HereComesTheSnow

Falling Skies

LTJG ROY KILMER, CALLSIGN "COMMIE"

---

Within the suddenly-lonely space high above the destroyer, LTJG was very well aware of the fact that there was only one blue team unit up top when there were supposed to be two. The rushing blood had to have gone to Braide's head— no amount of sim hours truly prepared rookies like him for the roar of live combat, where the hammering heart told you every play was made for keeps. Cutting a sharp angle downward, he radioed in for the pair of Sentries below. <<Slender, Denim. Confirm splash one apiece. You guys get out of here, we'll clean things up.>>

His thrusters burned as he readied his autocannon. There had been one Fenrir that had escaped the pincer, albeit with heavy damage— and a quick look at his sensor arrays told him it was just about on a crash course to where Braide had ended up. He pushed hard on the throttle.

Time slowed, as he cleared the bottom lip of the destroyer's hull. The Venator was there, Rook's query in his ears after the kid had more or less pulled himself out of the storm. There was the Fenrir, down an arm and a leg, control surfaces all askew. There were the twin white-flag and SOS Pings, hitting his IFF—

And there was the combat knife, barely even an inch out of its magnetic lock.

Kilmer made his decision, and an icy voice filled the radio.

<<Break left, Elliot.>>

The Shrike's autocannon rose and loosed a single round. At this distance, you almost needed to try and miss. There was a moment where the bleeding-edge prototype seemed to impassively loom, its black paint bathed in the orange of the blooming fireball between them, the brassy visor seeming to drink the flame and burn as it regarded the Venator.

Within the spindly interceptor, Roy took a deep breath, letting the procession of comms roll through as he eyed the radar picture once more.

Then,

<<The plan's been updated, Rook. Rhino is engaging the enemy Fafnir in close— you and I will play fire support. Cover him, follow his lead. I'll handle the drones.>>

Retros fired, and Commie drifted away, turning as he prepared to rejoin the fight. Past the precipice of the hulk, he paused for a moment as he painted targets. The drones were small, nimble, erratic in the way only pure fly-by-wire could manage or handle. Paramount twice over that he handled this. In one sense, this would be a good stress test of the limits of this spaceframe's maneuverability when faced with top-of the line opposition—

Two funnels burned in to meet them ahead of time, sent by the Fafnir to keep the pair of them off its tail. The onboard autocannons loosed, hunting the juiciest signature they could find. Kilmer broke off, his afterburners flaring, and returned fire even as he peeled them away. In his wake, a parting word of advice.

<<Just focus on where you are, and what you need to do. That's what gets us all home.>>

— and in the very real concerns of the other, he was the one responsible for Rook's safety. Funnel drones were a rough puzzle on their worst day, and with the greenhorn only just having come out of the hole of reckoning with his always-immediate risk of mortality on the field, Roy didn't want any of that possible hesitancy to pay the Coalition dividends.

Maybe he would have been wrong.

Maybe Braide was as back in the saddle as he'd said.

Even so.

<<Commie, defending!>>

A hard bank right saw him dump a bouquet of flares in his wake, puzzling the targeting systems of the funnels for a moment as dozens of signatures painted themselves upon the infrared spectrum— granting Kilmer the split second he needed to bring his ionized blade to bear, and punch forward hard enough that the back of his helmet slammed into the seat.

Just as with the retreating Fenrir, he would afford the universe no chances.

His blade struck, burning through.

<<Splash two funnels.>>

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

I can think of no man more ready for single fatherhood than Amerigo Spadoni

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

Are we dads now

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

Damn. Almost had you.

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

handsome is halfway to adorable

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

well, amerigo’s halfway there

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

@HereComesTheSnow post theme song: the Crazy88's battle sequence.

Aubri's post theme song: Yakkety Sax.

@AWildSquirtle

i mean hey man look at Callum

you get ahead by being a lil goofy

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

aiming for today. yesterday saw me completely crash, but i more or less know what i wanna write

@HereComesTheSnow

counts

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

Amerigo Spadoni

Furino Estate, Castle Gardens, Present Day
@AWildSquirtle@Estylwen

---

In truth, the shambling mass of hot ash and fetid breath was half-right regarding the prey it had stumbled across, an admirable eclipse of the demonic average by any measure. A pair of tempered steel eyes flickered between the crawling mass as it first appeared, top edge cresting the roof of the estate, and his three protectorates— two of which were very much as terrified as it claimed. They were drawing close, which was good...

His sword, nowhere near so white-knuckled, remained level and steady as his smirk had not yet faltered. Their engulfing seemed at once fast and terribly slow, each shift in the dimensions of the ashen blob eating more space than it necessarily covered. A noxious liquid was leaking from the many yellow-toothed maws that were scattered along its breadth— keen vision picked a drop hissing as it met the stone of the estate's roof. Sure enough a tiny waft of vapor rose to join the smoke in the air.

"A shame..." he muttered to himself, shrugging off the coat that had till now been draped quite fashionably over his shoulders— revealing the lean and strong swordsman's frame beneath a simple shirt of cotton, as he wrapped the discarded jacket over his free arm. A bit ad-hoc by his standards, but when faced with acidic spittle like this, even a bit of a bastardized sword-and-cape was preferable to sword alone— he couldn't yet see how quick the bile might burn through, but an extra medium between it and skin could buy the crucial second he might've needed. "I'd paid good money for the sheepskin, only to waste it on the likes of this."

As well, it could serve to obscure his or any other form that might be necessary, from at least one angle— in the time he'd taken stock of affairs here on the ground, the chittering, crawling ash had all but formed a dome atop the unlikely quartet in the courtyard, surrounding them with more of those glassy eyes, rotting teeth, leaking pile, and of course that incessant chorus of airy, ashy voices. Unseemly. Unsightly.

Their lips puckered. Amerigo's stance shifted, as lightning-quick glance over the shoulder reaffirmed to him that Aubri had the two children well in hand, and was beginning to shift them away. Good, very good, that meant the lion's share of the thing's attention would fall to the only one here presenting threat—

The spittle was loosed from every angle, as the foreigner's silver hair was tossed through the air in a wild dance as held his ground, slipping, rolling, pivoting around the flying jets of acid. Okay. It was big, sure, but looked and sounded very airy— and it had spread its mass around them in the dome. It wasn't terribly affected by his blade's presence alone, but that stood fairly to reason—

A few streams came too close for comfort, and he caught them on the edges of the black fabric dangling from his forearm— immediately, the fluid produced a noxious, billowing stream of white, and he felt the balance on his arm shift. One theory tested. Time for another. He whipped the coat forward as he darted to the side, sending a few droplets back towards the closest set of eyes. He wanted to know how this thing liked having its own bile thrown back into its faces, since it so kindly had covered everything it showed him with weak points like eyes and mouths.

The white bone of his sword flashed, and another spray was intercepted by a tight parry even as he moved himself again off-line. This time, there was no great release of steam— the bones of the sea evidently much sterner in the face of this assault than cloth. That was to be expected, that was indeed very good. While he had only ever known the artefacts carved from that sacred material to offer their protection against the arcane in a radius about as far away as the tip of his sword at full draw—

"You're right! Very surrounded! Surely it seeks to wear us down from every angle!" Amerigo finally crowed his belated response to his employer, catching him and the two little ones out the corner of his eye. Seemed the accent thing was short-lived after all. No skin off his back. His hungry smile had yet to fade— if anything, the warming of his blood had only stretched it back further. "But I wonder, Aubri—"

—Therefore, what else was a man to do but bring that blade to meet the ash, and its test of the Shade-borne structure into range?

His footwork had seen him spiral away from that initial position, as evasion inevitably demanded. By now, he was about halfway from one of the dome's edges, a smattering of beady, vacant eyes leering at him. He was a dozen feet or so askew from the other three, at enough of an angle that they weren't terribly easy to focus all the caustic pelting upon as a whole. Good. This would be the opportunity, before it caught onto that idea and began to herd him into them. He dodged past another stream—

And rather than continue his winding ballo of pivots, sidesteps, and redirections, shot straight forward with all the speed he could muster, the tanned leather of his coat buying him a crucial second, buying him those last few yards. He cast it off his arm as he was suddenly before the nearmost "face", the tattered fragments sailing to blind the eyes. Fundamentally, nothing about this demon had read as "dense" to begin with by Amerigo's measure. It had been a mass of pumice and cast ash, riddled with hollow tunnels and crevasses between each face, perhaps aiding in that breathing he'd heard. It had then stretched itself around them to form this dome, spreading that mass of ash thinner. And that, combined with so many mouths and eyes...

"How deep might I need to cut to free us four coins from this flimsy purse?"

Meant that he was certain the vicious bite of his opening swipe through them all, fast as a thought, would hurt like hell.

ArrowFell: The Wizard Queen's Court

yeah it froze over my fuckin sleep debt