Krayzikk

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

Hey folks.

Short version, FedEx fought me a lot harder and a lot longer than I expected, assignments piled up, multiple family visits, a birthday, and on and on. The good news is that the post is done (a little shorter than I planned) and is going up right after I post this.

The bad news is, obviously, that it's late. And a lot of stuff went into that in the short term but in the long term it happened because I ran this first "episode" so to speak pretty poorly. Providing only two enemies centralized things in a way that if one person didn't post, someone else couldn't post. And if one or two people didn't post, I wasn't really sure how to move the fight along and preserve momentum without causing problems for myself and for all of you guys. On top of that some stuff that I had pushed back definitively pinning down because it didn't matter yet suddenly mattered right when I was dealing with everyone else, too.

I've got a two-fold strategy to fix this moving forward. Firstly I'm holding myself to having a post done every week on a certain day (to be determined when I check when coursework is going to be due over the summer so they don't overlap) or at least a post explaining what I'm waiting for before I make another one. I'll announce what day that's going to be, and I'm going to hold myself to it. The second part is decentralizing further storytelling a bit so it doesn't all fail if one or two posts don't materialize.

Lastly I would appreciate it if everybody who is still here and wants to stick around could sound off so I can do some planning. If you've dropped me by now I totally understand and no hard feelings at all. I just need to know for my own planning. If it turns out that pretty much everyone has dropped, I'll check in with whoever's left about how we want to proceed.

Sorry again about the problems, and letting you all know I still fully plan to stick with this.

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

Sorry to hear about your computer. I hope you don't need to replace the GPU.

@Crimson Paladin

You'd hope, wouldn't you?

You'd really hope.

[+]

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

Quick update: No progress from FedEx, but all of my big assignments for semester's end will be done after tonight. I've been working when I have time, post will be up before the weekend.

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

Quuuuick update on me. Finals hell. In addition to finals hell, FedEx trashed my main computer in transit. I have my laptop, but that means where I'm set up is a little more variable.

Short version, everything's on fire.

That being said after today I have no more assignments and I'll be fixing my computer as soon as FedEx pays out. So, I should hopefully have a post up before the weekend. Sorry about the delay on my end.

Secundi Lux

---

Wonderful! Perfect!

The tips of her fingers, arms still spread wide, swung to and fro as though coordinating a beautiful symphony. The ebb and the flow, the rise and the fall, the rhythm within the chaos. There was a pattern to it, a beauty. It wasn't a careful, perfect Classical piece; it was Romantic, with all of the rough edges and complex strands that bared the very soul of its performers. And hers, oh hers would be the brightest!

The new girl was perfect, a new instrument to the piece facing the monster with poise and power! Ahhh, her addition would round them out, smooth away the gaps and imperfections until they were a perfect performance. But now, in this moment, it was her spotlight! The devushka would confine it, with strong earthen walls and she would burn it just as the joy burned within her. Oh, this was living! Hell's attacks were parried, Selma fell from above, the strands came together and melded, building and building and building to that perfect crescendo for her to punctuate with-

The beast shattered, and her mood with it.

Crushed with as much finality as Selma's landing, and her perfect performance was finished with a fucking off-note, off-key crash. Her grand finale smothered in its crib, a track cut off right before the climax. How unsatisfying. Her joyous grin curdled, fading into neutrality as her arms lowered. In place of joy she had only sore ankles. She scuffed her shoe against the ground and kicked an icy fragment, grinding the next nearest under her foot as though the Void were responsible for the massacre of her vibe.

Hmph.

"Who's the..." She stopped, voice flat and ruffled. Rivka jerked her thumb at their new arrivals by way of explanation, deciding the words she had chosen wouldn't be very... Diplomatic. Then she nudged the fallen tree (quite a sound with her toe without looking."You. Who are you? Up, devushka, you're making us look bad."

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

Yeah the bad news is FedEx trashed my desktop and one of my monitors. Soooo I have a claim going.

The good news is that my post work is in the cloud, so I can work from my laptop. So slight delay, but we aren't too far off track.

Advance on Distant Proxima (Mecha RPG)

Hey guys! Sorry to be saying this after such a break again, but real life kinda got hectic for a bit. Classes, some upsetting family news, all that good when-it-rains-it-pours stuff. On top, of course, of the fact that there were a couple really key posts that I was waiting on. When they finally happened I had gotten busy myself.

The good news is I have been planning, drafting, and writing as much as I can during this, and I've got a good five hours stuck in an airport terminal on my way home with my laptop. If the post isn't up tonight (which even if it's done it may not be, because travel is exhausting) it guaranteed, 1000% will be up by the end of the weekend.

If it isn't Snow is going to physically show up at my house and beat me half to death so.

Secundi Lux

_{should be easy for you, right devushka?}

---

By all rights it should have been over as soon as it began. Rivka's shots were perfect, two in succession grouped no more than centimeters apart. Her hand could have covered their path quite comfortably, and they struck with tremendous effect. Hell itself was nearly neatly nicked cleanly in two, nicely nominating her for her rightful acclaim. Its right arm simply separated at the shoulder, cleaved from its form and dispersed with prejudice. But still it remained.

To see it fall intact, to hear the commotion below that signified its survival, was disquieting. It warred with her sensibilities, made assault upon her wisdom, and openly clashed with all common sense. But she recognized the dissonance within her own mind quickly and the world slotted into its new proper understanding. Her brain insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that this was a living thing. It simply didn't compute to think of it as anything else. No living thing could cope with such massive trauma; contained within its torso were all sorts of vital organs and squishy bits, things that were supposed to remain intact and inside. Such wounds could only cause death, swiftly at that. Even her assailants at the station would have succumbed, had she the power to pierce their corrupted skin properly. It simply didn't make sense that things thing could still be alive, not even after she had already seen how its smaller kin manifested. But there was the root of the issue.

This Thing did not live. Not the way she understood life. This Thing was naught but Power, Power wrapped around a core somewhere in its being much as she could be thought of Power wrapped around a core called an Armagus. Rivka still possessed all of the incidental squishy bits, the form and functions that made her a human and not simply a gem that controlled Nox. But that had been stripped away, had it ever existed, and this Thing was nothing but power and control. Of course it didn't care if it lost an arm, or a leg, or half its body. It would simply will itself another, as it was already doing far below. It could not be mortally wounded, not without striking the core of its being. Would the same happen to her if someone struck at her Armagus, the prism of her soul? Would she be nullified as effectively, again reduced to merely mortal?

It didn't bear thinking on, but in that flash of insight she understood. If it had no form to wound, and its core could not be found, she would simply have to incinerate its entirety in the fires of creation. Let it burn within her soul, reduced not simply to nothing but erased down to its merest iota of energy. Let whatever remained scatter to the winds and speak her name, warn its kind that a new song had begun and theirs would soon end.

She laughed aloud and waved as Selma dropped like a messenger from the heavens, like the herald of her very own presence. Though, perhaps that was a thought better left unsaid to the girl who could tie her in knots? Still, Rivka didn't much like the idea of dropping to the street below quite so much. Her rocket idea had a lot of promise, but trying to slow a give herself a little bump and attempting a controlled landing were two different propositions. If she couldn't angle straight up and down what would she control her fall with? Her sleeves? Her gun? Did she look like Demonetta?

Actually, the gun thing had promise.

Kto ne riskuyet, tot ne p'yet shampanskoye.

Laughing again, more to cover her own flash of concern with her own plan than anything else, she dove over the edge and felt the wind whip her hair around. She would never reach terminal velocity, not from this height, or she would never attempt such a thing. She waited, and waited, and waited for what seemed like an eternity but transpired only in the merest fractions of seconds until she was about two storeys off of the ground and-

Her rifle ignited, not with a shot but with a plume. Rather than focused, it was diffused; combustive forces erupted form its barrel and in direct opposition to the rifle's path. They pushed it up, and with Rivka's steel grip pushed her up. Not enough to stop her, not nearly, but enough to blunt the forces; and for her to bleed them off even further by using her makeshift booster as a fulcrum, swinging herself down a hundred and eighty degrees to alight on her feet. Well, to hit her feet, feel her knees buckle, and turn it into what she made sure to act as though was a perfectly controlled somersault.

That one actually hurt a bit. Work on that idea.

Still she popped to her feet with no visible discomfort, spreading her arms in an expansive gesture proclaiming her mirth and enveloping the scene before her all the same.

"Selma! A kiln for our new friend, pozhaluysta!"

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

@Krayzikk: Is everything okay?

@VitaVitaAR

Joke aside, we'll go with 'mostly'. I should hopefully have a post up within a couple days, I'm sorry it has taken so long.

Secundi Lux

【Ｌ　Ａ　Ｓ　Ｔ　Ｇ　Ａ　Ｍ　Ｅ　Ｏ　Ｖ　Ｅ　Ｒ】

---

Safely ensconced within the observation tower Rivka beheld the debut of her fellow stars to be, observing with a widening smile as they tested their new abilities. She felt their elation as if it was her own, an echo of her own revelry, and they did well. Crystal went next, and there was no trace of the anxiety she had felt so badly only a few days prior. No tremble, no fear, only a confidence to match the surety of entropy itself. She was poised, she was controlled, and against her the Void had not the chance of the ice they had become in Hell. If Crystal was grace, then Selma was passion. The towering girl may not have had the clear formal training of her precursor but she more than made up for it with an energy and a vigor that could not be matched. She was the force of tectonic plates, primordial forces deep within the Earth that had erupted in the form of a Germanic farm girl. She laughed when she shouted, and within her she felt a glimmer of pity for even the Void that had suffered so at the point of her elbow.

But Chie…

At last her lips curled downwards into a frown, the building crescendo of her mood… Lost. A symphony should have a powerful finale. Not loud, necessarily, but fitting for the piece and this simply wasn’t. It wasn’t her fear. The girl had been afraid before she ever set foot in the testing area but she had faced it and become what she could be, if without the joy the others had felt. Facing such terror was difficult and for that she had Rivka’s respect. Nor was it for her technique, for there was nothing wrong with being an amateur. She had none of the experience that she possessed, nor that of Crystal or Selma. To be an amateur was a necessary beginning. In this, as in all things.

And yet she felt dissatisfied. This was their test. The first of many, but the final proof of their worthiness to be an Ars Magi. These foes were barely more powerful than what they had collectively faced down only days before, creatures they had humbled with soul and will when they were but mortal. Why did she not fight? With the merest application of her magic, with only what she had demonstrated during their flight from the station, she could end this. Faster than her peers could have. With the force at her fingertips now it should have been easy. And then the last strike; she had opened her mouth to warn her, but she was too slow. Not that it would have mattered from so far away, or behind the observation tower windows. There was nothing Rivka could do, the operator was about to call for a med-

The room shattered in sound and fury for the second time in a week, and Rivka again became closely acquainted with an ugly, dingy concrete floor. At least this attack was quieter; her ears rang, but not nearly as bad as badly as before. What a strange thing to say. But it was true, so whatever struck them must have been different from in the subway. Such thoughts were fleeting. More important than the difference was the simple commonality; they were under attack.

The artist pushed herself to her hands and knees, from there to a proper stance, and as she did she reached once more for her power. It was clearer this time. The prismatic melody at her center, sublimely energetic, did not have to extend to her a hand. The connection had been made, her core awakened, and it would never fall silent until the last note left her lungs. The purple light exploded from her center and wreathed her form in blinding intensity, replacing mere cloth with her Parma as it went and infusing her with that raw power once again. When it cleared, the barest fraction of a second later, Rivka was ready to face Hell itself.

And Hell had come, this time in smoother, sleeker guise. Did it mean to beguile her? Surely Hell didn’t think her that simple. It was thirty meters away to her eye, give or take. Her shortest range pistol competitions were at twenty five meters, and her rifle targets a good bit farther than that. It was, suffice to say, not a difficult shot. More concerning was the attack that it had begun to charge again already. She was good, but she wasn’t about to take her chances trying to shoot down an object traveling at attack speed. Nor was she going to be any good at playing defense; any fire hot enough to interdict the strike would only serve to cook everyone in the confined space. No, she was not here to play goalie. She was here to dance with intricate precision against this foe, to engage and destroy with the utmost grace and discrimination. But how to get out of the way? It would take too long to climb down and find a new perch, especially when so many lovely elevated firing positions surrounded her.

Well, there was no reason she had to use the ground, was there? The next building was just over there. Rivka bit her lip, thinking for only the briefest second. If she considered it she might decide against it and where was the fun in that? She backed up a scant few paces and ran forward, pushing off of the ground, placing her next step on Selma’s back as the girl began to rise, and pushed off again with all of the strength in her invigorated muscles.

”An encore already? If you insist~!”

Her parabola was too sharp, she knew that already. She would drop shy of the rooftop she targeted, and while she would probably survive she doubted it would be uninjured. Their strength had already been reduced to a scant sixty percent of what it should have been, how would they ever cope without her? Who else would make up that extra forty percent but Rivka Sokolov? No, no, that wouldn’t do. But she already had an idea, a marvelous idea. Focusing that magic she had played with before, she funneled the flame down. Rockets had climbed to the heavens on such pillars long ago, so what was the difference? Even a gun worked on the same principle, both were merely combustion forced through a focusing cylinder. It wasn’t designed for the purpose but her skirt was much the same shape. The Baeterraen rode that explosion through the air, laughing gleefully at the top of her lungs all the way. True flight was beyond her, for now, but a raw impetus of force? That was easy.

She landed hard and rolled with a dexterity she would never have expected to recover, popping again to her firing position on a single knee and sighted on her target. The basketball sized orb had begun to fly just after she jumped, and she was glad she didn’t try to shoot it down. But the audacious bitch that tried to ruin her debut? She was a simpler target.

Rivka sang out happily and squeezed the trigger twice in quick succession, sending two piercing shots towards its center mass before breaking the rifle to release and refuel.