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Face your demons rolled 2 10-sided dice:
2, 8
Total: 10 (2-20)
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 Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:04 pm
Amarus opened her eyes, and she was surrounded by a warm, white glow. For some reason, instead of comforting her, some instinctive part of her was wary of the white wisps that began to separate and float away. The wisp in front of her was leading the way to ... somewhere. She wasn't sure where, exactly, but she did realize it wanted her to follow it. Given she had no idea where else she could be going, she merely followed it, though she was on the alert.
It was beautiful here, unlike the climates she'd learned to appreciate. Singing in the background exacerbated how uncomfortable she was, and more wisps appeared, slipping into the spectrum of visible light one by one until she was walking amidst many trees.
"The last time there were so many trees was..." she paused, as she walked: she couldn't quite remember. Something seemed familiar, but on a distant vein of her unconscious mind. Nothing she could access. It was certainly going to bother her.
The trees thinned, and she stood before one large silver tree. Amarus was patient. AMarus listened. She would cultivate a tree, sure. She was pretty sure she loved plants, at some point. It felt like it, at any rate. She heard singing from in the lake, and was told that she would receive a gift, if she were to revive the tree. She cupped water in her hands and carried it gently, trying not to let it slip away. Despite her best efforts, she lost some of it; she did, however, manage to carry about exactly half of the water she'd started with. Hopefully enough to make a difference. As she poured it onto the tree, a single acorn fell forth.
 The acorn was ... 10mm large.
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Face your demons rolled 1 10-sided dice:
9
Total: 9 (1-10)
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Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:08 pm
Having returned to the lake, Amarus heard the singing again, and she leaned over the surface. She was quite hesitant about getting this close to the surface, but she'd been told to do so, so here she was. Besides, she was newly-armed with a bow that comforted her in a way.
The huge, dark blue bubbles formed, and she saw: her own face, reflected in some of them, her eyes still eerily devoid of emotion or light. Bright, but empty. She reached out, seeing other faces, other glimpses of claws and of fur, of feathers and of patchwork. A bird with plumage that looked like a comet's trail. It was mesmerizing. She pulled the nearest memory in.
--
Sweat dripped down her brow, and Amarus tied a cloth above her eyes to keep the dirt, the blood and the sweat out of her vision. Crisp, clean. Perfect. She had lived here her whole life: the Arena, where she was pitted against combattant to combattant.
They were, seemingly, without end. She had her long hair braided in a multitude of thin sections, some dyed a very bright blue, some black, most of them a rather bright pink. She had them clipped up with pins made of carved bone, their points tipped: in combat, when cornered, if she lost her weapons she would merely remove one of the clips and use its pointed tips to slash the throat of whoever had cornered her. She did what she had to. She always did.
Amarus did not wear much armour; she was focused, mainly, on speed. There were more than a few lash-like slashes across her side, her arms, her legs: thin, white scars crisscrossed most of her body. 99 kills, and today would have to be 98.
Her fingertips were capped with gold claws, needle points jutting out about as long as a single finger. When her opponents fought her, they often made the mistake of thinking she was unarmed.
She was fast, and she knew all the soft places to stab. Unfortunately for her opponents, it often took only a single blow to sever very important bones, nerves and muscle. She was skilled at acrobatics, and used the terrain to her advantage. She was fearless, and faced her opponent as such: another woman, whose left breast had been hewed off, which Amarus tried not to look at. The woman had clearly done it so that she could draw her bow with ease, and Amarus winced as an arrow sailed past her face: she was going to have to be fast, and close the distance, despite her opponent being equally fast.
Amarus ended up having to charge at the woman, and flip up so that she was behind her: as she was flipping, one of the arrows skimmed past Amarus' arm, clipping and slicing her shoulder open. She would have to clean that carefully; the site, on top of that, was immediately numb. Amarus feared it was poison.
She stabbed one of her needle thin weapons into the base of the woman's skull, right by the nape of her neck. Death came for her.
Tomorrow would be number 99.
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Face your demons rolled 1 10-sided dice:
8
Total: 8 (1-10)
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Posted: Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:25 pm
It almost felt like a strange dream, the vision of a dragon creature that fought alongside her. It had been beautiful, she thought, as she reached into the water to retrieve a second bubble.
Her phone lit up for what she was sure was the fifteenth time. Its glow illuminated the entire basement, where she lived, and the start-up music of This is Halloween began: she loved hearing it in the game she was currently playing, but she kind of resented it when it came to the phone calls. Perhaps she would have to change that soon. Actually, she should set it to silent-- except the last time she did that, she forgot to turn sound back on when she used the alarm, which meant that she was fifteen minutes late for her job at the book store. She didn't much care for books, but it was more about organization and cleaning than it was about reading.
"Son of a b***h," she cursed, typing a storm, her fingertips glancing across the keys as she tried to tell her team to stop letting the Deus gank them in PVP. "Just ******** keep it together, jesus f*Ck," she added.
She was in her underwear, sitting cross-legged in the computer chair. If the others on her team would just... ugh. She'd been forced to recruit PUGs to fill her party, and there was just nothing worse than taking a bunch of losers she didn't know into an important PVP match. She was just so bored of PvE she didn't know what else to do, and she had kind of been ignoring anyone she might have been able to recruit. In a way, it was kind of her fault she had no one to play with.
Most of her teammates had died. She was there, alone, with a Demon with red skin and black horns. Every time she tried to message him and plan a strategy, he just answered her in a series of characters she didn't recognize. Maybe he was German or something. It was starting to piss her off, especially since they were the only ones still competent enough to be alive.
It was at that moment her power went out, and she cursed, pushing her keyboard away from her. She took a swig of water, leaned back and rubbed at her eyes. This was her life. She didn't want to sleep, not yet. She didn't want to go to work in the morning, either- but this was just what she had to do, right.
Reality, who needs it.
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Face your demons rolled 1 10-sided dice:
10
Total: 10 (1-10)
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Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:10 am
Taking another step into the lake, as the memory of another life, another version of herself dissipated, Amarus reached out and held another bubble.
--
Amarus rested against the black scales of her dragon, the tufts of its feathers peeking out in places around its maw. Its eyes were shut, and the barbed tail rested around her protectively. She stroked one of its spikes with her thumb, gentle, loving. It was a part of her, it's true. She leaned back and felt the mist on her face.
They were resting against a rock, covered in moss. Amarus' armour was mostly off her, protected by special cloths made to keep the dampness out. She was wearing most of her leather gear still, and it was a little uncomfortable, but better than being caught off guard. Her sword was in its scabbard, leaning to the side of her, the gems set into the pommel glinting in the half light. Her dragon exhaled breath so hot that it coiled up into the damp air, chasing away any clouds of mist nearby.
Amarus admired, not for the first time, the way that in any ray of light her dragon's scales would instead shine with a purple-pink sheen, as if its life force was trapped just behind the darkness of its outer scales. It was beautiful. And yet, champions would come to try to slay it. They did not understand it was part of her, and she was charged with the task of slaying heroes.
Not because she did not want them to succeed; no, she was the hero-slayer because she must test their strength, their endurance, she must test whether or not they would crack. If they could withstand her onslaught, they were deemed heroes in full. Capable of defending not only themselves, but cradling the lives of many in the balance. Few were successful. Amarus stood up, bent over and whispered to her dragon: "A challenger approaches. Do you slumber within me, or do you fight?"
It opened one silvery eye and said: We fight as one, before it rose to its feet, becoming far larger than it had been a moment ago, and stood to obscure her. This was always how it began: the challengers, distracted by the dragon, failed to realize that Amarus was just as much a threat as her summon. She seemed so small in comparison.
She hoped this one would succeed.
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Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:36 am
The memories she'd wandered into so far were beautifully fascinating, for the most part. She could do without that weird technology world in which she had understood how electronics worked, apparently. Amarus picked another one, one that seemed darker in some ways:
Being accepted into Pigfarts was an honour. Amarus had worked hard for it, and she knew how hard she had worked, what she had sacrificed: she wasn't big on learning from books, so she had exhausted many a mentor, gleaning from them what she deemed important and then effectively ensuring they would no longer remember what it was, exactly, she had learned from them. The reason she was scared she would be sorted into the "bad group," was because she feared that what she was, what she had done, was a darkness that slumbered inside her.
If she was sorted into Serpentarius, it would all be confirmed, wouldn't it? That there was no hope for her, that she would have to embrace what she was and learn to accept that she would never be good. Everyone wanted to be good... but Amarus just wanted power. Power to govern, power to lead, power to protect the ones she loved. Didn't everyone want power in the end? They just didn't know it. Even the truly good must have a core of power at their center to resist the corruption of, ah, evil.
"Maybe I can get into Leo," she said, with a grimace, as she set aside the chaotic spirals she'd been doodling for hours to relieve this sense of impending doom. Well, one way or another, she wouldn't be able to change what she was sorted into just by worrying about it. Amarus sighed and put aside her pen, and then took a sip of her tea, following the pen spirals with her eyes as she tried to sort them out.
[[OOC: Choosing prompt 7, as it allows us to stop rolling after 3]]
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Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:45 am
[[ Choosing prompt 6 as my last of 5! ]]
Lightning flashed across the huge windows lending a glimpse to the garden. Amarus flipped her notepad open and, in the series of symbols comprising her writing system, began to jot down notes about the layout before she touched anything. Her grey eyes scanned the room, and noted several things she believed to be out of place: candle wax spilled across the desk and trailed over to the body, a letter opener stuffed between two couch cushions, and black charcoal smudged all over the carpet in something that looked nearly deliberate.
"Say, doll, would you bring me a ladder?" she asked, flashing the woman who'd led her in a sweet smile as she winked at her. The woman was reluctant to leave, and in fact very upset by this entire situation, and started to tear up just by being addressed. Her companion, a blonde woman with a silver necklace, shushed her and rubbed one hand up and down her upper arm.
"It'll be fine, Agnes, just get the nice detective a ladder like she wants, okay?" Marlena asked, smiling at the emotional woman. Agnes sniffled a bit more, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and went to find the ladder.
"So what does it look like to you, detective?"
"Something's not quite right, ma'am-- it seems to me like the kind of crime you'd find in a pulp fiction, not here in your living room," Amarus replied, poking the sofa cushion aside. The knife had red wax on it, not blood as she'd thought it would. There were no visible wounds on the body, in fact, just a frozen grimace on her face.
Agnes returned shortly accompanying a man who carried the ladder, set it down and left the room. Amarus caught a glimpse of his face and was immediately suspicious by the way he didn't seem to want to even be in the room with them. She filed that suspicion away and took a step up the ladder, another one, and another until she was at the top: the charcoal was very obviously a smudged pattern, with some kind of runic symbols around the outer edge. Amarus' eyes narrowed.
Some kind of summoning...? Upon further inspection, the pile of ash was very obviously human remains; a monocle glinted inside the pile. Something suspicious had gone on here, something distinctly supernatural-- but did the occupants know? Or were they the victims, themselves?
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Posted: Tue Aug 27, 2013 11:54 am
The sapling was beginning to grow into a tree, and Amarus felt its joy as her own joy.
It began to sway, but it was growing, it was so close-- she heard a voice tell her not yet, and went towards the lake to recover more memories, more water. However, when she returned, she found something else entirely: A distant castle, a beautiful array of colours glinting off every surface. Amarus nodded in reply to the voice, and went to take water from one of the pools.
Amarus reached into the dark pool, cupping water in her hands. Memories sprang to life: the pain of Scarentines and not understanding how she could possibly ever find anyone who cared for her the way her friends had their own significant people. The notion that no matter what she did, she could not be loved, because she was just a ghost, a spirit with no family and no memories prior to waking in the Haunted House. She had no soul, how could she be loved? The pain of having not tried harder surfaced.
What could she have done differently? She didn't understand it in the least, she didn't even know if she wanted to be loved. Didn't she? Did she? What was it like? The heaviness of those early days spent wandering without a single friend weighed on her, painful.
"Is there any point to regrets?" she asked, when she watched the single apple grow, and a voice asked her if she was pleased.
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