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Above the Storm [FIN]; [P]
Topic Started: Thu Dec 19, 2013 3:44 pm (962 Views)
Elena
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Ajiah watched patiently and then flinched. "She's going to alert them all like that!" She squeaked. Elena patted Ajiah on the head. "Stay with the skittering, I'm calling in my troops." Splotches that might have been seagulls twisted in mid air. From the trees came Kun, scrabbling onto Elena's head as he wasn't allowed on the cultural artifact. The splotches drew closer. The Overwatch blasted the mountainside behind them with sheets of bone shards. Talons came shrieking in, the four of them swarming the edge of one rooftop, chased in by Stalkers jumping from the hills. The seven fought defensively, picking their fights carefully.

The Overwatches swung by again as the combat Harbinger landed, sinking into the ground and then churning it up as she fixed her stance. The elite guards collapsed off of her, shaking dissolved organic adhesive from their form. The black beasts followed as well. Elena motioned forward and drew Ajiah with her, rushing down to the courtyard.

"What are you doing!? We'll get surrounded much more easily!" Ajiah questioned. An overwatch swept past, snapping a ghoul rushing across the clearing into the air, and in the same motion releasing it. The humanoid sailed through the air, spinning head over shoulders before disappearing into the treetops.

"We need to close our defense as much as possible, the courtyard is more defensible than a wooded area. It will take a half hour before the Harbinger can bring the remaining undead in!" Elena replied. "Kun, command the force atop the wall, I'll organize the ground defense!" The little scout leaped from Elena's head, speeding into the air. The ghouls in the treeline had stopped, given that the Overwatch were maintaining constant flights overhead.
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Ari
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Ari could only stand there and watch as the predators overwhelmingly became the prey. The sight of Elena's powers over undead was amazing to behold. These mere ghouls couldn't withstand the bigger, more unique beings that tore them apart. She found herself drawn to the temple. Her eyes glazed over again as her feet carried her without conscious thought, still holding Agorst lowered in one hand. Before she knew it she was pushing in the main temple door. Her charge's words about the courtyard being a good position to defend fell on deaf ears.

The inside of the temple was cracked with fern weeds and draped with huge lengths of tattered old festival-ribbon, the kind with the riffled triangles dangling from strings. There was no light. Ari staggered over buckled stone. The sound of laughter rang loud in her ears to the point that she could barely think about anything else, if she was even capable of conscious thought at the moment.

Ari smelled blood. "Help!" the tiny feminine voice belonged to a survivor, a young priestess trapped in a crumbled corner of one of the larger chambers. The swordsman ripped through festival ribbons to reach the voice. "Thank the Kings, it's you! I thought I would starve to death in here. Please, help me."

But Ari's attention wasn't on the trapped priestess at all. It was dead centered on the big mural on the other side of this room. A beautiful painting of a huge praying mantis, its armor painted with intricate, familiar designs. It wore a billowing cloak made of hound fur as it devoured the dragon Kolkrung alive. The Nalaians depicted in the painting were cutting open the yet-uneaten stomach of the dragon to retrieve their swallowed kinsmen.

"Are you listening? You're not listening..." The voice became increasingly insistent, and angry. A chuckle tumbled from the priestess' lips. "Honestly, Mantis, your vanity makes it far too easy..." Monsters dropped from the ceiling and appeared at every doorway. Ari's attention from the mural didn't waver. Her lips were moving quickly, but the sound that came out was barely detectable. The priestess turned into tendrils of black flesh, escaping the collapsed section and reforming behind Ari. "You know, we all thought you had skipped a generation. And yet here you are, the false king's lapdog all the same."

"My debt is soon complete. I will shed my skin and release my claws of gold twice more, only twice for the storm. Demon scum as you do not feed me or clothe me or decorate my hide, but I must crawl through the dirt all the same, if only for this reason divulged." Still speaking in a monotone, Ari slowly turned to face the priestess. "O Demonkin, keel over and die so that I might leave this place with a blade untainted by low lifeforms. The limbs of all your brood are ugly and bitter-tasting, barely enough to feed me for an hour, and not a challenge to obtain."

The priestess made a toothy grin. "You have quite the mouth, Incarnation. Maybe killing your two little friends would deflate that massive ego of yours? I just sent the perfect children of mine to do the job."
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Elena
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Ari had entered the temple without warning or a word. Elena looked back moments after she did and immediately scurried after her. She called in her beasts behind her, and they immediately abandoned the front lines. Kun's force jumped in ahead of Elena, buzzing in through the doors ahead as the elite guards beat an awkward retreat. The group massed up at the entrance to the temple, using the elite guards as a living shield while the attacked over them, dragging aggressive ghouls back into the temple where they could be thrown to the floor and mobbed. The Overwatch streaked overhead, butchering ghouls in deadly displays of taloncraft.

Ajiah had contented herself taking rapid notes as Ari spoke strangely to the obvious demon. Something about Incarnations. Elena strode forward. "Ari? What's going on?" Elena asked. Her three black beasts peaked out from behind her, keeping their heads low. A low growl emanated from the trio.
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Ari
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The priestess seemed shocked by the appearance of Elena and the Professor mere moments after her threat. Ari recognized the humor, lips pulling back to reveal teeth and mouth opened like a silent laugh. That expression was wiped clean as soon as the demonkin took action, though. Her right arm burst into a cluster of barbed, fleshy tendrils that parted in all directions before converging toward Elena. Ari appeared on the opposite side of the tendrils within the blink of an eye, body bent forward, and at the same moment the tendrils burst into ribbons of flesh. The swordsman swept her fingertips down into a puddle of black blood, then dabbed a trio of dots onto her forehead. This upside-down triangular pattern mimicked the simple eyes between the two compound eyes of a mantis.

She wielded Agorst the Bastard in an inverted grip. Her stance was low, agile, almost graceful in a primal sort of way. The whole spark behind her eyes was different from before the first ghoul died. There was an intensity hidden beneath flaunted boredom. "Let your children fight my allies. Then perhaps this fight will be worth my attention." She had completely ignored Elena's question, unable to recognize or respond to her own name.

Monstrous ghouls with powerful upper bodies surrounded Elena, Ajiah and the black beasts, responding to the growls with their own hellish snarling. Only their eyes looked remotely human; the rest of the details of their features constantly shifted, bristling with spines.

In another blink of the eye Ari had impaled the demon through the chest and pinned it to the wall. It disassociated once again into ribbons, twisting hard around the swordsman's limbs as it weaved its way up around her body. The tendrils reached Ari's neck in a second or two and strangled her.
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Elena
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Ari was certainly not herself. Elena stepped back as the woman spoke strangely. Ajiah appeared to know what was going on, but Elena did not. She straightened her strange outfit as she stepped back again. And then more ghouls appeared. Elena reeled backwards and scurried away, sending her black beasts in her place. They, unfortunately, were not the best match for the ghouls. The black beast's necrotic breath was not of much help against the already did. It did seem to slow them as it burnt what little living flesh they had. Daisy bolted off the line of battle, streaked with gore. She rammed the lead ghoul into the ground and stomped up to his face and cracked his skull neatly with her powerful jaws.
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Ari
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Ari took one look at the fight behind her and scoffed at the demonkin. "Your lesser undead are not even a threat." The priestess tried to run away through a wall of lesser ghouls, but only managed a few feet. Ari tore through them with well-placed elbow strikes, then dipped and weaved through the last of them to reach out with her free hand and grab the girl by the back of the robe. When she predictably tried to transform, Ari went to town with the slashes, cutting them into even more pieces before coming in and pinning the beast with her full bodyweight, then slammed Agorst through her neck to further secure her to the floor. "I assume the sky demon king wants information, as well. Tell me, why are you here?"

"Tell the king that there was a weakness in its followers. In its doctrine." The priestess coughed up a mouthful of black blood, then smiled. "Tell it that before it labels me as evil. You're part of nature, Mantis. You understand what I mean when I describe myself as a, heh, opportunistic predator."

Ari lidded her eyes disapprovingly. "And the ghouls?"

"The ghoul constructs are mine. But the normal ones, well..." she chuckled. "Let me just make two things clear: this girl I'm using was a cook, and these priests were some of the most gullible idiots I've ever witnessed."

"I see." She ripped her sword out of the demonkin's neck, limbs bursting with chitin spines. Ari savaged the corpse, ripping it apart until it wasn't even twitching anymore. With that done, she shakily stood and turned toward Elena. "Kill the rest, pile and burn the bodies. My strength is-- fading." That was all she managed to say before the color came back to her eyes, the spines faded, and Ari collapsed.

Seconds passed before the swordsman drew in a sharp breath, eyes blinking open a bit. She couldn't move. Felt weak, like she'd just done something her body couldn't handle. Most importantly... "What's going on? ...You followed me into the temple?" Ari realized that she had blacked out for at least a few minutes.
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Elena
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Elena immediately followed Ari's advice, and her beasts began dragging the corpses into one great bonfire. Elena spent time healing the ones that did manage to get injured, while calling the Harbinger back to pick them up. Ari offered a question. Elena looked to her, taking her hands off a Talon's broken limb.

"I did, and you didn't seem to be here mentally when I arrived. You walked in on your own. You spoke strangely, and with authority. You know quite a lot about these events and you were referred to as the Painted Mantis." Elena looked back to the Talon. She reformed the creature's flesh with her magic. Outside, her beasts had created a great pile of corpses in the clearing and were just waiting for little professor Ajiah to provide one of her matches, which she was having difficulty locating.
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Ari
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Ari stared in utter bafflement at Elena. "Wha--?" She realized all of a sudden that she was desperately thirsty. Her mouth and throat were dry, lips were cracked. She fumbled to get her canteen off her hip and chugged it. Gasped for breath as soon as she snapped her lips off. "I can't remember any of that. I was just going toward the temple. Can't think of why. And then I walked through and there was this mural... Oh gods. The mural." The swordsman clambered back to that room on shaky feet. She took a moment to just stare at the huge, partially defaced painting. All it was was a picture of a giant insect eating a dragon. Her response was disproportionate. Ari put her hand against the nearest wall to support herself, bending over and pressing her fist against the breastplate of the Painted Armor, face creased in pain.

"That's, gngh, the Painted Mantis, right? So why was I referred to as--- agh! My chest..." Like there were coals in her lungs, almost. Ari stumbled out of the room, started regaining her balance a bit more. That let her get out of the temple with less and less need for support from the walls. "The Painted Armor?" she muttered.

The unfurling staircase slowly spiraled down from the sky demon king's anvilcloud. Ari waited until the job was complete before she started the climb. At some points she had to lower her body to nearly all-fours just to avoid teetering off the edge. By the time she was back in the world above the storm -- this time emerging directly into the sky demon king's antechamber -- Ari was gasping for breath. The sky demon king sat on its throne with legs crossed, one elbow propped against the armrest, watching Ari make a fool of herself.

"What of the temple? Is it clean?"

"I don't care about that! Tell me at once what this armor truly means!"

"You don't know? The Painted Armor has been worn by every Mantis incarnation since Kamon." It tilted its head. "To varying extents, of course. What, did your family give it to some random daughter of theirs?"

"Clearly they did, and they lied about it too. Told me it was just a way of passing through your domain safely. Declared allegiance to you or something."

The sky demon king laughed. "That is the most outlandish lie I've ever heard! You must be quite ignorant of your own heritage to fall for that! Hah! The Mantis, allied to me? Indebted, yes."

Ari released a slow, heavy breath. "Alright. Fair enough. Then it was just a misunderstanding." She turned around, removing her antlered helmet. "Let Elena and Ajia debrief you, then. I don't belong here."
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Elena
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The bonfire lit and a depressed looking vampire professor sitting in front of it. Soon enough the healed creatures had curled up near it as well, basking in the warmth. It was an odd scene as the elite guards and black beasts waited for the Harbinger to return. The talons were not so lucky, nor Kun. Elena had found a disused stash of cleaning equipment and had shown the beasts how to scrub stone and operate a broom. The talons had proper arms and could operate both. And Kun had an eye for detail, or so Elena liked to think. A stairway unfurled from the sky and this was enough to get Elena to grab Ajiah to follow her. The pair ascended the stairs behind a rather determined Ari. They agreed without word it was best not to help her, considering the look on her face and her physical mannerisms.

In the antechamber the skygod and the mantis bandied words, mostly the skygod heckling Ari. Elena had long determined he wasn't her favorite person. Ari just as suddenly handed off the actual meat of the issue to Ajiah and Elena. Elena immediately went blank. Ajiah, thankfully, stepped in.

"Elena and Ari defeated the ghouls. They were lead by a demon-lady in religious garb. An earth demon, I think? Ari killed her. She had also customized several of the ghouls into more fit for combat constructs. Elena's beasties took care of the bulk of the ghouls that remained." Ajiah explained.

"Oh, and I set beasts to actually clean the temple. It'll be spotless!" Elena offered. She caught a funny glare from Ajiah. Perfection counted for something, right?
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Ari
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Ari left the palace deeply unsettled. Her fever had finally subsided. The faster I forget all this, the better.

Just as she stepped from the last stair onto solid ground, the swordsman looked up and saw that the rain had stopped and the anvilcloud was drifting off to some far-away location. The sky demon king had likely offered to deposit Elena and the Professor anywhere they pleased. Ari was standing in the back yard of her uncle's manor, welcomed by many members of her extended family. She responded to their smiles with a stern face, turned and started to leave.

"Wait." It was her grandmother's voice. "Go to the city Mandira, in Nal'a. You'll find answers there." Ari didn't even stop walking, but she heard it.
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