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Post by Rifel on Nov 11, 2009 1:40:27 GMT -6
(Continuation of this.) Finally, after what seemed to be much longer than it should have, they'd reached Thoncir. The streets were well paved, and alive with people. It was almost as though someone, or something, had taken the reigns, and gotten the city back on its feet, since Rifel's last visit. There were even a few buildings being rebuilt, generating a rather commercial atmosphere. Most of the structures were metal and wood, so reconstruction really wouldn't take too much longer, on that note. It was sort of a relief, he felt, that this world could bounce back so easily from the brink of destruction. It had done so quite a few times in its history. Though specific instances were growing more frequent as of late. It was almost as if there was a greater force at work, trying to destroy Etrah before it became too much of a hindrance. After all, it wouldn't be too many more centuries before the technology would begin to rival Haven's again.
Stumbling through the streets, using the chimera boy as a support, Rifel scouted for a safe place to rest. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted one such locale. It was a narrow alley, mostly empty, with a large dumpster. He figured the trash was mostly construction waste, as the gap sat between two half built structures. It would be out of view of curious eyes, and, for the most part, a good shield from any elements that might decide to arise.
His free hand, the one not thrown over his support's shoulders, dug through a pocket momentarily, retrieving a handful of small coins. Holding them out, in front of the boy, he made an effort to stand on his own feet again. It was difficult, but manageable. "Here," he said, "Go get yourself something to eat. Should be enough to feed you for a few days, if you spend it wisely. So, you can keep the change, in case you feel like running off." Rifel began limping toward the alley he'd marked for himself. "I'll be over there. If you come back, you'd better bring me something, too."
Walking, in its own right, was simple enough. It was merely a matter of shifting his weight as he moved. Unfortunately, this caused his body to sway a bit, possibly giving the impression that he was under an influence of some sort. It didn't help, that he was stumbling into an alley. But, he wasn't concerned with the general public's perception of him. Right now, he was concerned with sitting. That was his current goal. And he just happened to achieve it, taking residence on a chunk of something that had missed the dumpster. It was solid, and felt like rock, so he wasn't worried too much about whether or not it would make an adequate seat.
"Now, I guess we'll just wait here for the kid to come back. I never did catch his name." He couldn't remember if it had been given, but that still didn't mean he'd be able to recall what it was. His body now able to actually relax, it began making strange noises, stirring, letting everything but the stomach settle. "He'd better come back with something good." Thus, commenced, the waiting game.
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Post by Raziel on Nov 29, 2009 22:29:33 GMT -6
After the greatly exaggerated distance had been crossed the pair finally reached their destination. The port city was a great deal smaller than Raziel had expected, but when one is accustomed to living in a massive metropolis, most other places felt minute and insignificant. And this being the boy's first venture anywhere other than Treno, Thoncir felt stifling and yet not with such an open sky lacking of the towering constructions. He found himself loving and hating it at the same time.
Primitive, as well. It didn't have the vibrant buzz of technological advancement, the flashy billboards, neon signs and whatnot. The streets were lively, though; everywhere people were bustling to get somewhere. Thoncir seemed like it'd been hit by either war or some sort of natural disaster, as a great deal of the activity was that of rebuilding. People're like cockroaches. No matter what's thrown at 'em, they crawl right back out of the woodworks.
Before he'd had the time to drift off into speculation at mankind's persistent and possibly pestilent resilience, Raziel's keen ears heard the 'clink' of coinage and instantly snapped to awareness of the little pouch held before him courtesy of Rifel. "Hm?" He put eloquently, inquiring as to why the money were being bestowed unto him; nodding in acknowledgment at the answer that came shortly after. "Gotcha." Cutting himself short from asking if the man had any special requests, thinking better on the idea as Rifel seemed to require much concentration just to shamble about.
The prospect of food... Was ecstasy. A grin broke his expression and he set into a brisk stride that quickly broke to a light jog, the Chimera dodging and weaving through crowds of people. He was feeling renewed. He'd grab a bite to eat, find out where he was and how to get back to Treno. He'd even come back for the old geezer with some munchies afterward. Things were turning up.
[Sorry if I made any errors, not really up to snuff on what Thoncir's like or what level of technology it's at. I'll leave it here in case anyone else wants to jump in. If no one's got anythin', I'll just edit into this one.]
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 5, 2009 23:22:51 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,1,500]"Have a good one," Drake said as he turned and walked away from the Ricky's Grilled Goodness kiosk. He held his burger in one hand, a red-tipped cane in the other. Despite his Perceiver powers having returned to him, he found he attracted a lot less attention when he carried the cane.
At first, he had simply strolled around in his Century Suit, letting his powers compensate for his physical blindness. But he seemed to draw a lot of attention to himself, so he had decided to dress in street clothes, and keep the Century Suit and his swords at his condo. The walking stick was sturdy enough to double as a quarterstaff anyway -
Drake froze. He felt a being coming toward him, a creature of considerable power, if not enough to muddle his own abilities. A man, at least for the most part - his canine ears and tail, feline eyes and bull's horns suggested a not-quite-human origin. Drake was able to sense dark energy and bat-wings, two good signs of a demon, but there was undeniable holy energy within this young man as well. Drake was somewhat confused by this walking conundrum, and began to focus on the teen's mission.
As Raziel walked past him, hell bent on finding some kind of food, Drake decided to break the ice and let his ability flag fly at the same time.
"There's food about 100 feet that way," he said. "Pretty cheap. You and your wounded companion can eat like kings and still have a little coin left in that pouch."[/glow]
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Post by Raziel on Dec 23, 2009 22:35:20 GMT -6
The people, however backwater hick-ish they seemed in the young city-mutt's eyes, were surprisingly, or perhaps not so, far more likable than those one would've met on the cold concrete streets of his still beloved city. They smiled and offered greetings as he rushed past, albeit a few inevitable scowls and stares were received as well.
As he jogged past a blind man, the latter called out in passing; mentioning of food to be had at a pretty price, with directions and distance. The works. Raziel liked him already. Need-to-know information without even asking. Such beauty was convenience. "Thanks, gramps."
The light clicked.
His flighty feet came to an abrupt halt and he rounded on heel to face the vision-impaired man. His trademark arch of the right eyebrow, quizzically scanning over this stranger. It was hard not to blurt out with the usual 'The fuck are you?', for uncanny circumstances such as these his vocabulary shrunk to simplicity and vulgarity. There was something unsettling about this situation, a knot tightening within his stomach. He felt wide-open and exposed.
Involuntarily his left fist clenched, knuckles turning white with tension. "And you are?"
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 26, 2009 21:29:27 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,2,000]Drake was a bit taken aback by the boy's comment. "Gramps?" he quietly repeated to himself. This young man was admittedly quite young, but all the same Drake 'looked' at himself and found that he did, in fact, look fairly old. Not that he wasn't, but he never thought his physical apperance let it show so much.
He then heard the young man ask who he was. I love it when people ask me that, he thought, stopping a smile from crossing his face. This next part always blows them away.
"My name is Drake," he said. "I'm a Perceiver. A clairvoyant, if you prefer that term," he added. He then couldn't help but let a thin smile cross his face. Here comes the fun part.
"Your name is Raziel Locke," Drake continued, now speaking more quietly. "You haven't been here long, and you're not even sure where 'here' is. The gods in the dimension where you were born didn't like what they saw, in spite of the fact that your genetic enhacements make you superior to normal humans in most respects. They cast you out, and in doing so they changed you, made you even more than what you were."
Drake looked around him, then back at Raziel. "In their defense, they picked a good place to put you on cosmic time-out for being too different. There are all kinds of beings with abilities beyond those gifted to your average human. Even a guy with horns and a tail can lay surprisingly low in this area, if that's what you're interested in doing. If not, well, in this place there's always something big happening."
"Welcome to Etrah."[/glow]
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Post by Raziel on Dec 27, 2009 18:47:20 GMT -6
Patience was something thin and spread sparse in the Chimera's repertoire of virtues. Shifting his weight from his left foot to right, and back to left again, he awaited a response whilst the blind stranger pondered something. Today, old man... I'm hungry. He thought, and was on the verge of speaking his mind only to be cut off by the reply. The man professed to be something of a psychic, as far as Raziel was concerned the term "clairvoyant" meant. The eagerness to brush off this wannabe Miss Cleo was overwhelming, but dwelling within that eagerness was something far more pressing. A vague uneasiness crept across the boy.
But it didn't end where it should have, the man carried on. Some things better left unsaid were spoken.
Snap.
The color drained from Raziel's face, his jaw set slightly apart in shock. The cheery, young azure eyes lost their radiance, paling. His entire body trembled as he took an unsteady step back, eager to put any form of distance between himself and this man who embodied an unbearable truth. Run raced laps around his mind, but he never had the chance. The air grew stagnant, all was still. Passer-by's stopped in their tracks, all present could feel something approaching.
A pulse emanated with Raziel at its center, ripples of raw energy rushed for and wide. Light and Darkness slithered across the boy, coiling around his body in a violent mixture of perfect oppositions, mingling yet struggling for dominance in the same motions. The pressure from earlier returned with a reckoning vengeance, forcing the Chimera to his knees.
The top of his lungs weren't high enough to carry the deep, agonizing scream that came from Raziel, it was silenced swiftly by the explosion of the two energies wreathing him. The sheer release sent all within fifty feet flying off their feet, buildings shook and rattled in their foundations, while weaker structures collapsed.
The dust and debris dispersed, revealing Raziel cloaked in an large and foreboding aura of Darkness, only a shred of Light flickering directly about his outline. His expression devoid of emotion.
[Sorry if it's over the top.]
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 30, 2009 21:20:38 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,2,000]Drake was scarcely able to perceive Raziel's energy burst before hitting the deck, covering his face as debris and energy soared over his head, flattening the very stand Raziel had professed a desire to buy food from. He had also happened to flatten a considerable radius of bystanders, but aside from one old man who had chipped a bone, no one was seriously injured.
"This is not low key!" Drake attempted to shout at Raziel, knowing his voice was likely drowned out by the rushing winds caused by Raziel's blast.
He stood up once the worst had passed, looking at Raziel's black aura. Apparently the darker side of the dichotomy that made up Raziel's otherworldly power had taken center stage, the light side only barely displayed. In retrospect, maybe Drake had showed off a little too much; coming right out with a profound personal truth that the teenager probably should have come to gradually had now given the situation a lot more potential hostility. Damn it, Drake, he thought to himself. You should know better by now.
In any case, the situation was what it was. Drake faced Raziel. "You wrecked the barbecue stand," he told the young dimensional immigrant. "Now you're gonna have to walk 2 blocks to get something to eat."[/glow]
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Post by Rifel on Dec 30, 2009 23:20:34 GMT -6
"What the fuck was that?" he mumbled from his alleyway. Rifel rose to his feet, much more capable of standing now, than he had been a few minutes ago. Were one to look closely, they would notice small bolts of black lightning tracing around his joints. He began staggering from the alley, in the direction that he had felt a large scale blast. Shoving his way through a rather clustered crowd, he could only let out a sigh. What he saw, was the kid he'd come into town with, who had, apparently, just exploded with energy. People were still picking themselves up off the ground, including a blind, older man, who proceeded to reprimand the child.
"What the hell happened to him?" Rifel shouted, approaching the blind man, "Please tell me you didn't cause this. I would just hate to beat the shit out of an old man for picking on a kid." Without waiting for an answer, he redirected his attention to the chimera boy. He walked toward the kid slowly, as not to cause another blast of energy. "Hey, kid. You do realize I was joking when I suggested you had a choice of bringing me back food, right?" Rifel paused to smile at his own joke. "But we'll talk about that later. You wanna tell me what's going on here? What's with the light show? Tell you what: Why don't you chill out, then we can talk this over without anyone getting hurt. Sound good?"
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Post by Raziel on Dec 31, 2009 1:11:49 GMT -6
The eye of the storm. Motionless and unaffected by the chaos surrounding. All about him had gone blank, the boy no longer having any semblance of hold on the wheel. Hunger, sorrow, confusion, and rage all faded away. In a manner, he slept whilst his power awoke. There was no understanding of the Seer's words nor recognition of Rifel within those empty eyes.
The Darkness was vast and deep, thriving and moving as if it were a living entity. Tendrils of energy slithered across the air about him. Step after step the distance between the three shortened, and as he came closer to the pair the foreboding element molded itself, shrinking closer to his frame and taking a new form: Obsidian chains. Six in total, fifteen feet in length with serrated links. Each came in a pair upon his back: one at the shoulders, mid, and lower.
The black links coiled, like snakes rearing to strike. Bladed tips sprouted forth from the ends of each chain. In the same instant they shot forth wildly towards the two men, three at each, aiming to impale.
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 31, 2009 1:41:20 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,2,000]Drake foresaw the chains, and the spikes that were attached to them, about to stab him if he remained where he was.
As per his usual defensive maneuvering, knowing where his opponent's attack would land gave Drake a strong advantage. He simply leapt to the left, the chains whizzing past where his face and chest would have been.
Drake waited for the time and angle when his staff thrust would slide into the links of each of Raziel's chains, and struck at the opportune moment. With the staff entwined in the chains, Drake swung it in an attempt to pull the chains and throw the boy off balance, having also foreseen that he wasn't planning on letting up anytime soon.[/glow]
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Post by Rifel on Dec 31, 2009 2:09:44 GMT -6
The blades came at him, and frighteningly fast. With a well placed roll, Rifel managed to take only one, minor wound, as a single blade skimmed through his left shoulder blade, while the two others passed over him by a dangerously close margin. Clear of the attack, Rifel stumbled back to his feet. Were he completely recovered, this would have been child's play. If things got too heated, his final hand would be forced, but he wanted so much to avoid that, as it would cease his natural recovery for close to a week. After all, that was how he got into the situation he'd been in, when he landed on the beach. He'd pushed his limits too far against Vurkiel, and had only recently begun to regain his natural recovery threshold.
Keeping his eyes on the boy, a finger stretched outward to his side, aimed at the blind man. "Old man," he said between heavy breaths, "I hope you know that I'm holding you responsible for this. Just what the hell did you do?" Of course, he had no real way of knowing that the blind man was at fault. All he knew for sure, was that the chimera boy was targeting him as well, which meant there was some discontent between them. But then, why was he also attacking the man who'd helped him only moments before?
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Post by Raziel on Dec 31, 2009 2:30:47 GMT -6
Each movement flowed fluidly, uncannily and nigh perfectly timed. Whatever it was that had taken control of the Chimera appeared to know well how to operate the commands. The three chains of energy disconnected immediately upon being halted by the makeshift quarterstaff, freeing the body of their burden though not before his body had begun to jerk forward due to the psychic's counter. The remaining three retreated back and shifted location, forming a circle about Raziel's midsection as he caught himself on his hands. The natural agility and flexibility inherent from his mixed genes allowing him to recover quickly and turn the near-fall into a handstand, he wound his body and pushed skyward, twisted rapidly a few feet above ground as the chains about him rotated in sync at a furious pace, creating something of a windmill of serrated chains.
Meanwhile, the three that had disengaged slowly intertwined themselves with the blind man's cane, creeping ever closer to its carrier, craving to constrict.
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 31, 2009 2:47:55 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,2,000]Drake noticed Raziel's twirling, and the resulting disconnecting of the chains he had hoped to use, as the others began spinning around, whipping at him. Drake fell prone, rolling away from Raziel's chains before they struck him, shoving himself up and away from the whirlwind of dark metal and, at least temporarily, out of harm's way.
He then 'saw' the chains which were on his staff begin to wrap around it, working their way toward him. He stood up and began to swing the staff violently in an attempt to flick the chains off of the staff. He managed to send one flying, but still faced the problem of the others.
"I may have over-educated the youngster," Drake shouted at Rifel as he gave up and tossed away the staff, deciding to live without it until the two remaining chains forgot about him. "I told him more about his...arrival here than I probably should have," he added. "And his dark side totally lost it."[/glow]
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Post by Rifel on Dec 31, 2009 3:09:30 GMT -6
"You told him about his arrival!?" he shouted in return, "I already did that!" It was true, that rifel had told the kid that he wasn't in his homeworld anymore, so he didn't quite grasp how one more person telling him the same thing would make any sort of difference. What did this guy know, that he didn't? "You aren't from..." What was the name of that place the boy had mentioned? "Treno? Are you from his world? Did you bring him here?" One thing was certain, though. Rifel was right in assuming that he'd have to kick the old man's ass after this was all over. Of course, that was assuming that there was still an ass left to kick.
Almost automatically, he lowered himself to the ground, supporting himself on his hands, almost as though he were preparing to do a couple of push-ups. As the maelstrom of chain and death spun violently above him, he rolled to the left, ending in a crouch after five revolutions. At his position, he was just at the edge of the swinging blades' reach, the wind they generated tangible on his cheeks. His hands lowered themselves to his hips, wrapping around his weapon's handles.
"Calm down, kid. You're in a safe place. You have no reason to do this." Fortunately, any civilians that were still hanging around after the initial blast were gone now, leaving just the three of them. "Look, kid. You are really pushing it. Stop this nonsense before someone gets seriously hurt."
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Post by Drake the Perceiver on Dec 31, 2009 3:16:40 GMT -6
[glow=maroon,2,000]"I told him why he arrived here," Drake said, taking another backward jump. "And it wasn't exactly because he won a vacation. The news really rattled him, and the rest is history."
Drake 'looked' at the staff. The chains were still moving, best let it lie for now. "And I'm not from Treno," he told Rifel. "I'm a Perceiver. That's how I knew so much about his situation."[/glow]
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