Chevaleresse

Barracks Mitsu nods at Lotus's offer, and shakes her head at Solomon's. "I don't need food; the energy that mortals get from it is different from faith." Her eyes widen slightly in response to Alexandria's offer, fading to a faint furrowing of her brow as she watched Alexandria perform her magic. Well, it didn't feel like the magic she was accustomed to, but it had to be some form. The offer and subsequent influx of faith from Kurosawa and CivSec drew the same amount of surprise, but the method of transfer was a bit more familiar; she recalled a pair of gods that'd done something similar back home. "Thank you very much for your assistance; I am sorry to trouble you so." She bows politely again. "I will lend my assistance wherever I can, though I would hesitate to class myself as 'better' than any other god." She glances at Kyle. "The role of the mortal in the relationship between them and the gods is to provide the faith that the god needs; that would be the best way to assist me, if you wished to." She looks back to Kurosawa. "I gather that you mean something more than lending my blade to your cause." Ballroom Hiroki backs up a few feet after righting herself, her primary and secondaries emitting an ominous whine. "Don't ever do that to me again or I'll burn you to a crisp right there." Outside The boosters are, by now, mounted firmly on the tail end of the castle-tank, and the technicians skittering in and out of the vehicle have largely come to a halt, gathering outside. "Hey, you might wanna get everyone out here to listen up for a sec," Cid calls out to the people around the entrance, and shouts into the entrance of the castle for people to listen again for good measure. "So, we got the boosters hooked up and everything, and even managed to get an inter-world navigation program hooked into the control terminal. Problem is, this thing's not sealed up too tight, so you're gonna want to stick around in one of the spots we've got plugged up tighter and not be wandering the halls. Unless you like your ass extra-crispy, but that's not exactly how I like to spend my time." He ducks into the entrance hall for a moment and tapes up a paper to it. "Notes on everything we did are in there. It's also got the places you want to stay in there, so I'd read that part at least. Anyway, y'all are ready to head out, so I've just got one thing to say to ya: Good luck." With that, he waved an arm and sent a choice expletive or two at the workers, causing them to drift back into the town. New IC threads inbound, please wait. . .

Ballroom Hiroki squawked in startlement as she was flung about by the man. She collided with the ground hard enough to crack it, though it wasn't enough to hurt her through her armor and the systems designed to compensate for such events. She reflexively swung her main gun toward Andre like a bat as the self-righting systems kicked in, the jets firing in order to generate the force and torque needed to get her onto her feet as quickly as possible. Barracks "Another world. . ." The already downturned corners of her mouth sag further, though beyond that she doesn't show much of a response beyond continuing to wobble slightly. Her expression turns slightly pained - or is it rueful? - at CivSec's analysis. "Your god is correct, from what I understood of his speech - as are you," she says with a glance at Alexandria. At Argent's question, she bows slightly. "I apologize. My name is Saigai Mitsurugi. It was rude of me to wait this long to introduce myself. As for how I can be 'fixed' . . . It would not be easy. I had scarce worshippers before the invaders came, and now, I have none save the ones that bound themselves to this sheath." She rests a hand on the object in question, and takes a breath, the faintest hint of raggedness sounding during the inhalation. "Please excuse me, this is a large amount of information to process at once. I do not believe I require the attention of a healer, however." Her tone left a bit of a question in that statement. "I do not know how I arrived here, so I cannot answer that question."

Barracks The woman blinks. Profanity? A strange miko indeed, especially now that she got a better look at the woman. The sort of battles fought in Gensokyo didn't call for body armor of any kind; it wouldn't help defend against spiritual attacks. "I was. . . fighting." She switches to English; her words are a bit stilted as it's a language she hadn't had much occasion to actually use, but otherwise she's not hard to understand. "Trying to stop what I thought was the end of the world. Where is this place? I did not believe there was anywhere safe left." Was that a firearm? They were uncommon in Gensokyo, for a few reasons; they were a relatively modern invention, and useless against youkai besides.

Ballroom "Okay." Damnit. She'd still hoped that the large man wouldn't ask for one, but she didn't have any real reason to refuse. She scooted her chair back and stood up, taking a few steps away from the table, her bare feet sending the faintest echoes through the chamber. She turned to face Andre. She summoned her mech, blue-edged metal plates ascending up and around her body in a flash before extending outward into the main cannons of the Knight, the process raising her up off the floor and netting her at least a foot and a half of extra height. The orange glow that seemed to leak from beneath the plates over her chest would have been more notable if it hadn't been for her "wings" spreading out and igniting as she fired the jets, lifting the mech an inch or two off the ground. "I don't want to ruin the room, so I won't fire anything." Her voice sounded slightly tinny; the mech had to project it outward, as it wouldn't generally escape the confines of the helmet. The visor hid her face; it was designed to only let light in and not out. Barracks A miko? An unusual miko, but still a miko. That was strange. She'd thought them all dead or worse; her consciousness had been pared down to just her physical body, which was evidence enough. Her storms, her eruptions and quakes hadn't been enough to drive back the things that feasted now on reality itself. They'd thrown their support to her, even though the only thing she could hope to do was destroy the invaders faster than she destroyed them. . . Where was this? It wasn't the hill she'd finally collapsed on, it wasn't Gensokyo, it didn't feel like home, with power and magic so thick in the air you could swear that you could cut it with a knife. Was it the outside world? No, there wasn't a difference, not any more. . . Her eyes flicked open; they'd closed in her fall. She fell? There was no other way she could have ended up in the woman's arms. Her own limbs trembled. A question was asked. "I can hear you." She replied in an old dialect of Japanese, but not an incomprehensible one. Wait. What language had that been in? English. Why did the miko ask her in English? The goddess spoke it well, but it still struck her. She twisted in the other woman's grip; if allowed, she'd stand on her own, albeit still rather wobbly. It wasn't befitting of a being of her station to have someone cradle her in their arms, especially not before others.

Hiroki slowly reaches out and shakes the hand, silently hoping he didn't try to yank her arm out of its socket with the return shake. "I use a mech to fight. My main strategy is overwhelming firepower and enough armor to wear my opponent down faster than I, myself, go down." He would probably ask for a demonstration, given his excited attitude. . . could she calibrate it to not damage the floor and walls? She hesitated to even walk on the floors with the Knight; the thing was heavy. Barracks The earth shook briefly, but enough to be felt, possibly enough to unbalance anyone in the middle of a delicate task or at an unfortunate point in their walk cycle. A flash and what sounds like the crack of thunder emanates from a point about three feet in front of the kamidana that Kurosawa had set up; once the light clears, what appears to be a Japanese woman in some sort of multicolored ceremonial robe, with ink-black hair and unnatural yellow eyes that seemed to be a faint glow. The sword belted to her waist might have made her seem like a potential threat if it hadn't been for the fact that she was in the midst of collapsing to the floor in a heap of limbs, fabric, and hair; the last of which seemed to reach down to her waist and was tied with a few teal ribbons.

Hiroki blinks. "Um, thank you, I guess?" The gigantic man was intimidating in a much different fashion from Venus's somewhat offputting demeanor; it was tough to not be unnerved by someone who was over two feet taller than you and probably at least three times your body mass; though she didn't think she was at any real risk, of course, given the fact that he'd shown no hostile intent and she had a death machine to call on at will. Still, she shrunk away noticeably.

The two approach their de-rusting with vigor. Mar's thwacks leave the remaining surfaces as clean as if they'd been newly manufactured, if with some worryingly large divets in them from the depths of the rust. As the group turns away from the second set of cannons, the groaning of metal sounds, and before any of them can react, it quickly turns into the shriek of the stuff tearing itself asunder, the central gun falling off at its halfway point and slamming into the rock below, chipping and cracking it with an echoing bang. Hiroki nods slightly at Venus's offer, though she seems to still be attempting to locate the source of the golden bauble that had dropped from the ceiling earlier. She jumps slightly as Andre barges in.

"I guess I started because I was bored. I didn't really have any hobbies and I didn't need to work. Fights with Favor mechs almost never end in real injury unless the people in them do something crazy-" A brief look upward and to the side accompanies a transient look of discomfort "- so there was nothing really stopping me from picking it up. I just, um, kept going from there. I'm good at it." She sounds somewhat doubtful, as her violet gaze flicks from meeting Venus's to gazing back down at the tile floor. "I got this far, so I'm going to keep going."

i'm interested but you don't have a great track record as a GM and i've thrown a lot of character concepts i liked at games that shortly died thereafter because the GM gave up on them

"Um, no, I haven't heard of those stories. . . I understand what you mean, though, I think. Um, why I started fighting. . ." She trailed off. It really was a childish reason, like you'd hear out of a shounen hero or something. She wanted to be the strongest. Well, that wasn't entirely true. She just. . . never felt strong. No, not that either. She never felt good at anything. Except for when she fought with her mech. But that was such a silly thing to say out loud. ". . . I don't really know. I just, um, started doing it one day."

"I'm not meek," Hiroki replied with sudden vehemence. "That's exactly why I wore the cloak and those fucking shoes." The expletive was somewhat unfamiliar in the girl's mouth; it was something she mostly heard in the music she listened to, and was certainly never supposed to repeat. "People never take someone like me seriously. Every single person I challenged in the first round of that tournament laughed." Not strictly true, but close enough that it didn't matter. "Because OBVIOUSLY a little girl couldn't POSSIBLY be fighting, and even if she was, there's no way she could beat your face in, right? I'm sick of it."

Hiroki flushed slightly and looked down. "Um, I'm not actually disfigured. I just said that because, um, telling the real reason for the disguise would have made it pointless." Her discomfort was clearly growing, though it was now fairly solidly directed at herself and being caught in a lie. "I'm, um, not mechanical either; my mech doesn't even have a real AI." Ugh, he's just gonna get mad at me for lying and then stomp off and call me a kid or something, damnit. I knew this would happen.

Hellfire Knight vs. LOLI_HUNTER The roar of the crowd echoed in her ears. Were they really here because of her? It seemed like almost too much to ask for; she actually smiled slightly at the thought, though the only beings to know would be the non-sentient program that controlled her guns and Hiroki herself. No, I need to focus, I can't just bask in the crowd right now or I'll lose and it'll all be for nothing. Now, I need to concentrate. I'm fighting - oh. The curve in her lips quickly reversed itself. The one person that'd actually shown some concern about her. And now it was Hiroki's job to crush her underfoot like she'd done to everyone else. It shouldn't be hard; her mech had an equal or favorable matchup with basically everything, and Kagari was no exception. She took a deep breath as the match started. No. We each came her knowing what we had to do. To hold back would be to throw everything up to here away, and it would be disrespectful of Kagari. Her hud displayed the standard startup screen; everything lit up green. "Activate primary, secondary jets. Prime all guns. Jets to 105% power." She wouldn't be able to use the ground to maneuver as much in this field, though her hovering mitigated this. She sighed. "Activate opening subroutine." She brought her primary cannon in line with her opponent, the shoulder guns following at offset angles, as the remainder of her guns flared to life, peppering the field before her with bolts of plasma. Much like before, each individual shot wouldn't do much, but it'd be nigh impossible to dodge all of them.

Hiroki looked somewhat startled at Venus's appearance; she'd been thinking, not paying attention to her surroundings. Is it really a good idea to talk to him? He seems . . . off. Like, artists are supposed to be kinda weird, but he's scary off. Still, you're supposed to be polite, and we are on the same team. . . "Um, yes."

Hiroki, after revealing herself and then managing to get herself flustered immediately, headed back inside the castle, bare feet padding against the stone floors. She strayed away from where most of the activity seemed to be happening without any real direction, and in her wanderings managed to end up in the ballroom. There were still a couple tables left behind, along with the occasional toppled chair, so she pulled one up and sat down, cloak still draped about her.

"Um, my given name is Hiroki. I forget that English speakers don't know that, sorry. And please just call me Hiroki, shortening it feels, um, a little, familiar?" She looks at the engines, at the castle, at Cid, and back to the engines, an increasingly dubious expression on her face.

"It's my, um, nickname for the tournament in Tempest. My actual name is Yukimura Hiroki." She seems unconvinced by Theodore's reply, but it seems to have at least had some effect, as the girl's returned to looking about at their surroundings somewhat nervously. [13 vs 19] [18 vs 22] Name: Shoddy Scale Cloak Description: A cloak made of chainmail with small metal scales attached somewhat haphazardly, with some imperfections in the chain weave. A similarly imperfect enchantment is infused. Type: Armor Armor: +3 RES Minimum Stats: 1 STR Weight: 6 SYN Bonus: 5 SYN = +1 RES, 10 SYN = +1 RES Special Qualities: Rewind: On the first instance of damage taken per battle, this armor provides double the normal RES bonus by shifting the wearer slightly backward in time. Heavy: Due to imperfections in the crafting process, this piece of armor is especially encumbering to wear. An astute observer would have noticed the Battered Hero seemingly vanishing once he reached a certain distance away from the group, shortly after he drew his sword. The group heading into town runs into Cid, a group of human workers, and two chipmunks(?) that he glares at pointedly before turning toward the group. Two of the workers are pulling a cart with what appears to be two enormous rocket boosters and miscellaneous parts on them. "So, I figured since you found yourselves a ride, I'd make getting y'all offworld easier on myself. All we gotta do is hook up these gummi boosters to that thing's engines, and you'd be good to go. They've got properties that let them travel between worlds, so they should get you going with the power from your, uh, castle's engines. Probably. Sound good?"

"Hey, just because I'm a girl, don't think I can't keep up! I fought the strongest people in Tempest and came out on top, so-" She abruptly cuts herself off, looking about at the group somewhat self-consciously. She elects to glare at Theodore instead of continuing whatever rant she'd just started.

"It's um, me. I'm the Hellfire Knight." The voice was actually slightly on the deep side for someone of her size, as she hesitantly pushed back her hood, revealing her face; she had somewhat childlike features, with bright violet eyes and silver hair, though her face was set in a determined expresson. "Um. I decided that hiding myself was pointless, since we're not fighting each other."

The big guy was right. This was the chance of the lifetime. A chance to save everyone, a chance to prove once and for all that she was strong. Even if she'd thought she'd had it in Tempest. . . She trembled a bit. Probably because Kagari turned into goo. Yeah, it was that. Okay. Enough is enough. I don't need to hide anything from them, we're all on the same team. If they can take the ten year old seriously, they can take me seriously. A hand reached up to the Hellfire Knight's chin, and grabbed hold of something, then pulled. It was hard to tell what it was with how quickly it dropped with their hand. "I am."

The man actually looks. . . confused? by the mention of the "dead body thing." "I do not know of what you mean, but if the mere sight of me is enough to break your resolve, then the multiverse is destined to be a meal. No, there is no one else that should have been with you. . . there is no time. . ." With that incredibly helpful answer, the man turns around, and begins to plod away, drawing a massive blade from his side after a few moments - one thrust through a loop in his belt, that scraped along the ground slightly as he walked with it in hand.

The man nods at Eon's question, but frowns. "The condition is worse than I had thought. . . Very well. I did not ask for clever answers. The fact that you do not know is an ill omen. I will tell you. You are here because the multiverse is dying." He pauses for a moment, as if for dramatic effect; however, a close observer would see that he was simply taking a breath, slowly. "Creatures, known as Trespassers, have been escaping into creation and devouring it. Gorging on reality. Growing stronger, too strong. You were gathered to stop them. She should have told you this. . ." He shakes his head once. "There are hundreds of worlds afflicted with them as we speak. You must stop them. I know of one world that is nearly destroyed by them, but you are not strong enough. Not prepared. You must take your sacred duty seriously." He glares at Kyle again, before staring at Solomon. "Gather your strength. Travel to other worlds less corrupt and rid them of the ones responsible, and grow stronger. Then, I will show you the way."

The massive figure fixes Kyle with a withering glare before turning his head to face the center of the party once again, slowly, almost as if it caused the being pain. "Do you know why you are here?" The voice was deep, extremely so, but not so deep as to sound inhuman; the ragged, gravelly tone wasn't the sort one heard out of demons and monsters.

The tank rolls up to the town, and Alexandria parks it outside before lowering the drawbridge, allowing its passengers to get out - including a Cid that was rather too stunned to silence to say much until this point. A group of people, led by Leon, exits the town, gazing up in awe at the massive vehicle. "I, um, found some more strays for you. I see you uh, found your own thing." Leon, Gary, Dimitri, Nyahiro, Ritsu, Soryn, Tesla, Victoria and Ashley are in! "More of them?" Cid - the blonde man with the cigarette from earlier - walks out of the vehicle just in time to respond to Leon. "Where the hell are all of these bastards coming from?" "Who knows? Almost wish we could hold onto them, though; we need more fighters here." "Yup, Heartless are a massive pain in the ass, but whatever. I've got an idea after seeing this thing; remember the plan for tossing 'em out of here? I figure we can just chop the engines off and mount 'em on this tank." At this, Leon looks at the man dubiously. "Look, all we gotta do is hook the boosters up to the engines this thing already has. Magic and all that happy bullshit will do the rest." "Whatever works. Alright, you guys, go say hello or whatever, I don't actually care. Cid will be back shortly with his crew." Cid hops down and follows the brown-haired man into the town. There isn't much time before someone else makes an appearance, however. The sound of labored, but deliberate and heavy footfalls of metal-clod feet are clearly audible, as a massive figure - easily over eight feet tall, walks out from the canyons. His - it looks male, anyway - body is covered in a battered suit of steel plate, with medium-length, ragged hair slicked with sweat and blood. The armor is rusted, and covered in a mix of what looks like it was actual red stripes of paint and dried blood. He leaves a trail of it behind, though less than you'd think given his most startling feature: a veritable armory of weapons jammed into his flesh, to the point where it seems that there is no logical way that he should be capable of breathing, let alone walking about, even if his gait is one of someone who is clearly wounded. He stalks up to the party, golden eyes glowering out at the party silently. Anyone who stared at him for too long could have sworn that, for the briefest moment, he looked exactly like them, except in a state that looked like they were in the midst of dying violently from whatever would have done them in in their native worlds; The Hellfire Knight, for example, who'd gone outside when they stopped with the rest of the group, saw herself, armor torn to pieces, venting plasma that scorched her flesh as her Favor ran out. She gasped slightly in startlement, blasting those listening with static, and shook her head - when she looked again, he was back to being the impaled warrior that had walked up.

[14 vs 28] Name: Crude Cult-like Spear Description: A Golden Stone Rod Clutching a Blackrock seamlesly melted into it with a Groove holding a sharp splinter of poor quality metal, It's black surfaces hold Forbidden Writing that has emerged on their knapped surfaces, Barely held back by the Golden Stone's Holy Nature. This weapon seems to whisper into your ear when you hold it. Type: Weapon Damage: 1d8+ choice of STR or SYN Minimum Stats: 2 Str Weight: INT Bonus: Maddening Strike: When wielded by a user with 10 or more INT, this weapon inflicts an additional 2d6 of psychic damage that bypasses RES. Special Qualities: Eldritch Whispers: This weapon corrodes one's sanity simply by holding it. All status rolls (whether to resist or inflict them) are rolled twice, and the lower result is taken. Additionally, it inflicts 2+the wielder's level pure damage per turn, regardless of what actions the wielder takes.