Enter The Arena As Your Avatar -- The Spinoff!

He realize the implications and smile.

I am very happy to hear that from you, Milord! he says, keeping his composed stance but being quite visibly happy.

She seems pleased that he figured out her meaning right away.

   "I'll be on my way now. Feel free to continue your training. If you are to fight in my name, I want you to be strong."   , she says.

He nods.

Right. I bid you a good day!

Once she's out, Niagara put on his helmet, smile in a dorky manner, and resume training harder!

She leaves the room, looking around the hall for a moment before leaving the area.

Edited by DevilPsyco on Jan 31st 2020 at 11:31:35 AM

Hotel Del Rey, Whiterun

The man known as Daniel sits in the lobby of the hotel with an expression of mild shock on his face, still trying to process what he's seeing as he seems to be just staring absentmindedly at a lit lamp.

There's a modern hotel building. Just sitting on the outskirts of Whiterun, just like that. With electricity, because fuck everything you think you know, that's why.

Hotel del Rey, Whiterun

SI!Rey is on his laptop in the lobby, looking at the Kingdom Hearts wiki, when he closes the laptop and looks up at Daniel.

"So, Daniel, was it? How did you know about Roxas's nature? I thought you didn't know anything about Kingdom Hearts."

Edited by KiriK on Feb 1st 2020 at 1:37:37 PM

They can almost hear stock glass shattering noise as 'Daniel' turns to Rey with an expression that is somehow even more haggard than the one he'd been giving the light bulb.

Well, shit. What now?!

"I. Uh. I think I read about it on the internet once. Yeah. On Wikipedia or something." Whether he's always a Bad Liar or has been just caught completely offguard, it's hard to tell, but Rey should not have much trouble figuring out he's concealing something.

Rey looks at him.

"Dude... just admit you have superpowers and stop trying to play dumb. There isn't a single mundane person living here, and we're all from the same Earth - probably."

He sighs and looks down to the ground.

"I guess the jig is up, huh... thing is, I'm not really supposed to tell this to anyone. If the people of Earth knew, it would cause..."

He pauses.

The Guardian Of Nothing

"...ah, fuck it. We're not even on Earth, anyways. We're in some weird-ass place that looks like Skyrim but there's a modern hotel just... standing there, and I'm talking to a dude whose controllers turn into lightsabers. Odds are, I'm the least weird thing in here.

"So, first things first... I am... not actually even human at all. I look like one, I act like one, but..." A cluster of extra red eyes, strikingly similar to those of a spider, open in his forehead, then disappear as if they hadn't ever been there.

Edited by Arachnos on Jan 20th 2021 at 2:00:38 PM

Rey momentarily flinches upon seeing the extra eyes.

After they close, he concludes, "... Gross, but cool."

Ants in the Eyes of God (What is this, a march for ants?)

A moment later, he thinks of something else to say. "You know, being biologically the same as a human..." He hesitates to continue, but finishes his thought. "... isn't what makes someone human."

Edited by KiriK on Jun 21st 2023 at 9:44:51 AM

He smiles. "Well, long story short... my name is actually Arachnos. I am an envoy of Arachna, the goddess who has woven the Earth of my dimension. I guess you could call me a demigod, or an angel. Now I'm normally supposed to monitor the Earth and enforce Arachna's order, but all the magic has kinda... packed its shit and left into a separate subdimension. Without me. I can't very well use my magical powers for Order in a world where anyone finding out would cause mass chaos and hysteria.

So I guess I'm in retirement, or something. But sitting in some cave waiting for something to happen for a few dozen years gets boring as shit. So... I adapted."

"... Trust me, if your world is anything like mine, the only ones panicking would be the assholes in charge. No random schmuck out in the streets would see a guy using real-ass magic like a superhero and be afraid... unless that guy looked like a possible villain, which most people with a 'creepy spider' motif do."

Rey sighs. "No, I'd be more concerned with someone taking you in and experimenting on you to determine a scientific explanation for your magic. That fear is why, whenever I return to my home Earth from here, I ask a creator deity friend of mine to suppress all my memories of this place until it's time for me to come back here, so I couldn't accidentally think to do something that would prompt government scientists to come vivisect me, or at least confiscate my weapons."

Edited by KiriK on Feb 1st 2020 at 2:19:01 PM

He gives Rey a blank stare. "I... hadn't even thought about it that way. Granted, if they tried, they would find it really hard to hold on. I have my ways of getting out of disadvantageous situations like that. Let's call them... shortcuts." He spreads his arms in a shrug and winks.◊

Rey smiles as if stifling his laughter. "... Fuck you."

"Anyway, what can you do with those powers?"

"Well," he says with some pride, "Here's one of the lesser applications." A thin wire, barely visible by its sheen in the air, emerges seemingly from under the nail of one of his fingers. Arachnos twirls it around, showing off, when suddenly there is a slicing sound, and a nearby lamp falls down with a cacophonous noise and a loud meow out of nowhere.

Arachnos' face goes red. "Uhm... that... was totally supposed to happen. Yes. I was aiming for that lamp all along. Pure skillz."

Rey watches with intrigue.

"A more... in-depth showcase might be required. To the pool!"

He tries to lead Arachnos to the (very large) pool and hot tub room.

Arachnos follows him there.

"By a more 'indepth showcase', you mean exactly what I think you mean, right..?"

"Yup. A fight."

On the floorspace between the main pool and the hot tub, Rey pulls out his Vive controllers and goes saber-mode. He has a rather basic stance, back slightly hunched with blades pointing partly upwards and outwards from his hips. One saber is gray, the other yellow.

"Your move first. Fight to kill if you want, I don't have much in the way of nonlethal options. We should come back if we die either way."

The Wild Boy With a Vivid Fantasy (Ballroom Blitz - Sweet)

Omega walks in. "Hey, is the pool taken, I-"

He sees Rey and Arachnos, who he had only gotten acquainted with as "Daniel" a few days ago, about to fight.

And he decides he's better off just watching instead of trying to get involved. Whatever reason they have, it seems non-hostile enough.

Edited by KiriK on Feb 11th 2020 at 8:38:15 AM

"Come back if we die? You're... sure about this?" Arachnos asks skeptically. "Well, it's your funeral... Or mine, if you win."

If he's telling the truth, that should go some way to avoid my little possible snag with the Broodmother... Though I wonder how she would react if she found out an Arachnos was being resurrected without her even knowing. As he's given me free rein to attack lethally, it doesn't sound like he's lying...

"Well, if someone's funeral it is, I might as well dress appropriately." Arachnos' casual attire seems to somehow "re-weave" itself into a jet-black business suit with faint white vertical stripes, a white shirt and a red necktie.

A sinister shine passes through his glasses. "Let's dance."

Atracotoxin

A white bolt of something appears in his hand and he hurls it at Rey, who might be forgiven for mistaking it for an energy projectile at a distance. In reality, the projectile is a cocoon, and upon impact with anything it will burst, showering the target with small black spiders that will attempt to inject paralytic toxins with their bites.

Edited by Arachnos on Feb 1st 2020 at 4:40:25 AM

Rey slices it, and is immediately covered in spiders.

He briefly panics, but then remembers why he chose the pool room to fight, and there's no indication that these are diving bell spiders. He jumps into the hot tub before they can bite him to shake them off with the water and heat.

Holding his breath as he fully submerges, he then points his right-hand saber out of the water as it changes back into a controller, and a parabolic arc of shimmering light is drawn from his present location to... roughly behind Arachnos. Without goggles, he's keeping his eyes shut, which means he can't aim precisely, but he has the general area he wants.

Edited by KiriK on Feb 1st 2020 at 3:50:55 AM

Sure enough, the spiders detach, most of them floating to the surface of the pool, their little legs paddling through the water uselessly before they despawn. A very acute eye would see them seemingly disintegrate into tiny threads, as if they themselves were made of animate silk.

A vision of Half-Life's Suppression Device passes through Arachnos' mind, prompting him to get the heck away from the point of light with all due haste. He is unaware that it's a teleport endpoint, but he seems convinced that staying next to it would be a bad idea. Another one of those web whips emerges from inside his sleeve. Rey may notice this one has arcs of electricity running over its whole length. He is in water. Time for bad.

Rey pulls a trigger on the controller, and suddenly he is on the shore in front of Arachnos (because he had moved away from the initial arc's endpoint, it was no longer 'behind' him).

His left-hand saber turns into a meaty-looking gauntlet, and he goes sliding forward in an attempt to grab Arachnos by the lapels with a yell of "SURPRISE, BITCH!"

If he succeeds the grab, he will dunk Arachnos himself into the hot tub with greatly magnified strength.

And then pause to take a few deep breaths because holy crap he has not practiced aquatic action very well.

If Arachnos gets dunked, he will be relieved to find out that the tub's water is not chlorinated or saltwater (wait then how has it stayed clean? Arena magic, duh), which means he will not electrocute himself with that web unless he tries to.

Hotel Del Rey's pool area

Rbade moseys on in, seeming fairly haggard. He's scrolling through some webpage on his iPod when he looks up and sees... uh, the fight.

"..."

He thinks about saying literally anything, but instead decides to lean against the wall and watch the show.

Winterhold, The Frozen Hearth

In the room that he'd claimed for himself and Iris at the Frozen Hearth following their ill-fated showdown with Thanos, Thor quietly stews in the same chair that he'd fallen asleep in, his current lack of a shirt revealing both his legendarily jacked physique and bandages covering the wounds he'd received from the Mad Titan.

Iris, having been asleep for nearly 24 hours at this point, finally wakes up as well, slowly but surely.

Unlike most people who'd be in this position, she immediately recalls what happened and how she got here. She sits up on the bed, looking around for a moment only to be surprised by seeing shirtless Thor on the chair.

"Well, that's definitely not the worst sight to wake up to.", she says to him with a smirk as she tries getting out of the bed, wanting to stretch her legs a little. Once she gets out, she gets a slight cramp, winces a bit, and (after raising a finger to ask Thor to wait a moment) turns around (facing away from Thor) and checks on her stomach area.

She's horrified when she sees that small bits of crystal have formed on it. Quickly lowering her shirt again, she looks around frantically before going into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, forgetting to actually say something to Thor, which may be a cause for concern.

Edited by DevilPsyco on Feb 1st 2020 at 11:59:31 AM