wintersoldier
Snowdrops
LG
Lord Zee
Timemaster
Damycles
Izurich
Villamvihar
FunnierPrezLight and Shadow
wordcount: 2684 (+3) (+3 rapport per character)
Midna: level 9 EXP: ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (25/110) (+1 bonus pending)
Roxas: level 8 EXP: //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (34/80)
with
Warp Charges: 1
Warp Charges: 1
An Ushanka and 4 climbing mitten wearing Midna looked up at the tall tall mountain and, after a moment, joked ”Hopefully this one doesn’t have a `don’t freeze to death` challenge at the top of it” before having a thought, tensing, and then the rope connected to her to find her partner, breathing out an audible sigh of relief when that man was not found at the end of it.
Instead it was Roxas, who she hadn’t exactly spent that much time with (they’d somehow managed to end up on different sub teams for every leg of Midgar) but between facing her fears earlier, and the cart racing of all things back in Twilight Town, she only had good experiences with the guy, resulting in her flashing a genuine pointy toothed grin before she asked if he ”had any experience with this kind of thing?”
”Nope.” Roxas answered. But before he could do anything else he looked down and noticed poor Scamp shivering between his legs. And so Roxas put him back in his Poke Ball for the time being so the little guy could stay warm. ”That guy said movement abilities were disabled, right?” He asked, realizing that meant he wouldn’t be able to coast through this with Flow Motion.
”Seems like it” she replied, as she watched her flygon try and fail to take off before unsummoning it.
”Wait.” Roxas realized, ”I wonder if…” He tried to use the Phantom Ruby necklace to summon a virtual cube as a test. And sure enough, it worked! Movement abilities were disabled, but summoning abilities like this one still worked just fine it seemed. And if all damage was also disabled…
”This’ll be a cinch!” Roxas exclaimed. Then he used the power of the Phantom Ruby to summon a set of cubes in a diagonal line. This made them look like a floating staircase. And it also gave them an elevated platform to use as a small head-start for the climb to come. ”I can use virtual cubes to give us extra platforms whenever we need. Normally they hurt other people, but that guy said damage is disabled so you should be able to stand on them, no problem!”
”Only one way to find out I suppose” Midna agreed, before taking a tentative step onto the first step of the stairway. And true to Ballyhoo’s word, the cube was harmless to her. At least inside of this minigame anyway.
”This is as many cubes as I can have out at a time.” Roxas explained, though admittedly he was still fairly new to this specific power. ”But I should be able to re-summon them as we go along without much limitation. So as long as we’re creative with them, they’ll give us an edge. I hope.”
”Say, how good are you at jumping?” He asked when they reached the top of his construct, ”I’m pretty good at it myself, want me to jump first and try to swing you over afterward?”
”Not exactly something I've done a lot of. Used to be able to float after all and the royal life didn’t exactly call for leaping around rooftops” Midna replied, before her face became contemplative, before rhetorically asking ”I wonder” before her hat suddenly rose up off of her head, carried skywards on the middle finger of her shadow hand
”Now that, that is going to help make up for my lack of jumping legs a lot” she said, pointing up at the hand while it gave a thumbs up. And that prompted Roxas to vault over to a nearby natural platform. Of course he couldn’t dispel his cubes right away while Midna was still standing on them. Since he was obviously a lot more “parkour-inclined” than she was, it seemed like he would have to be the one to make some of the first jumps.
”You can try jumping, but if you drop straight down we should be able to swing you back up onto this platform.” Even if he couldn’t actively use flow motion, that didn’t mean he couldn’t still draw from his knowledge of using it to figure out their momentum and the distances it could carry them. Especially since he was able to calculate a lot of that pretty quickly in his head thanks to his Medabot spirit.
”Sounds good, but for these” Midna replied, as she simply reached up and grabbed the first thin platform she had to jump up too, before hauling herself to it ”That’s not going to be necessary”
This strategy worked for about all of the first little cliff, as after that they were presented with a jump that was longer than the rope between them, meaning that it was together or not at all. ”On the count of three?” Midna suggested after eyeing up the gap.
Roxas nodded. ”One-” he counted.
”Two-”
"Three!" they called together and then took a short run up and then leapt up and across the gap. There was a brief moment of panic as Midna’s lack of friction caused her to slide towards the opposite edge of the little platform they’d jumped to, but before she reached it purple dragon claws erupted from her sandal exposed toes and dug into the terrain, preventing any kind of fall.
”Phew, close” she said, before asking ”alright, what’s next” and taking a look across the gap to the other side of the little pit the platform was floating above, one that looked a little bit wider than the one they’d had to just do.
Others had had to use elaborate swinging tricks to pass this, but them? They had tricks of their own to bypass this. Roxas himself was the source of one such trick. With a gesture he was able to generate a basic bridge of virtual cubes they could simply walk across. Of course he assumed it wasn’t always going to be this simple. And he was right. The next platform was a bit elevated and too far for a bridge of cubes to reach. But there were a couple of narrow, vertical wall structures hanging down along the way. And the mittens were able to stick to vertical surfaces for short periods.
"I think we’re gonna have to do some swinging this time around." He admitted, "How do you wanna do this?"
In response to that, Midna reached out with her shadow hand and grabbed the bottom of the first overhang while she was still standing on their jumping off point before saying that ”I think we can get away with just one”
Roxas was pretty sure he had an idea of what she had in mind and nodded. "Got it. You swing us forward and I’ll give us a place to land so we can try to jump the rest of the way." He said and then grabbed her non-shadow hand as a signal that he was ready to go whenever she was.
Midna blinked once in the most miniscule moment of surprise, before flashing him a confident grin as she wrapped the remaining three of her four hands around the back of his hand for a secure grip. Then it was a ”1- 2- 3!” before she leaping off of the edge, using her shadow hand as a rope to swing both of them down under the overhangs and then tossing him forwards, bypassing the 3 underghangs others were using, and sending him towards the end in one fell swoop.
It didn’t look like they quite reached all the way. They would have barely missed the platform, but for the virtual cubes Roxas summoned on its edge in order to make it close enough for them to touch down without any problem. He was also quick to dispel the cubes afterward, to prevent any other teams from utilizing them. Climbing up onto the top of the structure they had just swung underneath was a simple affair. But the next actual platform challenge was… less simple. It started with a long jump onto a very small floating platform, in order words a target that was easy to miss or overshoot. And then three more jumps onto similarly narrow platforms that also increased in elevation followed by a long overhang that blocked anyone from being able to reach the next elevated platform.
"These just keep getting crazier, don’t they?"
”They really do” Midna agreed, before also adding ”Also if you mess up-” as she looked down and down and down at a drop that could well them take them all the way to the start ”well, it's a good thing damage is off but that is a long way to get back up”
Still, they seemed to be making good time, she spotted at least one team down below making much slower progress, but that was no reason to let up the pace. ”You can make it bigger, and even if we miss, I can make a grab for it, so it’s going to be ‘crazier’ for everyone else I think”
”Sounds good.” The Nobody agreed. They pretty much followed that plan exactly. Roxas used virtual cubes to expand the landing area of the jumps. And as for the overhang, they did have to do a bit of momentum swinging to pass underneath. But once they were on the other side, they kicked themselves off the side of the overhang in order for Roxas to instantiate another “staircase” of virtual cubes they could climb to reach the elevated platform. ”Nailed it!” he celebrated. ”Haven’t had any chances to practice with my virtual cubes much, so this climbing race was just what I needed.”
”Still getting used to not being able to levitate here too, so it’s working out for me too” Midna agreed before adding that it was a ”Shame those will only work for you out of here tough”
"What do you mean?" He asked in confusion. A split second later he realized what she meant. "Oh the cubes don’t hurt me at all. They only hurt other people who touch them." He clarified. "Anyway, where are we going next?" He looked around and the only thing he could see was some kind of cave entrance. "I guess we’re going in there next?" He asked as he pointed at the entrance to the mine.
”Right, but i’m going to have to unlearn that they are safe and useful is the thing” the princess clarified before nodding and agreeing that ”that it does seem like it's the only way forwards”
With that said, there was nothing to do but step inside and see what it had in store for them, which turned out to be a bunch of slow moving and fairly narrow platforms. ”So now we have to time the jumps with those? Crazier and crazier” Midna observed, before correcting ”or, well, everyone else does, you can just pop some wherever we need them”
"We gotta be careful about it though." Roxas warned. "I can only create more platforms after I’ve touched a non-cube surface. So we have to make sure we touch the natural platforms in between my virtual ones. Other than that, we should be good." Their somewhat shady tactic had gotten them ahead of most of the other teams. Well, there was one other team that was equally ahead. And that was Captain Falcon and Roland, who’d been managing to blaze through the platforming. And they didn’t even use any virtual ones or anything!
"I think I just figured out who the team to beat is going to be…"
”Look at them go” Midna commented as she stood and watched for a moment, impressed by their straight up skill, before saying ”well then, let’s not get left behind” because the two had definitely been a bit lax in that department thanks to their cheating abilities.
"On it!" Roxas said. The first moving platform was intended to be used to let a team swing their way onto an overhang they could then climb up to where a vertically moving platform awaited. At least, that was the intended way of doing this. Roxas, on the other hand, gave himself and Midna another staircase of virtual cubes that would allow them climb up directly toward the second moving platform, skipping the first one altogether.
Midna then casually reached up to grab onto and pull herself to a little rock below said second platform, only for it to shake in a worrying manner, prompting her to let go. A few moments later, it fell down, only to be replaced by another little rock.
”Nasty. Can’t trust these ones it seems” she said in reference to the rock, but, fortunately, again, they didn’t have too. That was a super easy fix for Roxas, who could just give them a few cubes in about the same spot they could safely stand on without them crumbling beneath their feet. And that also made timing the vertically moving platform easy as well so making it that far was a snap.
”Problem solved. Onto … however many more problems there are” Midna said, before commenting ”You know, I thought these were supposed to be ‘mini’ games, but this is already a lot, and I can only imagine how bad it would be if we fell” right on time for a roar of frustration to come echoing up below that sounded rather distinctly like Bowser being furious about falling who knew how far back down.
”Or maybe there’s some shorter route that we don’t know about?” Roxas suggested. Some of the next sections looked like they relied more on the falling blocks from the looks of it. On the bright side, by now Roxas had figured out that the blocks only crumble and fall when one stands on top of them. So that at least meant they could be trusted so long as the two of them were clinging to the sides. He supposed it wouldn’t matter too much so long as they could keep using his virtual cubes. But that did make him wonder if they would eventually reach a section where those alone weren’t going to cut it.
