Brendon and Valtina stood at the highest point of the cemetery.
The Grand Cemetary was the massive gravesite for the consorts who'd fought the denizen and been killed in the process. Together, the pale couple had gathered a large amount of the ghostly consorts from around LoFaM.
Brendan's general warrior aura and Valtina's kind charisma was proving really valuable to get as many of them as possible; and here was the largest collection of ghost consorts on the entire planet.
They were all so sorrowful, both from the memories of how badly things had gone, and from the corrupted spirits overhead, keeping them from thinking about how much damage they actually had managed to do to the denizen before they were killed, preventing them from feeling anything from despair.
As a result, the basket ball sized Doom Bringer Brendon had fired into the air to drive off the corrupted spirits had not only gotten everyone's attention and driven off the enemies, but also lifted the cursed thoughts from their minds, letting them think properly.
Granted, even without the curse they would still need to be convinced to join Brendon on his war march to the denizen.
He'd already found the path to them. Their lair was hidden behind a massive wall of extremely dense fangs called the Maw.
He was pretty sure his new powers would let him get passed the Maw and in to the denizen, but he didn't want to risk it without help.
And when it came to convincing them, seeing that Valtina's Sylph of Life powers allowed her to revive the spirits, returning them into flesh and blood beings, worked pretty well. It would take her awhile to heal this many people, but she seemed happy to help her moirale.
At least, she assumed it would take a long time, until Brendon attempted to help, combining his destruction of doom with her healing of life.
He'd expected that, if it did anything, it would just speed the process along; he hadn't been expecting a massive AOE heal pulse that revived nearly the entire consort population in a single motion.
OP: God I hate you.
Aspico's cheeks flushed a deep olive green when she realized what she'd just sent. Patior and Aspico had been messaging back and forth for awhile now.
Both of them had found the entrances to their respective denizens, Aspico through a combination of helpful tips from the consorts she'd guided back to sanity and from following the flow of soul power she could see with her powers, Patior through a combination of information the consorts had been willing to give him once his help had secured their time and mathematical calculations to triangulate the entrance to the denizen's lair.
They had been discussing how to proceed, how much training would be needed before facing the denizens and what the best way to go about said training, but Patior's comments had just started to get to her.
Granted, her own were probably getting to him as well, but he was better about keeping a lid on it.
Aspico hadn't fully realized what she was typing until she'd sent it. She'd just felt so comfortable in her bickering with him, it felt just like it had years ago, back when they'd been happy and hateful in a pitch spade together.
OP: Platonically I mean.
Aspico added, only realizing in retrospect that if Patior hadn't been thinking of it as anything more than a platonic insult than he may well had started taking it another way purely because of what she'd just said now.
She facepalmed, cursing under her breath. Before she could type another message that was likely to backfire, Patior replied.
EE: I'm sure. Shame. Having a potential kismesis to see afterwards would be wonderful motivation to not get killed in battle against the denizen.
OP: Right.. I know that. I'm the Seer remember? Obviously I'm attempting to give you a sense of false hope to keep you going strong.
EE: How cold.
OP: Whatever gets the job done.
Furlok had been learning even more about her powers as she fought her way through the marketplace section of her land, generally at a loss as to what she was meant to be doing there other than fighting the monsters.
Until now that was. She'd learned that in addition to stealing velocity and using it to essentially flash step, she could steal the size and density of items as well, growing large temporarily while shrinking the target.
She'd been roughly twice the size of an ogre for two days now. She had quite a few ideas on how to use this against Brendon; both for normal combat purposes and for… more NSFK purposes.
But more than that, she'd been learning a bit more about the planet rather than just working her way through it. Unlike the rest of the players in the session it seemed, Furlok knew exactly where the denizen of her land, Echidna, was.
Her castle was in plain view of everyone. Evidently she hadn't come to this planet intentionally, but rather had crash landed on it. Her actual home was on a little moon-more of a meteor really-that orbited the planet.
She was so distressed about being away from her home, she'd begun releasing monsters of such power that the efforts the consort shopkeepers when to in order to keep their families safe was driving them slightly mad.
It didn't help that the poor planning that went into the layout of the massive marketplace made it infinitely harder to protect, too much surface area to defend with plenty of secret routes to get inside. If it were smaller, it'd be easier to guard.
Furlok looked up at the sky, seeing the glorified meteor Echidna had come from orbiting over head. Furlok had never attempted to take on this much size before, but it seemed she was gonna have to.
If she played this right, she could kill two birds with one stone.
Dustine hadn't considered how his powers could be used aside from just powering himself and his weapons up and keeping himself pumped up mentally.
He hadn't thought he would need much more than that, both because it hadn't failed him thus far and because he personally wasn't one to think too deeply into things like this.
But the Rage aspect, as Aspico had informed him, was about more than just pure aggression. It was also about negative emotions, like fear for example.
Taking this into account, he decided that if he couldn't beat the muscly consorts into helping him out, even when it was for the sake of saving their lives from the denizen living beneath them, maybe he could use a less physical motivator. The power was called Fear Tactics, letting him exploit the fears of those around them.
Doing this, and after beating the primary defending musclenought in each town, he was able to do some serious convincing. He had to get scary for it. Very, upsettingly scary.
To the point that he was kind of putting himself off with the things he said to the consorts as he wailed on their attackers. It was for the greater good he supposed, but that didn't stop him from being extremely upset by it.
He didn't want to talk to Risura about it, both because he didn't want to distract him from dealing with his fucked up land, and because compared to the literal and metaphorical darkness his matesprit had been through, his own troubles would seem like nothing.
Really, he didn't even want to talk about it, just talk at all so he could calm his nerves.
Checking over the consorts again to make sure they were still hard at work moving the moat, and giving them another Fear Tactics scolding, he found a quiet spot out of their view and took out his phone to send a message.
Lurabo answered the message from Dustine, hands free as she did so.
SI: What's going on?
CD: Just trying to wrangle an entire planet's worth of towns to lift up the moats and cause an intentional flood.
SI: Why's that?
CD: Flood out the denizen. Gonna find whatever weird palace or temple or lair they're bumming around in. Gotta make a flood to get the thing to rise up into view.
SI: I'd wish you luck, but producing it seems more helpful )XD
CD: Lol, no kidding. So you're still letting off luck?
SI: Luck, light, illumination generally. I can see more and more of the platforms and ladders that would have been out of sight otherwise. Gonna cross my fingers and try to steer these wings towards the new ladders. Wasn't sure how to find the denizen on my land at first, but it occurred to me I could probably just let out as much luck as possible and hurl myself in any given direction.
CD: Fucking hell, your powers kick the shit out of mine. I'm having to put on my angry face.
SI: You? With an angry face? Sorry, but that just sounds cute. `w`
CD: I am Knight of Rage, Breaker of Worlds, grrr! Anything?
SI: D'aww~!
CD: Well it works on the consorts XP
SI: I'm just teasing, lol. Risura doing alright?
CD: I think so.. He's been looking into the horror-terrors more. He thinks there's one lurking about on his land.
SI: Hm.. I might be able to lend him a little light, in several ways actually, to help him out.
CD: Could you? That'd be great actually. My power can only help me I'm afraid.
SI: '^_^' No worries, I'll try and send him a little Light, then I'll see about that big ladder I'm seeing in the distance. Good luck flooding the world.
Risura stood his ground in the face of the giant worm-like beast.
Well, saying it was especially like anything was a bit of an exaggeration. Its existence seemed to be subjective, shifting between shapes and sizes the same way a liquid shifted based on its container.
At the moment, it appeared to be a sort of massive work with four mouths full of sword-like fangs, three sets of slightly mechanical looking wings, and a back end that split into two different tails.
It had shifted from a draconic bird with fishlike scales and snake eyes, a bear with insect features and glass sculpture like hairs, and several more his mind refused to recall.
Regardless, the feminine jade blood boy had managed to beat it down to low health, and it was now moving slow enough for Risura to be capable of safely attempting a new ability.
He'd used Rip before of course, but he wanted to try the power that naturally evolved from it. He grabbed at nothing-both literally and metaphorically-pulling open a void portal.
It wasn't exactly a black hole (for one thing it was an actual hole and not a sphere) but there wasn't much point in describing it as anything else as it sucked in the beast in front of him, casting it to the void, trapping it within the nothingness that lay outside the mortal world.
He panted as he closed the portal. It had been a flash of inspiration seemingly from nowhere that had allowed him to connect all the pieces.
The horror-terror lurking on his land seemed to go by the name Nyarlathotep, with various henchman scattered across the land. He had no intention of confronting the beast.
After what he'd been through the last time, he wanted nothing to do with the monster. He was off to battle his denizen, having beaten down the only obstacles in the path.
The sooner he finished off his denizen, the sooner he could get off his planet and back to Dustine; and away from the lurking dread hiding on his land.
Jeff placed the final key into the clockwork lock to finish winding the gears of the planet.
With the turn, the consorts would no longer have to drive themselves mad with worry over what time it actually was, nor would they be at risk from the randomly shifting plating and gears of their land.
Well, not that it ever actually was truly random, just set on a timetable that couldn't possibly be kept track of without minor control over the flow of time itself.
Jeff chuckled as he turned the key. He'd had to wail on the clockwork titan that had been guarding it for hours (only a few minutes in real time, but he'd still had to experience those hours of attacking with his baseball bat and it had been a pain in his time displaced ass), so it was rather satisfying to feel the key slot turn and hear the shifting of the gears beneath him as the planet finally normalized itself, returning to the way it had been before the denizen had arrived.
Speaking of the denizen… Jeff glanced outside of the clock tower and peered at what before had just been a long stretch of empty metal. Sure enough, now that the planet was back to normal, the ground had opened up and a massive mountainous lair that Jeff could only describe as a doom fortress had risen up.
The denizen was left out in the open for Jeff to face. Well, it wasn't really a choice, if Jeff didn't rush in and sort things out with the denizen in a matter of minutes, they'd go into a rampage and likely level the planet.
Jeff took a deep breath, slowing time to a crawl so he'd have time to get all the way out to the denizen's lair before his rampage.
Arvis stepped out onto the platform.
Java was standing nearby so full to bursting with the freedom breath she'd borrowed from the monsters across her land she was shaking like she'd caught hypothermia.
The gecko consorts of Arvis' land were all either barricaded in their houses, looking through the windows, or at their bravest, at the open doors with weapons in hand. They weren't bad people Arvis had learned, they were just afraid.
They were afraid like Arvis had been afraid of being found out. But unlike Arvis, the consorts had done nothing to deserve the role they'd been given, locked up in their land. It was the denizen who had made them so afraid, and it was the denizen Arvis knew he had to speak out against.
He'd assembled the speech meant to inspire the consorts from the many bosses scattered throughout the mountains, but even with the paper fully assembled, the speech was only about eighty percent done, which was still useless by itself if he couldn't find some way to finish it himself.
Arvis didn't have time to figure out how finish it, so he figured it was time to meta-game the system.
Between Java's powers, and the one's he was learning how to use, he was pretty sure they could handle this. He began to speak, which in itself was already a risk. The last time he'd made the mistake of speaking verbally in a town he'd had to escape a lynch mob. Still had the scare from where'd been stabbed with a pitchfork.
But he spoke, and spoke as loud and powerfully as he could. Trash was thrown at him first, followed by stones. After that came the actual full tilt weapons.
Thankfully Java was able to lend help with this, expending some of the breath she'd gathered into Cuttersprite and Pilotsprite, allowing them to act fully autonomously for a few minutes so they could protect Arvis from the crowd, cutting through and blowing away the things thrown or swung at Arvis without hurting any of the consorts.
The more Arvis spoke, the more consorts came out of their homes; either to hear him or to try hurting him. His words began to stray from the speech more and more as he seemed to know what to say almost instinctively, as he'd known the fear of working with the others, of letting himself be out in the open, and he knew now how important it was to overcome that fear.
New Links. It was a Page of Blood power that Arvis hadn't even realized he'd had until quite recently, allowing him to strengthen connections both literal and metaphorical.
His powers flowed into his words as he spoke. Seeing this, Java began to exhale again, releasing freedom into the consorts. The plan had originally just been for their powers to work independently; Java would free them from their fear, Arvis would bind them together.
But their powers being used in conjunction and in such close proximity for such a similar goal seemed to trigger a new ability, a shared power: Revolution.
The consorts gradually became less aggressive towards Arvis as he continued to speak, dropping the speech papers and the ability affected even him, letting him bring out more of his passion for the consorts to grow more inspired.
To seal the deal, Arvis did the unthinkable. He threatened the denizen; and did so with the denizen's name even. Armok, the denizen of Blood. No sooner had he done this was there a sound of commotion from the nearby red river, no doubt underline bosses rising in opposition to such an action.
But Arvis was not afraid, certain he and Java could fend them off. And they wouldn't be fighting alone either it seemed; the consorts letting out a battle cry and following them towards the attacking monsters.
Mutosi looked at her reflection in the mirror, wondering if she was really about to do what she thought she was about to do.
She'd brought her consorts back to their points of origin and had, as a result, been left where she'd started. From there she'd returned to her house, finding Scorpionspite hovering around the land.
Her lusus had come down and insisted on inspecting Mutosi, which was always slightly embarrassing but after the ordeal she'd been through, it was actually slightly comforting. She'd gone inside and started thinking, thinking about everything she'd said and done.
She… she still didn't think there was anything wrong with what she'd done to the consorts.
She knew that there was, she knew it was wrong, but she didn't feel it, couldn't fully believe it. For the first time in her life, she was completely unsure what to think about herself and the world. But she did know how to fix it.
She took a deep breath, gripping her broom tighter for support as she began to use her Test of Faith ability to manipulate the belief of her target. It was nearly effortless at this point; but she'd never used it on herself until now.
She grit her teeth as she felt the power grip her mind and the feelings therein, like some sort of parasite digging into her body and repurposing it. Mutosi shook as she tried to focus, forcing her own beliefs to change.
She didn't know at the time how dangerous what she was doing was, didn't know if it was a good idea even at the time, and most disturbingly to her, she didn't know if she would still be 'her' after she was done.
The thing that brought tears to her eyes though was the thought that maybe no one would care whether or not she was still her..
I figured I'd have one more set up chapter before the denizen encounters, don't worry, they're on their way next chapter. And yes, the combo abilities for Brendon and Valtina, and Java and Arvis, those were in fact my interpretation of Fraymotifs. It makes no sense to have moves that you buy like items, and none of the fraymotifs in Collide had been bought first, so I've decided they're just combo moves between different classpects, which makes more sense.
