Little Bird

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

((OOC: I have constructed this post under my best understanding of the actions I am under permission to take, and to the best of my present ability within a reasonable timeframe within my availability. I’m confident, at the very least, in my surmising that Sarah’s turn around would fill the time that it would have lapsed as the spikes launched. In particular if the spikes are being committed to the .5 second time gap between (potential) impacts. If this all proves insufficient or improper for addressing circumstances… well, I’ll just have to cross the bridge if/when I get to it)).


The worst possible circumstances could always seem to come upon a person at the worst possible times. This sense of truth would come to haunt Sarah in her toil by the wheat fields. Through her grit and effort, she had managed to forge her resistance against the first of the six stone spires. With the extra doing, she was furthermore successful in shrugging the projectile off of and away from her.


Yet, it would be in the coming of the second spike, in which she found her judgement at fault. Where she had anticipated its course to carve a straight path in the wake of the first, it instead altered course, redirecting to strike her abdomen. With less of a window to respond, would come a more concise reaction. Offering a turn at the hips, she planted her feet toe-forward, a positioning permitting a more fluid motion as she would bend at the left knee into lean out of the path of a direct impact. This second spike would, indeed, connect with her abdominal, in a more glancing strike, cutting against her front side, compounding with the scarring left in the passing of the first.


Within the timeframe of this movement, the third of the six spikes would beset upon Sarah. It was at this point that she would commence in her effort to circle behind the spires; this same act would also serve to face her back in the direction of her opponent. Her her first maneuver to this end would be to carry her left foot into a forward step, offset towards the left in the intent to sidestep the incoming third spire.


It was after this that Sarah would then endeavor to make the rotation proper: She would swing her right leg around as she pivoted towards her left side; a motion anticipated to set her out of the path of the fourth spike. When her right foot would set firmly to the ground, she would close her stance, pulling back while pulling her left foot in closer to her right. With this, would come a more natural stance, and, as she would hope, the chance of avoiding the bulk of impact as the fifth. Impact from the sixth spike would prove an inevitability, striking her to much the same effect as the first, tempered chiefly by her then still-active augmentation.


If this maneuver were to leave Sarah in a, relatively, single piece, her attentions would shift back towards opposite end of the road, and the incoming red cloud. Her sensory priorities would realign, in majority, away from visual focus to disperse heightened awareness to others such as sight and touch. As the physical reinforcement would recede, a new concentration of her energy would coalesce within, and flux outward from her core. As the cloud would encroach upon her, she would release this amassing of energy. Covering all angles surrounding her body, the resulting force would burst outward in comparable fashion to her earlier offensive. If her own suppositions on the matter were to prove accurate, the exerted force would disperse the cloud from her immediate vicinity.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

I will not be able to maintain my availability timeframe for Wednesday of this week.

However, I will hold myself accountable for Friday up until 5PM.

@Wayward

I rescind my statement of lack of availability for tonight. I thought there was an event upcoming this week that I was planning to attend; but it's actually not until June 7th. I'll be working out my post this evening, and it should be up within my usual timeframe.

This, however, will NOT sway my resolve for Friday, should I have a response to make on that day.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

I will not be able to maintain my availability timeframe for Wednesday of this week.

However, I will hold myself accountable for Friday up until 5PM.

The Dirt Town Orphans

@AkaiJose@Ayame@Pyromaniacwolf@Wayward@Ghost Queen@Timemaster@vietmyke

OOC's up!

@Medjedovic

Thank you. Working on my character. It'll likely be a few days, because time management is a thing.

The Dirt Town Orphans (high fantasy gang RP)

Hm, to be sure how many players I have, I'll wait for some CSs before I move this to the OOC.

@Medjedovic

I take it then that we should post CS here when ready?

The Dirt Town Orphans (high fantasy gang RP)

Ah. Yes. I saw the previous run of this like, a week ago, and was interested in it.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

I suspect this post will be my moment of truth, as it were.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

A weighing handful of circumstances now busied Sarah’s mind and body.

The first and foremost of these was the aftermath of her own attack. As with just about any application of force, there came a recoil. A minute backlash, it was something Sarah would shrug with general ease, owed in part to the firmness of her stance; following through with the natural recoil of the arm out of the punching motion, she swiftly retracted her right hand back into its previous position. The second came in the immediate desire to witness the result of her actions first hand. How would the man up the road respond? Would her maneuver be enough to faze him?

These questions were, and would have remained, imperative, if not for a sudden, unseen sensation that would distract her from what was in front of her.

Something, a subtle something, barely glancing across the threshold of an uncommon sense as her hand reeled back in. Not the man before her; he was still too far out for that. But, comparing what she felt to what she could see, it wouldn’t surprise her if the two were related. That detail wasn’t a priority of highest concern to her. What she could see but not feel took a backseat to what she could feel but not see.

Her first response was to turn her head to her right, where the wheat field on the southern side of the road would have served perfect place from which to engage a sneak attack. This same act would inadvertently bring her attention to the threat at hand. The sextet of stone spires, had been well en route to shish kebab her backside.

Where in the pass of the previous stone spike, the factors of time and awareness had proven themselves leaning to her favor, this round was not to forgive her as readily. Impact was inevitable. She had let her awareness of her surroundings slip too much to make a graceful evasion. The movement she would begin with was short, and covered no ground: a simple rotation initiated from the right leg, which put her right hip in the place that her back had been.

In a simultaneous action, she generated a increased flux of power, coursing from her core, through the entirety of her torso, so far as to carry to the surface of her skin. The energy carried with it the stimuli, signaling to the affected area of the body that a defensive measure was needed. Her tissues responded in a hurried fashion. Muscles contracted; skin and bone took on a weight impressing of growing density as Sarah’s energy flowed into their fibers. She would continue this process only so long as it took for the first spire to make contact.

The purpose of it all was nothing more than to dampen and blunt the impact of first spire. Between her prep, and some added benefit from what padding was offered her by her jacket, the first contact, came such a result as stone against the trunk of a thick tree. It was painful, but the tree would persist and stand strong.

Recovering from the opening shock of the blow, Sarah laboriously freed herself from the continuing drive of the first spire. This, along with the second spire, cut passed her, and through the fabric of her jacket; the first would leave behind the souvenir of a scraped scar just above her hip. The third spike would come to pass in the wake of the second, and Sarah then set herself behind the last three as she made a turn back towards the other end of the road.

With that danger presumably passed, she met the next one with all the more enthusiasm. Billowing from the other end of the road, the cloud of dust, filled with a dark red tint not unlike the flashes that had preceded the gaunt-looking man’s appearance, was practically upon her. Uncertain of the what the odd coloration brought, she could only predict that the cloud would bring a significant drop in visibility.

Feeling the need to conserve herself for a protracted conflict, she tempered the inner flux, normalizing her physical state. Her sense of sight blurred, and taste all but vanished completely, as she focused stimulation to towards hearing, touch, and smell. Her ears would prove her sharpest allies amid the veil. A reborn flow of energy would form, staging just below the surface of her skin, like an inner-lining to the entirety of her body, ready to release as quickly as Sarah could react.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

Fifty… maybe sixty feet. Sarah had only made it so far, barely scratching the distance between her and the other when a movement from the end of the road stole her attention; a subtle, one, that she could have admitted to almost not seeing: the slightest rustle of pants as the heel rose and fell. While it could have been a mere fidget, or movement for movement’s sake, Sarah’s sense of preparedness delivered her thoughts directly to the possibility of an imminent danger; the expectation of a sudden rush of a likely adversary was her conclusion, and she would act accordingly.

As the man’s heel fell, she slowed her pace, and raised her fists to fighting position, left held in front as a slight mask for the right. As the hands set into their places, an internal flux directed energy through the arm to the palm of the closed right hand, where it would hold until the right moment.

What came to follow, or rather, what didn’t, threw the young fighter for an initial loop. The anticipated charge from the man opposite her never came. Instead, came a brief, unexpected level of stillness… And then, a vibration through the ground, resonating like a hum up her leg. Stirred for a moment before reassuring her footing, she took to a slightly wider stance. As the ground before her began to split, her course of action became evident. Repositioning her left leg, then at the rear, more to its proper side, she bent at the knees. In the following, motion, she sprang into a low jump to the right, lunging out to compensate for any missed distance.

The maneuver put her, albeit narrowly, out of the path of the swelling, stone skewer that had set upon her.

Shaken, and by effect, more motivated towards combat, she moved with urgency to make her response. After setting her left leg back to its rear placement, she stepped forward, throwing her right hand forward. As the hand pushed in the direction of her then opponent, the fist opened. The energy, until then reserved within the palm, released against the air, spurring a gale that would sweep across the length of road. The force, and the air it carried, would spread outward, and evenly over a steadily expanding area; if a shape were attributed to it, it would be that of cone, widening towards its base. By the time it would reach its destination, this area would span a rough diameter comparable to Sarah’s height.

[TZDL2017] Xavier Bloodrayne vs Wayward - Preliminaries

A distance off, towards the Western end of the Sement road, the towering stalks of nigh-forgotten wheat rustled on the southern side of the road. Those closer the road bent out against each other as those further in were parted by a vigorous force of hand. There within the field, one hundred feet south of the paved pathway, a ‘modestly’ clad, dark-haired girl pushed her way through the grain as though it were some insufferable drove of city-dwellers. If an onlooker could have seen her face, the expression would have confirmed such an outlook: the tall growth was little more than an obstacle to overcome, however trivial it was.

So, the dark-haired girl, ferocity practically etched like stone-carving onto her face, and an obvious fire blazing in her eyes, forced her way, unabating, through the wheat field towards the road she understood to be on the other side.
Unabated, that was, until a calamity pried her attention away her course.

She was nearly fifty feet out from the road when, through the overhead clearing she had produced for herself, she took note of the obvious, and altogether atypical, shift in the atmosphere. The flashing rush of blood-red was first to catch her eyes, bringing her to the thought that something new to her was occurring. Then came an explosion, which, by its sound, could have come from mere miles behind her to the south. Next came to gale of winds, billowing across the landscape. If not for her being in the thick of the field, the girl thought, she might have been carried along to the road by it. Certainly, it proved enough to convince her to lower herself to the ground, a position that at least brought some sense of security amid the chaos.

A meteor? It was the only thing she had ever heard of that could have happened so suddenly.

In a matter of mere moments, her question was answered. Though the wheat had blocked out her view of the cause, another flash of red disrupted the otherwise blue serenity of the day. Following a second explosion, originating from the East. This time, she knew for sure that it was something close by. As a result, she renewed her proceeding through the field, this time with increased vigor, and trembling of anticipation.

Not a moment after, she emerged. There, she, the girl who went simply be ‘Sarah,’ burst out from the dense growth of the field, just in time to witness the faintest visage of a living thing flip bottom-side down just before slamming down upon the Sement road. When the dust and dirt began to clear, the visage came into better focus: a human-like figure, standing roughly a quarter of a mile to the East. With clarity, she took in the man… or woman… or thing, as it stared in her direction. Beyond pale, the… whatever it was… was gaunt by the looks of it, like an apparition from a modern horror flick.

Though the distance made it impossible to get any sense of the thing’s power, it was a no-brainer that something capable of such an impactful entrance, in particular surviving one at all, was not to be taken casually.

Sarah would proceed, then, with a slow, cautious pace. She took in the presence of the barn, already worse for the wear, and shaken more by the dramatic arrival of the being; it could provide some cover, if she could get to it. She thought of her knife, carefully stowed in the interior pocket of her leather coat; the other person didn’t appear to be armed, which she could play to her advantage.

At last, with a bold dose of daring, and firm focus on herself and her surroundings, she took the first strides towards the other end of the road.