Pickled Piper

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

I should've posted this before the actual post lmao but here it is, Ryuko's sheet for the toyale

Now with new interchangeable arms made from REAL brass!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ryuko is somehow both famous and infamous, and yet can be neither as needed. Those who recognize her will either sing praises or bring up rumors; The latter can be easily denounced or deflected, and it's not as though anyone really believes that she's behind the deaths of dozens of officials. Nay, nevermind all that, those are just counterfactual conspiracy theories -- if there's anything that has a basis in it, it's her family's counter-claim that other, real assassins are trying to frame her by killing high-value targets at parties and fanciful events she might happen to be at.

That's her current mode of mission-completion. Eventually, one way or another, that trick will fade; Such targets will fear coming near her, even if they believe her innocent, simply to avoid the "curse" or "contagion" of being near her. But even that can be dismissed, displaced, by claiming racism against the woman with a British mother, "rest her late mother's heart!"
Distraction from her real crimes by distracting from real racism against other mixed, Black, or naturalized Japanese citizens... "Only heartless people would do that!" she might say.
The irony being her own father's and sister's poor views of her, for the very reason. Makes one wonder why she even works for them.

Though it's true she has a heart, it's buried under her copious work, compensated for by masks of emotions she's not experiencing anyways. She's a master assassin, good actress, and the proliferate socialite daughter of an influential Japanese businessman, who's also her handler. It's a family business, really (pun intended).

Few would seldom (or if they know, seldom dare) connect the dots between her and a "different" curly-blonde-haired Blasian woman known for cat burglary, espionage, and killing. With only a mask, and often a hood, to hide her identity on camera, this brazen criminal, militant, and slaughterfiend has carved a path through the criminal underworld, though set apart from the Yakuza and similar organizations in due part to her borderline paramilitary activity. Unknown to all but those closest, she's undergone experimental combat drug therapies designed to heighten her senses and reflexes and to alter the way adrenaline activates, and interacts with, her body and brain. In addition, she's been trained all her life in a broad selection of weapons. She knows techniques of the combat, seduction, and thought-blocking varieties. On top of all of that, she wields a multi-use weapon of war for an arm, a katana made from a space metal, and can employ the usual fanfare of energy slashes and other such minor abilities found in anime and fighting games. Whatever comes her way, she'll be ready for it.

Toyfix© RYUKO TANEGASHIMA™ Full-Mettle™ Action Figure with 4 Interchangeable Metal Arms & Katana for Maximum Mettle™!

^{Warning: Do not sharpen katana or sawblades. Do not point katana near face. Do not aim sawblade launcher at face. Even unsharpened metal can cause serious harm or injury.}

Parts

Shy of 7" tall, with a 4.75" katana
11 ounces without any of her right arms or other included implements
Stylized look similar to anime, manga, or some American comic books or cartoons

• Main body made from plastic
• Hair and clothing made from malleable, bendable plastic
• Mask and cape made from elastic cloth
• Katana made from stainless steel, with plastic handle covered in cloth a la actual katana handles
• Interchangeable right arms made from brass, containing some electronics, with magnetic stumps
• Right upper-arm stump is electromagnetic, serving as both a connector and a power source for the arms
• Right upper-arm opens at the triceps; Receives a single AAA battery
• Knees are special joints molded to have partial gear teeth, where the forelimb "rolls" along its counterpart much like a ball would roll along the surface of another ball, attached by a same-colored metal brace, to allow more flexibility and more accurately capture the motion of the human knee.
• Shoulders are a complex multi-joint system, hinging at where a human's pectoral would flow up into the shoulder muscles. It looks a little odd, especially when flexing the shoulders backwards, but it provides an optimal amount of forwards-and-backwards flexibility; The shoulder itself, and upper-arm, then rotate and spin via their own simpler joint system.
• Hips and thigh are similar to the above configuration, involving hinges deep inside the pelvis that actuate considerable and distinct chunks of plastic that actually belong to the thighs rather than the pelvis itself.
• Abdomen is a saddle joint, angled to allow for rotation of the waist and bending forwards and backwards; Left and right leaning is not allowed except through utilizing the hip joints.
• Neck is a simple pivot
• Head is a ball-and-socket joint

Powers

• Tempestuous: Alongside her more natural abilities are powers of wind and energy beams. Her slashes can release Crescent Sword Beams, which soar like sharpened frisbees. Alternatively, she can control the wind with a well-timed Tempest Slash that cuts at a distance, or give herself an updraft to jump higher or to launch herself in different directions while airborne.
• Tinderbox: She emits heat and sheds some serious embers when her blood gets going, particularly whenever she puts her all into an attack. She's not as proficient in fire magic as she is in wind magic, but it's there and it can potentially start a fire. It's mostly involuntary, subconscious more than conscious.
• Tigress: Although she's a toy and has no nervous system, she retains her physical and mental enhancements; She's more acrobatic and athletic than most other toys of her size and design. Her reaction times are halved compared to a normal human's-Er, toy's.
• Triple Trouble: Aside from a regular right arm with a hand for grabbing things (and a hidden steel spike), she's got three more:
  
  
  • Sawblade Launcher: Two pairs of curved claw-digits that fold to pinch a toy sawblade, or any similar-sized and -shaped object, e.g. nickels, quarters, and washers (the hardware kind, not an appliance). Launches them at a considerable speed, albeit with appropriate recoil.
  • Integrated Taser: With fingers permanently splayed out, this hand's only use is delivering a controlled shock through a node on the palm, powerful enough to sear paper and skin. Powerful enough to see effective use against humans, of course.
  • Grappling Hook: Replaces her hand with a weird, dark-green-blue, somewhat alien-looking appendage that better serves as a grappling hook -- good thing it can be launched like one from its wrist!
• Trapped: That Claptrap™? It really will chop off fingers like a bitch. No touchy >:(

Feats

Ryuko is a skilled actor and swordfighter; perfect for an assassin of her caliber. Her grasp on politics is also excellent. As an assassin and something of a modern-day samurai, she’s learned both the way of bushido and the way of the ninja.

• Regularly gets away with various disguises, aliases, and alibis (and the crimes they enable of course), albeit usually with corporate help to assuage any incriminating aftermaths.
• Trained since childhood against her sister in hand-to-hand combat and swordfighting. That's how she lost her arm, in fact. Her sister is crafty and serpentine in her tactics, and so Ryuko knows well how to spot feints and concealed attacks, and she can protect herself proficiently even while blindfolded or being attacked from any angle.
• She's also got many tricks up her own sleeve. Her ability to parkour and balance goes beyond that of most others. She knows how to use walls and other surfaces to her advantage when attacking or dodging.
• Toy-scaled as she is, her Crescent Sword Beams can travel a few feet max and cut through paper, cloth, string, and the like. Her Tempest Slash will feel like a breeze from an aisle's distance away, but any closer and it'll slice like a steak knife.

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

Some toys are made for entertainment. Some toys are made for edutainment, a dual-purpose physique to allegedly allow kids to have fun while learning.

There sat in a box on the highest shelf of this aisle -- an aisle of misfit toys, it looked like -- an action figure, a hybrid of between the feminist Action Heroine line and the otherwise ideologically benign Full-Mettle series of action figures. The latter was your standard toy line, with the gimmick that its were Full-Mettle™, rather than full-metal of course but they wanted to use the phrase so they turned it into a trademark to avoid lawsuits, the last smart decision they'd ever make. Only the blade, and right arm and elbow, were metal -- stainless steel katana, brass arms with magnets.

The former toy line...

The former was quite the intellectual property. Action Heroine, like Ryuko herself, was both revered and demonized. It garnered media attention for its unique approach to applying feminist concepts to action figures "for boys and tomboys alike". This crossover toy never made it to the shelves, originally. The concept was of a mixed woman ninja assassin named Samantha Carver from Detroit, also a PhD in various STEM fields and a government agent. Suffice to say, the heads behind Action Heroine were among the few willing to make such a profound toy. Not many were ever produced. Few were sold. Plenty of YouTube videos got published demonstrating the figure's unique functionality, and for good reason.

Controversy surrounded this action figure, or "doll" as some would call it, despite being marketed explicitly as an "action figure" for tomboys. Its designers framed it as a robust and progressive new toy with potential self-defense applications. One clandestine handshake and one-night stand, and Full-Mettle gave its full, outstanding support in making this misandrist's dream a reality.

The doll's most distinguishing feature -- it was difficult to even get a patent for, let alone get any factory to agree to produce, to the point they had to simply hand-make what was ironically designed specifically to attack the hands -- the doll's most distinguishing feature, designed to teach a lesson to any boys who happen to be gifted this toy, say, for Christmas, and who were perverted enough to think of sticking their finger up the skirt she wore...

This feature, so aptly, ironically, and idiotically named the Claptrap™, was the brainchild of a certain Susan Deedee Wyatt, who had sought to make "a doll that teaches not to touch the no-no spot".

As expected, many feminists denounced the toy, and the brand, calling Action Heroine "a bunch of faux-minists pushing their agendas". Whether self-described liberal, conservative, or literally anything but that hyper-specific sect of the Far Left -- which was denoted as "the definitive alt-Left" -- almost anyone who considered themselves a feminist by any metrics viewed it as a satirical or self-sabotaging product. The backlash caused many to skew in the other direction, creating a surge in misogyny. Crimes of violence against women rose by 4% in the first month. It was wrested from the hands of young girls, sometimes to be used against them, and public outcry was so problematic that Full-Mettle diverted half of the entirety of their profits in an effort to hire enough lawyers to get seven laws passed or changed, all to protect and distance themselves from this phenomenon. Action Heroine became perhaps the first company ever to be classified as an illegal operation in such a manner. Even conglomerates like Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big What-have-you grew modest and timid in the wake of Samantha "Claptrap" Carver.

On all political, ideological, and moral fronts, this action figure caused destruction and regression like no other could. As the pendulum swung full-force in the other direction, doom was wrought. What were conservatives became "progressives", though distinctly more sexist; What were progressives became "anti-regressives", but even some among them became more misogynist. Witch-burning came back into popularity, much to populists' and populations' combined (and often hypocritical) dismay. Bible-thumpers now actually, literally thumped their bibles, sometimes against the heads of any who might be found owning a Full-Mettle or Action Heroine toy. Time travelers came from the past rather than the future, and they called modern-day humans cavemen and Neanderthals for the chaos that plagued the First World countries. In the year not of our Lord, 2029, former presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden would fly to North Korea to discuss nuclear annihilation of the human race with Vladimir Putin, the entire Kim family, and then-Emperor of Ukraine-Russia Volodymyr Zelenskyy. God, Buddha, and other deities deemed this timeline the official Bad End and gave instructions in other timelines on how to avoid this fate (one option proposed was to simply eject oneself from the cycle of reincarnation, and, if Judeo-Christian or Islamic, hope to fall into another universe's Wheel of Life).

All this, Ryuko learned upon waking up, and she joined Veronica in a horrific bloodcurdling scream.

Her voice hitched -- she cut it off, shutting her mouth. Hopefully no one would have heard her or would disregard the noise, which had stopped as fast as it had started. She hyperventilated, then forced herself to take slower breaths... then realized she didn't really need to breathe at all. She didn't have lungs, after all.

What she did have, she didn't want to activate at all. She'd only use the blade of her katana in combat, and no other blades.

At least she had pants on... She hoped it covered the Claptrap.

Memories returned; A deal in the backroom of a strange office building in Okinawa, one even the Yakuza dared not go near. Like Ryuko and her family in her own life, this Toyfix© RYUKO TANEGASHIMA™ Full-Mettle™ Action Figure would have to propel the brand to the top of the ladder through surreptitious means: This battle royale.

But why this toy? Why?! she thought. She didn't want to think about all the similarities between her and this toy, which seemed like a parodic knock-off of herself. It was for the sake of that strange man in the backroom, whose features and mannerisms only now registered as distinctly off, inhuman, that this toy must hit the tops of every chart known to (wo)man.

In order to do that, she needed to escape the confines of her package.

She was restrained by form-fitting transparent plastic, but there was enough wiggle-room to contort herself, as she might with her real body, sideways and scrunched up to thrust her fist out at full force. The plastic caved in under her fist. She reached, tore, and stretched a hole in both layers of plastic. Then she was balancing on the edge of a pseudo-industrial shelf.

Now outside the box, she could examine its packaging. Irrespective of similarities, the yellow-dominated print displayed Samantha Carver's image and her name in proud bold outlines. This was her fight, but not her success she was fighting for. To either side stood the actual doll, each in their own boxes. Each was lifeless.

Someone spoke. She turned to face her; It was the other doll that'd been screaming. This "Vero" appeared... weak.

A good first kill.

Ryuko pulled the black cloth up to over her painted-on mouth, then tore the stainless steel katana out with her one hand. A magnet on her back secured it in place -- she needed to, because her right arm, all of her right arms, were severed and locked in the plastic cell she was held in. She was swift and efficient in her retrieval of them. Only one would fit on at once -- she chose the sawblade launcher. It held an actual steel sawblade of bite-sized proportions, though completely blunt, owing to its cartoonish appearance.

She gathered the rest in her arms and descended, shelf-by-shelf, hanging by her legs each time and dropping in a back-flip onto the next, until she was on the floor. I'm going to be needing a paperclip, a key chain, or maybe a wire...

Now grounded, she turned to face Veronica. Her voice was as sultry as ever, but her tone was mocking. "Vero, huh? You don't sound very sure of yourself," Ryuko taunted her; A lie, but only as an insult to attract Veronica's attention. "Let's see what you're truly capable of."

And in case she was capable of much -- Ryuko hadn't enough hubris to disregard the chance of hidden strength -- Ryuko settled into a wide stance with slightly bent knees, like an athlete. She held her spare arms in her right arm, clutched to her chest; She bent forwards, left arm raised to rest a hand on her katana.

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

And so, the fight was finished.

Not over, not by any means, but the ending was underway, so she thought. Her sense of time started to falter; Events came before and after; Events became 'fore and after. The purple eyed facsimile made a near beeline to Exeter, hurling itself like a shuriken on a direct intercept path of the approaching vomit beam, dimensions folding until it collapsed down to the size of a kangal. On its way to the girl feelings of dissociation took hold of her and the beam, this copy of Aracite sliced through the Amalgam, its branches having extended far enough for azure it was starting to become green moss to be visible along its upper length. The copy captured the products of its arboreal destruction within its gelatinous body, grinding wood, and moss within its core in search of the bacterial agent known only as Dorn - the *Healer* Of Cosms "I shouldn't know this."

"You don't."

The seventh-scale vibrations ceased their structured language, and the crystalline room lost its cerulean glow. Separated from herself, Ecluy drifted back down to the circular patterns that marked the floor like the white pips on semi-transparent casino dice, each ring smaller and yet more interlinked the farther away it was from the central design, a Mohr's circle on a raised platform; One main ring, with two rings inside of it, one larger than the other; a two-dimensional representation, and therefore simplification, of a calculation used in determining the amount of stress that a single point in a material object is experiencing. Used here, it was a tad more metaphorical -- and a tad removed from the original definition. It had its spiritual uses as well. So she'd been told.

Another Luminar stepped towards her. His white robes made no sound when dragging on this floor; It was all the clonk-kalonk of his footfalls. The temple's High Priest himself, Azimuth.

Exeter couldn't quite determine the emotion on his face; He'd always had a perfect poker face, she knew, but this was something else. An honest, yet complicated expression.

She vaguely gestured to the room, one she'd first considered before being aligned with, contacted by, and connected to the energy that concentrated here, at the end of the known universe. The journey here had taken years -- she was twice as old once she got here, and almost literally bored to death from constant mid-flight meditation.

She still couldn't believe what she'd seen. "So this is real?" she asked.

"It is an Order Built From Order," Azimuth said. "Not any less real than an Order Born From Chaos. Just a different kind of real."

She blinked. "It certainly hadn't felt any less real than our universe. I swear I almost died!"

"You almost did, indeed. Just not the you here. A more experienced, yet conflicted you."

"That's a funny way of saying 'thousand year older but still flawed' me." She put a hand on her hip, pursing her lips. "What's the point of being my own peeping tom if all I'm going to see is how I almost lost myself to, you know, myself? Evil myself, I guess."

Azimuth's expression finally broke into a smile. Something remained, however. Conflicting emotions, maybe, warring underneath the more vocal and transient emotion of amusement. "Young Ecluy, you have much to learn. Learning from oneself, in every sense of the phrase, is the best way to improve. The woman you saw, Exeter, is desperate. She is flawed, yes. Few things are perfect. Even this machination-"

He gestured more deliberately to the dome-like ceiling above, where garbled images washed over one another in a sea of cerulean pixel-particle data. "Even the Listening has its flaws and mix-ups. We live on the verge of infinity; We are not amid the infinite, and must depend on things outside ourselves -- including other ourselves and perspectives -- to correct our paths."

"So you brought me-..." She clenched her jaw. "I was sent here because I'm predisposed like she is?"

"You are yourself."

She clenched her jaw harder. Enough to snap steel.

Azimuth's face softened. "Exeter did not succumb to it."

"Almost did."

"Almost. Perhaps she could use a reminder to stay on top of her flaws." He again gestured to the psychedelic dome. "I will align you to the Order Built From Order once more, if you wish."

Ecluy looked up at the data dust-storm. "If I die there, I don't die here, right? And that won't cause weird time anomalies or interreality problems-"

She looked down. Azimuth was already walking away, towards the shell of yellow lattices that allowed him to "lower" her -- it felt more like rising -- into this Order Built From Order, the partly isolated reality that'd been constructed by the thread-of-thought-beings, themselves from an Order Born From Chaos. She was still unsure what the difference was between the two types of realities. Both seemed real. Both seemed equally chaotic to her.

The seventh-scale vibrations began talking again, drawing down pixel-particles to adhere to her soul and mind. She rose, and then she stopped, but it still felt as though she were rising.

Much akin to someone putting on headphones to listen to music, she became parallel to the Listening and became a listener of this Exeter person, unaware of Dorn and the names of the monsters and their origins, fully immersed and pressed against that other Order.

Exeter opened her eyes from a long blink, and in that time, her perception, observation, and memory of the girl Ecluy from the other reality had all been eradicated from memory. Rather, they had been pulled out of herself, as they were still attached to Ecluy; And when she came back in, Exeter's mind -- now in an emersion from that reality -- no longer held Ecluy's "Order Born From Chaos" in its conception. Nothing did. Even Aracite might not have noticed or, if it did, retained that memory, all-seeing as it might seem and distinct from (Exeter's) reality as it might be.

To her, this reality she resided in was an Order Born From Chaos. Why wouldn't it be?

To Aracite, another participant in this self-contained story of brewing up bubbling boredom-bashes in brains, even if it should recognize that its "outside" wasn't quite as "outside" -- actually, more like "next door" -- as this other reality, it had naught much it could do about it. The two realities would sooner or later go their separate ways, anyhow.

The facsimile skidded to a halt mere feet from Exeter, its eye shifting purple to red, to stone gray, and back to purple. She eyed it warily in return. In the distance, titans raged; Small as this version of the eye was, she didn't care to test if attacking it would mean certain doom for herself. She didn't have much of a means to communicate with it.

She knew one surefire way to get her position across.

As the creature's little eye peered towards the battle and yet spied eight spots to spray down, Exeter took it upon herself to help clean up -- action spoke louder than words. The titans were not so distant now, only lightmoments away. With an outstretched arm, she squeezed the blob of negative-mass matter into a needle-like shape, roughly the dimensions of its original form as a sword. It resisted maintaining this shape, naturally. She twisted the matter lengthwise, providing anti-tension while also setting its eventual driving action to be less like a nail and more like a screw or drill bit.

Last time, Barrusom's dark matter coat had nullified her attack. All she'd need to do now is to part that coat, forming a bullseye for her attack. From this far away (as opposed to farther), and with the recent power boost from the green frequencies of her nova grenade's blast, Exeter mustered the matter-maneuverability to burrow an alcove into Barrusom's defensive coat.

She wrung the negative-mass needle tighter and tighter, more compact and spring-loaded. She let loose this black bolt, taking it the long way around -- the quicker way, once acceleration through the matter was accounted for. It was a struggle to keep its form together. It wanted to veer off every which way and burst in all directions like ink in oil. But now wasn't the time or place for that.

She took a deep breath and grit her teeth. Somehow, she felt like something else was watching over her, maybe cheering her on.

When the needle completed its round-trip and left the diminishing mass of Ebrias, flying lightning-fast, she corrected its path and angled it towards Barrusom. Light speed was not only trivial to the Luminaru -- it was also relative, much like everything else in the universe. She needed only most of the speed from before, with Aracite providing its own acceleration of Barrusom to complete the equation.

Perfectly straddling relative-lightspeed... with calculating precision... And then she let it free from her lightspeed-limit-decoupled telekinetic grasp.

She, again, was attempting a time-machinegun, only these "bullets" were now spiral-flange projectiles whose particles would diverge like a budding tulip, a tiny swarm swimming through his flesh. None would decelerate; They'd continue ravaging the Ravager's insides until the particles were diffuse enough so as to slip out, leaving only tiny holes behind in the wake of a largely tenderized, discombobulated majority of his torso, and then escape into the void surrounding him.

On repeat.

Until Barrusom was no more.

Battle Toyale — Christmas Rumble!

I arrive, and I bring with me a multitude of characters I could choose from:

• Ryuko, with interchangeable metal arms that each have distinct functions (hi-power laser, sawblade launcher, grappling hook, and maybe a fourth one). Probably an anime figurine/action figure with a sharp-ish metal katana.
• Exeter, also an anime figurine or action figure. Gains power and whatnot from light as per usual.
• Sigisverg. She's a ragdoll and her sheep are tiny plushies. Might be her magical girl form because why not.

Gonna have to figure out which one to pick while working on a post for the Barrusom thread ;P

A Bubbling Brew To Bash Boredom's Brains In

Hello again! I shall be posting a reply shortly (measured in days).