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 Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:55 pm
Quote: Snowy Showdown (16) : There’s something magical about fresh fallen snow–completely undisturbed and untouched by the rest of the world. It should be relaxing and peaceful–a sign that no one has been around and you’re perfectly safe. Except, the best predators lie in wait, completely invisible to their prey. What do you do when a patch of snow starts clumping together and taking shape right before your eyes? When it all comes together, it looks like a person, only there are no features, just a snowy white form. Maybe there wouldn’t have been an issue if you hadn’t seen it, but it’s too late. In frantic, panicked movements, it lunges at you with icy fists. It feels like being pelted with snowballs, but each hit lowers your core body temperature–rapidly. The creature is highly susceptible to heat and will melt if exposed to it; if you hit it, snow splatters everywhere. It may attempt to reform, but eventually it loses strength. You might not want to stick around to see if it just needs a little more time. If the creature manages to knock you unconscious, you may wake up covered in snow and with a bad cold. You may be more aware of strange, snowy figures that seem to be standing around in odd places; who knows where these things are hiding?
And yet. This was ******** new.
She'd been on her way home from patrolling when she spotted it--a shifting in the snow near her that slowly moved, changing into a hulking white shape that seemed none too happy to have been spotted.
It charged at her, flailing its weird snowy limbs, and she yelped and jumped out of the way--but it was a near thing.
"Ohh s**t," she said, "oh s**t I hate this."
As if that was going to necessarily improve the situation, but expressing her general upset made her feel better.
Even if it didn't stop the creature from turning to swing at her again.
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Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:31 pm
By contrast with Karakorum, Dunwich was well acquainted with the magical troubles and travails that lived in Destiny City. It came, she supposed, with the territory of spending as long as she had laboring at the lowest rung of Knighthood. In fairness, some of that was on her for semi-regularly tapping out from most things about the magical life, but that also felt a little bit unfair, considering she and D’If were both wholly grown adults with jobs and taxes—and a Negaverse who had only recently felt somewhat less threatening—the way all the undergrads seemed to deem insulting.
Still, Dunwich had seen a great deal in her years as a Page. Even during the years when she hadn’t powered up very much, becoming aware of the magical goings-on in town made Eva more sensitive to them. More likely to notice that certain things seemed weird, potentially inexplicable by normal, rational logic and science. Once placed into one of those positions by Fate, or Cosmos, or Whomever, Eva-Dunwich could decide for herself whether or not it felt like any of her business. Maybe it would be, and she would stick her nose into things then deal with whatever consequences arose from it, or maybe it wouldn’t be and she would leave it alone. Point was: the decision rested with her.
Which was exactly where she’d found herself in this moment: trying to walk home from meeting some of her fellow DCU STEM lecturers for drinks and snacks, staring at an obviously magical situation involving some pile of snow that had decided to get up and move around, wondering if it really felt like any of her business.
Part of Eva Denman said that no, this truly was not her business. She didn’t need to care about anything besides herself, her Wonder, Jacob, and D’If the Wonder up on Saturn……but then she saw the Page. Powering up (in some shadows by a statue, no witnesses around to cause any trouble) and rushing in didn’t necessarily even the odds by much, given Dunwich and the other Page respectively had a driftwood heart and a sprig of ivy for their weapons. But abandoning another Page to fend for herself against whatever this monster was, it didn’t sound like the behavior of a Knight who ever hoped to be anything else but a Page. Steeling her nerves and readying what she had to call a weapon, Dunwich ran out into the fray.
“Hey, ugly!” The phrasing sounded weird to her, as soon as it hit her ears, as if she really had no business saying such things, but well. Whatever, she was going to run with it. What she’d said got the snow monster’s attention, and with it whipping around to face her, Dunwich lobbed her driftwood heart like a shot put, sending it clean through what vaguely approximated a head.
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Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 5:52 pm
Karakorum was so, so relieved to see someone else show up to help her. She was a big brave Page totally capable of fighting s**t on her own, but that didn't mean that she was exactly excited to have to do that, especially against a monster that was way bigger and way meaner than her.
Just not a fun situation, and not one she wanted to continue to be in.
"Thanks for the assist," Karakorum said, grinning a little recklessly as she watched the other Page's weapon cave through the monster's head. Sure, the snow started to reform into a head pretty quickly, but it gave her time and an idea.
There was a finite amount of snow. They just had to knock enough off that it couldn't hold itself together anymore. At least, that felt to her like a reasonable solution to the problem that was presented by its existence.
Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn't. But she stretched her little ivy sprig betwene her hands, ran forward, and jumped up so that she could loop it around the monster's neck like a garrote. It would be brutal to do to a person, or even a youma, but this snow monster? That, she could do.
Her ivy slid through its neck slowly, pulled by her weight against the monster's flailing, and as she pulled it, snow splattered onto her. Even with the resistance to cold she'd noticed her powered form granted her, this still made her shiver, but she kept her grip as best she could.
"Keep on hitting it," she encouraged the other Page, "we just need to beat it down!"
It struggled and flailed, desperately trying to dislodge her, and honestly, part of Karakorum felt kind of bad about this. But the greater part of her did not want to continue being assaulted by a snow monster that had clearly started the beef between them, so here they were.
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Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2025 11:30 am
Without her weapon in hand anymore, Dunwich used what she had available to her. Incidentally, this meant her hands. Swinging her fists at the snow monster felt almost as silly as yelling “Hey, ugly!” at it. But one had to make do with the means available, or that’s what she told herself as she pressed through the feelings of “Oh, lord, I probably look ridiculous” and “Oh, ********, COLD. Cold cold cold cold cold cold COLD!!!!!!”
Genuinely, every time the snow monster’s arms whanged into her, it felt like being pelted with snowballs that somehow, managed to hit Dunwich in the face, body, and soul simultaneously. She couldn’t explain that, she didn’t think. It sounded pretty average for an evening in Destiny City, though.
Yet, perseverance paid off: eventually, the snow monster collapsed, a heap of wet, frozen white stuff on the ground. Although it stopped moving, trying to reconstitute itself, Dunwich stomped on a little pile of the snow anyway. In all likelihood, she probably accomplished nothing by doing this, but it made her feel a little better regardless. A little more certain that maybe, this stupid snow-beast was actually down for the count and would actually stay away.
Once she’d put her own mind at ease, Dunwich turned to the other Page with a smile. “That was inspired, using your ivy sprig as a garrote like that,” she said, then held out a hand. “Dunwich of Neptune.”
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Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2025 11:46 am
It felt like awesome teamwork--the other Page punching the snow monster from the front, and Karakorum hanging off its back, choking and kicking it until it finally collapsed.
If she let out a little undignified yelp when it crumbled and she suddenly wasn't holding onto anything anymore, and if she landed on her butt in the snow, well. She'd looked really cool before that, so she could accept this little flaw.
She dusted herself off as she stood, shivering briefly but giving the other Page a smile right back and taking her hand to shake.
"It was really cool of you to go charging straight in, and I super appreciate the backup. I'm Karakorum of Cybele," she said. Wow, up close, this Page was obviously more mature, and getting rescued by a hot older woman was sort of The Dream. "...Do you wanna maybe patrol together? In case there are any more of those things?"
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Posted: Thu Jan 09, 2025 2:48 pm
“I actually haven’t gotten to do something like that for a while,” Dunwich confessed, grinning sheepishly and rubbing the back of her neck. Regaling this poor younger Page with the whole sordid tale right off the bat probably wouldn’t cut the best look, but a cute little summary was maybe okay? “My husband and I got on the wrong side of the Negaverse a few years back. But it’s been a while, so we’re trying to get back in the swing of things, y’know?”
The offer of a patrol went together well with that idea.…… It wasn’t what Eva had planned, but she could handle the civilian side pretty easily. “I’d love to patrol with you,” she said, reaching into her subspace and getting a rush of relief that her little pen and notepad were still there. She wrote out the note for Jacob quickly, maneuvering deftly around the cute designs of seashells and fish. “Just let me send this to D’If to let him know I’ll be home a little later than expected.”
She had the note ready right as she finished speaking. With a quick stamp of her signet ring, it rushed off to Jacob—addressed to him as Jacob Denman rather than as D’If, Squire of Saturn, since he probably wasn’t powered up right now. Then, she turned back to Karakorum with a smile. “Shall we?”
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