Brendon had successfully managed to dispatch all the imps who'd gotten into his mouth, gathering a decent sum of the build grist that they'd left behind. Furlok had had a few choice words to give him for ignoring her earlier messages, though considering he;'d been mid-firefight at the time, he found it hard to sympathize with her on that front.
PP: Your housG !s gonG and thG sky turnGd rEd, the fuck !s go!ng oni?
FS: It's hilarious how you ask me that like you expect me to know. Hang on, Droogsprite is saying all you need to do is use the cursor to built up my house. I need to get to that glowing thing above my house, and you will to when OP gets you into the game.
PP Th!s !s a wG!rd fuck!ng gamG. So, l!kG, !'m gonna gGt onG of thosG spr!tG th!ngs to? And whatGvGr ! put !n w!ll comG to l!fG?
FS: Droogsprite's saying that yeah that's about the size of it, but you need to hurry because the reason the sky turned red is that there are meteors coming for you.
PP: How thG fuck arG you just casually say!ng thati?i?i?
FS: Oh come on, it's just a game. If the meteors hit, you won't be in the game but it's not like they're real.
PP: 1'm look!ng at thG Gmpty cratGr that usgd to bG your housG, ! th!nk th!s !s for rGal.
FS: You're full of it, but whatever, just hurry up. Droogsprite says I can use the Alchemiter to make new weapons and stuff, this is gonna be great.
Naturally the first thing Bredon alchemized was his shotgun, combining it with Midnight Crew poster to create the Wake Up Call, a lethal double barrel shotty that would blow a hole through a brick wall.
Next was his ax, which he combined with cigar lighter (he didn't actually smoke, but he kept a box of cigars and a lighter to complete the look on the rare occasiona he allowed himself to be seen in public wearing his mafia get up) to make the Fire Ax, a heated chopping tool that did perhaps the exact opposite of what a fireman's fire ax did.
Next he combined his mafia outfit with the figure of Hearts Boxcar from the Midnight Crew, creating the Boxcar Buffer. The pitch black suit clashed slightly with the heart symbol on it, but had been imbued with the muscle man of the Midnight Crew's strength and durability, making it decent armor.
Next he combined the hat of the Boxcar Buffer with his computer, creating the BrainBoxTop, a hands free computer that left him check and answer messages just by thinking about them, and was just as durable as the rest of the suit.
Brendon took his figures of the last two members of the Midnight crew, Space Slick and Clubs Deuce, for later combinations, storing them in his wallet modus along with his admittedly less beloved figures of the Felt, the Midnight Crew's rival gang.
With his new gear on hand, he headed outside and up the stairway Furlok had made for him. It was littered with various shale imps, all dressed in Midnight crew attire and armed with cuesticks or firearms. At the top was not an imp, but something much bigger guarding the gate. That was going to be a problem.
Furlok didn't care what Brendon said, those meteors were real and they were actually coming down. She had to get into the game quickly, and OP had already placed the three items in her hive. She quickly went through the process of creating her entry item, which appeared in the form of a block of cheese.
Furlok hesitated to enter though, remembering she had to put something into the pulsating kernelsprite first. She reached first for the painting, the masterpiece, as it would be the most quick and efficient, but decided against it.
She took a deep breath and ran out of her hive, throwing herself onto the grass of her lawn ring and starting to dig as quickly as she could with her bare hands, pulling up dirt in handfuls and flinging it to the side. If the sprite really did bring things to life, then there was only one thing she wanted to go into it.
She reached into the hole, prying out the first piece she could find: a skull. The skull of her lusus to be more specific, buried in front of her hive to preserve her memory. Furlok bolted back inside, chucking it into the sprite and not even looking at it before sinking her teeth into the crystalline cheese to enter the game.
The empty space where her hive had once been was bombarded with flaming rocks only moments after she entered. Furlok recoiled from the broken cheese, hoping she hadn't cracked her teeth on the stupid thing, and feeling like an idiot for thinking it would behave like actual cheese.
She forgot all about the pain in her mouth when she turned around though, seeing someone she hadn't seen since she'd learned how to walk. Her lusus was alive again, and hovering in front of her.
She wanted to hug her, but she flew away when she did, "If you touch me, you'll get fused into the sprite." She said, both she and Furlok's jaw dropping. Lusus couldn't verbally talk to their trolls, but now she could. Furlok didn't care if this game blew the entire world up with meteors, she officially felt that it was worth it.
Aspico was completely shocked by the revival of Furlok's lusus. She supposed she'd been underestimating the power of this game. As a result though, she was less heartbroken than she would have been when she found her own lusus's body.
One of the meteors had been on a collision course with Aspico's hive, and the harpy like lusus had sacrificed herself to buy Aspico time, flying up and meeting the flaming rock head on.
Her body landed in the lawn ring, and was thus easily brought inside and put into the kernelsprite before Aspico drove her rapier tip into the large bird seed that had appeared as her entry object.
Lurabo just barely understood what was happening. She only firmly understood three things: she needed to put something into the sprite, she needed to destroy the crystal ball that had appeared as her entry object, and she needed to do it without her hive being destroyed by meteors.
Her lusus was, of course, the prime candidate for the sprite, but when she went down to get him, she was struck with a sense of utter dread. His door was open. The meteors hitting the ground had shaken the hive and freed him. There was no telling where he was now.
Lurabo took a deep breath, taking out her tarot cards and drawing, hoping she would draw something useful. She felt her yellow blood freeze solid in her veins when she saw what she'd drawn: The Devil.
Lurabo was a firm believer that there were no bad cards in her deck. She was limited to only the basic major arcana cards, which she did wish to change in the future, but she still felt that any basic tasks could be solved with the right cards.
But this was not the right card. It was her first unlucky draw in months. Not five seconds passed from her seeing the horned demon on the card before she heard her lusus wailing in pain outside.
She ran from the hive, doing all she could not to break down when she saw her lusus. He hadn't made it across the street before a meteor had descended crushed him. It was small, and had been slowed down by something else before hitting. Her lusus was still alive, but in great pain.
The chimerical creature looked up at Lurabo, pleading. Lurabo knew what she had to do. She drew again: The Hanged Man. Her lusus let out a choking sound as he vanished from view, appearing inside the kernelsprite and merging with it. Lurabo hurried back inside, taking out her crook and smashing the crystal ball to enter.
Jeff was surprised by just how unprepared he felt as Arvis dropped the starting items in his home. He knew what to do, he'd been planning for it for months with his friend, but now that it was happening..
He tried to shake it off. He took a swing with his bat and freed the kernalsprite, then left the room quickly to find something to merge the sprite with. He supposed he could put his poster of Jackie Robinson into the sprite, or perhaps the Bambino himself Babe Ruth.
Considering the sprite could have two things put in, he supposed he could combined them both inside of it. But he never got the chance to do so. He heard an odd, almost ethereal ringing sound from his bedroom, and ran back just in time to see someone vanish in a burst of flash of red.
His sprite had been taken up. A few consorts from the nearby kingdom must have found their way into his house, because somehow one of each four kinds of consort had managed to fall in, combining in such a way that it counted as one thing.
He supposed they must have all gone in at the same time while holding hands, the end result being a sprite with a turtle shell, alligator jaws, iguana skin, and a salamander tail. He couldn't begin to wonder what circumstances had led to this merging. Had it had anything to do with the flash of light he'd seen?
He didn't know, and considering the flaming ball of murder falling towards his house, he could stand to figure it out later. He took his bat and swung at the pinatte style hanging baseball that had appeared as his starting item, shattering it, and entering.
Arvis was half glad to be the last one entering the game. It meant that he didn't have to help anyone else enter the game and could just wait and think. He already knew what he was going to put into his sprite, having been told by the others had be would need to do so before he entered.
He did not know what he was going to do about a strife weapon. He'd bought a strife specibus, but hadn't actually assigned a weapon to it yet. He was told that it didn't matter, but of course it did, they'd think he was stupid if he went in with a weak weapon.
He needed Jeff's help with opening the Crux, jeff using the cursor to drop the chair on the lever. When it opened, Arvis pitched his favorite boxing game into it, creating the sprite as the main character of the game, Cutter Strike. He was the loner of the game, using the only hooked weapons in the series.
Seeing them appear on his sprite, he got an idea. He'd bought a fishing pole years ago, but never used it because he'd never actually had anyone to go fishing with. He stored the pole in his maze modus for later, but kept the hook, putting it in his strife card and creating Hook-Kind. It wasn't the greatest he figured, but it would do.
He returned to his room, using the hook to chip at the mannequin wrestler that had appeared as his entry item until enough pieces had come off for it to count as broken, letting him enter the game. He suspected that he would have been killed by meteors had Cuttersprite not been slashing them out of the way for him.
And with that, the six members of the hero team had entered the game.
