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1 mo ago
Current got thrown out the party for keeping it too real. saw that ball drop last year man who cares they just put that shit back up but nobody is ready for the truth when i say it.this country is under attac
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1 mo ago
My new years resolution will be one of great intent and genteel manner. No more status bar tomfoolery. No more games of the mind. I will be a serious man of serious bearing, no longer in silly mishaps
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2 mos ago
so does anybody know what conditioners aren't too rough on chlorophyll
3 mos ago
trying to find the "golden ratio" of weed and ozempic to cause my appetite to stack overflow and reactivate the long-dormant photosynthesis gene from that 50% of DNA we share with plants. will update
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4 mos ago
many people dont know this but a good cue for deadlifting is to bring your chest up and lock your lats for proper spinal stability. this also applies to interacting with gorillas i'm told. testing no—
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Gerard Segremors


@Eisenhorn@VitaVitaAR

"Sound off, people. All up?"

In the wake of the deluge of black ichor and smoke that poured out of the Gannek's dissolving corpse, Gerard's voice rang clear as his unmarred blade cut through the fog, revealing his armored frame standing tall, marching forth. The pit in his stomach, thankfully, was fading fast as the beast, and light was returning to the field once more. He eyed the severed head as it faded from a sickly gray to an ephemeral white gold searching through the empty sockets. Very dead. No mistaking things. They'd timed eachother well. On his shoulder, the feather-light force of his passenger pushing up from the pelt atop his sea green tabard peeled his eyes back to the center.

"There. Sir Rolan has her— go to them. See what help she might need." he gently urged, jerking his head in the direction of his comrades as they retrieved Enfys from the grime the Gannek had left. Caulder was coming to, Rolan cleaning their VIP, Yael there to keep an eye on the scene... Good. Nobody truly out of sorts. Keeping one ear open for the big man's reply to his and Rolan's health checks, he kept his blade drawn as he began to take a circuit around the small clearing, and tree that the fetid beast had torn through.

"Perimeter check," he called to the rest of the knights, eyes scanning the further treeline as he made the round. Given the immediate need to about-face from investigation to monster hunting, this had gone fairly cleanly— but even so, you didn't scuffle with a gluttonous demon like one of those things without making a whole lot of noise. They had doubtless pulled eyes onto themselves with the commotion— these next moments would illuminate to him whether or not they would belong to innocuous, skittish, wholly mundane woodland creatures—

Or something altogether more sinister.

"We should be ready to pull back to the Keep, especially if Enfys needs further treatment." he advised. If Caulder ended up concussed, he didn't want him out here either, to be fair. "How's she look?"
Gerard Segremors


@Eisenhorn@VitaVitaAR

Beneath his visor, Gerard's breath came from behind bared fangs as the meaty squelch sounded from above, flecks of black blood dashed across the crest and tabard as he felt resistance give way at the other end of his impromptu boar spear. That empty head was pasted, no question, and the scream that came in the wake of his assault heralded filaments of daylight forcing their way through the gloom— almost. Almost!

Even assuming that there was barely a brain up there to have crushed, it had to know now that it was close to death. Its' thrashing was growing ever more desperate, his sharpened gaze picking up the tiny serpents of sinew trying to re-knit around the wound he'd imparted, around the weapon itself. They couldn't. Not completely. It would have to live with this... however long it had left. Like any beast knocking on the door to the next world, it lashed out with redoubled fervor— cornered at the end of the line, killing or dying. He knew that mind well.

Let's put it out of our misery, then.

As if a swirl of blackened vines blossoming forth, the shadowy arms from its split maw rushed down the length of the branch by scores, entombing the branch, trying to rip it from his grasp. Anything, to deprive the knight of that implement that he was attacking it with. Killing it with. It had to get it out of this unyielding force driving its head away from the rest of it's body—

And yet it found none of the resistance it expected, as with a wrench of the shoulder the surging knight cast the branch, finally, down into the earth, wedging the base into the soil even as the Gannek's many arms all but entombed it within their crushing grip. When they splayed out to try and find the man that had done this to them next...

"AS ONE!" he howled.

He, and his thoroughly protected passenger, were gone.

A blurring arc of steel caught both torchlight and a lone ray of Reon's Grace, brilliant against the dissipating black mists it ripped through.

"INVENTORI LUCIS! SOLI INVICTA AUGUSTO!"

And with those twinned lights well in hand, he brought his balde down onto the gluttonous, exposed neck of this beast of darkness.
Rudolf Sagramore


@VitaVitaAR@vietmyke

Three blades clattered to the ground, the percussion kick of surrender echoing off the walls on either side of the melee. In time with the hastily rising hands, the blur of black and white that had suddenly accosted them from the rear restrained himself, fading back into Rudolf's low-hunched form, his wings mere inches away from the next throat that would have stained them yet redder. In the gloom between Brightlam's domiciles, that crimson essence had of course looked closer to spilt ink than anything else.

"Lucky you saw sense."

Fitting that they invoked Himstus the way they did— blood was red because it carried his fire through the body. That was why you went cold when you had lost too much, so the legends went. Why when blood was spilled, fight too left the heart.

They weren't smart enough to leave the three of you alone to begin with. They couldn't recognize Galahad as a dragoon until he kicked one of them through a wall. They argue among themselves like they're not on the wrong end of swordpoint from every angle. Do you think they're smart enough to honor their surrender, once our two friends here take them at their word? Smart enough to remember this happened, the next time they've swords in their hands and somebody takes a wrong turn?

Red stained black... unfortunately familiar idea. The fight had nearly left him more than once— and the last time, it hadn't even needed a drop of his blood to start seeing itself out. His brow furrowed as he sheathed one blade, and kept the other interposed between him and the throats of their would-be muggers.

There's one way to be sure, kid. They considered your life forfeit. The only thing that saved you was that you're stronger than they are. Suppose they're even half as good as the 'boy in the stupid uniform' that they fight like. How many people are still on the wrong end of the equation? Most of the same ones your questing to save, I'd wager.

He held his gaze, drawing closer, closer...

And without taking his eyes off them, plucked the first of the three swords from the ground in his free hand, pinching the ricasso between his first two fingers.

You know how easy swords are to buy.

"'Captain', huh? This sure as hell didn't seem like such an organized setup as needing a chain of command." he mentioned, cutting into their squabbling and taking the second sword between his middle and ring finger. He moved quickly between them, always keeping that bloodied sword at the ready, and in short order the third had joined its peers between ring and pinky, all three held in that odd, reversed grip and pulled well out of reach.

"'Left Edren behind', too." he noted, as though spying a worm crawling at the bottom of his barrel of apples. "What's the story here? You conscripts that deserted during the war or something? You fight too much like duelists for that to be the start and end of it."

He knew Robin wasn't going to let that lie unaddressed, and he admittedly had his own curiosity regarding the elephant in the room of how their 'Captain' and her adoptive old man might have been related— but if her previous tendency not to think things through told him anything, the thought that dear old dad may have had a more checkered past than she knew could well have thrown her off course and compromised her ability to ask the right questions.

Hell, if she immediately assumed this school of swordsmanship was strictly limited to her father's tutelage, then it wasn't at all hard to imagine where a hasty mind could take this setup. She could have the lion's share of the interrogation once they'd established these key points, but he didn't have the inherent biases that'd color how they broke the ice.
LTJG ROY KILMER, CALLSIGN "COMMIE"



"General Quarters, General Quarters. All hands to battle stations. I repeat: General Quarters. General Quarters..."

BOEING PHANTOM WORKS
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

STARTING SHRIKE MAINFRAME...

PILOT PROFILE CONFIRMED: LTJG ROY KILMER (WHITELISTED)

LOADING PLUG-INS...

INITIALIZING...

DATA FOUND...

VERIFYING UPLINK...

SYSTEM ONLINE


Elsewhere in the hangar bay, live video feed that had once been projected onto the hangar bay doors had been abandoned in the tumult that came with the call to arms overhead. Playoff season back on Earth. It had made for a fitting background noise to the "sports bar" atmosphere von Brandt's poker games always took, and a welcome distraction after his first three hands claimed their first victim— the man exiled from the table the very same whose beloved bomber jacket and aviators rested atop the abandoned phone, muffling the video feed as much as the commotion of the scrambling pilots and ground crew alike had drowned out the audio.

The owner in question of all that abandoned property rolled his neck, a snug fit within the cockpit of the 7th squadron's "Christmas gift" from Boeing. It was a good thing that he'd really broken the new bird in with their training exercises the preceding couple months— while he was a damn good pilot, getting used to the space and peripherals he had to work with was paramount. Even he made no bones about how little he cared for the idea of leaving the boat for a furball before he knew how movement felt, let alone maneuvering. Even as one hand slicked back straight blonde hair to pull down the helmet of his flight suit, the other danced along the controls, calibrating, flipping circuit breakers, rotating his control surfaces while the comms uplink took that extra second it always did to reconcile the training data his testbed was collecting in the background with the 5th fleet's encrypted channels.

> Reactor: Online_
> Life Support: Online_
> Flight Response Systems: Online_
> Weapon Systems: Online_


His ground team and he had done a good bit of work on the verniers this go around— he was excited to see how well he could handle a wider thrust correction cone. He had half a mind for shelving the analytics while he was at it, if only to spare him those extra seconds it demanded on startup before he was ready to launch— but even then, four years serving under Commander Kodos had instilled a pretty accurate shot clock in his noggin for cockpit warmup. By his count, 54 seconds since the announcement had come over the P.A. Kind of slow, given how close he had been already. He opened comms—

"Hah! Fuck you Hex!"

"DAMMIT!"

And immediate feed spilled into his helmet, filling his ears with a surround-sound experience of the two squadmates he'd spotted scrambling into the hangar while his optics had roared to life, casting the mechanics of his ground crew and their finishing touches in a brassy orange glow. For their part, they were as used to the bickering as the pilot some 27 feet up, and took no pause before waving him the all clear. Among their number was the unmistakable all-white of their recent addition to the ranks from Boeing, a package deal with the new ride that had a heart attack any time he learned what exactly went on in here after-hours. Roy had long stopped telling him fro that reason. The man raised a hand to his ear—

<<Kilmer, I swear to God Above, if you're leering at me like that because you're getting ideas>>

> All Calibrations Complete
> All Systems Nominal
> Standby for Launch


With an electronic snap, the radio feed switched to ATC as the sleek MAS's head moved along, eyeing its heavier peers. response was good across the board, and time was short— their sudden shift in vector would only have the Coalies caught with their pants down for so long. His hands took a mere fraction of a second to rest on the controls, feeling the power of the reactor at his heart flowing through the wiring, through the hull itself. This was the moment he always made sure to share with his chariot— just them, and whatever god or demon of war smiled upon the battlefield they would wade into that day. A shared prayer for good hunting, good fortune, and good understanding between them. Look alive, sweetheart. This one's for real.

<<Tower, 101-5. Systems green, Commie ready for launch.>>

As pilots went, he was fittingly old-school over the radio— clear-voiced, frosty as it came, smooth and swaggeringly calm even as the doors opened up to reveal the bedlam awaiting them. A cultural holdover anyone from aerospace could recognize, going as far back as radio and aircraft themselves. Any military pilot you could name made a point of sounding as crisp and professional as a man or woman could once the mic was hot. As he flicked over to the 101st's channel, he smirked to himself as he caught the tail end of the Commander's speech. Poor old boy had to have been sweating the new kid getting thrown straight into this mess— to say nothing of how much faith Rabbit and Hex must have inspired. It was a good thing they'd each gotten their pounds of flesh early, really.

Of course, there was an elephant in the room a hair under six feet tall and with his own track record for stacking up maintenance hours that was probably being spoken to that he was ignoring, but...

Y'know.

One problem to worry about at a time.

He opened transmission, finally presented with the lull he'd been waiting on.

<<Commie, up and ready. Sorry to worry you, Boss, I figured I'd just let everyone get it out of their systems while I ran preflight.>>
Gerard Segremors


@Eisenhorn@VitaVitaAR

It was eating the light.

Yael was thankfully quick to pivot after he'd barked his "orders", and the combined efforts of her and Rolan had freed up Caulder andf his mighty axe in an instant— and an instant later, the burly knight put it to good use, bringing a fell-handed cleave down through the Gannek's soft underbelly— a ghastly wound on anything that drew breath. They had the advantage, they had the pressure, they were winning. As coordinated a fighting force as could be leveled on the fly against such a foe.

Unfortunately, the magical nature of their foe meant that even rending it open like this wouldn't be enough. His stomach churned, as though ready to howl. His eyes began to strain, as the relatively thin field of view afforded by his new helm was quickly growing dark. Unnaturally dark, as though the light itself were sucked out of the air. It sought to blind them. Desperate. Hurt. Feelings he knew well, with each remembered pang of hunger it foolishly forced into his brain.

Where his light faded, his eyes, ears, and breath sharpened. Where his stomach groaned, his heart hammered, buoyed by old, familiar war drums. It had made a crucial error in this effort. One that would spell its undoing. Many men would be enfeebled, distracted, or otherwise unsettled from their fighting for by this phantom of starvation. They would believe their bodies sapped of strength, the way hunger did.

Gerard, by contrast, came from a life where these feelings came with war. He had fought to put food in his belly, day in, day out. A sufficiently starved wolf would even challenge a bear for the rights to a kill. A sufficiently starved fighting man—

In this moment, a realization alighted upon him. Barely even a thought, so much as an... understanding. That of something he was previously not fully aware, of knowledge and perspective he'd not yet needed. In the moments where their strengths checked one another, the teeth-grit deadlock between beast and man, he... had more to give. There was still yet strength that he could bring to bear, still power he could use.

The knight breathed low, golden eyes glaring out the darkness of the visor as though coins catching the firelight of Rolan's torch. Beneath his plate, fur, gambeson, cloth, his muscular frame held sturdy, coiled like a spring. His moment was close. with a light in the darkness, there would surely be a moment of primal recognition that something new was— THERE!

He remembered the broken end of the felled branch he was driving into this thing's maw as a primarily ragged thing, but all the same split wood— that first jagged, primordial point that the first men had waged war with. Not all that far from a stake. The Gannek's stomach wound was belaboring it, unable to properly close, but Rolan's bolts and the cuts made upon its limbs were still sealing quickly. Its regenerative ability was still very much alive—

So why not turn that against it? While not quite the anathema that staking the heart of a vampire was said to be, the too-hungry soldier for hire that it had dragged up, so soon after he'd begun to properly tuck him away, still wanted to know what it would make of having its' skull impaled upon this lance by any other name. Would it burn precious seconds and energy having to shove it back out the roof of its mouth? Would it simply close around the branch, like wood fibers around a nail? He'd find out. He'd find out, kill his enemy, and this damn facade of emptiness would release the vice it had his gut in. Heavens above, double wages upon them all.

He brought his sword arm to the length of old wood, bracing it on both, and drove forward with redoubled force— the instant the Gannek's beady eyes wavered, he was going to run it through. If Reon's lucky rays still pierced the unnatural gloom in some way, the timing might have even lined up with his peers truly tearing that initial wound open. An immaculate opportunity for a one-man (and technically one fae) siege engine to pulp the brain right through the base of the skull.

Gerard Segremors


@Eisenhorn@VitaVitaAR

Hardly a breath after Dame Yael forced one of the Gannek's crawling, grasping arms back into its maw, a second line of edged steel blurred, as the longsword in the wolf-pelted knight's hand sent another home. He grunted, snarling as he drove all his power into the dried, dead ground beneath, keeping his impromptu boar spear wedged against their foe's most dangerous weapon, checking its advance, keeping that belly exposed. That was the key to all this. Everyone here knew that.

None moreso than the beast itself, as two legs snatched Sir Caulder's axe and stopped it cold, while a third reached for his helmet while he was still stuck in deadlock for generalship of the weapon, strength met with strength. Gerard had mere seconds to react, even as Rolan darted in and out of range behind the bite of his hunting knife to disable an arm—

"To Caulder! Go! We'll be alright!" he howled, the immediate echo in his helmet ringing down to the Aessyr's ears as much as Dame Yael's. As though to make good on his promise, lightning cracked behind his visor, and he pressed the advantage, forcing his arm, shoulder, and torso behind it forward, buying more distance... for now.

He could feel the strides of the crawling length of arms even as he bat them away with his sword. Between that and the titanic strain he was putting the wood under (even with the grain as opposed to against), he wouldn't be able to check it like this forever— at some point, he'd need a fallback. His passenger was buried really deep now, so he didn't believe he'd lose her if he needed to move quick...

"Be ready, but have faith. I've got you." he breathed.

If he felt the branch was about to go, he'd cast it off and use the second of obstruction it'd buy to get at the neck— take over as battering ram, find an angle where the monster couldn't get its mouth or arms around to reach.
This post was fact-checked by real Earthnoid patriots: TRUE



im plenty adjusted it's normal to enjoy fast flight and melee combat yknow
there's a pageantry to it
Rudolf Sagramore


@VitaVitaAR@vietmyke

"Friends of yours, Fey?"

Blades crashed, painting the heavy shadows of the narrow alleyway in brief showers of orange as the trio of Kirins (nobody reasonably expecting Goug to fight) squared off with twice their number in soon-to-be unlucky highwaymen. Negotiations had quickly fallen through after it became clear that nobody intended to part with their gil so easily— Rudolf had barely the time to raise a smirk and an eyebrow at the thought of robbing people so heavily armed as they were before he was set upon by a pair of masked ne'er-do-wells.

Silver lining was that they'd prove a fair first outing for his new recruits.

The seconds that followed were a cacophony of steel striking steel, as the heavy, curved Crane's Wings at his hip were set to work on their first sortie, turning aside the straighter, thrusting attacks made by his sudden opponents. His eyes narrowed, taking their measure while he had these opening moments of uncertainty. They darted to and fro between the figures, his companions, the narrow space and sturdy walls they'd walked themselves into. Something itched at the back of his mind, feeling like familiarity.

From the jump, it seemed like they at least had a rudimentary idea of how to maximize their advantages within the space— cramped as this back alley was, he couldn't completely open the Wings up the way they demanded. His new recruits were well-suited to casting oneself almost into a dervish, swinging the body through powerful arcs as one blade played off the momentum of the other, each strike lending some of its torque to the next— fine as a lone fighter, but when minding his comrades in such tight environs, he'd suddenly found himself kind of wishing he had brought along Valon's spear instead—

That, at least, would allow him to more than contend with his opponents, who had far less concern for the likelihood of accidentally striking an ally. Theirs were the classical form of cut-and-thrust, in keeping with the highwayman look, all in-and-out movement punctuated by needling tempo. He was penned in by the space, and forced to make his reads on the defensive— they would already be out of the way by the time one of his cuts would pass through where they'd been. Trapped at the edge of their range and with no way in, he most out of the three present would be suspect to a death by a thousand cuts once they wore him down. In basic terms, this was what he intuited to be their gambit.

What they had failed to account for was to be a fatal gap in the theory. One they had no reason to know of, in fairness, but was simultaneously a load-bearing element of the whole idea that had been swiped from beneath them, one that made him probably the worst to encounter, rather than best. He'd figured out what it was about the feeling of each exhange that had been bugging him.

He watched the nearby man step in deep. The rhythm, the form, the openings...

He had seen this before.

A few times with his eyes from afar, but more importantly, once over the span of a moonlit bout behind his swords. The other half of that ill-fated eve was barely two steps to his right. The space was very different, true, he didn't have a whole courtyard to open up and apply pressure through—

As the masked mystrel man tried to retract his spada, he found it off-course and caught between the Crane Wings as they crossed over its length, catching his edge on the "featherlike" quillons on the spines. Behind the thin strip of black cloth, his eyes would go wide for the moment the pressure was relieved after a slight tug forward.

"Either way, if they're holding us up I'm playing rough." a cold voice intoned from directly in front, as a blur swelled through the gloom. Still trying to catch himself, the next instant saw the world explode into a field of white pain as Rudolf's pommel smashed into the bridge of his nose. Blinded, he reared back only to find a boot planting itself into his stomach, sending him crashing into another.

—but with that revelation in hand, these guys were now an open book. Forget responding in time— by the end of sparring the better version, he was confident he knew how to break rhythm and regain initiative at a moment's notice. He could attack stance, wedge his cuts in between theirs, or leverage physicality in tight, just as he had here.

The time to sit and watch on the back foot was over. Now that he knew what he was dealing with, it was time to smash through their game the way he had the best of this archetype. Having bought himself a moment's space, the Sagramori Auxilia decided it was his turn to use the terrain to his advantage.

As though channeling the spirit of the mighty sabertooth whose fang he had pried out four years ago, the young man surged forward and pounced, using the nearby wall as a springboard to launch himself clear over the heads of the highwaymen—

"Heads up, nimrod."

—Only to descend upon their rearmost like a falling buzzsaw, twisting at the hips and trunk into a whirling set of hews as his boot planted upon the wall opposite and launched Wings and Warrior both towards the earth. Now behind their lines, suddenly it was the three Kirins bunching up and entrapping the would-be robbers.

He had no intention of letting up his assault.
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