts the ten count. The flying rule is also in effect.

Other Penalties: No harming the audience or any NPCs. If your character falls off the stage, just assume everyone backed away fast enough to avoid being hit, with security guards keeping people back. If your character somehow gets to the top of the DJ platform, which is pretty slippery, the NPCs here will get away to let you duke it out if you must.

Fight Ends: After August 5th, 11:59 PM Central

((OHOHOHO!!))

It took about a good two minutes before the sound system was repaired, as this multi-million dollar popstar had back ups just in case. He couldn't let the hype die down for another minute or the crowd would lose their energy. A rising WHRRRRRRRR loud ring roared through the stadium before the music kicked back in.

"IS EVERYBODY READY," he shouted to the fans all lifting their hands, not even knowing whether they were alive or dead.

The digital beat began anew, and the kid's voice blasted through the atmosphere once more. Of course, he sound crew weren't happy at Deitric now, both for his ignorance of who Erin Karter was and for his atrocious action of destroying one of their systems.

((The sound won't be back on until both fighters make at least three posts. Then on Deitric's fourth post, the sound will return.))

Deitric remained silent while the crowd parted to let his opponent through. He had last spoken to James in passing prior to the tournament, and he had expected the man to do well. Thus far, he had not been disappointed. Beneath his calm facade was the ever present hint of adrenaline, the thrill of anticipation and the rush that came from combat. Glory was the goal; it was all or nothing. A warrior never hoped for anything less than a proper opponent, and as with every opponent, he was ever expectant.

When James called out his name, the man's response was a simple raise of his hand in a sign of acknowledgment, holding the gesture for a moment only before letting his gloved hand drop back to his waist. The light from the demon slayer's hand briefly fought with the stagelights for dominance before it was snuffed out, but the brave made no significant display of power in response. His pupils dilated momentarily, illuminated with an inner glow before focusing, the light suffusing outward so that the light spread outward from the entirety of both sockets.

"As you say," he agreed.

The warrior threw himself forward into a run, but his path only took him towards James for a few short steps before he leaped up and outward - almost as if he were aiming to throw himself feet first into the crowd.

KERRANG

Instead, the bottom of his boots smashed hard against one of the the tesserated, skeletal towers of metal that held up a stage light array. The metal groaned in protest as the brunt of Deitric's weight bore into it, and the screws that bolted it to the ground snapped as the entire tower - nearly 20' of steel - toppled forward. With the light array ontop, it was like a giant fly swatter, poised to land smack-dab ontop of James Eredas.

And Deitric maintained his balance on the falling tower, looking as if he were riding it on its way down. The crowd screamed in surprise and fear, even though they were safe. Cables were cut and severed, left hanging sparking in the air, and a handful of lights had been knocked free to crash into the floor. The musicians above in the DJ booth cowered beneath the turntable.

Thankfully, that also meant they couldn't play - or sing.

The joys of improvisation at work.

Luckily for the crowd, the lighting array had smashed bulbs-down, all of the shattered glass contained beneath its not-inconsiderable bulk. Hanging like lank jungle vines, thick power cords swung in the air, forcibly ripped from their housing in the lighting array and from the stitching of heavy-duty staples that were meant to keep them above the head of the performers.

One of the sparking cords was in Deitric's right hand as the support tower he was standing on shuddered its last, vibrations from the crash dying beneath his feet. There was a visible, three inch gash in the leather of his studded and strapped jacket where the knife had caught him in the chest and seemingly bounced off. Something black and scaly beneath the leather shone dully in what light was left, as if he were wearing dragonscales.

It was, he had to admit, a close call. Not for the first time, fortune had saved him where fate could not.

Without a moment of hesitation, Deitric adjusted his grip and clasped his hand around the end of the livewire and the cackling, exposed metal wiring disappeared in the clench of his fist.

KSH-KSH-KSH-KSH--

Suddenly overloaded by the power surge that moved down the cord and into the warrior, the arrangements of lights blew out violently, showering a twinkling storm of glass onto the stage. The nearest speakers that shared the same electrical wiring and pathways began to screech and smoke until nothing but white noise droned from them. The larger, stabler pieces of sound equipment simply warbling in protest as their source of power was redirected to a single point; Deitric Jocasta.

The surviving lights - those that weren't direct arrays on the metal towers surrounding the stage - had flickered and dimmed, but were still giving of some sort of illumination over the crowd. Ball and arc lightning burst into existence around the brave and died in the same instance like a light show gone from Hell. The volume of the amps and distant speakers grew and died at random. Not even he could draw out the level of electrical power that served as the lifeblood for the entire stadium without dying, but he had certainly hemorrhaged and directed a portion of it, however small.

The moment had only taken two or three seconds at most as soon as Deitric touched the exposed metal, standing his ground atop the metal beast he'd felled. Sickly black smoke curled up from the hand that grasped power cord, which had ceased sparking, and bright light blazed like fire from inside of the brave's eyes, like a human Jack o' Lantern. The air around him brrrrzzzzed with the thrum of static electricity.

This was what power was. It was like being born again. He had rarely introduced such large external charges to himself before, and each time, Deitric had found that he could barely direct the energy, let alone control it. This time was different though; the energy was leashed and lashed by his will and the experience he had gained since his the first time the scene had been played out, against Ebris Dhifi in his first Heaven or Hell. That time, he had needed to jam the cord into his arm just to draw the power out. This time, it called to him, and he to it.

His will was its command, his whim its direction.

If James hadn't attacked him in the span of those scarce seconds that he had taken to cannibalize and assimilate some of the power from the electrical system of the concert stage, Deitric would drop the dead power cord, letting it sway like a hangman's noose, an unseen body hanging from its unmade knot. The palm of his hand was an angry, burnt, blistered red, but he made a fist all the same.

"Come," he motioned towards James with his left hand, stepping off of the fallen metal spire and onto the stage towards his opponent. Through the pain of his singed hand, he smiled.

Deitric's voice came from his lips, but it was also coming from the speakers he'd seemingly burnt out, casting eerily around the concert stage like some sort of ghost transmission, dying into a feedback of echoes that faded to radio static.

Deitric's head tilted to the side while he watched James go about evening the odds. Rebar was heavy - a straight stick of iron or steel. It weighed more than any sword would have at the same length, but as far as "cracking skulls like eggs" went, the piece of construction material could do a good job. It wasn't the sort of thing most men would want to tango with.



It didn't intimidate the tribesman, though. He turned to face James after stepping lightly off the fallen tower, shards of glass crunching beneath his boots. His hands had since curled into fists and came up to a high boxing guard as he began to approach his opponent with what must have been a definite sense of purpose powering his swift, sure steps; as if the rebar in the man's hand didn't even give him a single worry.



With something like as crude and heavy as rebar, there wasn't much in the ways of subtlety. You built with it, or you brained someone with it. Deitric would have to be blind to miss the swing coming his way as the pole of metal careened through the air, but even if he was muscularly powerful, not even he could physically block something as weighty as that. Not physically, at least.



Luckily, he didn't have to. The hum of static power grew in power as he threw himself forward, deeper into the path of the blow. It was a common enough tactic for trying to take off some of the sting of a swing, but drawing close wasn't going to stave off rebar. What would, however, was magnetism. Deitric emitted a strong, magnetic field, and when the rebar had gotten close enough, it too had been magnetized - and they shared the same magnetic charge. Opposites attract; likes repel.



Even so, the brave's magnetic muscles weren't as strong as his real ones - the swing would certainly weaken as the steel resisted the temptation to strike Deitric, whose magnetic capabilities were more potent than usual thanks to the boost in energy he'd taken, but it could still ugly him up as much as a good punch to the mouth. Thankfully, his upraised arm took the brunt of the blow squarely across the bulk of his shoulder and upper bicep, head ducked down and chin tucked. His armor proved pitiably useless against blunt force trauma. It felt like someone had just broke a broom handle over him, but at least it didn't feel like rebar. It hurt, but not as much as it would have. Not enough to stop him. And that was a problem - he wasn't stopping.



The Khasmin man stepped in past the quasi-repelled rebar while it struck him, barely pausing as he sought to move in to close quarters. James - unless he had swung with both hands - still had one hand free, but if he could hit his opponent, then the black-garbed brave could hit him, and he was certainly close enough for either happening to occur. Ducking slightly, both his arms shot out like twin pistons, aiming to smash his fists as hard as he could squarely into James's chest, his right aimed for the center of the chest, knuckles up, and the left aiming for a couple of inches below the solar plexus, closed palm up to provide a mirror opposite to his right fist. Normally, it would have hurt, but the circumstances were far from normal, if the dual blows struck.





Not one, but two super-powered blows, aimed squarely for the demon slayer's torso, up close and personal. It was like someone had just loaded a double barrel shotgun and then unloaded it point blank, without the bloody shredding of flesh and fatality, but with all the sort of raw, obscene violence. It was going to be a painful experience, to say the least, when - if - the two fists hammered home across the sparse distance between the two men.

If both blows struck, there would be enough forced generated and transferred to blow the fire warrior back off his feet and several yards through the air. Deitric wasn't exempt from pain, though - beneath the sound of the blows (if they had indeed struck) would be the quiet, crackling of finger bones breaking as his left pinky and ring, and right middle finger all broke in tandem under the force of his blows, sending fiery lances of pain running through both his arms.

The pain would be worth it, if the twinned blows struck. Even if only one struck home. The wear and tear the technique put on the darkskinned tribesman was nothing to the stress it put on the bodies of his opponents. If a few broken knuckles or fingers were the Devil's Due, then he'd just have to grit his teeth and pay it; gladly so.

If there had been time, Deitric might have been surprised. But surprise was simply part of the game; no fighter could anticipate every single move or motion of their opponent. It simply didn't happen, even the greatest tacticians could predict so many potential responses. It was when a fighter was presented with adversity that their ability became apparent through improvisation on the fly; good fortune often concealed it.

Their size difference slowed the throw, but that mattered little - with the proper application of leverage through the right mechanism, even weight and strength could eventually be overcome. But a sacrifice throw put one fighter on their back in order to do the same to the other, it worked because momentum forced one man along an immutable path. What happened when the same throw was applied to an opponent who could change their momentum without physical aid?

It became a trap of the opponent's own making.

James had thrown himself onto his back in order to force Deitric off his own feet, and it had succeeded - the larger of the two fighters felt his weight lurching inexorably forward, his feet leaving the surface of the stage. But the tribesman didn't intend to go quietly; he wasn't going to let the daemon slayer take him for a ride that easily. At the same time James's foot ignited with a flaming boost into the brave's stomach, something else burst to life, point blank between the two men, emanating from the black-haired warrior's fists.



Without an iota warning, all the energy that had been pent up in Deitric's arms - unable to be put to use in direct punches - was suddenly unleashed in the form of a massive Maelstrom Spiral, bearing down right ontop of James. The burst of fire around his abdomen had pushed the lower half of his body up, when abruptly the Spiral drove his entire body back down, arms and upper-body first. The entire phenomena was large enough to engulf not only both fighters, but a circular radius of almost four meters. No amount of pyrotechnics could compare to the lightshow that was going on at that moment.

Enveloped in a massive sphere of cackling, raw power, the force bore downward, essentially trapping the daemon hunter in between a rock and a hard place - the lightning swirl of the Maelstrom, with Deitric at the center was the hammer, and the floor was the anvil. The entire stage was alight, as if someone had turned on one giant light bulb right where the two fighters had been. So much force was being emitted point blank that the stage beneath them begin to dent, bowing inwards from the immense pressure.

Suddenly - like all Maelstroms - the cyclonic sphere of energy abruptly reversed itself. Instead of propelling Deitric forward, it was now meant to propel his opponent away - but with nowhere to go, James would be (if he had been trapped in the first place) pushed harder against the ground while the tribesman would be thrown up into the air, the spiral of power pushing him upwards as it engulfed the area of impact in a cone of lightning, sound, and fury. Loose pieces of metal tumbled about as the excess of electricity played havoc on the electromagnetic field. Throughout the entire episode - which only lasted a few seconds, at most - and for a long moment afterward, the roar of thunder ripped through the stadium, enhanced by the distinct acoustics of the stage.

With a crash, Deitric landed like a meteorite in the DJ station, smashing a massive, multi-tiered keyboard-synthesizer beneath his body. He had managed to control his landing by turning in the air, but his flight path had been a bit beyond his means. He hoped they didn't intend to have him pay for whatever he had just broke. He didn't know the name of it, but the pieces he was lying in and on looked expensive.

Erin Karter swore aloud and the entire quintet of musicians skittered to the back end of the DJ station, which was proved to be fairly spacious. They disliked most of the fighters, but now one of the more notable ones was in booth with them. Garbed in black leather with studs and spikes and all manner of straps and bolts, with smoke curling off of him as if he had just dragged himself out of a burning building, the long haired fighter terrified them. For a moment, they thought he must have been dead.

"...Ow."

The brave picked himself up out of the wreckage, his entire right side throbbing painfully, and Erin and crew skittered even further away, if such a thing were possible. Hard plastic and electronic material proved to be a not-so-great landing, but it was better than the floor, and not nearly as long of a fall; the zenith of his upward flight had only been ten feet higher than the DJ booth. Rising from the ruined, ten thousand gold machine, he looked out over the stage to see what had become of his opponent, who - if he wasn't mistaken - he had crushed and electrocuted into the floor of the concert stage.

But there was always room for a surprise or two.

"Tch," Deitric tutted thoughtfully while he watched his opponent pick himself up off the ground. The metal strings of the guitar in the DJ booth thrummed softly, reacting to the magnetic and electric interference in the air from his presence.

'I would have guessed as much,' he thought. The front of his jacket was scorched, and the leather was beginning to peel, but the tribesman had long since stopped caring about cosmetics. He crunched broken keyboard keys beneath his feet as he stepped up behind the hollow countertop that served as the front of the booth and the half-wall for the disc jockey to set things on.

The brave surveyed the stage briefly. Shattered glass covered the ground like barbed wire, and the tower he had overturned sat across the "front' of the stage like some the skeletal remains of some sort of animal. From behind, the musicians watched him warily. For a moment, it looked as if his back were widening, like Deitric was going to grow wings at any moment.

WHUSH

Instead, the counter-top he'd been standing in front of went flying through the air towards James. The widening of his back had been his lats flexing as he suddenly ripped the table off the ground and into the air in one, upward shove. Like a desk, the underside was "empty" to allow for equipment storage below the actual counter top, so it wasn't terribly heavy. A good eighty pounds of cheap plastic, fake wood, and acrylic was flying through the air towards the demonslayer.

Despite James's suggestion, the long-haired fighter wasn't coming down. He wasn't an idiot; the high ground was an advantage, and he didn't feel the need to relinquish it just yet. It gave him the perfect position to hurl down punishment at his opponent.

The musicians didn't seem to agree with his assessment, and due to creative differences, chose to fled the scene and promptly got the ******** out of Dodge before one of them got electrocuted into a coma, or burnt to a crisp.

James wouldn't get too much time to muse on matters - a second, considerably large item was already on its way towards him. It looked to be part of the DJ booth. It was, in fact - Deitric had dislodged the upper component of the DJ booth that acted as a decorative overhead, and now nearly two hundred and fifty pounds of cheap construction material was flying toward James Eredas.

After hurling the counter-top, the brave had reached up and grabbed the edges of the overhead, which mirrored the actual platform in make - bright lights built into the sides, made of black plastics and painted aluminum. It hung from the real ceiling, made to strengthen the impression of the DJ platform being a sort of tower.

It had taken some effort, but taking a step forward and putting his weight into it had managed snap the overhead from its flimsy supports, sending it hurling towards his opponent. He had practically shot-putted the chunk of decorative construction at his opponent, holding it overhead and pushing with his legs to send it down with enough force so it flew, rather than topple and tumble. It weighed more than he did, truth be told.

"You won't win any fights by staying down there," Deitric called out calmly, standing tall atop his metaphorical hill, no strain evident on his dark skinned features. He was right; as long as he held the higher ground uncontested, he could throw whatever he liked at James, and force the demon hunter to expend his energy ducking, dodging, or breaking whatever the tribesman threw his way.

And the brave wasn't getting any weaker. The air around him had begun to hum loudly again, catching the right pitch and making the cymbals and guitar strings near him resonate. The more time he spent throwing whatever was on hand at James, the stronger he became. He wasn't under any sort of pressure, standing ontop of the platform, and he wasn't about to physically exhaust himself by throwing guitars or parts of a drum kit.

Deitric was a ticking time-bomb of power, especially when he was given time to put himself through his metaphysical paces and really begin to gather energy en mass. The longer an opponent waited, the more likely he was going to explode - and the more powerful he would be when he did.

He was the king of the hill, and no king willingly handed over their crown. He was more than happy to sit on his throne until he wanted to move forward, and if James didn't seek to dislodge him, then all the better for Deitric. The crowd certainly didn't mind - it wasn't as flashy as things had been moments before, but no one decried the piecemeal destruction of the stage and the action it provided.