"So, what's up with those fiery arms you're throwing around?" Skaven's voice distracted the Empress while the two were rushing downstairs in search of the other Stars. "It's not something I've ever seen Mana use. Is it a mental invention? Some ninja invent flashy techniques when fighting inside the mental realm to impress their opponents, but I've found it to be the most comfortable to translate your will with what you know best. I'd have thought you to be of the same school of thought."
"You ignoramus, I am Mana," the Empress beamed an angry glare back at Skaven, freezing him on his toes there while the Nara wondered if his comrade would flip out and attack him next. With how odd this young woman in an all too familiar face and a red dress that looked rather alien on her acted, nothing would have been out of the ordinary at this point. "What you meant with that ridiculous observation is that the Sorceress hasn't used armor ninjutsu. Somehow I don't doubt that."
"Sorceress? So, you're an alternate personality… That explains it." Skaven snapped his fingers, shaking Shige-H up a tad, who still bumped on his shoulders while the two rushed down the stairs.
"Explains it? Explains what exactly?" the Empress stopped and turned back, placing her hands over her hips. Her mean glare advised Skaven to choose his next words carefully.
"How effective you are at dismantling and resisting this mental control. There are still a few questions, yes, but it is unlikely that tutor Ridworth knew about your altering personalities. It would explain why he'd not be able to contain you once you manifested," Skaven explained in a defensive posture. At that moment he clarified that he'd have rather not held a deadweight klutz in an extravagant dress over on his shoulders.
The Empress vanished in an azure blaze, this sign of aggression baffled Skaven as he didn't think he'd have set his comrade off with that answer, but the azure whirl blasted well over his head. The Empress whirled her authoritative foot over her head while floating upside down and stamped it onto the ceiling, splatting a sword-legged arachnid with a bowler hat concealing its wind-up body. With puny clangs and jingles, the separate pieces clattered all over the floor while the Empress descended and pressed the lines of her dress down as they were late to catch on with the kunoichi's position.
A pair of blazing armored hands emerged from a firestorm of ethereal energy centering at the Empress' upper body while separate fractions of armored limbs, interconnected at the center through a non-existent pin thrust its blade-tipped edges like a flurry of fists, decimating an entire swarm of these spying critters that might have sought to latch onto both ninja and put them to sleep or to ruin their mental avatars by slashing their faces off with those knifed legs of theirs.
"Armor ninjutsu is a pinnacle of shape manipulation. The Uchiha revere their signature armor ninjutsu technique as something that comes from Gods themselves. Of course, Sorceress would be too afraid of her potential and shy away from using such amazing techniques. I, however, am not the Sorceress. I shall bring happiness back to my life by living up to the potential lying within this body." The Empress proclaimed while striking a flashy pose that was very much unlike the Mana that Skaven knew, then again, it was very much unlike Shige-H to act like a pampered little princess too.
"Psychic signals detected. Tomi detected. Shall I lead you to her location?" Damisan exclaimed in a mechanical and apathetic tone.
"Lead the way, buddy," Skaven sighed, knowing full-well that this janky mechanical version of his friend wouldn't move anywhere near fast enough to lead the way to anywhere, resulting in them having to lag behind it.
Truly, dragging behind this helpless and lagging tinman built out of rejected scrap felt like torture all of its own. There were only two ways through this staircase: down or up, and yet this tin scarecrow knew the exact floor they needed to stop on, which would have made the arduous task of checking every door much simpler.
"What is this place? If I realize that you've betrayed us, I'll smash you to bits, understood?" the Empress gave Damisan a warning glare to which the emotionless robot remained completely oblivious.
"Tomi, Tomi is four hundred and thirty-seven steps in that direction," Damisan raised his hand, lacking the articulation in his hand to point a finger as the janky things sparked and let out tired noises when the tinman raised his hand.
"Madness, what kind of place is this?" Skaven looked around as he took the first steps through the hallway and into a flat, reflective obsidian platform that extended seemingly infinitely in each direction. Around them to each point in space except right underneath their feet laid a vast, lemon-colored space with massive playing cards floating all over the place with colossal and translucent silhouettes of planetoid-size versions of the entire playing card deck looming all over the expansive, lemon horizon.
"A place where Tomi is. A place from which the sooner we extract her, the sooner we can leave!" the Empress proclaimed, pushing Skaven and Shige-H aside as she walked past Skaven. Her less than gentle shove forced Skaven to fumble and fall flat on his face with Shige-H landing daintily on Skaven's face.
The shock of it proved sufficient to awaken the sleeping princess as she shook her hazy eyes and stood back up, completely oblivious of the Nara gentleman underneath her to gaze at the marvelous mental dimension they've found themselves in. Feeling like being a human stepping stone was not something he was too fond of, Skaven wriggled out from underneath Shige-H's heel and buttocks and stood on his own two feet, dusting himself off.
"We've been noticed! We've been noticed! Enemy signals inbound!" Damisan pointed to the skies above hosting mechanical hawks with silver, sword-shaped quills around their wings and lined up around their heads as they reached out with their vicious, hook-shaped claws to dive and scoop up these unwanted visitors.
"Eek, protect me!" Shige-H shrieked and hid behind Damisan. The useless heap of iron bent his head to the side as two red beacons flashed in the opening line on his box-shaped head.
"Understood, engaging defensive protocols!" Damisan shrieked out in a mechanical tone, surprising both the Empress and Skaven who were unaware of anything of the sort being present within this useless heap of junk that previously only slowed them down in their quest to recover the Stars and smash this entire mental realm to pieces while claiming perfect test scores. "Barrage Rocket Punches!"
As the scrap scarecrow raised its hands up, the sheet of tin unraveled, letting loose multiple belts attached with Damisan's prosthetic forearms to them. As willpower to protect the klutzy and cowardly young lady hiding behind him surged through the tinman, the jets on the other end of the forearms ignited, unleashing an entire wall of rocket punches that tore through the rushing murder of mechanical crows and reduced them to a sum of their falling scrap and littering knife-shaped quills they used as a ranged weapon.
"You know, you could have really assisted us with those hat-spiders earlier, both with warning us about them and with destroying them…" Skaven squinted at the robotic version of his friend who, now that he had fulfilled his orders, stood there utterly motionless and stared at a single point in space–the supposed location of Tomi.
"You just need to be nicer to Mr. Robot. I've found that muffins taste better when I don't fling my brush at the maids, I figured the same rule applied here. Peasants are simple, so the rules that apply to them must also be the same," Shige-H pointed out with childish glee in her expression.
"Well, you're not wrong…" the Empress turned away from her temporary ally to focus on Tomi's location while the entire party began moving toward that direction. Damisan even stuck his pathetic, wobbly robo-legs back into his core and replaced them with rollers to keep up with the rest of the Stars.
"Oh, are you of the layer of aristocracy as well?" Shige-H turned to the Empress, looking rather excited to have found herself a friend who might have shared her life story.
"Sure, something like that. I've subjugated everyone else underneath my crushing heel, does that count?" the Empress shined a sassy smirk, the first sign of excitement instead of irritation and desperation on the young woman's face.
"Well, papa has to deal with plenty of tyrants and dictators, so I suppose we could be friends as well. You'll have to buy me something nice, as those people always do for papa to make sure they receive his monetary and cultural support," Shige-H pondered on it for a second before snapping her woven in silken gloves fingers with a beaming smile.
"Will not killing you count as something nice?" the Empress rolled her eyes, feeling like her newly re-met friend was already too much of a handful to deal with even though the pair had barely interacted so far.
"Hey, Damisan, you're the last one of us to wake up, do you have any hint of what's going on here? Why is everyone so strange inside this mental fort?" Skaven wondered, turning to the short roller beside him who waved his puny robo-arms to swim through the air and help his rolling bottom to move faster so to better keep up with the rest of the squad.
"Why would he know? He's absolutely useless…" the Empress grumbled.
"I figured since he hid some surprises from us already, needing to be asked to fight back, maybe he's hiding some more knowledge from us too?" Skaven shrugged, but judging by Damisan's silence, he had not the vaguest hint.
"But then perhaps we can ask someone from wherever we're going about that?" Shige-H pressed her hand to her face as if she had just received some sort of divine clarity for her own eureka moment. Skaven offered a single creeped-out look, whereas the Empress completely ignored that brain fart.
"Hmm… That lump of junk said that Tomi should be around here, but there isn't anything here at all…" the Empress pressed her hands to her hips while looking around. Just when she thought that she had achieved proper concentration to think this whole thing through, growls and barks made themselves known in the horizon as more wind-up dogs dashed across the reflective, dark floor toward them.
"Robo-servant, fight them off now!" Shige-H waved her hands about in a moment of panic while the Empress snapped her fingers in front of Damisan's face and kicked him rolling back and out of her way.
"Abandon that, you said that Tomi is here somewhere. Pull her out. I'll deal with those mutts. We have some unsolved business after the last time I met them, anyway." The self-made sovereign in the red dress demanded while she took a fighting stance to engage the rushing bunch of mechanical hounds.
This proved to be a much more arduous task that initially seemed as because of the speed and shifty nature of these wind-up dogs, they could disassemble and reassemble in a blink while having virtually limitless space to maneuver with their unnatural speed in. No matter how many ethereal limbs the Empress sent their way or how many she tried enclosing and surrounding in a fiery vortex, none of them gave in to the demise that the Empress had promised.
Skaven didn't fair all that much better either, after realizing that this unnatural personality taking over Mana's mental self wouldn't check the cash she wrote with her bossy and unpleasant mouth. The dogs could have run circles around his shadows and even when Skaven wrapped his shadowy tendril around one of them, it just exploded into constructor pieces only to reassemble once the Nara had lost his focus to take him on again.
The dogs were toying with them, rushing past, tackling them, and grazing them with their teeth. Every time someone injured their mental selves, they'd flash in various colors best representing their natural chakra colors. The empress flashed in bright gold, as Skaven did in a brighter shade of yellow too. Shige was the one flashing in night blue, while the dogs didn't seem like they'd bust through Damisan as they merely bashed at him and dislodged a piece or two before running off.
"What's taking you so long, you useless…" the Empress was about to scold the battered and bent up tin can beside her before a sharp protrusion of a gear forehead ripped through her abdomen and left her impaled on it while the dog shook its head like a mad bull and sent the Empress hurling through the air and down on the ground. Her image flickered. She was as strong here as her willpower was, and as long as she had the guts to refuse death–she'd not surrender to this mental dimension or its dangers.
Still, thinking that one would never surrender was one thing, but the mental stress experienced within someone else's mental fort had its own ways to twist, bend and break one's will. The Empress flickered in a shade of Dijon, lacking the strength to return on her feet. The wind-up dog snarled with a mechanical grunt of grinding gears, looking to maul his prey until she either dissolved away from the confines of this mind or until she surrendered and returned to her cell.
"Shige…!" Skaven grunted, wrestling against another dog while the pink princess just collapsed on her knees, covered up her eyes, and hoped for all the beasties to go away and leave her alone. The leader of Stars hid behind a childish belief that if she couldn't see the monster in her room–it couldn't see her either.
Just as the mechanical hound froze in mid-air, its grinding gears just about ready to catch hold of and rip the Empress' whole face off and grind them within two clashing grindstones, the entire beast splattered into separate pieces. A shower of mechanical parts and oil washed at the Empress, corrupting her dress with black stains and her perfect, dyed skin with grease and bruises from the barrage of pelting parts hitting her from a near-point-blank explosion.
"I'll say, a jolly good kill, isn't it?" a girly voice distracted the Empress from the humiliation as she turned to Tomi with a shaking head only to see Tomi dressed in a jockey's uniform and a pointy, steel helmet while fashioning a prolonged tube attached with a kunai belt. These knives were quite massive and had sealing glyphs on them too, some of them resembling the standard explosive seals found on explosive tags.
"Objective to secure the target complete!" Damisan announced, picking up its detached arm with its remaining hook and trying to stick it back where it was meant to be.
"Tomi…?" Skaven wheezed out, still struggling against the grinding gears that closed up closer and closer with each inch.
"Ah, excuse me, Skaven you old chap, I got too absorbed in the moment there…" Tomi guffawed to herself before taking aim with her kunai-flinging rod and pulling on a ring on a steel wire which launched a hi-speed kunai bolt straight at the exposed bottom of the beast with sufficient velocity to penetrate through its brain and splatter oil all over Skaven while the gears in its jaws stopped turning and left the lifeless beast prime to be flung aside which Skaven promptly did.
With a bold and wide step, Tomi approached the cowardly princess and extended her hand to help her up. Shige-H sniffled while looking up, curious why these horrible, mechanical, grungy sounds had all but faded away. Once she saw the dapper-looking friend of hers, Shige-H jumped up almost directly into little Tomi's hands.
"Come now, madam, you'll miss an adventure of a lifetime by sitting on your own laps like this. Open your eyes, gander around you, take aim at the life's chest and fire. Drink from the fountains of spoils that spill out!" Tomi fumbled around with a much larger young woman in her arms, especially with the oversized dress that Shige-H donned getting in Tomi's way. Ever the gentleman, Tomi put Shige-H down and turned to Damisan. "I must thank you, tinman, seeing all those beasts for me to slay in a safari of a lifetime, I just couldn't contain my sorrow at being imprisoned within these foul chambers inside these playing cards. I've always said that a robot is a man's best friend, I have never been this glad to hit a jackpot as I am now!"
Before Tomi could conclude her praises and expressions of gratitude, a screaming banshee as a black nun with a shroud over her helmet vizor burst forth, ripping through the card from which Damisan had fished Tomi out just now. With playful vigor, Tomi rolled her spear of thunderous precision around in her arms before taking aim again.
"Not quite a beast, nor will this head dazzle any esteemed colleagues to visit me in my mansion, but alas, die anyway, loudmouth wench!" Tomi cursed before plugging one into the screaming banshee and reducing her to lifeless shreds of black cloth that burnt up in the lighting now that the creature was murdered.
A loud thud made the Stars turn toward Damisan before they could even wonder what was to be next as the Empress stomped the disarmed little scarecrow down on the ground and pressed it well with her heel, choosing to vent her frustration at being embarrassed with oil and scrap being flung at her face on the emotionless, glorified mailbox they were stuck with.
"Endo, where?" she growled, shaking from either a chill running down her moist back from all the grease that soaked her or frustration.