I'm Pollen, hope you're not allergic. I like writing a myriad of characters in all kinds of genres, so I'm pretty much down for anything roleplay-wise.
It arrived in the form of a shadow, a winged silhouette passing in front of the sun so high up above that for a moment, the entire arena was cast into darkness.
A circling vulture, perhaps? No, there was no bird alive with wings like that. Bony, chiropteran, like great webbed hands extending to grasp the sky itself. Any denizen of any fantastical universe ought to recognize the wings of a dragon, and know enough to cower in fear at the sight of them. When their shadow fell upon you, chances were it was already too late.
The wings folded, and the distant shape dove downwards in a spiraling arc towards the half-buried Colosseum. Sunlight glinted off bright crimson scales, the red hunter swooping in to eye up its latest prey. After circling one final time, it slowed to a gentle glide and alighted delicately atop the highest point of the arena ruins, where it stood up straight and cocked its head at the tender morsel sat down below upon the sandy floor.
"Oh good, you're already kneeling. I do prefer mortals with some semblance of self-awareness."
Not quite a dragon, as it turned out. She certainly had the wings of one, and the nigh-impenetrable red scales, but up close her form was almost fully humanoid, a slender and feminine shape clad in nothing but her own reptilian hide. Her delicate features and soft black hair were more elven than draconic, and her voice brought to mind a beautiful siren luring sailors to their deaths in the open sea. Bright, inquisitive golden eyes fixed themselves upon the feline champion, and the hunter's lips curled into a gentle smile.
"I hunger, beast-man. You may be thankful that it is so. Slit open your throat, and I will do you the honor of taking your flesh as my sustenance."
I apologize for the absence. Doing this on mobile gives me no notifications. But here you go, one of my more physical characters
Alright! He seems pretty fun. How about this for an opponent?
Name: Lyra Gwynn Age: Around 60 years Height: 5'7'' Weight: 125 lbs Race: Shroudwalker
Appearance: Lyra looks much younger than she really is: she was twenty-two years old when she died, and her body has stayed that way ever since she returned to life. She has a slim and bony build, with jet-black hair that extends down to her shoulders and eerie yellow eyes. Her skin is a darkened gray that blends perfectly into shadows, making her almost invisible in low-light conditions. For clothing, she favors a sharp black coat with long tails, and a pair of well-ironed formal trousers. She does not wear shoes.
Weapons and items: - The Shroud: Lyra is bound to a floating mass of dark particles, a living cloud of unnatural smog that follows her wherever she goes. In more casual settings it will lie hidden in her shadow, compressed and passive, but in combat she deploys it in full force, and it can grow large enough to fill a small house. The Shroud has been intertwined with Lyra’s very soul since her first resurrection, and she can manipulate the size, shape, and position of the cloud as though it were part of her body, giving her excellent fine control over its form and density. Other than being movable, the Shroud possesses three dangerous properties. The first is that it absorbs and stores light and sound waves, including frequencies such as ultrasound or X-rays that would normally be invisible to the human eye. This renders it perfectly black to outside observers, and masks any noise passing through it. Light and sound it absorbs can be gathered and later redeployed offensively, as wide bursts or tightly concentrated beams. Secondly, it relays sensory information directly to Lyra’s neurons, beginning with the patterns of light and sound coming into contact with its outer edges. It also keeps her aware of its contours, allowing her to effectively 'feel' anything in contact with the cloud. The Shroud differentiates between her own thoughts and those born of other powers, obeying only those that are truly hers, and she can use it to detect foreign incursions into her mind. Last but not least, the Shroud will resist any and all movement within itself not initiated by Lyra or her abilities. Its minuscule particles originate from a far-flung universe devoid of all life, and their presence in other planes of reality will bend physics around them slightly, slowing down other matter and energy passing through areas where the particles are gathered. This effect works more powerfully against faster movements: walking through the Shroud is merely uncomfortable, running through it is like pushing against a wall of molasses, and bullets or anything similarly fast will face resistance strong enough to slow them to a crawl. The more spread-out the Shroud is, however, the less powerful the slowing effect becomes, and tight concentrations are required to fully exploit this property.
Abilities: - Physical parameters and training: Even before she died, Lyra was considered an exceptionally talented warrior. While her strength and endurance are better than one would expect from a person her size, it’s in speed and mobility that she truly excels. She can outrun the fastest of beasts, react quickly enough to avoid gunfire, and traverse even the most dangerous and chaotic terrain with impeccable balance and poise. Her skill with the spear is the stuff of legend, and she’s also known to wield daggers and shortswords in close combat, fighting with an inhuman precision that has only grown sharper since her resurrection.
- Shroudwalker physiology: The Shroud has infested her unliving body, changing her once-human form into something strange and unsettling. Though she still moves and talks and thinks the way a living person would, most of her biological functions have simply stopped: she no longer breathes, eats, or consumes any known form of chemical energy. Medical examination reveals that even her brain and nerves are electrically inert, though evidently some form of information transfer is still going on. Some otherworldly power seems to animate her now, preserving her from all forms of aging and decay while enabling thought and motion. It seems to be tied to the Shroud itself, which permeates her entire form and has infused itself within her lungs and bloodstream. Notably, Lyra can synthesize Shroud particles within her body into a solid form, extruding them as pitch-black spines of varying thickness and length. While Lyra can wield these without issue, they don’t seem to be fully affected by external sources of kinetic energy, requiring exceptional amounts of force to damage or knock aside.
- Cryopsionics: Psionic abilities have long been known to manifest in various individuals across the many universes, and during her human life Lyra was one such person. While her powers did carry over after death, however, they were irrevocably altered by the manner of her resurrection: her mind is no longer the lively thing it once was, and only barely feels what could be described as human emotions. Due to her psychic nature, this emptiness manifests itself in the physical world as well, with her very presence dropping the surrounding temperature by several degrees. By exerting her will, Lyra can shape and focus this effect, bleeding thermal energy from select areas and sapping the drive and resolve of sentient beings. The closer she is to her target, and the more narrow her focus, the faster the resulting drain occurs. Lyra can channel these psychic attacks through her Shroud spines while wielding them, which sharply raises their potency. Like many psychics, she possesses a form of telekinesis, which exclusively affects matter frozen in crystalline form (such as ice and snow). While this specialization restricts her in some ways, it also grants her firmer and more precise control, and allows her to spread her influence like a virus. Once she's seized control of a fragment of ice, Lyra can shatter it at will to flash-freeze an area up to four times its width in radius, and gains control over any new ice created. The larger the shattered ice fragment, the colder the resulting freeze.
Lyra's earliest memories are of hard times, of dust and dirt and exile. Her people were forced out of their ancestral homelands several years before her birth, whole cities laid to waste when an ancient and powerful dragon decided to seize their mountainous nation as its territory. Faced with the wrath of a monster no mortal could challenge, the indigenous population was left with no choice but to flee. Even as they left their lands behind, however, they vowed to one day win them back.
From a young age, Lyra and her fellow children were trained in the arts of war and magic. Their elders told them stories of their homeland, instilling within them a burning will to defeat their common enemy and return to the life of old. Year by year, they trained relentlessly, eventually leaving their parents behind to travel the world and seek new skills and powers to help them succeed.
Lyra had never been particularly talented with conventional magic, so she sought out an order of psychics, and learned to channel her mental strength as a means of attack and defense. She wasn't satisfied with this, however, and ventured further still, seeking dangerous and forbidden secrets well beyond what others would dare. She traveled further than any before her, through burning deserts and dense jungles, across steep mountain ranges and into dark ravines teeming with hidden predators. She saw landscapes that dwarfed anything she'd ever dreamed of, and came to know of peoples and creatures whose vibrant diversity fascinated her, but still she wandered further, always fixed on her goal.
In the end she sought out a rumor, a ghost. Whispers of an abomination from another universe, a being that warped existence around it wherever it appeared. She walked out across a frozen sea, to the distant point where it was said this being sometimes passed through her world.
To this day, Lyra had never told anyone what she found there. What is known is that she came back with the Shroud.
There was no more need for training or exploration. She made her way back to her people’s homeland, and, rather than waiting for her old comrades to gather their forces, walked straight into the dragon's domain and challenged it alone. It was barely even a fight, for the beast soon tore through her defenses and snapped her up with its massive jaws, swallowing her in a single gulp.
It went exactly as she'd intended. Out there on the icy sea far away from all trace of civilization, Lyra had made a deal with the devil: she'd give up her mortal life, and receive in exchange a rebirth, a physical resurrection via a permanent joining with the Shroud. Thus, trapped within the corrosive, poisonous interior of the dragon's stomach, the fragile human quickly died—and then woke up, gathered her strength, and tore the beast apart from the inside, slaughtering it as one-sidedly as it had done to her. As soon as the news reached her people, they rejoiced. Scattered families flooded back to reclaim their lost cities, and the many would-be dragonslayers arrived to find their life’s greatest battle already won. Lyra herself was honored and celebrated, showered in gifts and offered the title of High Queen.
For Lyra, however, something had irrevocably changed. She had returned from death with all her intelligence and skills intact, moving and speaking just like a living person… But she’d left something behind, as well. Her kindness. Her empathy. Her intensity of feeling. When she looked at her people now, she saw only scurrying creatures of flesh and bone, puppets to their own primitive instincts and desires. They might as well have been ants, for all that they mattered to her now.
So she spurned the glories offered to her, and left her homeland behind. The Shroud whispered to her of far-off worlds, entire different universes filled with people and creatures she could scarcely have imagined before. There was a great game afoot, with entire planes of existence hanging in the balance, and now that Lyra had achieved her personal goal, it was time for her to uphold her own end of the deal.
To serve as harbinger, and bring about the end of all things.
If you think she'll do, then feel free to pick a battleground for us and/or post up a fight thread. If not, then just let me know and I can check my roster for someone higher- or lower-powered.
Much like yourself, I'm comfortable fighting with just about any level of powers, so pick one or slap down a character sheet and I'll see what I can offer.
I'm also interested! It seems like superhuman abilities are a focus here, but would a Batman-esque no-powers-but-many-skills archetype be workable as well?
No worries. I did another reply myself, just to wrap things up on Favian's end. You can do a closing post for Aslain if you want or just leave things here, either way I think we've reached a good stopping point.
Thanks for the good fight! If you ever want to write stuff again together (arena or otherwise) then feel free to hit me up in PMs.
Shadows loomed overhead. Hands grasped as his arms, pulling him away from Aslain and lifting him to his feet. Favian gasped for breath, the dagger falling from his loose hand while he blinked the sweat out of his eyes. It was over. He'd done it... To his own satisfaction, at least. Had it been a real battle, had he truly met his end, he would not have been ashamed of his performance.
His muscles were burning from exertion, bruised flesh beginning to throb beneath his armor, but he was quick to recover himself. Finding his balance, he shrugged off the attendants and waved them away, pulling up his visor and blinking in the fresh daylight. His heartbeat slowed, his breathing began to steady, and at last the calm returned to his mind, like a cold shock after being caught in a fire.
Well. This was more than I had bargained for. He'd presented himself for a duel on foot hoping for a challenge to keep his skills sharp, and had received one of the most difficult fights in his life. Not since his encounter with the stranger in the forest had someone pushed him to his limits like this, forcing him to leave calculated movement behind and rely on his instincts and raw ferocity. He would think over this battle many times, he knew, and perhaps learn something from it as he did.
Smiles did not come naturally to the cold Sir Favian Procell. But he made an effort, at least, as he reached out and shook Aslain's hand. "You are formidable, Sir Aslain, and there is not a man here who would doubt that now. The next time we meet, I will have to be sharper and quicker still—and that need will make of me a better knight. So I say to you: godspeed." He inclined his head, and his humility in the gesture was awkward yet sincere.
But the training and anticipation could come later. For now, he released the hand of his worthy foe and went to retrieve his sword, to rest and recover and sleep before embarking on the next steps of his journey. If today had shown him anything, it was that he still had a long way to go... And that there were still foes out there who made those violent, martial heights worth reaching for.
Yup. If there were a third party here, it'd be easier to judge, but honestly I think this is over. I can't really see a way for me to stop that strike. In a real duel to the death, it would've killed him. But the dagger to the gut is pretty substantial. It's usually a slow and painful death as the gut had a lot of very nasty things in it. Stomach acids, gut bacteria, and so on. But if I were to judge, I think I'd give it to Favian on this one.
I mean, I’m not going to disagree with you there. If I didn’t think that last stab would earn Favian the win, I wouldn’t have had him do it in the first place.
You’re right about the gut stab, though. With a sharp blade it could easily be lethal, and Favian’s chances of survival would come down to stuff like how big the tear in the gut was, whether his kidney got hit, whether he could get medical attention in time to alleviate some of the damage, etc. That said, I alluded to this in Favian’s internal monologue. At the end of the day he doesn’t care what the judges think, since as far as he’s concerned the man who crawls away clinging to life while his opponent lies dead behind him is the victor.
That said, I don’t mind how things turn out in-character from that point on. So feel free to wrap things up however you like! I’ve had great fun with this, and I hope you got something out of it as well :)
It was a lucky thing to have an opening, but a split-second advantage was useless in the wrong hands. Options flickered through Favian's mind—should he throw another punch? A knee? No and no: neither one would have the momentum to stop a tackle. The safer course would be to throw his weight forward and counter the tackle with a sprawl, turning the fight into another grueling pushing match. Both knights would have ample opportunity to use their daggers then, and Favian was confident he could at least hold onto his lead until the marshal called a halt to the match.
But was that really what he wanted?
His mind, cool and rational, knew that this was far from a true battlefield. Yet in the thick of the fight, his warrior's heart had awakened, and now it roared in his veins, thundering through his skull in a deafening war cry. He did not jockey for points, God-damn it! He did not fight to be ruled the winner on a technicality! Tourney or no, he would not settle for being handed petty glories—he was Sir Favian Procell, the Storm Knight, and he would take this victory with his own two hands.
Sir Aslain surged forwards for the tackle, and Favian welcomed him with all his might. His body twisted clockwise, and his left arm lunged downwards, wrapping around the lion knight's helm in a tight headlock. Then both his feet kicked off the ground, and he was throwing himself backwards, pulling Aslain along with him, an ungainly mass of man and steel splashing together against the muddy grass.
I can't beat him in strength. And he's every bit as skilled as I. That left only one recourse: the mad, the unexpected. Rather than resist the tackle or try to land a counter before it happened, he allowed himself to fall, and used his own strength to bring Aslain along for the ride. Rather than landing with Favian on his back and Aslain positioned to easily stab or mount him, they'd end up pressed together, with Aslain's head held tight against Favian's breastplate and his chest squashed against the storm knight's lower torso.
Based on the course of his tackle, both of Aslain's arms would be at the level of Favian's waist or hips. If Favian had been quick and lucky enough to catch him at the right moment, he might even have managed to trap Aslain's dagger hand by squashing it between them before he could properly line up the strike. Favian knew better than to underestimate his opponent, however, and was prepared for the worst. A knife to the gut? A man can survive that, at least for a time. In a true battle, he'd have risked the same sacrifice.
The fall had nearly knocked the wind out of him. His armor mitigated some of the impact, and the ground was not hard, but even so it was enough to drive a sharp breath of air through his tightly clenched teeth. His body, though, it knew what to do. His left arm lower down for the tackle, his right arm aimed to run me through the intestines. Now was the moment, perhaps the best and only chance he would get.
Held in his right hand, Favian's blunted dagger slammed down upon the back of Sir Aslain's neck, striking right beneath the base of his helm.
A knife to the spine? Dead before he can take a breath.
I'm thinking making this a lot like how the medieval knights used to duel during competition. Not really meaning to kill each other but dueling as if they were trying to and having someone score. I figured we can agree that if that was the case, you'd be ahead because of your earlier hit on his shoulder.
Sure, we can play it that way if ya want!
Edit: wrote my reply as such. Lucky thing for them both those blades aren't sharp :P
Hello!
I'm Pollen, hope you're not allergic. I like writing a myriad of characters in all kinds of genres, so I'm pretty much down for anything roleplay-wise.
Come talk with me if you want! I'm friendly.
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Hello!<br><br>I'm Pollen, hope you're not allergic. I like writing a myriad of characters in all kinds of genres, so I'm pretty much down for anything roleplay-wise.<br><br>Come talk with me if you want! I'm friendly.</div>
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