Voidian Knights
Chapter 1: Call me Joshua
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The figure looked about the forest they had found
themselves in, confused as to how they had come to be there.
Then
sounds of a battle reached his ears. Like a shadow he moved through
the trees until the carnage came into view.
The scene before his
eyes pulled him up sharp, a cat-girl, wielding a staff, being swarmed
by monsters, a large number of which were already felled. The sheer
quantity of them however was beginning to take its' tole on the sole
defender; the staff wielding girl.
Suddenly the figure leaped into
the fray, reaching the girl just as her strength gave out. He
snatched up the fallen staff, instantly adjusting his grip before
laying flat the remnants of the mob.
"Good! She's just
exhausted," he said, checking the girl.
Assuring himself that
all she needed was rest, he set about looting the surrounding
corpses, a task that provided him with a fair number of barter-able
items, though for all he knew he was discarding valuable items as
well.
"Perhaps I should ask her when she wakes?" he mused,
spinning her staff absently through his fingers. The moment he
realized what he was doing he whacked himself in the head.
"Ow,"
he rubbed his head, "Note to Self: Don't pay attention to what I'm
doing; It'll be less painful that way."
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Krrr looked about himself warily before returning his
arrow to its' quiver and checking that he still had his supplies;
good.
He looked about himself again, by his reckoning he was in a
village of tabby Nephilim and Nepharim, but that didn't seem quite
right.
"Well I'll be! I never seen a dark grey Woren before!
Welcome to Worent! The name's Liam,"
boomed one of the Nepharim,
extending a hand in greeting.
"You misstake me surr, I am
Nephirrim not ...Worren?" he replied but accepted the hand
anyway.
"Not Woren you say? And I never heard of Ne-fill-him
before, how about a wrestling match?" Krrr chuckled at
that.
"Trruth be told, Irrm morre a Mrage than a Wrresstlerr,
but showr mre wherre to put mry bowr and quivrrr and Ird be happy to
showr-yu wrhat I can do."
Liam paused, trying to decipher Krrr's
rolling accent, before grinning.
"Right this way Mage."
"Krrr,
Krrr Riol."
"Ker it is then."
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Jroa twitched his wing spines and fingered his sword
hilt, wondering at the crater and why it smelled of a clan brother; a
Dragon Clanner.
"I tell ya, there was a town around here!"
"Well
there ain't one now." A group of about five bandits were arguing
mostly about the lack of the expected town and if there would have
been anything worth stealing from a new town anyway. Jroa had a
feeling that they were lucky it wasn't here now as the area smelled
of dragons so the town would likely have held at least one of his
clan, and even those who had never ascended were dangerous;
near-death having a tendency to cause more ascensions than anything
else. 'Never turn your back on a dead Brood' was a saying that was
already in use when he went to sleep, though maybe not so much
now.
He shifted his weight and his wings twitched again and
suddenly the bandits were all staring at him. He grinned at them and
leaped up drawing his sword and flaring his small wings to control
his landing.
In a matter of moments the bandits were bound by
bands of earthen magic and rope.
Sometime later Jroa reached
'Hometown.' He thought the name a little strange, but he had not come
here to question it's naming, but rather to collect any bounty there
might have been on his quintet of captives.
Bounty collected, Jroa
was heading towards the Inn for a room when one of the guards asked
him, "Do-ya know someone by the name Ryu Bateson?"
"No,
why?"
"It's just that ya look a lot like him is all, though we
hav't seen him here for awhile."
"He's probably a clan-brother
of mine then, I'm Jroa Tlaw." Jroa continued on his way after that
thinking, 'Perhaps this Ryu could tell me of our clan's status, I
should try and track him down' he yawns. 'But in the morning.'
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Griffin was trapped. He could feel the ocean above him,
both from the pressure and his own power; he remembered well what the
aura of salt water felt like, and there was a great amount of the
stuff pushing down on him.
Thankfully he could absorb power from
the ground below him and the ocean above him and live off that for a
few years. Hopefully someone would notice the minor effects such a
thing would have on the surrounding environs and get him out, as
until then he'd have to hibernate.
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Kara was still grinning when her audience became a
bat-winged girl, mostly due to the fact that despite her obvious
differences to the soldiers(gender, number, hair and eye colour,
extra appendages) her reaction was much the same: shock.
"Hi,
I'm Kara Lorrud; The Mystic Shadow Thief. Could you tell me what this
wonderful looking place is?" The bat girl was still somewhat
shocked but somehow found herself responding.
"Yua Bateson, more
commonly known as Patty The Phantom Thief. This is the Thieves Tomb,
a place of a thousand passageways and a hundred thousand traps and
locks." Patty blinked; she had practically given this strange girl
her life story in the first ten words of her introduction. Kara just
grinned at her.
"Don't worry 'Patty', the treasure of your
identity I'll keep. Do you mind if I call you Fan? Also, what brings
someone to a place like this?" Again, Patty felt somewhat odd as
she found herself answering these questions as well.
"I'd prefer
Patty, Phantom, if you insist, and people either come here to
practice The Art free of persecution or to hire a thief,(.) There are
a number of guilds that gather here, though any self respecting
Master Thief works solo as I do."
"Coolness. You can call me
Shadow, Shade or Kara. Hmm, as you haven't heard of me nor I of you,
I'd assume that I've somehow been transported to another world. So,
being that that is my situation: Tell me how you have wings and if
anyone else knows it."
"My wings are a sign of my Dragon Clan
heritage, and it is far from common knowledge."
"Nice, now one
more thing. Can you show me around your world, the richest cities,
the finest views, the ancient places and treasures?"
" I
already told you, I work alo..." Patty suddenly found herself
unable to continue.
"That's not very nice, I'll just have to
steal your resistance to the idea from you."
"I guess I could
do that." Patty final managed.
"Wow your good! You and me are
goin' ta have a blast!"
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Rethan grumbled about this latest disturbance to his
peace. He was on an island, the denizens of which seemed to require
all his learned skill in intimidation to keep them at bay.
He made
his way to a small house he'd seen from the beach that he'd suddenly
found himself on.
When he
reached the house he raised his scythe and viciously knocked on the
door with it. He glared at the dark skinned man who answered.
The
man, unlike most people Rethan had met, was able to meet Rethan's
disturbing gaze. Rethan blinked then closed his left eye.
"Sorry
about that, I've been having one of those days," Rethan offered in
his dry voice.
"I'd almost hate to ask, considering that left
eye of yours. Why don't you come in?" the man responded, moving to
allow Rethan entry.
A wolf-like humanoid looked up from their work
on arrow fletching as the two entered.
"We don't get many
visitors out this way. What brings you here?"
"I wish I knew.
One moment I was walking home after sorting out a mess in my
backyard, the next I found myself on your beach to the south,"
Rethan sighed "I get the feeling I'll be here for a while. I'm
called Rethan."
"Bo," the wolfen one introduced himself then
gestured to his companion saying "Karn."
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Will suddenly found himself in a city, something more
commonly found among
the stone elementals of his world than any other group. What
surprised him was that the inhabitants weren't elementals; he didn't
know how to describe them. He did note that a number of them had
small, useless, wings protruding from their backs; the air here
conveyed to him the knowledge that they weren't always so small. It
also conveyed to him how their speech made it vibrate and that this
place was called Windia and how it liked talking to birds and that
these people could once change into giant birds and speak to it as he
was now.
Then a fresh breeze flew by and brought with it the
knowledge that there was only one great bird now and it was sad as it
couldn't change back and talk with its' kind.
Will sympathized
with this new breezes' sadness and asked it directions. What he
didn't notice is how the air vibrated thus making his question
audible.
"Wh-ere i-s Gre-Bir' Mi-na?" A number of people
looked about in fright, trying to find the source of the disembodied
voice.
It wasn't long before Will was sitting high up in the
Castle, conversing in the way of birds and air with the Great Bird:
Mina Windia.
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Rand was working his mother's field, he still couldn't
think of it as his own, when there suddenly appeared a giant of a
man. The man was dressed in a strange looking armour, like plate
armour only the plates were attached to a sturdy harness. The whole
thing looked more like it was made to keep the man from hurting or
attacking himself than to protect him from an enemy, though its
appearance would have been enough deterrent to keep most people
away.
Noting how skittish the man seemed, Rand approached him
cautiously, surprised to find the man to be his equal in height and
very nearly girth as well.
It took some time but Rand was able to
calm the man and found to his surprise that once calm he became
something of a scholar. When he removed his thorn covered helm Rand
was struck by how much he looked like a giant Grass Man with his
blue-green skin and his red and blue hair. His powerful purple gaze,
however, was more akin to Ryu's green stare than anything else Rand
was familiar with.
"My gratitude to you for calming me, my
friend. I have been dubbed Rax Drakko, when I have been called
anything other than 'Monster' or 'Test 2 5 1'. I'd like to thank you
but all I have to offer is my strength, Berserker Rage and command
over fire and ice. If you have need of any of them just ask."
Rand
just grinned at him.
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Temva
blinked, then he looked about himself carefully. Yes, all his senses
were in agreement, he was no longer in the Lu forest of his
homeland.
He moved carefully over to where his arrow had flown and
found the back end of the shaft where it had fallen. His arrow had
been neatly severed, perfectly in half.
"Useless," he said of
the half arrow as he dropped it back into his quiver, possibly in the
hope of at least recovering the fletching, maybe as some kind of
proof as to what happened, or maybe even as a memento of his
home.
His grey eyelids slid over his silver-blue flecked golden
eyes as he raised his nose into the air. He'd find the one who
smelled of blood, sap and tobacco and then move on from there.
He
turned, crouched down, almost to all fours, and began to silently
stalk through the trees. He was so intent on finding his target that
he was almost in a meditative state, forcing all his concerns from
his mind until he had to deal with them; hopefully he'd know how to
by then.
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Weaver appeared
precisely where he knew he would. He knew he would wait there for
something more to happen, and he knew he'd be itching for action
before it happened.
He sighed and looked at the insubstantial
tower he had appeared in front of, at the two figures he could see
trapped within through what should have been solid walls, at the
seven powerful artifacts around the pair.
"Such a thing has the
Time Key wrought here. Only myself and Alterum can enter and leave as
we please," he paused for a moment, "I should see if their
spirits are at home."
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The figure watched as the girl stirred.
"I was
wondering when you'd wake." She looked around carefully, noting the
pile of corpses piled up in the clearing opposite to where they
themselves were.
"I'm Katt," she said and silence reigned at
the unspoken question.
"Call me Joshua," the figure finally
answered.
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