An old church you are familiar with and have seen many times has recently been closed due to fire damage. The area has been deemed too dangerous for anyone to enter, and yet you notice a strange gargoyle perched on the roof. It is large and imposing and you know it’s never been there before. If you try to climb up the building or if you leave the area and return, the gargoyle will have disappeared. You never see it move, but you know you saw it. Giant stone sculptures don’t just up and fly away…right? Whatever it is you saw, it’s gone now, but you might want to keep your eyes on the rooftops and pay attention when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
Noctua needed some time to herself. This time of year made it more difficult to find sleep than normal and it was getting to the point where her senses were overloading more than ever over almost nothing. When a car alarm went off a few days ago it was almost too much for her to handle. She had spent the next ten minutes crying in a pile on the floor because the sudden sound had cut through her concentration and caused her to collapse out of her yoga pose. It had been nothing, really. And her rational mind knew that but... it didn't stop the flood of frustration from being magnified by the lens of her exhaustion. So yes. She needed some quiet time alone to gather herself. Maybe some silent reflection and meditation would help her...
She slid through the night like a shadow, her hood up around her head, long heavy braid spilling out over her shoulder with only the sounds and shapes of the night to keep her company. Shadows around her crept up and took hold of her own shade, the clawed hands of branches reaching out to ensnare the darkness that she cast. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end as she imagined tangled vines and thorny brush seething and roiling, untangling itself to trap her. For one brief moment, Noctua had a vision of the forest foliage wrapping itself around her ankle and tripping her. The scent of soil was thick in her nostrils as she clawed the earth to escape, but to no avail. Nature was far stronger than she, and it made quick work of her body, using the spiny vines that ran along the forest floor as piano wire to equally parse her out to the surrounding brush. Trees opened their roots to accept the gift of her body, trapped forever in earth and wood, eyes unblinking and lifeless as she gazed up through the roof of the forest...
Noctua gasped as she burst suddenly into a clearing, moonlight far too bright in her eyes. She shielded herself and tried to make sense of the shape before her.
A charred behemoth, standing like a forgotten sacrifice surrounded by woods. It's only surviving feature was a stone gargoyle atop it's pitched roof. Noctua looked behind her, swearing that she could see the forest retreat back into itself. It could not touch her here. She turned back to the church and hurried inside, not recognizing that the shape perched on the roof had vanished.
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 11:43 pm
Faustite crouched, his hands planted flat on the rooftop and his avian spine bent double under the moon's blistering glare. He inhaled, and poison thought leaked out into the atmosphere. Sititng low on the horizon, the full moon cast his shadow at length against the bare wilderness, chasing cheeky branches with his visage. He felt tired suddenly, like the world leaned on him at whim.
Faustite knew it as the groaning in his back, the burden carried by too-thin muscles at the benefit of breath. Often his back railed at him for his transgressions — for his rooftop hops, his stints of free-running, his rare choice of combat. Pain stood as a heinous reminder of his imperfect biology. His ineffectual evolution. A child grown and a monster applied internally. The merge cost him energy and patience and a better nature — totals often unseen to those like the corrupted senshi who leapt from her own shadows. He gleaned a vague familiarity about her, sitting as he was near the church's gutters. He rolled his shoulders. She was the one who attacked him in Negaspace, was she not?
A slip, and he landed the short distance below, upon the stained shadows of leaves. Prodding her now, while so spooked by her own demons, promised a bad time. He'd see more of her magic, certainly.
But a certain schadenfreude assured him of a good show, a proper time of it. One need not even push her in any single direction. Her skin sung, high-strung and pitiless under the moonlight. If he approached her, she would retaliate. He was a monster, after all.
That promise led him forward. He passed through the hollowed-out double doors into the scattered remains. Pews bent backward under invisible flame tongues. Most of the rest looked like familiar rot — a betrayal of rains after the fact. Inside, she was the unburnt thing among the detritus. She was all hair and tattered rags, wild eyes. He approached her as his shoes sounded his presence. "Are you the religious type?" Can you worship nightmares in god's house?
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 7:50 pm
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huddling against the chill of the night, Noctua didn't notice the other chaos signature approaching her until the scent of smoke reached her nose. The acrid stench burned her sinuses, causing her expression to wrinkle in disgust. Was the building still smoldering? Noctua looked up and around, searching for the ember that still burned hot enough to create pollution thick enough to be detected. In the dark of night that shouldn't have been so much of a task but... there was not a single mote of light to be found along the blackened bones of the cathedral that sheltered her. Even as she felt the timbers around her for signs of heat, there was nothing.
So what then --
Her search was cut short when the familiar voice cut through the night. Noctua half turned to the boy who approached her, blue eyes bright within the shadows that claimed her. She knew him... or rather she knew of him. She scrutinized him longer, trying to place the voice and the face under a name but when she reached into her mind, bone-thin hands came back empty. It wasn't until the smoke reached her nose that recognition registered in her eyes.
"Nephilim," she muttered, returning her attention to the damaged frame around her.
"Not in the traditional sense," she answered finally, her voice thin in the darkness. With fear or exhaustion, even she had no way of telling. She hadn't slept in a week, she was weak, she was awake. There had never been a spectre more in need of reprieve. She could feel the wretched pull of bone-deep exhaustion down to her core. If the man-beast wanted to fight her, she would have no choice but to unleash her magic and flee. God she was so tired of fleeing...
"But I do believe that there is a reason that we keep meeting in churches. What about you Nephilim?"
Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:39 am
That's right. She called me that once. How right she was in the eyes of Leucite.
"I heard a religious man speak before." He leaned his shoulder against one of the support beam husks dotting the area. It groaned, compliant but complaining, of his weight. "He spoke of Metallia as a saint. He spoke of officers wielding the divine right. He spoke of a world made to be ours. Maybe this comes as no surprise — I trouble with believing in a dogma that damns me, with a doctrine that tells of the Pit as a destination." He recalled the speech well, though their meeting had long passed. What good came in reflecting upon it now? His 'abominable' self was perpetually cast in twilight, standing between worlds, between fates.
He wasn't this Dreamer of the lower cast. He wasn't blessed-cursed with sinuous fear and livewire senses. So much of her looked frayed long past her measure. Her hair a mess, her clothes in tatters, her behavior erratic. If Metallia was a saint, what did she see in that? What did she find amidst bird bones blackened with fever dreams?
A nudge against the column set him upright again, and he approached with fingers poised together before him. He watched her, even as his eyes betrayed no featured movement. "What reason do we have?" The words clung to the smoke in the air. "What reason do we have to meet in such a sacrosanct place? Tell me, Dreamer."
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Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 8:52 pm
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The closer Faustite came to Noctua, the farther back into the shadows he attempted to melt, forgetting momentarily that she was not ethereal like the darkness around her, but instead corporeal, and bound by simple laws that governed her world. Such laws came into play when she felt her back pressed against a charcoal beam behind her. Her breathing caught in her throat and her hands searched behind her for an exit, finding only ash and soot and solid wood behind her. For someone of normal strength, the ghostly weakness of the beam would have been no barrier should they want to escape. A swift kick, a solid shoulder... it would give. But as Noctua pressed with all that she exhausted frame could offer, it barely budged.
Her hear quickened in her chest. Before her, Faustite loomed, coming ever closer with careful, measured steps, his ink-stained fingers pressed into wicked little points before him. Her bright, sleepless eyes flickered like moths between his face and his hands, mind racing, wondering what to do next.
Her body saved her, pulling a cry of fright from her throat in the shape of the word no from her throat with all of the high-keening sound in which fear composed itself. She pushed from the beam suddenly, wrenching herself form the shadows with violence that she hadn't even known that she possessed, angling her body just so that angry little joints might find fissures between muscles and soft places to land. She had to get away, that was all she knew. Get away before whatever miasma he clouded her with before returned to claim her breath again.
Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2017 8:19 pm
This one's insensate. Pity for her. Her fear carved her avian shoulders into quick little ruts, with her too-thin head mounted on a spinebone frame spun of overwrought energy. She looked, in those moments, like a perfect disaster — a dependable, crackling, muddled youthfulness that spat anathema at creatures like him. At monsters and darkness. At smoke. He counted on her for that.
I remember being stabbed in the chest — not my chest. Strange how the memory turns to curse me. He watched her churn beneath her skin, heard her shriek pierce the charred silence in their holy grounds. And when she charged toward him, he watched it too.
He watched the smoke coil up about himself.
He watched her as his visage flicker-switched from one end of the church to the next. She would stop or she would starve for air. The canary in his coal mine might well drop as a function of treachery. But so it was expected, wasn't it? Passion begat betrayal. Grandeur beckoned a cold sword through the heart. Even now, he felt its algid burn, its ghosted, twisted memory.
"Do be careful, Senshi. That attitude will buy you certain death." His hands fit into one another, his knuckles popped. He waited for return fire.
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Dispersion ;; Range: 3 foot radius with Faustite at the epicenter. Duration: 30 seconds Use Count: 3x Miss Chance: Circumventing magic, stepping beyond radius before execution, stepping out during the attack. Holding breath and closing eyes mitigates some of the effects. Effect: Faustite draws his hands together, and a sound curiously akin to an opening lighter may be heard. With a deafening blast, Faustite then envelops himself in choking smoke. Those caught in the radius of the initial blast endure a residual ringing in the ears and mild disorientation. The blast itself articulates as the billowing black smoke, and those who breathe it will suffer burning lungs, stinging eyes, and may cough frequently depending on their reaction to the smoke. The symptoms of ringing ears and coughing will linger after leaving the smoke, up to a maximum of five seconds. This attack is not intended to produce lasting damage (like lung damage or hearing damage), but may do so at the defending player's behest.
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Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 4:37 pm
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It was happening again. The smoke invaded Noctua's lungs and solidified, creating a palpable presence in the delicate tissue that offered no room for air. Her head felt like an echo chamber subject to an endless cacophony of sound, and her vision swam in response to the sudden disequilibrium. She fell mid stride, body uncertain of where her the limits of her corporeality ended and the rest of the world began. She melted into the floor, melted into liquid from the vibration of the sound that knocked her down.
Where had he gone? Once moment his flesh was beneath her fingers and the next... he was gone... Noctua cracked open watering eyes to search for him only to find a black shape standing across the church. How had he...? A wrenching cough tore from her throat, leaving wicked claw-marks in it's wake. Frantically, almost like an animal, Noctua began to crawl on her hands and knees, keeping her belly low to the ground as she moved under the smoke. The invasive smoke pushed painful coughs from her already weak lungs in billowing clouds of carbon as she moved. When she finally stood, the cloud behind her thought still clinging to her shoulders and hips with wickedly sharp claws, she searched for Faustites' coal black eyes.
"Nephilim," she cried into the blackness of the church, "you will not make a fool out of me twice. Noctua Feverish Nights!"
Noctua Feverish Nights Noctua closes her eyes and calls the name of her attack. Upon opening them, she will lock eyes with one person and they will be immediately subject to the attack. For the next ten seconds the victim will feel like they haven't slept well for the past few nights. They will feel sluggish, irritable, and confused. Noctua can use this attack 3 times in a battle if she pushes herself, but mostly she keeps it to twice. It's useful mostly for getting away or getting in a sucker punch if she needs to.
Note: She needs to lock BOTH eyes with her opponent. So if someone has a non functioning eye for whatever reason, the attack will not work. Alternately, if Noctua's eyes are out of commission due to whatever reason, be it darkness or injury, the attack will not work. If the environment is too dark to see anyone's eyes, the attack will fail as well.
Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 5:05 pm
The ones who crawled were the ones worth keeping. The ones that would forskae pride and better follies for survival — for escape from circumstance. Lesser as she was by rank, Noctua proved equal or greater by strength. By ardor. By sound and fury. By all the wicked little experiences that skirted him by, left him weaker for it.
Faustite learned to hate her then.
She crawled and wormed and writhed and he stood waiting, thinking. He forced himself still for her resistance. He needed to witness it — her strength — in full. Unblinking. Unhindered. She drew breath, eyes awash in smoke-stained misery, she bared her claws, she leapt at him with breath a raspy hiss. He couldn't move — not yet. But when her nails reached for her face with all her roiling rage, he caught her by the wrists with his captain's strength and backed toward the innars of the churgh. Her snarl wasn't missed. Her ire taken in full, he heard the telltale words as she cursed them against his ears. As she wretched her affliction at him.
Faustite knew the surreptitious effects once. He felt the shadow claw up around him, honing his senses to razors. Washing his periphery in wild accusation. Her brittle-bone snarl beckoned with too many teeth. He swallowed, the gesture sliding down his throat like thick oil. He felt strung too tight suddenly. Distant. Too spacious between small smatters of stars. Towed too deep into the ocean.
Too nothing and too everything, too all at once.
He needed someone else's strength to fight her — to ward off her overdrawn fury. Their mental stalemate would eat him, and he bared it with teeth. Dark energy came alight under his palms, enscorcelling them, voiding them from one area and projecting them into the next.
Projecting them into a dream that Faustite never dreamt.
