Alucroas

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

He was soaring, riding upon the wind with dark wings spread wide over the rise of a warm up draft lifting him higher and higher until, at last, he felt safely removed from the world down below. The feeling of separation, of being alone with only his animal instincts to guide him had a distinct calming effect on his psyche, like a feline wandering the woods by itself, or an eagle surveying the lakes and fields in search of prey. It was a peace that was prevalent throughout nature, persistent across time, and thrived in the blood and bones of all beasts, whose primitive minds endowed their bodies with the strength and resolve necessary for surviving in the world.

Neither man nor deity could ever hope to emulate this pure state of life, not without sacrificing something in the process.

In the midst of his tranquil flight, he could see the clouds starting to dim, their fluffy whiteness shifting toward off-gray, to full-gray, to pitch-blackness, their vaporous forms stretching away from him as they were sucked into a rapidly opening hole in the sky. The anomaly offered no light for him to see what lurked inside, but it did cast rays of darkness which beckoned all living things to enter its depths, luring them to a place that did naught but provoke primal fear, and a deep hostility that caused the jagged, dark-green scars on his arms to glow in preparation for what was to come. Roaring into the abyss, the he found himself falling victim to the machinations of the entity, swallowed whole as he felt the composition of his insides transmute into a different substance.

Metal replaced bone, battery acid replaced blood, strangely woven fibers took the place of muscle, and though his senses told him he still had organs, they remained only quasi-functional; present and performing their vital functions, yet somehow he knew their destruction would not hinder his capacity to move. All of this he could feel as plastic restraints tied him to the inside of a cardboard container, neck, limbs, and tail pinned with twin apertures for his horns to slide neatly into. The packaging he was contained in was considerably larger than the others, more fit for a small cat than for the plaything he was turned into, his form stripped of the beauty nature had blessed him with, and replaced with parts artificial, able to smell all the foul chemicals used in constructing his monstrous form.

Thoroughly enraged at what had been done to him, at where he was taken from, his body sparked with industrial grade lightning, melting his plastic bonds, jaw opening wide to unleash a second pair that was part of a miniaturized drake skull, punching a hole through his transparent sealing. Evidently, this was not enough to fully free him, for after ripping his way out of one cell, he found himself skull bashing the glass of a sliding cupboard, not knowing he was set up to be featured in the more expensive electronics section. Spotting the lock, the dragon reared back its tail, thrusting the sharply curved, four inch bone between the mechanism keeping him inside, yanking and screeching furiously, claws digging into holes in the shelf grate to give himself better leverage. Finally, the glass began to flex, cracks forming as his anger let him rip the lock free, followed by him flinging it off his tail hard enough to break parts where the panels overlapped, weakening the structure for one last violent charge, ramming his way through the barrier and spraying shards all over the white tiled floor.

The moment he landed outside his prison, the whole electronics section started blaring, bathing the department in a red alarm glow. Although the creature preferred the wild, he had fought in enough civilized environments, places run by man, and alien alike to recognize the sound of impending danger, promptly leaping onto the side of a sales counter, and quickly scaling it to gain a higher vantage point with which to spot any incoming threats. Sprinting across the surface, and knocking over several flyers, and mini-stands for prepaid membership cards, a sudden, loud, penetrating beep startled his ears, setting his armored scales abuzz with blue, crackling bolts.

A semi-large monitor with a smaller, black screen on top lit up in front of him, displaying an electronic poster image of his whole body on a brown background, emitting lightning as he fought what looked to be a combination of decked out super soldiers with high-tech weaponry, and hovering drones showering his body in a hailstorm of bullets that appeared to be curving around the contours of a very powerful electromagnetic shield. Snarling at the image, and the outrageous price of $229.99+tax, he let his jaws part and fired a beam of condensed electricity, pumping the circuits full of energy until the whole thing exploded, screeching and roaring as the electricity drained out of the dying monitor, which displayed the monster’s name.

The Abominable Alucroas!

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

I suspect I'll have to modify this profile, but I did try to be as detailed possible as per the rules.

The Abomimable Alucroas

A 16 inch, quadrupedal black dragon made almost entirely of metal, featuring very large scales painted with a mixture of charcoal and ink. Alucroas’ eyes are counter-colored, consisting of a sapphire right and crimson left, both of which are capable of detecting thermal, as well as electrical energy, appearing as a strange blend of red and blue for objects such as lights, television, game consoles, and purple for living toys, though this only applies to ones containing electrical components. This uncanny sight appears to serve a mostly predatory function, and is indicative of Alucroas’ newly preferred diet of wires over flesh, and metal over bone. To this end, he has a modified mouth appendage that starts as a skull, complete with horns and jaws, and is attached to a 6.5inch cord of hyper-jointed metal, granting it adequate mobility.

His head also features 4inch horns, and his tail is 16 inches, ending in a 4 inch, slightly curved bone with a semi-blunt tip. While the topside of the tail is fully armored, the underside has exposed vertebrates. The scales function as a highly durable armor, and can open up slightly to secrete a thick, transparent slime, that in all likelihood is a form of glue that has mostly, but not entirely lost its adhesive properties.

The dragon’s wings are hidden in two slots on his back, and when unsheathed, fling a highly corrosive battery acid. Alucroas’ wingspan is roughly 2ft across, and due to his mostly metallic composition, is only capable of gliding a short distance, though he has a rather uncannily destructive habit of being able to violently yank himself against anything made of metal. This is because Alucroas is a lightning dragon, and his electromagnetic powers, though greatly reduced, have retained enough of their fundamental attributes that he is able to perform at minimum the more basic feats.

Consequently, and because the beast's “batteries” are globally spread throughout his body in the form of corrosive battery acid, the abomination is able to emit static electricity off any part of its body, and fire out a beam up to a maximum distance of five feet. Suffice to say, keeping this monster at a distance is critical to one's long term survival.

Aside from being about as visibly strong as one would expect from a cat-sized toy, Alucroas’ forelimbs possess two dark-green scars running from his triceps to the middle of his forearms underside. The scars can secrete a shimmering compound that is thick like gel, and sticky like glue. Inhaling the fumes of this weird substance has a disorienting, discombobulating effect on the senses of other toys, and fortunately only lasts for a few seconds, or for as long as physical contact is maintained, its presence within the body easily sneezed away like cardboard dust.

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

I think it's meant to be whatever a toy can reasonably hold. also do you know how toy lazers work? they're legit just light. i'm a science interest, so...

Then again i ain't the gm, so take what i say with a grain of salt.

@Sky Blue

I was always operating on the silent assumption that we are to play actual toys, but it always helps me personally to ask for the sake of having something to weigh my own interest against.

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

Are we allowed to bring characters who have destructive powers scaled down to toyverse size effects? Foe example: a missile fires from a toy hits a shelf, but the explosion is no larger than a firecracker, or a laser beam that is only strong enough to cut through paper, and leave a mild scorch mark on a steel shelf, but with prolonged application would be able to cut through the beam.

Basically, my brain is operating on less of a literal toy fight, but something with toysized effects, but if everyone is truly launching fake missiles, aka, plastic rods with nothing more than kinetic force behind them, then it would obviously be unfair if I brought the former into the fight.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

The longer the Executioner observed the transpiring chaos, the more the holographic image of its crimson eye and tentacles appeared to increase in size, its black slit oscillating first in the direction of the rampaging Ravager, then to the Lumanaru. It repeated this action only once, followed by a cycling of different ocular colors in the form of purple, green, and gray, culminating in the creation of two facsimiles sliding off the original body like neatly conformed sheets of paper.

Unlike Barrusom, who slashed open a rift in the continuum, the Amalgam that entered through it, and the flood of cosmic acid which corroded it away, the facsimiles employed a far less destructive, albeit nonetheless unsettling means of inserting themselves into the universe. They simply phased through it, producing only the faintest of ripples as their passage occurred in a manner that was similar to osmosis. Floating as gelatinous, eight-limbed blobs in the vacuum, the green and purple-eyed pair rapidly collapsed their forms inwards, dimensional folding condensing and compressing their unknowable flesh. As the pair shrunk, their limbs formed sharply jointed bends, the ends pulled and stretched back until only a sharp, piercing tip remained, enabling them to skitter and run across the continuum.

The green eyed creature ceased its size reduction at almost 1.5x the ursim’s own, and immediately began to chase after the beast in a manner that was blatantly hostile. For every apergetic explosion that was about to ripple and stir the fabric of space-time with its disruptive shockwaves - Aracite the Executioner Of Cosms, was there to plug up the eruption, absorbing the burst into its own freshly hardened skin, its cells drinking in the cosmo-seismic energy. Repeatedly, it did this, albeit with an oddly reduced effectiveness the closer it got to Barrusom, that was still enough to put the eruptions on a precisely timed delay.

As Aracite came within striking range of its nemesis, it saw Barrusom, visibly aware of the uts presence by its raised fur and slowly crescendoing growl. The bear spun around, dragging its claws across the continuum to bring itself to a destructive, space-slashing stop, aiming for an overhead swipe with its mid-limbs, only for the cephalopod to suddenly expel the absorbed energy, and go arching overhead, straight for the very planet Barrusom sought to feed on. Determinedly, the beast drove its tongue into the gash it just made, and sucked up as much of the acidic blood milk sitting inside the Outerverse as it could, shrinking its size in the process, then yanked the siphon appendage free in a fashion that was just as viscerally repulsive.

Roaring with fury, Barrusom charged after Aracite, extending its tongue under its neck, passed its belly, and even beyond the length of its rising tail. In an act of seemingly counter-intuitive insanity, the ursim took its mid-paws and smacked its own stomach as hard as it could, almost mocking the Executioner’s own actions, until the intent behind the masochistic belly beating became abundantly and disgustingly clear:

It made itself throw up.

On purpose.

A jet of red and white vomit streamed from the siphon tube that was Barrusom’s tongue, its explosive force greatly exceeding what it had released earlier, a clear indication of how much the ravenous Ravager Of Cosms had managed to gulp down in one mad guzzle. The sheer force of its puke ray, whose direction was set to dissolve and tear open another rift to the Outerverse, from which more Amalgam roots would breach, and even more Corpas to ride its emergence, was ultimately set to strike at Exeter and as well as Aracite's other copy, sent Barrusom blasting across the void with its vomit-rocket force.

Long before the beam could reach its predestined mark, and the Ravager could reach its rival, having apparently disappeared, there was the planet’s ice moon. The only thing between it, and its scrumptious meal, which it instantly became single-mindedly fixated on devouring again. As Barrusom got closer and closer to the frigid rock, it caught sight of the edges of a vicious sandstorm rotating at speeds great enough to breach the planet's atmosphere. Its eagerness to finally feed did not allow the ursim room to analyze the out of place phenomenon, however, instead retracting its tongue into its mouth, and tucking its fully regrown form into a somersaulting cannonball.

For a mere microsecond, it seemed as though the moon would be sturdy enough to survive the impact, but just as certain as the Ravager's hunger was to overwhelm all its other drives, so too did its impact with the frozen satellite send cracks fissuring across its surface. Before the moon could even start to split in two, the other side bulged, ruptured, and erupted skywards, launching a spray of frosted asteroids hurtling at the cold desert planet. In the midst of the spray, Barrusom emerged out of the hole it created, upper and middle arms unfolding in a debris clearing spread, followed by a hard leap with its rear off rim, throwing the moon into a vertical spin.

One fourth of the way to its meal, the world lost its light to the beast’s starving gaze shrouding the world in endless night. Midway through the ursim’s final flight, transparent spikes resembling bent javelins disappeared onto the side of the world consumed by natural darkness. Three fourths of the way to its destination, green rays peered over the mountains Barrusom was set to pulverize, eliciting a faint snarl as the source of the illumination took spherical shape with eight menacing outlines aimed maliciously at its form.

–

The purple eyed facsimile made a near beeline to Exeter, hurling itself like a shuriken on a direct intercept path of the approaching vomit beam, dimensions folding until it collapsed down to the size of a kangal. On its way to the girl and the beam, this copy of Aracite sliced through the Amalgam, its branches having extended far enough for azure moss to be visible along its upper length. The copy captured the products of its arboreal destruction within its gelatinous body, grinding wood, and moss within its core in search of the bacterial agent known only as Dorn - the *Healer* Of Cosms.

–

The collision between Aracite and Barrusom sent the two of them whirling in a fixed position, caught between the planet and its damaged moon. The ursim’s claws locked tight with six of the cephalopod’s spiked limbs, thrashing wildly against each other in a vicious grappling match. For every successful breaking of the other's grip, a missed swipe slashed open a rift, letting more roots in, only for their tips to be severed as another angry swing was taken, opening yet more rifts, increasing the speed at which the Amalgam spread. This boost in the root's invasive efficiency naturally allowed them to slither and grow their way around the warring giants, snaring limbs and threading a weave of an impediment of ll the while steadily impeding their movements as the root invasion became an increasingly troublesome presence.

Soon, the monsters were stuck, hardly able to move, as the branches grew between their limbs, their motions nearly ceased. Despite the pair's entangled predicament though, the Ravager did have an advantage: its tongue. Ramming the appendage through the nearest rift, Barrusom drank as much as it could, shrinking down and escaping the grip of Aracite, whose whole form bristled at what it knew was coming, spikes protruding all over its limbs, shredding branches, and giving it enough space to attempt to enclose them around its foe in a crushing, skewering death trap. Seeing the attack coming, the ursim retracted its tongue to the proper length, slapped its stomach with enough force to crack a neutron star, groaned for few seconds, and puked its vomitous jet in an upward dragging motion, size increasing and arms outreaching.

The contact could not have been more immediate, for like a death ray that was comprised of enzymic matter instead of raw, concentrated energy, the focused pressure cleaved the Executioner's upper half in place of where the heart and left lung would be, flesh boiling and hissing as the Ravager's digestive fluids burned and steamed flesh. Enraged, Aracite found itself on the losing end of the opening round, for as Barrusom evacuated its stomach, so too did its size return, and with that came its strength as well. Namely the strength to perform a standing motion which allowed it to push its rivals limbs apart, forcing them open, and rendering Aracite’s nucleic eye vulnerable to a second attack, but therein lied very real, and very technical problem, that the ursim, in its extremely limited intellect, failed to account for.

The Ravager had six extremely powerful limbs.

But the Executioner possessed eight.

In an act of savage, but very much drivenly determined desperation, Aracite exploited the difference in limb count and shaped the tip of its top right tentacle into a spiked hammer, bringing it down like a whip. Barrusom didn't have time to so much as process the sudden impact, for the moment it was made, three of its six eyes were punctured and bleeding heavily fractionated rays of photonic energy, specifically the upper-right, middle-left, and bottom left eyes, the light superheating all that it touched. To add to the sheer viciousness, instead of simply letting go, the Executioner curved the spikes of its modified appendage into hooks, burying them in its nemesis’ sockets, and without mercy or delight, but simply raw, animalistic brutality, began to pry on the Ravager's mask. At the same time, its transparent flesh crystallized, funneling Barrusom's light through its own body, where it accumulated at the tips of the rest of its tentacles, all of which were cunningly aimed behind it.

Harder and harder did the Executioner pull, provoking a truly agonizing wail that made all of space vibrate and tremble. Exeter and the fast arriving facsimile would be able to feel it too, shaking their cells, and even the elemental molecules composing their organic tissue, and the dark matter which held it altogether. The Executioner had prepared for such a destructive contingency, hence its change in molecular structure allowing it to withstand the close range consequences of its actions.

Nearly finished inflicting its torturous punishment, Aracite gave one final tug, ruthlessly lifting off the damaged mask in segments corresponding to each punctured eye socket. Gooey strings of membranous tissue emitted multicolored, kaleidoscopic light, displaying incomprehensibly condensed versions of all the sights Barrusom’s eyes swallowed during its many rampages. Attached to those strands was a muscled and badly maimed complexion resembling a cross between a grizzly bear and a baboon, its tissues twitching as the Ravager temporarily succumbed to the pain. Then with one final rip, the Executioner removed what remained of the damaged segments and flung them to the wayside, rocket blasting all the energy it absorbed out its tips whilst the fractionated eye beams solidified into full blown pillars, each featuring their own heavily randomized collage of everything Barrusom had seen in its life, each scene taking physical form as it swept over the cosmos.

The trajectory of Aracite's path, pushed them through the ice moon’s debris field, then destructively through the two almost fully separated halves of the frosty giant, back along the path of the footprints, whose positions had subtly shifted as a consequence of the Barrusom’s wailing. It was upon reaching the first of the footprints that the Ravager began to reawakened, snarling at its foe, only to be struck by the might of its own apergetic stomping being explosively driven back into it. This simple detonation trick revealed just how intelligent and planning the Executioner could be, particularly when it came to dealing with its rival, evidenced again as it skillfully directed Barrusom into another repositioned footprint, sending the two blasting off in another direction, then another, and another, until it started to look like the two monsters were engaged in a game of cosmic pinball, with their destination precalculatedly aimed for them to arrive back where Exeter and the facsimile were about to arrive.

–

The facsimile skidded to a halt mere feet from Exeter, its eye shifting purple to red, to stone gray, and back to purple. It made no move to attack, nor protect itself from any hastily thrown together offense she might have chucked at it, though if she had been able to see the battle raging between its larger copy, and Barrusom, she would know that Aracite was not a creature to be taken lightly. Suffice to say, just as it was the case with this cosmos that was being so carelessly torn apart by the Ravager in its quest to feed, so too was it not yet her time to die, though in a few billion years, her Execution date would arrive in a manner just as swift and inevitable as her birth.

For now, so long as she didn't try to interfere with its cosmic rescue operation, it would leave her be.

Turning its slit away to focus on the battle, the facsimile positioned its tentacles like hoses, each one aimed at the numerous rifts produced by the Ravager’s chaotic nature and set to work spraying them down with Dorn’s concentrated essence. It would take time to complete the job, but as with all things, the rifts in the continuum were already starting to show signs of healing, for like peroxide poured onto an open wound, the edges of those portals began to bubble, and break Ebrias apart, initiating in its own microscopic war in stark contrast to the macrocosmic chaotic one that grew closer and closer in proximity to Exeter and the facsimile.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

The beast continued its charge, bothered only by its own hunger, fueling its savage determination to find a meal. Then, something extraordinarily odd happened: the radioactive fire contained within the dark matter orbiting Barrusom's body inversely sent the local temperature of space plummeting to a level that would make anything that passed through the inferno exceptionally brittle. Furthermore, dark matter was the glue that held the cosmos together, and was directly responsible for the bonding of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and all things present within the cosmos. Without it, there would be no planets, no stars, no galaxies rich with things for the Ravager Of Cosms to feed on.

Disconception, in its last moments, inverted the properties that allowed dark matter to hold everything together, including the sword's own mass. Had Barrusom not flung a substantial portion of the sticky stuff off its fur, the blade’s effects on its flesh would have caused the ursim to dissolve and crumble apart. Instead there was distance, albeit a small distance, yet still enough to prevent it from getting its body directly involved with the matter-destruction process that Disconception had wrought forth. The end result was the blade ushering its own anti-climactic deconstruction, molecular disassembly, and particulate dissemination, by forcing dark matter to behave in a manner that caused it to pull its existence apart instead of together.

Infinitesimally small fragments of metallic dust, themselves soon to be nothing, touched the upper-layers of Barrusom's sticky fur. It felt a slight weight differential, followed by an irritating itch that made the Ravager growl and turn around, responding as though something had just touched it. Surveying the area with its eyes, Barrusom bore witness only to that which it had seen countless times already, but as a precaution against further interference, decided in its primitive thinking to do something about being bothered.

Rearing its forelimbs up again, Barrusom mercilessly bashed the continuum of space again and again, backing up with each imprint it left so as not to be standing in place when the inevitable shockwave erupted. Then, driving its claws through the fabric itself, the monster deliberately ruptured the membrane separating the ocean of blood and milk from this universe. Space exploded yet again, carrying tidal shockwaves filled to the brim with the very same acidic content Barrusom had vomited up mere minutes ago, their corrosive effects so damaging to the continuum waves that soon, there would be no continuum lifting Exeter up, down, or wherever her sense of direction told her. Soon, there would be only waves of space-time dissolving red and white acid that would inundate and decimate all but the Amalgam, and those creatures whose habitats were the Outerverse itself.

Satisfied with what it had accomplished, the beast turned tail and blitzed toward its meal, fed up with not being able to gorge itself. Unfortunately, for it though, something else was also starting to get fed up–namely, with what the Ravager was doing: damaging the universe in such a way was bound to produce impurities, and throw off the collective multiversal equilibrium via interverseborne, pathogenic release, and thus – interfere with their natural lifecycles. In other words, universes would grow sick and die before their time, and that was extremely inconvenient for a different beast's feeding cycle.

A single eye appeared as a holographic, sphere-shaped crimson ocular, from which eight transparent tentacles spanning 7/8ths of this verse's total AU pressed against the star-speckled backdrop of space, and observed the chaos through a single black slit.

It was the Executioner…

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

The sight of gory destruction flowed into Barrusom's eyes, its brain processing the floating trail of death as a beckoning cosmic snack bell. Redirecting its path without a thought to where it had been going previously, the Ravager drove its claws through the continuum, gouging and slashing several more rifts open as it violently changed course on a racing path to feast. Considering It had not been far away to begin with, travel time was extremely minimal, the creature extending its siphon tongue with no regard for anything other than sucking up the mess Exeter created for him.

Unbeknownst to Baurrsom as it chewed, crunched, and even created more bodies after being unsatisfied with the amount it was given, in its turning and small hopping motions to lap up the creatures like an anteater, the creature finally took notice of the effects its footprints had on space. Namely the way they explosively bent and expanded the rift, wherein a new portion of the Amalgam’s branches were coming through. Consequently, Disconception found its momentum disrupted several times, with the rootsystem itself actively directing its growth along a path of interception, having like Barrusom, been given a chance to suck on the blood of dead Corpas pack members, and deduced a strange cause of death via the odd alteration of their flesh. It wanted to understand this phenomenon and copy the properties onto its own logographic parchment, wherein the laws of its own cosmos would be swiftly updated once more. Several splinters erupted from impact, the blade inevitably causing less and less damage until was alas snared in place, and luckily for Exeter, she would have been able to feel the absence of destructive intent being imposed on the blade: rather, if she could read minds, or sense intent, it was curiosity that she would first pick up on.

By the time the ursim finished eating, and the Corpas finished finding spots to hide, Barrusom had already taken off again. It was only a matter of moments before the pack reemerged, this time being markedly more careful not to remain too close by. Some of them acted on a different impulse, and instead went to go sniff the sword that had been caught up in the branches, eager to acquire a scent on the thing that randomly appeared to slaughter them. In the meantime, the Amalgam network only continued to expand in complexity, roots gradually extending to colossal branches, each apergetic explosion following Barrusom's path aiding in the endeavor of endless growth.

Meanwhile, at least as it stood now, Exeter seemed to be the one causing the most death.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

In the wake of its vomiting, Barrusom felt emptier than it had, even starting off, belching little more than bad breath vapors into the cold void of space. Instead of marveling at the sparkling glow of its crystallizing burp gas, its six-eyed gaze caught a much more appealing spark, though the size of its flame was barely akin to combustion motes and embers compared to what the beast had reached in evacuating his stomach contents. Before it had puked, Barrusom was close to the size of the Atlantic Ocean – now, the reach of its middle limbs was long enough to grip the heartland of the United States, and Central Europe simultaneously, with its feet gripping the head of South America, and the throat of Africa.

Shaking off the discomfort, Barrusom's fur was flung wildly to and fro, flinging humongous globs with sizes on par with the great lakes off its body. Each time the beast entered a universe, it did so by slashing through the contuum's guts, inadvertently bathing itself in sticky dark matter, the glue of that held matter together. Consequently, when the supernova reached Barrusom, the fire, and all the radioactive heat emanating from it was enveloped in a cloud that neither fed nor extinguished the fire, merely holding it in place.

Feeling a tad confused, and aggressively impatient, the Ravager rose up on its hindlegs, then slammed its front paws against the spatial fabric, generating a black tsunami which eclipsed all the previous ones it had clumsily rode in on. Stepping forward onto the colossal footprints it pounded into place, Barrusom waited for the inevitable return to a state of normality, though its effects on the monster's position were going to be anything but.

Waiting slightly longer than it wanted to, Barrusom began to growl with impatience before being suddenly launched like it was sitting atop a coiled spring, dragging the captured flames with it via the protective coating on its fur. The sensation mildly shocked the creature, causing it to let out a brief, albeit deep yelp considering the sudden change in its vocal pitch. Tucking in its limbs, rather than bounce across branches like it had done before drinking, the ursim spun like a cannonball with its eyes causing a most disturbing visual effect on nearby light sources, pulling their rays towards its face like streamers following the beast's “flaming” rotations, photons twisted into a thoroughly contorted distortion at the cause's epicenter; flinging more dark matter off its “flaming” body, Barrusom narrowly caught up with the shockwave it had released, and was fast-approaching the wave’s crest.

The need to feed was growing evermore maddening in Barrusom’s mind now. Soon it would land upon, and ride the wave it created to an appetizing planet, star, asteroid belt…anything would do right now after throwing up. Its relentless urges were exemplified in the destructive expansion of the rift as the wave pulled and stretched on space, letting more and more of the root system into the universe, the branches quickly becoming visible in conjunction with the continual conversion of space-time into rapidly hardening sludge.

In the midst of the growing chaos, a swarm of mustard pawed feet, bearing a hybrid structure akin to that of a canine insect characterizing the rest of their segmented armor, wandered along the moss-covered Amalgam. Elliptical mouths parted, revealing probing tongues covered in emerald studs tasting for food, whilst sharp diamond-shaped nostrils waited for signs of death and detritus to enter through. A pair of icy blue eyes scanned the area for a sign of direction, tails ending in a cluster of protruding thorns swishing back and forth.

No larger than German shepherds, the Corpas pack, Foragers of Cosms had arrived, not to aid Barrusom, but to follow the path of carnage the beast so often left behind in its wake, and feed on its gifts. Like the Ravager, they too were very hungry, but in a much more basic, non-insanity inducing way, which nevertheless lit the first spark of extraversal enlightenment. Barrusom was not the inhabitant of a strange dimension--its home was a verse all its own, threaded between other cosms, and presenting an ecosystem which appeared to display its traits more through the Amalgam’s invasive, logos-consuming tendencies.

How much of this Exeter would be able to piece together was unknown, nor was it entirely clear if Barrusom had fully perceived her during its less than stellar charge. How much danger the Lumanarun was in could not be answered with certainty: the tidal wave, though far stronger than the previous one, would merely move her around again, and though the swarm of insectile dogs did not function on a primarily predatory mindset, killing to survive was hardly out of the question. Would she meet their searching stares and become an early-game forage snack, would she spot them first and thin their population which numbered in the tens of thousands, or would Barrusom finally figure out that there was something deliberately trying to keep his paws off the cosmos’ many beehives and go berserk.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

The Ravager paid attention only to that which served, or impeded its capacity for lulling the unrelenting whining of its cells, crying out to have their empty spaces filled. Its belly bubbled with discomfort, thoroughly agitated by the boiling sensation building inside its stomach. A stuffy feeling spread through its veins, congesting arteries, and made Barrusom roar through the continuum of space-time itself, emitting a vibrating force that made the darkness rattle and fuzz with static energy.

Amidst the chaos of its whining, Barrusom slowed its charge, the shockwaves following its footprints springing back into place moved at a speed fast enough to pass beneath its feet, lifting the beast up like a surfer and adding to his feeling of unease. Space vibrated again, and produced a different sound, akin to a deep groan as the waters it drank earlier rose and fell, touching the ursim's esophagus, as he slid down the waves backside back. It was making the Ravager very nauseous, and there were many more waves yet to endure thanks to its mindless charging.

Numerous times did the shock-waves lift and drop Barrusom, and numerous times would Exeter find her ability to acquire a stable image of her target blocked by light-distorting waves. Furthermore, each time Barrusom’s six-eyed vision cone happened to catch her in its radius, streams of photons would go flowing around her, dimming the cosmos behind her down to pitch blackness, whilst blinding her anterior sight of the reckless monster, whose eyes were light-sucking vacuums with a gravitational pull on par with singularities. Fortunately for the warrior, this feature of Barrusom applied only to photons, leaving her body technically safe from the pull, but still woefully unprepared for the space-time waves that were about to lift her up just the same as their creator.

Still swerving uncontrollably, Barrusom's perception of the cosmos blurred, its constantly changing direction, even as it slid down the wave causing an undulating bend in the river of light rushing down the pathway to its eyes. Finally, the sensory madness became too much, and without pause or restraint, the beast’s stomach contracted hard enough to squeeze its contents up its esophagus, and expelled them through its siphon tongue with enough pressurized force to bisect a moon. Ontop of having extreme cutting power, this substance was highly corrosive to many things, space itself among them. This was not merely due to being mixed with Barrusom's stomach acids, however–the very swamp he drank from was a primordial ocean, born from the first creatures feeding upon the fruits that grew along the Amalgam’s many branches.

If Exeter, or her sword survived what was literally nothing more than the result of an upset stomach, she would see the great root system’s tips breaching through the dissolved continuum, as well as Barrusom, which whose size had actually increased in direct proportion to what it just puked out. Meanwhile, the darkness of space along the rift transmogrified to a fertile, quickly solidifying sludge, along which the Amalgam grew. Like the other things born of the Outerverse, it too, held a name - Ebrias.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

I am going to give other people a chance to decide if they want to join before responding. This post is actually a few months old and a few people who it was shown to private told me I should use it as a free for all trial by fire/gauntlet, so that's what I intend to do.