EVENT ★ CRUMBLING WORLD

[futurologists]

GO Are you prepared for the fight of your life? You better be. The Oska staff and the others who are staying behind gather in the courtyard to wish the recruits luck. It's a much more formal affair than rifting out to missions usually is, with recruits casting spells on each other for luck and for strength, and still others passing around potions and elixirs for healing and stamina. In addition to Audentes and the guests' teams, there are also a number of ex-convicts from the Asterion Prison ready to rift out as well, and familiar teams like Mariposa, Squirrel Fucker, and Unicorn. The undead catlike humanoid Pomarr stands near a brother and sister recruited from Q-65. A handful of former Zymandis agents look uncomfortable in their new purple uniforms but grimly ready for action, with Mavahari at the head of their team. And Team Kittypaw, Audentes's big sister team, is of course ready to get their hands (and paws) dirty right alongside everyone else. A green-skinned alien who works in the Medical Center steps forward and gives a brief statement of hope and a wish for luck. Then the recruits flagged for the rift begin to glow, the world flickers white, and it's time for the crumbling world. THE LAND AND SKY When the contingent of ALASTAIR teams rifts in, it's onto a series of unsteady, crumbling stretches of land. Why the land is so unsteady is quickly apparent: they are floating platforms, unused to the sudden weight of so many bodies. The platforms are so wobbly that some unlucky ones may lose their footing and actually go sliding toward the edge. This is not a soft landing by any means. Once you get your bearings, you'll want to start toward a castle rising in the distance: the Ophiel AI still active inside the ex-Zymandis agents' jewelcomms pinpoints it as the location of the TIMELINE.exe's signal. But don't expect an easy stroll to reach it. The entire landscape is separated into floating, drifting chunks of crumbling earth, with no way to travel between them but to jump. Making things even more difficult is the steam rolling over the platforms, obscuring the edges and reducing visibility all around. As the planet cracks apart, its surface peels back to let lava heat up the atmosphere, causing the steam and filling the air with oppressive heat and humidity. The lava occasionally burbles up into geysers, so be careful when jumping from platform to platform, and make sure you time it right. Patrolling some of the larger platforms are Zymandis robot guards. If you avoid the large platforms and take advantage of the camouflage provided by the steam, you might be able to avoid the robots . . . but if the steam clears, look out: they're equipped with laser weapons and can rocket boost short distances to whatever platform you may be hiding on. And not only is their close proximity bad for you, but their extra weight is bad for the already-fragile platforms. Make it past all these obstacles -- the platforms, the steam, the lava, the robots -- and you'll find the biggest platform where the castle sits, itself a crumbling mass of stone. THE CASTLE The castle is made of dark and brittle stone, and is palpably thrumming with magic and electricity, like a dark twin to Oska's own castle. It's situated on a platform floating high above the others, fortuitously far enough from the lava below that there's a respite from the humidity and heat. But this far up in the sky, the opposite appears to be the problem: the wind is cold and biting, threatening to push anyone right off the ledge. Best push on into the castle itself. Just beyond the massive gated door is the grand hall of the castle, though in its crumbling state, it's objectively not very grand at all. Elaborate stained glass windows once filled the walls and ceiling, most of the panes now on the ground in jagged piles of glass alongside stone rubble. It's probably best not to stand in one place for too long -- you never know when some other structure in the castle will collapse. Some time may be spent exploring the grand hall before moving on, though there's not much to find. A rusted halberd here, a pile of useless debris there. The Ophiel AI urges everyone to move on to find the TIMELINE.exe, but there's suddenly a noticeable chill in the air and from the staircase descends a trio of white-robed figures. The figures are spirit wizards, Ophiel quickly explains; they have no physical body but are instead formed by pure spiritual energy. As long as one lives, they will keep reforming as three, so all of them will need to be taken out all at once. Physical attacks won't be very effective against beings without a physical form, Ophiel continues; burn them away with magic and the elements and you might stand a chance. The spirit wizards can fling people about with wind magic, electrocute with lightning magic, and engulf anything in flames. Lacking a physical form, they can also teleport, so protecting one another is an important strategy to survive the battle. The other teams are all practiced warriors in one way or another, but with so many people in one place, all fighting the same enemy, some organization is called for before it becomes an all-out catastrophe. The castle, after all, can only withstand so much accidental fire before it's game over. OOC NOTES Welcome to the last mission of the season! This log will ICly last three hours, with the next log picking up immediately afterward. If you have any questions about this log, please direct them to the dossier. Because this log is going up near the end of the month, you may use threads started in October for November AC, provided you don't use the same thread for October AC as well. NOTE: November is the last month for AC Bonus Bank! The Bonus Bank will close on December 5th, 23:59 UTC. To celebrate the finale, we are removing the coin cap, meaning you can submit more than 100 coins with no upper limit. Coin balances will not transfer to Season 2. If you have questions about the game in general, please use the game FAQ.

Comments

[cashlin]

I am fighting them!

[and, as if to illustrate her point, lilith reloads her gun and petulantly kicks through the used shells at her feet on her way to jon's side. if she's intimidated by the intentional hole he's made with his fist, she's not showing it at all-- in fact,
she's standing beside him, now, almost like she's offering cover.]

I'm just not letting 'em swat me into the wall like a giant friggin' fly. Get up, fresh meat, we need your hard head, and we need it not lodged into the wall.

[lilith shoulders her gun again, buffeting one of the wizards long enough to distract it from a downed ALASTAIR recruit from another team.]

[metacides]

( "fresh meat". well it's not--an inaccurate statement, he supposes. and his head is useful for more than just being hard, although he'll give her that it's not as if humans can just go flying into walls and be fine. she moves over to him, and for the moment, he'll take the cover. jon is already on his feet, unharmed despite a few tears to his containment suit which do start to repair themselves fast enough. )

Yeah, yeah. Give me a minute. ( eyes wander from one spirit to the other, gaining a faint red glow as he watches them move. tries to track patterns, figure out what the hell their game is here, if it's not just being dicks. a hand raises, too--that faint red glow spreading down and over gloved fingers and spreads to the closest spirit, wrapping tight around it's neck, midsection, waist, and yanking it back to the wall jon had just hit moments prior. )

You can do more than just shoot it, can't you?

[cashlin]

[she regards his suit curiously as the fabric stitches itself back together. that's... certainly new.] Your orb shield fixes your clothes too? Gotta get me one of those. [u were close lils but no banana

and, before she can fire off another volley, the being's gone flying-- it's almost comical, like jon's carved out a target to throw it into with whatever his powers were. the ability's close enough to steele's that she'd have done a double-take even if he weren't throwing wizard-things around like ragdolls. definitely not a siren-- too not-a-woman to count-- but still interesting.]

Whoa! [she laughs like she is having the time of her life, because, well... a fight like this really is what lilith lives for.

as if in response, she pauses to hold up an energy enveloped fist of her own: a blue-violet light that moves like a flame but fades into the air like the haze of a heatwave.] Not without a big boom, I can't. But maybe I can slap one around without doing a whole phasewalk.

How 'bout it? You wanna see what a Siren can really do?

[metacides]

"Orb"? ( he doesn't know what the hell she's talking about; jon could explain that the suit is a loner, that it belonged to a clone and he. somehow ended up in it at some point or another when he was probably supposed to be dead, but that's a lot more explaining than he really wants to bother with. thank you, kon, for the clothes that fix themselves so jon doesn't have to fucking replace his suit after every scuffle. super useful. )

One at a time's not working. ( obviously. he'd ask what she means by siren, but he honestly doesn't give a shit at this point. she's got--some kind of special ability, jon doesn't need to know what exactly that entails. he should, but he can save any interrogating for when they're not fighting the same monsters. his knees bend down a bit, before he's flying just a few centimeters above the ground. ) If you can drag another in close enough to that one ( a hand points out to the one he just threw; it's up and running around again, fighting another, but it's still close enough. ) I'll break them all down at once.