[IC] TotMV:G^2: Clash of Fate: The Courtyard (Social/Prep Phase)

[Hal Henderics]

Dackly suddenly leaps up from her pushups.

 

"Ok! I need a fuel source, someone with cool powers, and all the archers with a quiver needing arrows!"

 

She shouts at the top of her lungs, which is rather loud, in fact.

 

She mumbles to herself, slithering around the pot, before pointing to Aurora.

 

"Your powers are the coolest, Lady Aurora, ergo, you have the option of partaking in the honor of making that fight outside either quieter or louder!"

 

Dackly says, pointing to her.

[Sutoratosu]

The spider- for as she emerged from the cover of shadows, it soon became very clear that was precisely what she was -leaned in close to the machines face, looking into it's bored, soulless eyes and holding her gaze there for several moments before finally pulling away. Her own eyes burned with a fierce emerald radiance as if in perfect contrast to the lifeless demeanor of the construct before her, as she turned back to Walmond

     "Nope, not a soul to be found. How disappointing..." She sighed, "but it certainly explains why she looks so... well, Blank..."  she looked as though she was about to say something else, but there came another voice into the conversation, one she'd not heard in a while.

14 minutes ago, Hal Henderics said:

 

 

"Your powers are the coolest, Lady Aurora, ergo, you have the option of partaking in the honor of making that fight outside either quieter or louder!"

"Hm?" She turned her eyes to the snake, half perplexed by whatever fever dream she was about to conjure and honestly somewhat more engaged by the idea of engaging in said fever dream than continuing to puzzle over the machine, She glanced back to the construct and then its maker "well... I suppose I have other matters to attend to now..."

 

With that said, she made her way over to the gorgon, staring at the pot as it was being prepared "Now, just what is it you're going to do here?"

[Hal Henderics]

"It's simple, these poor unfortunate soldiers have mere arrows fired from their arrows, against skeletons of all things!  It's sickening.  Ergo, I believe it is in my best and most benevolent interests, and not at all due to boredom, that I would like your assistance in producing a stock of alchemical liquid with which to fill their quaint and miserable quivers with arrows which prove more stimulating."

 

Dackly elaborates, a grin crossing her face.

 

"Fuel of any kind goes in this hole, and any sort of horrific attack or malady you would like to see fired upon the hoards for our amusement, you can toss into the big hole on top."

 

"Then I just pour it into some Quivers and we watch the beautiful fireworks."

[Sutoratosu]

The spider thought about for a moment. On the one hand, they were all a bunch of damn human knights, and human knights and her had most certainly never meshed well in the past; twas only natural she felt some reservations about suddenly gifting them with arrows blessed with any sort of power she might be able to give. But on the other hand... they were all stuck here out of necessity for the time being, and if those constructs managed to finally overwhelm the defenses and seize the gates, they would not discriminate over who they slaughtered. They had proven that much well enough already.

      "If I'm honest, I don't much like this idea..." She muttered, but held out a hand nonetheless and leting the crystal embedded in her palm flare to life regardless. Immediately, a small sphere of burning starlight erupted from the prism, pulsating and shedding the area around them with brilliant radiance "giving them something they could potentially turn right back onto us once this mess is over or they decide for whatever insane reason their chances of survival would be better if they killed us. But... if it will help keep those things outside at bay a bit longer... fine."

 

With that said, the sphere of light launched itself into the pot, vanishing from sight as it melted down into the conceptual stew that was brewing.... "This is the same type of fire that burns at the heart of stars- positive energy focused into searing light and radiance. These things... feel far too different from undead to be one and the same, but... I think it will still be better than whatever piddly bolts these fleshbags are already using."

[Hal Henderics]

"Good thing we control the supply with absolute impunity then.  Gifts that keep giving are overrated."

 

"Hey you!"

 

Dackly grabs an archer going for a resupply.

 

"New arrow from the Higher ups, I need to test one, let me borrow your quiver and bow, I'll give you the first batch of fresh ones after."

 

She says to him.  Provided he goes for it, she pours a small amount of liquid into his quiver, and fires the resultant arrow off the wall at someone important looking below.

[Chevaleresse]

The archer agrees with a somewhat confused look. Dackly's arrow arcs out toward one of the officers who happened to be on the edge of bow range; he swats at the arrow casually, as if he expected it to have little or no effect. He's somewhat surprised when the thing detonates, sending him flying and then rolling backward. Fairly quickly, the rest of them pull back a good fifty feet from the action.

[DragonRage]

"I can, but it doesn't last very long right now," Samantha admits, "It's a work in progress.  I'll probably be able to get something useful soon?  I hope, anyway."

[Hal Henderics]

Dackly pauses for a moment, before turning to the archer with a grin.

 

"Get your friends over here for some of this."

 

She pats the pot, nodding at him and handing a refilled quiver that she refills, and a bow ready for pyrotechnical celebration.

 

Any that come over get a fair serving of Starfire arrows until the pot runs out.

[Sutoratosu]

"Well, that was certainly something," Aurora watched with... a hint of a smirk as the bolt unleashed it's power, "and I suppose you have a fair point. Even humans like these wouldn't be short sighted enough to unleash the limited supply we give them on the ones who aren't trying to currently kill them. So..." 

 

without another word, Aurora got busy conjuring another sphere of starlight to fuel the pot, as Dackly went about distributing the blessed arrows.

[GodofGamingRWBY]

Walmond himself found his gaze traveling upwards as the woman he was speaking to exited the shadows, revealing themselves to be a form of hybrid between spiders and humans. A strange combination, but interesting nonetheless. For a few seconds, he watched as she leaned into Lambda’s face, seeming to examine her as the latter simply started back, folding her hands in front of her. 

 

Then the spider suddenly pulled back, expression disappointment at Lambda’s lack of a soul, before moving away at Dackly’s call. However, Walmond didn’t reply with words, all he did was watch her move away before looking back at Lambda, who stared back at him.

 

… Truly, he would have to spend some time at the castle to learn more about these people and what they knew. He was sure of it now, these were the sources of information he had been searching for. Alexandria and Gozer had been the two that gave him the idea that he could accomplish his research with their assistance, but the spider’s comment about Lambda lacking a soul was the thing that brought the idea back to his focal goal. 

 

Eventually, Walmond began to move again, Lambda following quickly afterwards, specifically searching for a potential library, or something where he could learn the magic of this world. It was a long shot, but something that could give him some more insight on creating a soul was something he was at least interested in checking.
 

[Strider]

Edmond

In response to the sudden flurry of arrows, Edmond quickly ducked down below the wall. Not quite quick enough, as one of the projectiles impacted his shoulder. It bounced of though, leaving Edmond unhurt, and with only the echo of the metallic collision in his ears. As soon as the volley of arrows had let up, Edmond peeked over the parapet, and began to zero in on another target. For a few minutes, he followed this pattern: take aim, shoot, duck for cover, repeat. He had little to fear from the arrows though, so his main reason for ducking was to give the enemy some impression that he did fear their medieval weapons. Otherwise, he might be targeted with the magic that he was slightly more anxious about. As he stood back up from his seventh or so shot, Edmond had a thought. Turning toward the chief mage, he called, "Sir! In a siege of this magnitude, what stops them from piling dead or living skeleton warriors in order to ascend the wall? Simply making a hill of the dead to climb?" In other sieges that would not be possible, but in one of this size, with so many expendable soldiers, it seemed like a legitimate fear. ((OOC: Do the skeletons crumble into dust when they die, or remain a pile of bones? If the former, Edmond would probably know from the earlier battle, and I'll probably edit this post.))

 

Liliya

"Still useful. i know it only lasts a bit, but how many people can you get at once?" Liliya was still smiling at this incredibly odd thing she had just experienced. "If you still want to, you can try out something else? Not sure what. . . how about you surprise me?"

[Hal Henderics]

The horrific sound of scraping meets Lilya's Ears as That strange Snake Woman drags a sloshing pot of something glowing and dangerous looking.

 

"I heard someone say Surprise.  I like surprises." She comments sagely.

 

"What's the Haps?" she continues as an archer walks over, and she pours a liquid fire into his quiver which he presents.

 

"Thank you come again!"  She tells said archer, who likely pulls a strange face at that.

 

 

[Strider]

Liliya

Liliya glanced at Samantha before answering. "I uh. We were testing out one of Sam's powers, right? So I asked her to surprise me with what she did with it. That would be the 'haps'. . . I don't suppose you would like to tell us what you're doing? Like why you have a pot, and what you poured into that guy's quiver?" Liliya was certainly a bit curious, and a little concerned about this snake woman's doings.

[Hal Henderics]

"It's alchemy.  It skips steps in understanding and context.  I throw some magic fire in, it becomes a liquid.  I pour that liquid into a quiver, it becomes what belongs in the quiver.  What belongs in a quiver, and is made from magical fire?"

 

"Crazy Arrows that explode on enemies, of course."

 

She slithers over.

 

"What does she do?"

 

Dackly looks over Samantha.

 

"No, wait, let me guess... you are... A Werewolf! The disheveled appearance, the stance of someone with experience tolerating pain due to intense bodily harm followed by equally painful regeneration, the... Unique Scent- -Anyway!"

 

She continues, glancing over that last comment.

 

"So, I'm Dackly, my best friend Gozer is doing something unimportant and boring over there, and you are intriguing, and I like your aesthetic!"

 

"So what do you do, Sam?"

 

Dackly pauses for a moment, sizing up Samantha.

 

"OH! Samantha! I didn't recognize you without the castle walls around you, How have you been!"

 

Dackly scratches her head.

Edited July 13, 2017 by Hal Henderics

[DragonRage]

"I'm not a werewolf!  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  I know a quite nice werewolf, actually," Samantha exclaims, "I'm a psychic.  A full range telepath, telekinetic, and empath.  Projective and receptive, if that means anything to you.  But I've got way more raw power than control, so I've been practicing not breaking and slash or cooking people and things by mistake whenever I get a spare moment."

[Hal Henderics]

"Oh I know, You are the Psychic, right? I remember that part."

 

"Hmm..."

 

Dackly muses conspiritorially, her grin widening.

 

"Well, try it on me!  I can petrify things that aren't there, as long as I THINK they are, and can see them there, and all my powers are based on my emotional state.  A Guinea pig lies before you, dear Samantha!"

 

"I'll leave you to your prior business, and wait patiently for my own brainwashing."

 

Dackly jokes with a bow, continuing her prior business of filling up quivers.

 

--

 

Meanwhile, Laver arrives, and speaks, walking around looking for party members.

 

"Hey guys? We finished hashing out a plan, can I get everyone's attention?"

 

He comments, and once everyone is within earshot, he explains everything that happened in the war room, and the decisions that were made there.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2017 by Hal Henderics

[Powder Miner]

Isobel (with LOTUS as usual hanging from her apron) stands in a somewhat farther part of the courtyard, the small AI giving out his own briefing.

"Alright, here's the deal. For the first part of our meeting, we learned a lot of the background of what's going on here --a lot of it, thankfully-- and we learned more about our enemies. Then we managed to identify one of the other enemies, which should allow our ally's scryers to find them, but we're going off of a fairly low amount of information here in that regard. I'll cover these two aspects of the meeting in order.

 

First off: the overall background to the conflict. This castle belongs to House Asterlux, of which the noblewoman Silef is the lord, and the enemies are House Shienar, a war that has evidently lasted some time and devolved into an outright war of extermination. Putting aside the opponents like the mist-woman for now, House Shienar is larger and has more resources, but seems to rely on mercenaries and the like as House Asterlux evidently has the better training. If we were fighting a traditional war, I would also expound on terrain and the like, but the fact of the matter is that we are not fighting a traditional war.

 

Shienar has interwoven themselves tightly with five highly powerful individuals called Servants. Evidently borne of the power of an object called the Holy Grail, there were originally seven individuals, called Servants, summoned by this grail, corresponding to historical figures, and they would normally have been controlled and fed magical power by seven mages, the Masters... except that some sort of incident with the Grail (I would not be surprised if our enemies were involved, given our presence here) killed all of the Masters, and warped five of the seven figures irrevocably, and they seem to have found some different power source -- these five Servants are all in the service of House Shienar, and House Shienar both wields great might with them and, as you have seen with their forces, leans on them. If we manage to kill all of these servants, Asterlux will be in a good position to deal with them.

 

The seven Servants summoned by the grail are as follows.

 

Rider, a Chinese warlord on a red horse, was killed by Nobunaga I believe before the incident that occurred with the grail occurred, and thusly doesn't much matter. I identified him as Lu Bu.

 

Archer, who is the one on our side, corresponds to Oda Nobunaga.

 

Assassin is the one that we fought earlier, the one who summons skeletons and mind mist and who also has a skeletal dragon. She is a priority target from my perspective, as the loss of those skeletons would I think do a great deal to damage Shienar's forces. We did not identify Assassin, but we have seen enough of her to I think help Silef's scryers find her. She will not be an easy target, but I believe that defeating her as quickly as possible is essential.

 

Lancer, evidently, is some sort of Westerner king who uses a holy spear, who has granted the other Servants and possibly their minions the ability to break our defenses and perhaps stun us in her presence. I have been told that her spear is too powerful to allow to be fully invoked, so when we fight her we will need to kill her quickly. The problem is that we haven't identified her, nor have we ever seen her.

 

Saber is some sort of... antitheist holy woman, who decries one god, and has a connection to dragons. When she's around, ongoing magical effects are destroyed by the strikes of other Servants or her minions. We haven't identified her either.

 

Berserker is some sort of horrifying monster man, covered in spikes and with a cursed spear. When he's around, the troops around him will reflect damage back on their attackers... but I was told by Nobunaga that this doesn't apply to him himself so if he is focused on and killed as quickly as possible, his troops should be killable. Isobel has actually tentatively identified him as Cu Chulainn, from Celtic myth.

 

Finally, Caster is at the back of their lines and produces artifacts for their troops. While I would dearly love to see someone with his ability dead before they can bolster Shienar further, thanks to his position and our lack of information we can't get him until last.

 

Now, I mention specifically identifying them for a reason. The way we are going to find their locations is by use of Silef's scryers, but they're going to be much better at finding the enemy locations if they are given actual names. If any of you think you know who any of the unidentified Servants I have mentioned are, it would be immensely helpful if you would speak up. As is, I suspect that we will be able to locate Assassin and Berserker and take them out.

Once we have confirmation of enemy location from Silef, we can choose teams to fight them and work on a plan to get to them, but until we know who we're facing for sure, I don't believe that's actually very viable."

 

LOTUS pauses for a moment, and then speaks again.

 

"Oh, and I want some of you to go find whoever is elsewhere in this castle and bring them back here, and repeat what I just said to them... or if you can't remember, just bring them over here, I'd just rather not repeat myself multiple times. I don't want to have to run Isobel all the way around the castle, either."

 

Isobel adjusts her bandanna with a little nervous energy. "LOTUS, it's not really a big deal, I wouldn't mind gathering everyone. It's not like it's a big task or anything."

 

"...and I would like to be here in case anyone wants to discuss something. We are going to be hitting crunch time soon."

 

[Sutoratosu]

as the boy and the Talking Slab busied themselves briefing the rest of the group, Ghost had gone up along the wall once she'd returned to the courtyard. If she was going to create any sort of opening once the scryers had found the Servants in question and the teams were assembled, she'd first need a idea of the scope of the killing field. While true, they'd all been out in the thick of it not long ago, when one was riding atop a floating platform of books that was threatening to be overwhelmed in fire and crash to the ground, busy intercepting enemy spells and simply trying to survive, you didn't really stop to bother just observing the sheer magnitude of everything around you. You focused on whatever was immediately trying to tear you apart, if you wanted to live.

     What she saw however, immediately made her rethink just how to go about her idea. Stretching out for literal miles and miles around the place, the army of constructs easily outnumbered any battlefield of any war she'd ever seen on her world by several of magnitude, at the very least. An Infinite supply indeed. Of course it had dawned her a rough estimate of how many were present while they were fleeing, but up here, without any distraction, with so clear a view... that guess had been snapped into pieces like it was nothing.

 

She had come down from the wall and back to the courtyard proper shaking her head. To hell with making a distraction, even with the power of the leylines, scaling her original idea of calling down a storm of great enough magnitude to make a large enough difference would be far more energy intensive than was sane to pursue. It would be both simpler and more cost efficient to help them sneak their way out, at least past the forces immediately surrounding the fortress. 

     And almost immediately, her mind leapt to her own ability, her Matipraskara- her gift. If she could create temporary pockets of space for each team to hide themselves in as they moved towards their objective, not much unlike the persistent one she used for herself to phase into and out of the plane and avoid detection... yes... yes... perhaps it could work. She just needed to work out the finer points... 

[Strider]

Edmond descended from the wall when he heard that the group from the war room had arrived. As soon as the tablet had finished speaking, and so long as he was interrupting no one else, Edmond posed these questions. "I assume that you four or five will be leading teams? Alright. How do we plan to exit the castle, and what is our time frame?" Really, he was asking about the time frame of the whole mission. How long a scrying would take, when they planned to set out, if they had a hard time limit on killing the servants, etc.

[GodofGamingRWBY]

It didn't take long for Walmond to realize that the few that went to the war room had returned, going over to where a girl was briefing the group through some form of machine. He simply listened to what they had learned, quickly realizing that there really wasn't anything he could provide to assist. Mythology and legends seemed to vastly vary from his world to this one, and others, and to top that off he never had a big interest in said mythologies... So him knowing any names of these "Servants" were very much out of the question.

 

… So, Walmond remained quiet, taking in the information as it came. He’d go and hunt down other members of this “party”, but he did not know all of the faces of those who arrived with him, so there would, without a doubt, be several people he would inevitably miss.

[StormLord]

Friedhold:

After collecting some food from Magnum Friedhold and Alice eat while listening closely to what Laver and LOTUS have to say.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Morgan:

Morgan finds a quite place to stand near the base of the wall and listens to what Laver and the computer(?) have to say.

[Twinwolf]

Victoria

 

Victoria, after the speech was over, went to go drag everyone else together and explain things. She'd been there for a while - enough to recognize most of the party at least, or at least hazard a guess at who was in their ranks. She'd explain the situation to them as she found them.

[IntSys]

Halley received words and came to the Courtyard. She gave the book a second reading and started to figure things out, for better or worse.

 

That was a lot of information for her, but she managed to simplify it into just "beat one, get sick weapon, and move on to the next one." A strategy that she wasn't all that unfamiliar to. The descriptions of the servants did echo something buried deep in the part of the memory that she marked as "cool fluff from ancient times that I can use to name things." In particular, the Lancer's holy lance. It was... Gung... Gung- what? Gungnir?

She put away the book and waited for the others to arrive, standing about.

[Hal Henderics]

Dackly slithers up to LOTUS and Isobel?

 

"Hey, are you two one of the ones with some authority? I've got this crate of potions I made out of Officer's Armor. I'm pretty sure it will make whoever drinks one look like one of the enemy officers. If you think you can distribute them when it gets time, I'll leave these in your capable hands and antennae."

 

She says, hefting the small crate of potions, and setting it down.

[Zetaark]

Ritsu

 

After some time to herself, Ritsu ended up settling at the Courtyard, arriving roughly in time to hear the general briefing. Seeing that others were starting to gather, she started moving about to see who she recognized.