[OPEN] FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE: PART ONE

[unshut]

WHO: Everyone and anyone
WHAT: An abomination redecorates the Gallows.
WHEN: Early August
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Part One of FROM RIFTWATCH WITH LOVE. Will include some violence, some general chaos, and some light murderin'.

There is a man in a worn traveling cloak. He is dark haired, with sharp features dominated by a dark horizontal scar near his hairline, and later someone will describe him as having been soft spoken when he asked for directions.

But something in the Gallows' dining hall, with its unreliable population for the midday meal, must catch under his skin; he's found his voice again by the time he steps up onto one of the benches.

"Is this all of you?"

Someone nearby tells him to get his boots off the furniture, so the man climbs higher onto the table and is louder the second time: "Is this really all you are? A few people in a tower on an island?"

Heads are coming up. As his voice rises, he produces an envelope from his pocket.

"Do you think this is funny? Playing at being something, and telling people you can make a difference to them? You were supposed to be helping, but you're all just sitting here! Don't touch me"—to someone encouraging him to get off the fucking table—"You were meant to be helping us. You promised you would, and I told her I believed you!"

Hands are reaching for him. No, really, get off the table. You can explain what's wrong once you're down; you're with friends— The man jerks his arm free, snarling, "Don't touch me! You're nothing!" A stronger hand finds him then and begins pulling him struggling down. With a wrenched cry of, "Livia!" the man slips from the table.

A column of fire pours upward out of him like molten heat from a crack in the earth. It bursts so high that it scorches a circle on the dining hall ceiling, and burns so suddenly hot that it sends those nearest to him recoiling backward as their clothes catch. The fire licks again in random directions, in chaotic fits and starts of light and heat, and the thing that rises up again in the mage's place isn't really a man at all.

The rage abomination will ravage its way through the dining hall and prodigious Gallows kitchens, then out into the courtyard beyond leaving considerable destruction in its wake until finally brought down by Leander. In the charred aftermath, the following can be recovered from among the mage's belongings: a leather corded bracelet with a green bead woven in it (too small for anything but the smallest wrist), a functioning phylactery, and a letter from "Riftwatch" which implies a history of correspondence and familiarly refers to the recipient by name, 'Felix.' An investigation of Riftwatch's files will reveal the log of having received a message from a similar Felix, No Lastname six months earlier. The message itself is nowhere to be found among the Gallows records.

The recovered letter assures Felix that all will be well, and includes instructions to wait in the woods above the crossroads of a small Wildervale village.

'Help will be on its way. Good luck, and safe travels.'

Comments

[luaithre]

Sharpness, clarity, a pulse of strength that feels restorative in nature and thereby at least a little familiar to some of what he can do for himself, if he were working with his usual elements -- but not all the way familiar.

He can sense its source, and doesn't have to like it to make use of it. He'd be a fool not to. His hands wind around a familiar evocation and white-blue runic inscriptions flash for a moment beneath his feet, once again summoning up protective magics that he has half a mind to fling Leander's way, and maybe it's that moment of indecision--

The Abomination twists in such a way that shatters reason. As if it had dislocated its own spine and grasping, oozing muscles strained to keep it in one piece as the Abomination swings out an arm, summoning fire and chaos together and expelling it directly for where Marcus made the mistake to stop moving, to cast. The attack hits him squarely just as the light of the Barrier gleams off of him, and then flashes, completely expended a split moment after its formation, even as it burns far brighter than usual thanks to Barrow's. Contribution.

Marcus lands hard on the ground, grip on his staff stubborn. Otherwise unharmed, miraculously. Even his pride is just fine, unshakeable as it tends to be.

Still. Mana drain has him slow to get to his feet.

[thereneverwas]

The spell purge comes just a hair too late to stop the Abomination from throwing Marcus, but the creature is briefly stunned and helpless once again (apart from, you know, being aggressively on fire).

Staying back as commanded-- Sawbones will kill him before any Abomination does, if he shirks her instructions-- he nonetheless raises his knife again, brow furrowed in concentration as it emits another burst of light that once again can be felt in the very marrow of Leander and Marcus.
Get up, keep fighting, you are unstoppable.

[sarcophage]

The impact—blast to barrier, mage to stone—grates like an insult against the two of them. They can do better.

Get up, keep fighting, you are unstoppable. Leander doesn't need to be told this, in so many words or otherwise—hasn't since he was a child first learning to wield a staff against a living target. Even as his body is fed, the impulse to shout at Barrow to stop, purely on principle, flashes past. Engulfed in the flood. He comes out sharp on the other side, jaw set, whites of his eyes flashing, quick as a snake.

He grasps a handful of air. Like a claw, his fingers tighten and clutch with effort. He sets his will against it, the form filling his hand, the barest squeezing of molten flesh, pustules bursting hot—straining against the seams of what is possible—

Reality gives way. Pulling free of its resistance, Leander makes a great tearing motion that twists his own body in time with his target, pulls loose a coarse cry of effort.

Within the abomination's grotesque form are the remains of structures—twisted, now, but still serving function. Muscles, bones. Organs writhing into vestigial shapes. This he knows: an arm is not connected to the skeleton but by one small piece of cartilage between the clavicles—the shoulder socket floats, the scapulae glide over the ribs. Leander has focused on what must still exist, beneath the burnt black scabs and the flame, and he has grabbed it in a handful and wrenched it apart. The arm does not reach, but is pulled by its shoulder, which deforms, juts forward; the scapula brings with it a slab of tissue, leaves a huge ragged gash in its wake. Seams tear open, separate. Blood gouts fresh, hisses on scalding skin, throws steam.

Caught in the momentum of its own deformation, the abomination lurches toward those mines. Their charge is holding, glyphs steaming blue in the heat; but it will expire within the minute.

[luaithre]

Perhaps Templars lack courage that they have to draw it out of the ether and inject it into themselves to compensate. Maybe they lack honour and conviction and maybe faith is merely an opiate that they consume to make the things they do tolerable. This is a bad time to be contemplative about the nature of a Templar, but half-formed thoughts from previous conversations and discussions, philosophical and tactical both, spark and spit angrily as Marcus tenses against this next dose of strengthening.

Still half-kneeling, he watches as the Abomination twists, oozes, spatters, and he sees the trajectory of its stagger. Marcus slaps his hand onto the ground in front of him, blunt nails set against hard stone as he drags power from the Fade as harshly as he draws on Barrow's augmentation, as if to drain both at once of all potential.

Fade light wraps around his hand as he flings it outward, and gleaming pieces of jagged stone once again rise translucent, and take on mass and opacity and form, and they are fired off towards the thing that was once a mage. It slams into him, knocking him towards those ice mines.

[thereneverwas]

Losing steam rapidly, and oblivious to any resentment his companions might feel toward him, Barrow makes a final push and, kneeling abruptly, drives the knife's blade right into the floor.

A beam of light opens above the Abomination and slams into it, stopping it the moment it sets foot in the ice mines. It wobbles for a moment, taking another step to catch itself and stumbling into a second.

Sagging forward slightly, Barrow looks up with searching eyes to the temporarily-stunned Abomination and its two adversaries.

[sarcophage]

A stone formed by command, given solid form purely by application of will—this mastery over reality, this is what Leander loves. Even the blazing bright column, while he resents both its calling and the one who called it, even this strikes him as beautiful in the instant it appears. In the meantime, an excess of confidence has slowed him to a walk—though in fairness, he would have slowed anyway, so great is his faith in his own work.

The glyphs trigger in a chain, three bursts in rapid succession triggered by the first crossing. The loss of momentum, the sudden suspension, enables the ice to build almost wholly unfettered by movement, compounding upon itself, a huge bloom of jagged glistening shapes. Water boils at the edges, frenetic bubbling of escaping air, slowing to cool. The hiss and squeak of thermal stress. Steam flows down and outward, dissipates gently.

Hard-eyed, breathing heavy, Leander nears the frozen creature with certainty that it will not move. It doesn't. He looks for an eye, or something like it; upon spying a hollow with a familiar shape, he watches it, and lays his hand on the frozen surface of a limb. At once it begins to melt gently under his palm. His mouth moves in a whisper.

[luaithre]

It is very tempting to just sink back to lie down on the pavement, but that's merely what his body wants to do, and so that impulse goes ignored as it has done many times in the past. Marcus stakes his staff against the ground and uses it to get to his feet, exhaustion making his vision swim at the edges.

He stays where he is, for now. Smoke lifts off the over-heated edge of his staff blade, seems even to emanate off his own shoulders in a fine veil of white-grey haze, but dispersing slowly the more he breathes in an ordered fashion. He watches Leander approach, kneel, touch, whisper.

Then he watches Barrow, wolf-bright eyes studying as if for some second threat. Wholly unfair of him, and yet there it is.