Alexandria Sue vs Xianxia
« Previous Post
+ Show First Post
Total: 808
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

The dialect they were speaking earlier isn't particularly close to any of these. There are some similarities, enough to start guessing at the meaning of unfamiliar words, though.

"Sister fox, [some sort of greeting]. This... Old [language]. Speak little. [Broken/drained?] qi. And- Ow." She touches the wounds still present on her now-smaller form. They're not bleeding.

She bows, fist on palm. "Good fight! Demon [scholars?], always good to fight. Please, go to [fort/manor]. I will be in your care."

The fox-person is now kneeling on the ground and breathing deeply, frowning in concentration.

Permalink

She's just going to take a step back, look into her heart, and really try to understand where the fox—fox girl?—is coming from. (She uses Backchannel.)

...

The fox girl is greeting her as a senior sister? In the Chinese sense of a peer of greater age or tenure. She's saying this is a dead language she doesn't speak, and thanks Rebecca for fighting against the blood villain, whom she identifies as a practitioner of... demonic arts? She's tired, or injured, but using the term in relation to her powers or soul? And she's asking Rebecca to defend the town's fort—which is the central compound undamaged by the fractures she saw from the air—and saying that she's out of the fight for now. She's sincere but vaguely upset about it.

Linguistic relativists would be fascinated to look inside her head her right now. She understands the fundamental meaning of what the girl said, but she can't fit it back into words to further process because she lacks the mental vocabulary for it. She has a feeling that if she worked at it harder she could deconstruct it down into concepts she can more easily work with, but this is enough for now.

She asks Backchannel how she can ask the fox girl if she should take her back to the fort. The resulting construction is slightly odd in her mouth.

"I can bring you to the [fort/manor], if you wish."

Permalink

She nods, and stands again with visible effort.

The sea of rifts breaking up the town is steadily settling down without its creator sticking around adding to it. The best way out is probably up and over. There seem to be more villains around, approaching through the maze.

Permalink

That's an encouraging sign. Hopefully the rifts will go away by themselves; she wasn't looking forward to helping the cleanup. She approaches, turns her back to the girl and crouches down, gesturing for her to put her arms around Rebecca's neck. Unless she wants to turn into a fox to be carried?

Permalink

Actually, yeah. She fox-ifies. A little fox this time, very long and slim and easy to curl around a shoulder or something.

Permalink

Unfortunately Rebecca did not get the shoulder memo and just scoops the fox up in her arms.

And then she gets out of there before the other guys show up. She's reasonably sure she can take them, given that she just beat up their boss and was starting to do damage before the fox got the kill, but she has one injured here. She shoots straight up at a low but constant acceleration until she gets a good view clear of the rifts, and then turns for the central compound and points for confirmation.

Permalink

Affirmative yip!

Wait, the sword! Ah, too late. It'll be there later, if nobody picks it up, and it wasn't particularly special as swords go.

The central compound looks and feels very solid. It has men and women in armor with spears or bows atop the walls, fighting off dead bodies. The most prominent is a middle-aged man dressed in silks and gold jewelry with a pot belly and another sword, who pulses with energy, noticeably strong, but weaker than the fox, who is weaker than the dead blood villain. He stands at the front and slashes at the attacking corpses with gusto.

The crowd of figures standing in the streets beyond seem to be panicking slightly. Probably they can feel that their superior is dead.

Permalink

That's a bit more dire than she was expecting. She shoots towards the compound, having to moderate her approach to not squish the fox with the g-forces. Is there an obviously protected center courtyard or somewhere to put down the fox?

She's also realizing perhaps a tad delayed that this place is clearly some form of fantasy setting, with magic foxes and sorcerers and spears and swords as the cutting edge of mundane weapons technology. Chinese fantasy setting, like those... 鹿鼎記, or 射鵰英雄傳. Which means she most likely has technology to trade if she can get Dressing Room to work. It was her least favorite part of outreach for how large of an impact it has, but she knows how to do it.

Can she Dragon Fairy Elf Witch the... she should not Dragon Fairy Elf Witch the corpses.

Permalink

There's a big outer wall which everyone is defending, a large courtyard full of hundreds of civilians but still some open space, and an inner manor/mansion.

Permalink

She is going to descend straight down into the courtyard and set the fox down in an empty space in the middle of the civilians.

"This good?" she asks, cannibalizing the words from their earlier short conversation. She's pretty sure the civilians won't hurt her, but it would be a stupid mistake to make. Her understanding of Chinese folklore is that fox spirits are not well liked.

And she Dragon Fairy Elf Witched fox spirit heritage onto her head.

Too late now.

Permalink

It's actually a little bit hard to approach the courtyard! Something wants her to Not Do That. It's a heavy, solid, stubborn thing. But not strong enough to actually stop her or do more than annoy her.

People scramble away from them.

Wynn turns human(-oid) again and shouts something into the crowd. A little boy thumps his chest and takes off running.

To Alexandria: "Good. Go!"

Permalink

She vanishes in a blur, then she's up in the sky again, surveying the scene. How dense are the corpses, immediately away from the front line? Should she be going for mass damage in the thick of the pack, or helping out the defenders up close? Are the human mooks doing anything she ought to be interrupting—anyone or any MacGuffin obviously the controller of the zombies she can take out? Or are they all being vaguely ineffective after their leader got taken out?

Permalink

The pack at the walls really seems to be most of the animate corpses. At least, the immediately accessible ones. It looks like the corpses are mostly autonomous but can be nudged by whichever blood user is paying attention to them at the time.

The blood users do not have an obvious leader. In fact, some of them are even retreating, as the lower-ranking blood-users lose their nerve and decide it's time to leave with whatever loot they can grab quickly. Looks like Mr. Gold and Silk is setting up for a charge out the gates to give chase.

Permalink

Chasedown duty it is, then.

How dense are the ambiguously-dimensional rifts, still? Is the city legibly navigable enough that she can she track their escape paths, start with the ones closest to the town limits, and work backwards?

...Hold on, are they escaping on the streets, or escaping into the rifts?

Actually—she casts an eye afar into the fields. There were people who were raising corpses out there, earlier. Are those people still there or running away?

Permalink

The rifts all lead to other parts of town or the nearby countryside. They are slowly shrinking and vanishing and seem stable. The villains are using them liberally to scatter faster. And there are indeed a few robed figures dashing at superhuman speed through the fields.

-Wait, new rift at the edge of town. Opened by three working together. A patch of creepy white and red forest is through it.

Permalink

Uh huh. She's guessing that's the exit plan of at least some of them.

She's above the three in seconds, then slams down into the ground in front of the forest rift before they can blink.

Can she close the rift with her fox spirit powers?

Permalink

She can! It feels kind of like smoothing out a sheet of paper or blanket. The rift vanishes.

Two of the three run. One decides to go prostrate and beg for mercy.

Permalink

The problem is she doesn't want to kill these people, not without direct endorsement by probably Mr. Gold and Silk, but she also needs a way that's scalable to all of these stragglers.

She suspects handcuffs out of Dressing Room won't work, and not trying to fashion her Perfect Hair into bindings either. If they can make portals, they can probably find their way out of restraints. Without more knowledge on their capabilities, she has to assume they can manifest essentially arbitrary effects.

The longer she stands here, the more time she wastes. She grabs the person by the collar and flies towards one of the running ones, her prisoner in tow.

Permalink

The first runner is definitely not fast enough to avoid Alexandria. Not even when they get a brief burst of speed, and then collapse in exhaustion.

Permalink

She still needs a way to carry or secure multiple people efficiently, and the last person is still running. She can't keep making round trips from the city center; people are fragile so it'll be more than ten seconds per trip, and there's a few dozen to catch. What do they do at home, for a scattering mob—she doesn't have PRT backup here, which is the problem—

Or does she?

She plops her two captives on the ground, facing away from her, and steps back. Takes a moment to herself, and changes into a PRT standard-issue Wyvern 116 back-mounted containment foam system.

"Stand!" she demands.

Permalink

They both stand and hold still, terrified.

Permalink

She sprays them down. The foam engulfs them as it expands, bogging them down in misshapen masses about 3 meters in diameter.

Are they struggling or trying to get out by any means? Is it holding?

Containment foam is meant to hold against arbitrary effects within reason. It should be able to keep down even some second-rate Trumps. If there are easier containment procedures specialized for these blood sorcerers, or whatever they are, she can learn them later.

Permalink

One is definitely struggling, but she's not Brute enough for it to unstuck her. The Blaster or Striker power she tries doesn't help much either. They remain foamed.

Permalink

Good enough. She's going to leave them here and hunt down the third.

This is going to look incredibly odd, and it's going to be a headache figuring out the right Dressing Room play to get the solvent, but it works. And it's powerful demonstration if she intends to sell technology to the civilization around here.

Any trouble getting the third foamed?

Permalink

He may or may not be slightly invisible.

Slightly. She can see motion blur and foam that just fine. 

The rest of the cleanup is some of the same, except for one who seems a bit stronger than the rest of the chaff who keeps dodging and sloughing off foam for a while. He's also carrying an unconscious girl- One of the blood users, not a kidnapee- Over the shoulder.

Total: 808
Posts Per Page: