Ain't Academy
"I know how to make her mad...." Remix said gravely.He pointed at Mahvash, and then at Lucy.
"You two need to make out to save the world."
Dormitory Showdown
Victoria barreled along at the very back. A fear had gripped her, shivers running down her spine.
She...She killed most of us?! Wh-What kinda chance can we even hope to stand?
As she dashed into the dormitory, there was a resounding thwack as she charged right into a flailing tentacle, knocking her into a wall with a wolfish yelp. She knelt there, nursing her bruised back and whatever was left of her ego recently.
"Come on!"
She reached out, both mentally and physically, trying to summon up some semblance of her old strength.
I don't wanna die! Not by her!
But there was nothing. Nothing but the still emptiness she had grown used to lately, where there had been vibrant power before. Everyone else was going at it with their powers, and here she was, with her stupid mental block she could only blame herself for. With a yell, she slammed her fist onto the ground. And if they failed...history in this world would just repeat. Without even bothering to get up off all fours, she pounced at the alternate Lucy in a desperate bid to try and do something to help, for once not suppressing her lycan strength.
"I won't let you kill us again! Or let my friend turn out like you!"
Edited by UndyingPhoenix on Jul 25th 2018 at 11:37:08 AM
Surrounded by weirdoes
Outside the school, a veritable blizzard was raised as Sam arrived the scene.
"You know, I wonder if this is how it feels to put down a mad dog" Sam commented, with an echoing, distant sounding voice "You have some pity, wondering if it could have been prevented, but at the end of it, you just have to put it out of its misery"
A giant rock formed above them as he kept talking.
"Guess your fall doesn't deserve to be artistic" He finished, sending the rock to crash into the Empress with really insane speed. "Hope you like ending up like a Rorschach Blot"
"Everyone, clear" He yelled at the others.
"Let's see how close I can get to hit someone with a comet, shall we?"
Edited by Blueace on Jul 25th 2018 at 5:46:15 AM
Wake me up at your own risk.
Ink-pocalypse
Hei quickly ducked into the portal as his clones melted into a swarm of bats after everyone else once he was sure the constructs would hold, only to second-guess his decision upon laying eyes on the true E-Lucy. The years had not been very kind to her mental state, and it pained Hei to see Lucy-gods, why did she look so much like his Lucy- emaciated and broken.
But this wasn’t the time for such feelings. As Mikael charged, The bats swarmed around E-Lucy, assaulting her with their shrieks, claws and bites. Despire their size, The bats could inflict a fair bit of pain due to not being made of flesh and blood.
“And then what?” Hei rumbled, arms gesturing to the corpses around them. “You got what you wanted, killed everything that breathes on this fucking rock. Now all you do is waste away here surrounded by corpses.”
“You’ve done enough here, Miss Livingston. Now it is time for you to rest and join your lover in the next life.” Hei declared, pulling out his baton and gun before charging at E-Lucy. “...Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
Edited by svenorzokarkoff on Jul 25th 2018 at 2:56:33 AM
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias - Lucy's Dorm
Mahvash gave the room a once-over. Fist thing: no coat rack. Second thing, she gave a slightly wide-eyed stare at Mikael charging Loud-Lu, more or less in her name. "Wow...ok. I've been used to the concept that others just went on your wake—or mine rather." And cut on the longest bit of inaction ever...
"Lucy Livingston," Druj Mahvash put her hands on her shoulders, and contemptuously turned her back to Lu-Two. "I..." And then she brought their faces together abruptly in a tangle of hair. And emphatically did not kiss Lucy, hovering almost nose-to-nose. "Apologies, but you're still..." She wouldn't say 'a tyke'. Lucy had, after all, come up with that "World of Cardboard" Speech. "in your moment."
The daeva instead gave Lucy a kiss on the forehead before taking Lucy well back from the impact sight. "Let's go. The rock drop will either be an excellent coup de grâce or a signal to start the next round."
Edited by CenturyEye on Jul 25th 2018 at 6:08:07 AM
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
AKA Nixer
???
Lucy's expression did not change as Matten kissed her on the forehead, but this time it was due to her brain frying from the sheer amount of “NOPE” messages rocketing through her synapses. And so she didn't resist at all, letting Matten pull her out of the impact site of Sam's makeshift comet, her brain slowly but surely breaking out of its stupor.
Which was quickly grabbed by a collection of tendrils, ripped in half, then mashed together at the exact moment Mikael was upon her, cracking the boulder in the process as she followed up this vicious attack with another towards Victoria, ruthlessly striking her with an oversized fist that morphed out of the wall with all the force of a semi-truck.
“Mikael! Vicky!” Lucy yelled, wrenching herself out of Matten's grip and lunging for her alternate self, only to be swiftly batted away into a wall by another tendril. The uncaring manner in which The Empress performed her attack was in equivalent to that of a disrespectful backhand, which only served to piss off Lucy even more. She inadvertently slipped back into her partial Entity state; the ink cocoon with the brightly glowing eyes.
The Empress let out another unstable laugh, only for it to turn into a scream of pain as she was nipped and scratched at by the shadow bats, flailing around all she physically could before she swatted them away using her tendrils. Any further attack the husk of a human could have was halted, however, at the sight of Hei approaching with his baton and gun raised.
“...Why... why didn't you come b-back for me...?” she asked in a sudden, broken whisper, before it turned into a wail of despair and rage, her eyes so bright they looked to be searing out of their sockets. “HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU?! SARDAR WANTS YOU DEAD, YOU HEAR ME?” she shrieked, her voice breaking from the sheer volume she was screaming at.
Lucy, although still within her own, empowered state, seemed to pause again, only to look over at Hei and send him a solemn nod. It was time to end it.
It was also time to run the #$&% away, but it basically had been for the past thirty or so minutes, so she supposed it could be delayed a little longer.
Still, she caused the ground around them to ripple in preparation of a barrier, and reared back several tendrils to ensnare her comrades and draw them out of harm's way for when it was needed. Again, she wasn't sure what would happen when The Empress... overloaded, but the term didn't exactly sound like the equivalent of a celebratory party popper going off, to say the least.
Edited by Enirboreh on Jul 25th 2018 at 11:33:40 AM
bork
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias
Mahvash noted Lu-Two's sudden return of vigor and undid the ice creation in its tendrils before it crush Mikael. "Yeah, you might be owed that." She did the same for the fist bearing down on Victoria, missiles in the form of moths chewing, i.e. unmaking with fancy graphics, the hand before it could crush Victoria. "And nice to see you awake."
Edited by CenturyEye on Jul 25th 2018 at 6:35:54 AM
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
Surrounded by weirdoes
"Well, guess it's time for a different trick" Sam said, as he stopped whatever was left of the comet. Focusing more than usual, he willed a sword to appear just inside of her. Using the snow, he aimed the snow directly to the eyes.
Then, he made a small dagger, ready to go to the gut.
And several spikes coming from the ground.
"This should leave a mark"
Edited by Blueace on Jul 25th 2018 at 6:52:22 AM
Wake me up at your own risk.
Breath of the Sun
???, Boss Battle
Seeing the ice attack coming straight for her, Mikael pulled her coat around herself for protection, and focused on her locket to pull up its forcefield. She prepared to smash into it, but fortunately Matten unmade it for her, dissolving it to let her pass.
Grinning as her fire melted all that remained of the ice, Mikael stopped her momentum with a few wingbeats, and complimented Sam's assault by tossing both her corrosion bolt and light knife at the Evil!Lucy's center of mass, following them up with a spat fireball for good luck.
"To hell with you!" She roared.
What is so amusing about this? Why do you take lives? How can you forget?
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias - Technobabble and Magibabble Fusin Dance in Lucy's Dorm
While her class continued wailing on Lu-Two, Mahvash kept the metaphorical eye out and continued refining her etchings. She took the slow way tot he dorms for a reason. When she 'shuffled her feet in the floor', she used the bloody run to reach through to the library.
At the very least, I can just tell them that we need to leave the school when this ends. Who built a hardlight machine with enough wattage to make a singularity anyway? Well, that was only one hypothesis, but likely, given the evidence available. Our esteemed staff set the training room to concentrate enough hardlight into a gravitational singularity, and their frantic 'fix-it' attempts combined with demonic warping ended up giving us an Einstein–Rosen bridge to another part of space-time instead of annihilated by inflationary instability. Anti-climactic that.
The daeva chewed on her burin a moment before returning to engraving her notes. Still leaves how to return. We initially settled on going through the Abyss or Duzakh. Even if the former is ew, we can't have everyone being devoured en route. Then we come to navigation. I never interviewed Mikael on how exactly he goes to and returns form the Abyss. If he just pops in and out from the same spot each time and returns to a parallel anchor on Earth, we have a small problem. If he has some instinctive navigation ability in the Abyss, we still have to contend with what lies within, while I keep my classmates from polymorphing. More.
"When you're done," Mahvash somewhat returned her attention to the Class putting down Lu-Two, "the short version is time and space remains somewhat warped, more so than usual, about the school grounds due to a decaying wormhole, we might be able to force ourselves back along its path—or part of it if this school can get power very quickly. Or we can move away and hop through the abyss. Also, Lin and Remix are fortunate to not have emerged... oh nevermind about that." Remix could have been spread all over the 4th dimension, partly sped up and partly slowed and partly 1:1 with the rest. But Lin has natural anchors all over. I really should start leaving divine marks everywhere."
Ink-pocalypse
“Ask him yourself.” Hei replied, firing two shots between her eyes, soon followed by the barrage of attacks from Sam and Milkael. Once the dust had settled, Hei shambled back to Lucy’s side, posture sagging slightly as the darkness surrounding him dispersed. “I think I’m going t-to need a drink this time...” He sighed, bringing a hand to cover his face.
Edited by svenorzokarkoff on Jul 25th 2018 at 5:28:58 AM
AKA Nixer
???
The Empress didn't stand a chance. She was impaled from both outside and within with ice, and struck dead centre with the unmaking bolt – which began to steadily decay her from her already present wound outwards – and finally shot twice in the skull on top of that. Somehow, she managed to keep conscious, blood leaking from her forehead as tendrils of ink trapping her weakening and frayed enough for her to slumped forward, coughing and spluttering up ink as her gaze frantically leapt around, desperate to take in every last sight before her vision shut down.
“...n-no... no...” she gurgled.
The spark in her eyes grew.
“I w-will not die.”
It grew brighter.
“I will not die.”
Brighter still.
“I will not.”
“GET BACK!” Lucy suddenly roared, her cocoon tearing away in sheer desperation as she forced her jaw to move, shooting out a tendril that wrapped around those in close proximity to her dying mirror-self and dragging them towards her, out of harm's way. The Empress momentarily clung on to Hei's shirt with a rapidly shot out tendril of her own, tears leaking out from her eyes as she reached out helplessly to him, before the tentacle of ink snapped with a ping courtesy of Lucy desperately pulling Hei back so that the Empress couldn't drag him over.
“I will not die!” the decaying alter continued to chant, her body being wracked back and forth as the light seemed to break through her eyesockets, the unmaking force of Mikael's bolt revealing rays of neon white that escaped her form like ethereal sunbeams. “I WILL NOT DIE!”
Her skin began to crack from the erupting light. The Empress was now sobbing brokenly through her agonized screaming, an otherworldly whisper audible from the swirling beams as her emaciated body shuddered even more violently.
“I! WILL! NOT! DI–”
The Empress exploded.
A searing flash of pure white light overtook her form, a great wind tearing through the whole room like a tropical storm. The walls cracked, rubble rained down, and the ink tendrils present violently flapped and flailed around, like a nervous system in the middle of an epileptic seizure. The shockwave would surely have torn them to shreds, but Lucy managed to hurl up the barrier in time, only barely managing to break out of her morbid curiosity of how the overload would commence to prevent their imminent demise behind a thick barrier of ink.
The cacophony was somewhat muffled by the ink, thankfully, and it eventually died down, Lucy soon dropping the barrier with a numb flick of the wrist. Seeing the charred markings on the wall where the Empress once was, the last few flecks of Livingston Willpower dissipating along with Sardar's background whispering, she seemed about to say something, only to yelp as another rumble hit, all the ink in not just the school but presumably the entire world collapsing away, creating a flood that almost reached their knees.
Having covered her ears at this point, Lucy could barely keep herself standing up, she was shaking so much, but managed to stagger back to the others nonetheless.
The silence was deafening. There was no longer a single living human being in the entire world. And one could feel it.
“I-It's over... oh, god, it's over...”
She barely registered Matten's news. She was still reeling from the whole thing. It was almost as if a mental fog had clouded over her, and she was stuck in a mute trance as her brain finally left its fight or flight state to fully process what the actual hell had just occurred.
bork
Ain't Academy
"Yup." Remix remarked. Lucy was right, it was over.Now it was just a matter of going back. It seemed like, as Mahvash explained, a decaying wormhole was interfering with all the people who normally teleported - which, in Remix's humble opinion, was disproportionately high, but with the lack of a control group of individuals with quirks to compare against, he couldn't conclusively determine if such a phenomenon was withing the expected range of probability or if it was exceptional - and that was why they hadn't done so.
"Maybe not luck," he commented to Mahvash. "I am the one who is controlling my own time, maybe I am still okay because when going through such a hole in the time and the space, I keep myself straight."
Edited by nman on Jul 25th 2018 at 5:54:59 AM
Breath of the Sun
Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead
Her bolt struck true, and the false Empress was no more, gone in an explosive flash. Mikael brought her coat up to protect herself, but once again one of her classmates intervened. That, she supposed, was the difference between men and monsters. Monsters were alone.
"Well, that went well enough, I guess." She smiled, recalling and sheathing her weapons before hovering over towards Matten. "So, now we just have to get back to our reality. If you can't cook something up, Mahvash, then we could also just find and break whatever's blocking my teleportation. I'd assume the source would have to be nearby."
Edited by kagescorpionakki on Jul 25th 2018 at 8:56:51 AM
What is so amusing about this? Why do you take lives? How can you forget?
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias
"Maybe not." Mahvash smiled back at him. "Plus, you have deity on you."
"You just need to leave the school grounds," the daeva answered Mikael while sifting through the wreckage of Lu-Two and finding her listless counterpart. "Of course that's if you know where you are going exactly, and anticipate no troubles in the abyss, and are suffering from no side-effects."
She gave the other one a quick once-over with an aura as dead as the eyes. Though her breathing was entirely redundant. Mahvash only did that to be social. "And this is probably the only universe where I'll be the sole survivor. Interesting strategy though." Hm...
She ended her musing immediately, pointing over her shoulder. "If any of you can power training room, we might be able to trace our way back—partly. Otherwise, we move away from the school and hop through the Abyss, while I hold your pretty little souls."
"If you want to try going back through that 'wormhole', I suggest powering the school quickly. Otherwise, you may just gather away from school grounds. Now be off. I've to check on things and make an end-of-life decision. Next of kin and all that."
Edited by CenturyEye on Jul 25th 2018 at 9:43:59 AM
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
End Of An Empress
Victoria peeked out from under her braced arms as the light faded and the world finally went to ease, completely dead save for the class.
"It...really is. Now we just need to get out of this place."
She got up, dusting herself off and looking over to Hei and Lucy. Hei seemed pretty hard hit by the whole ordeal, having to kill an alternate version of his girlfriend. Lucy too. She limped over to them, patting them on the shoulders simultaneously.
"She wasn't Lucy. Not even close. The Lucy I know wouldn'ta done everything that she did. Just some murderous, twisted maniac who had only the barest things in common with you."
She nodded as she looked at Lucy.
"You're more than just the physical similarities, you know? How you think and act makes you Lucy."
A faint echo from the Saint and Matten ringed in her mind, and something clicked. But for now, she was content to just take in the silence of victory. With a gigantic yawn and sagged shoulders.
Surrounded by weirdoes
"Let's not do that again until the next apocalypse" Sam gasped out.
Sam just shook his head at the experience. Using his ice to rip a piece of concrete, he carved two crosses, and marked them clearly.
Lucy Livingston
To the girl she was
Hei Lin
Friend, son, hero
Walking past Hei, he said, without turning to look at him, he spoke.
"For what's worth" He said, trying to be helpful "I know you two wouldn't hurt each other like that, just remember that"
With that, he planted the crosses on the floor.
Edited by Blueace on Jul 25th 2018 at 9:52:16 AM
Wake me up at your own risk.
Breath of the Sun
???
"Oh. That makes sense, I guess." Mikael blinked, suddenly feeling stupid. She flexed her wings as she prepared to fly up and out of the school, but not before looking on the newly erected gravestones. "Well, that's a bit morbid. I think I'm ready to find us a way home, now. Be back in a sec."
She jumped, smashing through the ceiling and ascending up, up, up into the atmosphere, as high as she dared to go, and started moving away from Saint Academy. Despite her bird's-eye-view, she didn't see any hint of any Nazis or teleportation-blocking machines. And no matter how high she went, her teleportation wasn't coming back.
So she flew farther and farther away, trying her teleportation every couple of seconds. To no avail.
Dammit, am I just blocked from warping anywhere on this planet?
Nonetheless, she persevered. She'd try for at least a couple more minutes before giving up so easily.
What is so amusing about this? Why do you take lives? How can you forget?
Deranged X-Mas Figure
???
As Mikael flew further and further towards the stratosphere, she could hear someone else doing the same. "Hey there, lover," said Ellie. "Ya know, I'm not normally one to doubt you, but are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, for all we know, the school might not have anything to do with this. You could fly just short of orbit and you still might not be able to port. I sure as hell can't. Maybe Matten's wrong?"
Doctor Who — Long Way Around: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13536044/1/Doctor-Who-Long-Way-Around
AKA Nixer
???
Lucy slightly nodded to Vicky at her encouragement, a faintest flicker of a smile on her face, before returning it to one solemn as Sam planted the crosses, a sudden lump in her throat forming as the sight of them hit her.
She couldn't look at them.
She abruptly turned to Hei, and approached him, shaking slightly as she wrapped him in a tentative embrace. She seemed unsure, like she didn't even know whether he was even there, and managed to force herself to meet his gaze for the briefest of moments before lowering it back down again.
“...I-I...”
She shut her eyes, trying to block the memory of the Empress out of her head. Every corpse, the sing-song voice, the laughter... she willed it all to leave.
But it wouldn't. Still it stuck with her. Because one simple fact kept rearing its ugly head in the back of her mind.
If it weren't for a matter of mere seconds, she would have lost it in that dome. And the thought of that narrow escape frightened her more than the actual presence they had fought. It was easy to detach The Empress from her, after all. She was so broken that she was beyond recognition, twisted into something inhuman. But if it weren't for one, damned second...
“I-I'm not leaving you, okay?” she found herself saying. “I won't ever do something like... this. I swear by my life that I won't let this happen,” she murmured, before looking up again with a steely gaze.
“This... thing... I-I was so close to becoming it. But now I know that, and what I could have done, I can't...”
She evidently couldn't take it, and broke down into quiet tears. Ashamed, she clutched him by the shirt, hiding her face away.
“I-I can't lose you... not to anyone, n-not even myself. But... please... just be happy, okay? Not for me, for you. I'm sick of being sad, I'm sick of feeling helpless, but I can't take that away from you. I-I love you so much... I do... but I won't be able to live with myself if I know I'd done something like this to you...”
It was painful for her to say, but she meant it. She needed to make it clear after this. The Empress had clung tight and dragged him into a horrific borderline state between existence and non-existence. That was something inexcusable. And if it meant potentially letting him go to prevent that from occurring, it was an option that she couldn't ignore. She loved him too much to.
bork
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias
Mahvash only whistled when Mikael came back. "May not just be the space around here. You went through a spontaneous Einstein–Rosen bridge, and you're not a swirling soup of photons and quarks. As far as side-effects go, that's rather tame." She shrugged. "All we have to do then is open the bridge from this side, even if its almost certainly incomplete, and to do that, restore power to the training room."
If we end up having to do it raw, energy is typically produced by moving wires through magnetic fields via kinetic energy from steam. With Caleb and Harmony we can cut out the middleman and just spin the turbines with their free energy. Or Sam can have Remix run on a water wheel. Or Sam can just spin them with his element. But that's less fun to watch."
Breath of the Sun
??? > ???
She looked at the clouds a head a moment, then sighed. "...yeah, you're right. This isn't working. Let's head back."
A moment later, Mikael and Ellie returned, and informed Matten of the apparently worldwide teleportation ban.
"Well if it's steam we need, Sam can make ice and I can make fire, so there you go. Actually, wait. Duh." She wrapped an arm around her girlfriend. "Ellie makes electricity. You can power a generator, right babe?"
What is so amusing about this? Why do you take lives? How can you forget?
Deranged X-Mas Figure
???
"No problem!" said Ellie. "Long as it isn't too heavy-duty, I should be able to manage. That said, you guys are sure this is gonna get us home, right? We aren't gonna wind up in some crazy alternative universe where everything's made of shrimp, are we?"
Edited by kkhohoho on Jul 25th 2018 at 9:41:43 AM
Doctor Who — Long Way Around: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13536044/1/Doctor-Who-Long-Way-Around
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
Ymedaca Tnias
"Almost certainly," Mahvash answered the demon without missing a beat. "That wormhole has had ample time to decay. Of course here, you lot will slowly die of deprivation here on the earth with no life. Going partway across that bridge gives us the nonzero chance of finding working equipment and help. Maybe a fair chance of being ripped into elementary particles by inflationary instability. That's the exciting way that we travel in this biz. Well, some of us could traverse the vacuum of space for new homes. At least Oliver is proof of extraterrestrial life...in that universe."
The daeva shrugged. "Anyway, start slowly. If we have to deal with frayed wires, we'll see them before they blow out the whole system. Not that I'm too sure what to do about that. I hope someone here is a mechanic if the wiring is hopelessly frayed. Or perhaps Remix donates his helmet for study?"
She snickered, ruining the half-serious attempt. "Anyway, time is clicking."
???, Boss Battle
Changing tacks and deciding to charge through Hei's convenient portal (maybe he and Matten working together could get a door open back to their world? Questions for later), Mikael swooped into the 'Empress's' Room and her lip curled with disgust at the monster that had taken Lucy's face. Something burned within her at the sight of Matten hung up like an animal, and she snarled, baring her teeth.
"I'll finish what Mahvash started, then..." She drew her corruption bolt and knife up in an aggressive stance. "And unmake the rest of you."
Spitting fire, she charged through her own hellish flames, letting them cloak her body with warmth to boil away any ink that might be thrown at her, and ran at the Empress with both arms outstretched. She was among the physically strongest of the group, and she'd put that strength to good use. This Evil Lucy looked malnourished, and besides which Lucy wasn't physical intimidating by any means.
Mikael would snap her neck with her bare hands if she had to.
What is so amusing about this? Why do you take lives? How can you forget?