HereComesTheSnow

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

sunday at the earliest, but don't worry about it overmuch

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

In that case I won't be able to make it this cycle

Secundi Lux

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"S'right," came the reply from the verdant monolith seated to the right of the pair, opposite Crystal and Rivka. A small bandage had graced her brow in the whirlwind aftermath of their initiation testing, a result of the otherwise sterling medical examination. It was telling of their newfound potential that the practitioners weren't terribly surprised that a scrape and some bruising was all she had earned for her meteoric descent— Selma had to admit, even she was a bit concerned after she'd felt her bones shake a little with the impact. "We just took our first steps today. Only goin' up the mountain from here."

Biting deep and heartily into a drumstick, her emerald eyes slid over to regard the two newer arrivals as she mulled over their conversations a while longer. Rivka and Crystal weren't always terribly much for idle chatter, but she'd managed to pull them into some friendly nonsense before they'd showed up— and it had stepped away from the forefront after this had taken root. for her part, she hadn't really given too much thought to whether or not she was really ready to acknowledge herself as Ars Magi...

How did it feel to use your powers, Miss Rosmarie?

"It rocked. I wanna do it again. I felt like I was invincible, unstoppable. Nothing in the world could beat me."

"But, hey, we did just start being 'em. They'll still be training us, y'know? It'll probably sink in more once we really put our noses to the grindstone on it. It's like, uh..."

She paused momentarily, eyes floating between the two girls as she searched for the comparison.

And do you, now, feel differently about yourself since the transformation?

"I'm trying not to. But I gotta say, it does feel like I'm a lot closer to what I've always wanted."

That being?

"Protect people from the Voids. Take back home. That kinda stuff. But aside from that I wanna make sure I stay the same ol' me."

Inspiration flashed as the memory faded back out, and as she swallowed, she raised the bone aloft as though a pointer finger, the classic gesture of "Eureka!"

"It's like dancing. You don't really feel like a dancer after you first shuffle to a nice beat, but if you keep working at it and learning how it all works, it starts to feel right."

The bone unceremoniously clattered back to the plate as she wiped her fingers. That made sense, right? It did to her— it should to the other ladies, then. For all their personal misgivings with themselves, all their uncertainties, all their needs of a good solid hug every now and again, Selma was pretty sure that if she could grok something, they could grok it too. They seemed smart. Surely they'd also needed to train stuff from the ground up before— and they probably didn't need to fight stuff like a gangly build, but the point remained.

She made to clap Chie on the back, good-natured and fraternal as ever—

How did you feel your peers performed, in that case?

"I'm glad everyone's okay. It got a li'l touch 'n' go at the end there, but poor Chie still gritted her teeth and fought through her injury like a champ."

And decided instead to venture north, tousling the smaller girl's long brunette locks in between bites of food, favoring her with a confident smile. After a moment, it graced the rest of the table in turn— Aoife, Crystal, Rivka. They'd been through a lot together in the past three days, nobody could deny them such. They'd faced the fire head on even when they weren't meant to— nobody could have predicted that train station going the way it had— and always come out swinging for the fences, even if it wasn't the perfect concertos someone like Sokolov had expected of herself. They'd always found a way.

And for her, their hard work was gonna be a badge of pride.

So regarding your encounter with the Void...

"Heh heh heh. Kicking them around for a change was fun."

That'll be all, Miss Rosmarie.

Congratulations, cadet. Today,

"Just watch. If we could handle all this before we start learning from the best in the business? Before you know it, we're all gonna be cracking their masks like old pros. They shoulda got us on that train when they had the chance."

Her grin passed confident and into wolfish, as she returned to her food with redoubled vigor. Payback Time was a-comin', and she'd long set her clock.

You are an Ars Magi.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

Gerard Segremors

...Is now really the time to be humoring this?

Perhaps wisely, the swordsman held his tongue as he watched the scene play out before him in the evening light, focusing instead on the colossus of iron that emerged from the courtyard opposite them. If nothing else, this was better than rising to the barbs in earnest. More importantly, this "Bors" character's appearance answered a number of questions that had floated around within Gerard's skull. "How exactly were those gates blown open", "are we set to run into the rumored member of the Shark's retinue with Giant's blood I remember hearing about", and "what sort of person would Jeremiah's sword have even initially been forged for, anyway", to name three at random. Towering over any man Sagramore had ever seen and speaking with the voice of a distant avalanche, it wasn't hard to see how he served as an equalizing show of force for Alette, given her spending the majority of this standoff plainly surrounded by their number.

Difficult to take down for certain. If he knew of the aforementioned vampire at all in his time with the Order, he'd make it a safe bet that she would swipe up the chance to cross blades with someone of his stature— which would inevitably produce a comical study in contrasts. Regardless, now that he was here and the two parties had more or less levelled out their chest-puffing to a healthy balance... Well, the third body showed the exact same wounds as the rest. The question was why— something he figured would only be discerned further inside.

He floated towards the interior keep, passing the Knight Serpenta and sparing a momentary glance as she bent down to inspect another corpse. The Naga was... hm. In many ways a kindred spirit, in many others a voice of reason to check those such as he. Yet for all her casual demeanor as she flipped a man's body onto its side to find a long slice down his back, he felt the need to reconfirm it for himself before continuing on. She'd gone and encircled Alette— however slowly and lazily, it was all the same a fairly clear message, even to a dim country boy.

Lucky it didn't escalate then and there. Playing with fire, ma'am.

He forged ahead, in the wake of his fellow Reonite, entering the bloodsoaked antechamber to little fanfare aside from the rummaging of the mercenary before them, and his senior's offered greetings. The woman was deathly pale from what he could see beneath her tanned leathers and the curtain of moonlight waves down her back. Adorned with knives seemingly at anywhere that wasn't a joint as she was, a quick examination revealed the wounds of the garrisoned men to be more of the same as outside, rather than anything that would indict her. The blood was too old for that anyway— beginning to brown over, and tainting the air with the smell of metal.

What sort of shared madness could have caused this?

"Must be some sort of magic to drive an entire garrison rabid enough to kill, right?"

He knelt, fruitlessly trying to glean new detail from the same kinds of evidence as before, brow truly furrowed into a tight knot of inquisition. Some poison in their food? Not his forte in the slightest— he neither knew of one that could do such a thing, nor a method of procurement and dispersion.

"Even rowdier soldiers for hire rarely take a brawl that far. We didn't. Men on the royal pay line ought to be much the same."

Where Fleuri wore the friendly mask of a courteous gentleman, Gerard's grimace edged ever closer to a scowl as his mind raced to find possibilities.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

had a little liquor in me letsa see what i can come up with

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

boy oh boy i will definitely not regret this at work tomorrow time for dinner

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

---

As the dull brown sands of the alien planet were cast into hellfire's orange by Konstantin's mech-scale satchel charge, the roaring thunder that rolled over the desert was sliced open by that same screech of metal rent by metal, now at a fever pitch, as if the plainly synthetic hostile were in agony. For a moment, the long howl seemed as if it would have no end, carried upon the rushing wind and heat through dust and sky. Kon began to believe he would seriously need use of his TLS and go for it's throat in both literal and metaphorical senses—

And then, with no preamble of denouement or trailing volume, it ceased, the ape of alien steel slumping into the sand as its top half nearly made the trip on its lonesome, roughly shorn into what was almost two by the blast. As it careened to the earth, its silence was mirrored by its brethren, a lance of light from the Voyager high above descending into silent metal, the foreign orbital shutting down with it.

The silence did not last long.

<<Nothing quite like watching the fireworks, eh, Stojanovic?>>

<<Good kill Stojanovic. It made a pretty light show.>>

[ERROR: Data Transfer to PANDORA unable to complete. Suspected Signal Interference. Retry? Y/N]

A field of orange light danced across Kon's screen for an instant, replacing the hues of explosive flame with that of a very, very confused machine learning program— one that pinged every unit on the board, be they designated hostile or friendly, as simply "Unknown". The pilot clicked his tongue, dissatisfied sneer beginning to form on his face as the system's diagnostics began to fight to reconcile some form of order with the scuffed dataset.

How very usual for this bleeding-edge crap. Stress test it for the first time in real combat, and suddenly all the bugs that had somehow hidden themselves away for fifteen years of development came to the fore.

[UPDATE: Data Transfer f̵r̵o̵m̴ PANDORA completed. Cached tactical data dumped to PANDORA.]

..?

Hadn't he been uploading to the Pandora?

...He was no network analyst or technician. Maybe it was a data synchronization between the ground team and the ship far overhead. Maybe the ship used its stronger comm arrays to connect to him. Maybe the alien scream had fucked with his electronics like the toxic rounds they'd loaded into it. It wasn't his job to know. For now, it seemed to have sorted itself out save for that minor, maybe even graphical, glitch. Friendlies were friendlies, the marked AO was unchanged, even chemical composition data was consistent with pre-kickoff (save for a little more in the way of atmospheric heavy metals).

The Pandora's techs and General Resources attache would have ample time to figure out whatever the hell had just happened. For now, he had to just get it back in one piece.

<<Bedwyr here. Applied pyrotechnics aside, capacity is unchanged. One shotgun is slag, everything else in working order. Merlon appears to have calmed down, give notice if it's not playing nice with anyone.>>

He returned to comms, circling overhead in a similar, if somewhat lowered, lazy drift around the ground team as before, conserving fuel for primary burn to leave the gravity well of this alien, now definitely hostile world. His eyes, drawn inevitably to the spoils of victory, prompted the display to magnify the charred remains of Bandit Two.

<<Looks like I stole Nebula's thunder. Just remembered Michael was the one that was supposed to roast an alien. Hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.>>

He came to a stop just a ways above his slain adversary, the jet wash from his propulsion beginning to hit the sands with enough downforce to kick up small plumes again, gentle clouds terminating a few meters away from the torn giant of silver. Were he not the man he had been shaped into by his youth he would have felt the urge to cup his chin in thought.

But he hadn't been the type to let a hand leave the controls for well over a decade.

<<I'll handle rear guard unless ordered otherwise. Keep an eye on things while we pack up.>>

Blades of the Blood Coast: A Grimdark Mercenary Roleplay

should i spring for it i’m almost certainly going to make a character that is a shamelessly clumsy, earnest love letter to Berserk, so best to just set the tone early

Blades of the Blood Coast: A Grimdark Mercenary Roleplay

My word is law.

given the circumstances, i'd be lying to say i'm uninterested.

Blades of Iron Roses: An Anime-Inspired Fantasy Knight RP

when i can