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Karl Jak

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The preshow had, in many ways, felt like a blur for the man at the top of the Syntech food chain. Even with a half dozen of himself tending to the majority of the public functions, Karl Jak had managed to find himself quite literally wrapped up in a handful of other ‘tasks.’

As he finally bid adieu to his preshow party favors, the executive turned his attention to the operation of the game itself. With the convention center just about finished in its conversion from ‘preshow’ to ‘show’, Karl ascended the stairwell that led up to Central Command. The room, for what would likely be the last time for a few days, was relatively calm and quiet, with most of the operators relaxing at their workstations.

“Looks like everything is readied, Sir,” Kevin replied as he glanced up from his clipboard. “That little glitch in the systems was fairly easy to resolve once the techs got around to the power cycling.

“See, Kevin?” Karl said with a grin. “I told you to trust my IT skills.”

“Of course, Sir,” the redhead answered as he holstered his clipboard and retrieved his tablet computer. “Everything is green. Should be initialize the fobs on your go, Mr. Jak? We’ve verified that all the contestants have functioning devices, as well as the device.”

Karl nodded and gestured to one of the techs on the far side of the room. As that young man started to tap away at the keyboard display, the man in purple made his way to his plush chair, dropped himself into the seat, and scooped up the microphone resting on the armrest.

“Hello, Ladies and Gentle-Persons, this is your host, Karl Jak.” The announcement triggered a hush throughout Convention Center-22. “At this time, I would like to invite all of our esteemed guests to shift their focus to one of our many Syntech viewing areas. Whether that be located at your hotel room, rauchous pub, upscale winery, or even somewhere far removed from the lovely confines of our Comet, I want to welcome you all to this installment of Dante’s Abyss.

“At this time, I want to ask all of our contestants to suit up with their gear if they have not already. Each of you has a teleportation fob that I am going to ask you to pick up and activate. It’s quite simple… you just press the button, but I recommend you make sure all your possessions are on your person at the time. The trip is one-way, and we will not forward your belongings to your final destination.”

While some of the contestants were likely ready prior to the announcement and now firmly on their way, Karl knew that not everyone would have been as on the ball. “If you fail to activate your fob within the next … thirty seconds, I just want you to know that it’ll activate for you, but I can’t promise the landing will be as smooth as it would otherwise be.”

With a smile, Karl set the mike down and leaned back as he closed his eyes for a momentary reprieve. He had a handful of silent moments before he started hearing confused murmurings from the crew around him. Slowly, over the next half minute, those murmurs graduated in a full-blown clamor as people started to smack away at their touchscreens and nervously start to examine video feeds and even the wiring on their consoles and machines.

“Something amiss?” Karl asked without opening his eyes as he heard the trademark rapport of Kevin’s cheap sneakers on the metallic floor.

“Sir,” Kevin was standing within arm’s reach of his boss.

Cracking one of his eyes, Karl saw that the mixture on Kevin’s face was one of confusion laced with a cold sass. “We have problems, Sir.” He remarked as he tapped his tablet a few times and turned the display toward his supervisor. “It would appear that there was a malfunction in the new teleportation matrix.”

Karl gasped as he sat up out of his chair and clutched at the tablet. His eyes scanned the screen to try and find some flaw in this shocking news. “It cannot be,” he declared as he turned his open mouth and wide eyes to the rest of the observation crew. “The folks in Engineering told me that the installation was successful?”

Kevin, a scowl still etched on his youthful visage, retrieved his tablet from his boss. “It was some type of software bug, Sir. It would seem that the something or someone altered a line in the coordinates.”

“Did all of the contestants wind up at the same location?” Karl inquired as he turned to what was normally a massive display of the island broken apart into several dozen monitors. Instead of a cast of people rifling through bags and adjusting to their new environments, the various environmentally themed backdrops were devoid of their contestant. “Are they invisible?”

“They were teleported outside of the Comet and her satellites. They were scattered across a small landscape, yes, but it wasn’t on Twenty-Two.”

“Then where?”

Kevin rolled his eyes. “I was hoping, Sir, that in your… infinite wisdom and understanding of information technology, you would be able to help us elucidate that information.”

“Oh my stars,” Karl muttered as he sat up out of his chair and casually summoned another tablet from a nearby workstation. With a simple glance down at it, he turned back to Kevin and chuckled. “Let me handle this one.”

“All you,” Kevin sighed as he walked over to one of the nearby consoles and pretended to make himself busy while his boss sat back down.

“Hello out there,” Karl spoke into the microphone. “I apologize if the volume is too loud, but I have some… unfortunate news for all of our lovely contestants.”

Someone tapped Kevin on the shoulder. “What’s he doing?” The young woman whispered.

“He’s broadcasting from their collars.”

“He can do that?”

“It’s a contingency, yes. It’s in the event that the audio system on the islands ever goes out, or… in the event that our contestants don’t make it to the island in the first place.”

Karl grinned as he glanced at the tablet. “Yes, hello. I regret to inform all of you that the parameters of our contest have… shifted. Fortunately, your tasks will remain the same. A device was teleported with you to your current location, and it’ll be up to one of you to collect a number of necessary implements in order to make this device operational. Whoever achieves that goal will be crowned our Grand Champion.

“As you might have already noticed, you’re not exactly on one of our carefully constructed island planetoids. In fact, my totally vague and completely unplanned estimates place the lot of you within a stretch of land deep, deep, deeeep in the wilderness of Cevanti, far beyond the communication dead zones or the conventional reach of Markov.”

“Cevanti?” Kevin rasped before Karl waved him back down into his seat.

“Yes, it seems like our haywire and one hundred percent faulty technology sent you far away and far outside the reach of mechanized salvation. However, you should know that you are not alone, despite what I just said. After all, you’re actually further into the Unmade wastes of that World than any living being has traveled before, and that means there are limitless monstrosities out there who are more than willing to keep you company! How lovely.

“Now before you go ‘Hey, Karl, those are the bad guys!’, I just want you to know that you’re not wrong. You remember that device I mentioned that will win you the contest? It’s also your best ticket out of this mess, because it’ll usher the Grand Champion back to us in one piece.”

“What about the others?” Kevin inquired.

Karl blew a raspberry at his personal assistant. “Let’s not make promises right now that we can’t keep, young Kevin,” the producer spoke, even as he only loosely held his hand over the microphone. Lifting the device back up to his lips, he smiled once more. “Once we triangulate your position, I’ll send a map of your surroundings to you. That map will update as the surrounding wilderness continues to collapse into unmade corruption. Trust me, you don’t want to wind up in a totally corrupted zone, but on that note, you also might want to double-check who you ally with. There’s not telling who is still the goofy-yet-plucky underdog from the preshow they claim to be and who is secretly an unmade monster!

“Keep your eyes and ears open, and I’ll talk to you all in six hours…

“Ta-ta!”

Turning off the feed, Karl stuck out his lip as he spun to face Kevin and the assorted workers. “I guess when life gives you lemons, right?”

“Right.” Kevin groaned as he tried to sort out this mess of a situation.

***​

Important Notes and Updates

1. Please cross-reference the map to determine your starting point. Please note that any tiles that might look like ‘ocean’ are actually a wholly corrupted wasteland surrounding your current location (aka 'Completely Unmade Zones'). If you’ve started near the perimeter or move their, your character would see that the terrain continues out in this direction but as a nightmarish, unmade nightmare-scape. Be inventive. Or, you know, avoid even going near the edges of the map, because entering an unmade zone will kill unmake your character, causing you to lose control of them for the remainder of the event and possibly loner.

1a. The two shades on the map represent areas that are partially unmade (the pinkish/red) and 'normal' (green). These two types of square will have different ecosystems and landscapes so feel free to, if you haven't already, touch up on the Unmaking and its effects <3

1b. Squares with crossed swords or the little red squiggles are the scene of previous battlefields. Do they hold significance? Who knows.

1c. The icons that look like ... santa hats? Those are semi-active volcanos.

2. Every six hours, the number of unmade zones will increase. I will announce these ahead of time, and like previous events, I’ll likely be kind the first few days of people who don’t necessarily ‘think out’ their moves. If you get a follow-up PM from me that says ‘u sure?’ that’s a sign that you probably want to rethink your movement.

The new Completely Unmade Zones (aka Dead Zones) for tomorrow are: --- Again, these zones will KILL YOUR CHARACTER -- T8, A8

3. The ‘Device’ that must be fixed/completed/whatevered (you’ll figure it out) to ‘win’ is located at Square C4 -- The person who arrives there first will be a special story event (but no ‘in-game’ prize, just to be clear). This square is a ‘safe haven’ which prevents Face to Faces from triggering, even if people want to kill each other.

4. Collar and collar rules still apply (Syntech obviously makes the best technology in the Crossroads #SyntechStrong?).

5. This phase will conclude tomorrow at 10 AM CST. This thread will lock while I process any updates. A new post will include the first item drops, the location of a boss battle, the first Quest Item location, and more(!)

6. I will edit much of this ‘twist’ and the adjustments to language and mechanics into the Rules by the end of tomorrow’s phase, if not sooner.
 
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Mad Maggie

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The teleportation felt different this time. More akin to going through one of Wraith's unstable wormholes, the gut wrench that came with molecular dissembly familiar and yet not. The key fob had apparently malfunctioned, according to the tinny yet smooth voice emanating from my ankle bracelet.

Cevanti. A planet I had not considered worth my time, but apparently just as wild and overgrown and full of death as Kraw. Hopefully my experiences there would aid me here, but...there was the unknown variable of the Unmade. I'd been making a concentrated effort to avoid becoming enmeshed in "galaxy savior" work. There were more than emough heroes to take care of that problem, but even if they failed I would most likely have more than enough resources to survive or escape by then. Still...the opportunity to study the effects of Darkseid's corruption first hand and in such an environment was a reward in and of itself.

My surroundings were dark and wild, but still recognizable. The feeling of hopeless uneasiness that pervaded Unmade spaces had not reached here yet. The forest was silent, unlike Kraw. Any predators here would not announce their presence, unless they were an idiot like Witt.

I took off almost immediately, determined to cover as much groundbas possible before the shock of our fumbled transport wore off. If I was to get off this blasted, cursed planet I would need to be proactive...

Some time later, I could see a smoking ruin carved out of the overgrowth, burned trees and uncovered stone buildings. One of the many ruins of this planet. I reached into my duffel bag and withdrew one of the items I'd been allowed to bring. It's power would serve me well against any land bound enemy, and after being so limited in my movement in the last contest, I relished the shock that would come with my sudden appearance.
 

Karl Jak

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Chara

Chara felt disoriented as she stumbled across the malformed landscape.

Hadn’t she just dealt with the unmade? Was she trapped in some type of rerun?

No, it couldn’t be that. After all, Opealon’s appearance was never this awful, even when they were pushed deep into the muck of the unmaking.

This place felt so much worse.

She didn’t know how far she walked, but at some point, she felt the crunch of boots all around her.

“Halt!” A number of voices barked. Her gear was in her bag, and while she was many things, dumb was not necessarily one of those, even with her brain feeling scrambled inside her skull. “Drop the bag.” Another voice replied as Chara slowly tilted her shoulder until her duffel bag plopped to the ground.

“What are you doing out here?”

Chara blinked a few more times, and at last, her vision seemed to be fully focused. All around her, she spotted a bunch of future-tech marines. Maybe a half dozen of them. “Karl sent me?” She finally managed as her eyes drifted to the makeshift fortification that the marines had clearly been defending. The building, a bunker built from what seemed to be scraps of metal scavenged from various sources, looked like the last place in the world you’d expect to find your salvation.

“Who?” Another marine asked before the ‘front door’ of the bunker creaked open to reveal a scowling blonde in power armor.

“Standdown,” she barked as the men and women around Chara immediately lowered their weapons. “She’s with Karl Jak.”

“Oh, no shit?” One of the marines replied as his formerly stern voice displayed hints of fanboy-ism. “Have you met the guy? Is he really that handsome in real life?”

“Jenkins!” Their commander rasped. “Keep your dick in your damn pants and go back to your post.”

“Yes, Sergeant Swift, Ma’am!” He yelped as he and the other marines dissolved into the landscape, leaving Chara and the blond outside of her bunker.

“You seem familiar,” Chara replied.

“You’re Chara,” Sergeant Swift remarked abruptly. “I’d know that even if that bow-tie wearing idiot hadn’t sent me a dossier on all of you.”

“He said this was where… the ‘thing’ was?”

“You mean that broken piece of shit he teleported here that’s supposed to rescue our asses? Yea, take a fucking look,” she groaned as she motioned for Chara to follow her. The teenager did, and in the main room of the bunker, she spotted what seemed to be—for all intents and purposes—a ‘broken piece of shit’.

“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be,” Chara muttered.

Sergeant Swift groaned. “It’s emitting some kind of field that’s keeping the unmaking at bay, but aside from that, I don’t know how to operate it.”

“I think Karl said he’d been sending the parts to repair it?”

“He couldn’t send that shit all at once? What does he think this is… a fucking game?”

Chara couldn’t help but chuckle, which only prompted Sergeant Swift to curse under her breath and collapse into a makeshift chair.

“Make yourself at home… the field this thing generates repels violence, so even if I wanted to smack you in the mouth, I couldn’t.”

“Lovely.”
 

Fennec Shand

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She was too old to be teleporting across the galaxy twice in less than twenty-four hours.

With a simple click of her fob, Fennec Shand — along with the various accouterments the Syntech folks had packed her with — was swept away out of the barracks. It had been a short and rather unremarkable stay; she wasn’t really into the whole ‘posturing in front of your competitors to see whose dick was bigger’ game, after all. She knew her worth; perhaps these scrubs didn’t, but soon enough, they’d find out.

When it came to teleportation, though… she’d always prefer the gentle — or not-so-gentle — rumble and tumble of an old-fashioned spaceship. The middle-aged woman burst from whatever pocket dimension the fob sent her hurtling towards and into the decrepit wasteland she’d been sent to with a start, her stomach flipping over and over. The complimentary breakfast she’d been given by the purple-shirted peons this morning quickly found its way back up her throat and onto the ground.

She fell to her knees, her bag falling from her shoulder and crashing onto the cracking, gray dirt next to her. She reached out and caught herself, thankfully avoiding a face-first collision with her puddle of vomit, and let out an annoyed groan. She blinked, sighed the sigh of a tired old woman who’d already had enough of this shit, and wiped the puke off her lips before pushing herself off the ground.

Her ankle monitor clinked as she took a few steps back from her vomit puddle. She’d appreciated that they’d been given choices on how to wear their collars this year; when she’d deigned to watch an episode or two of previous iterations, it had always looked either remarkably restricting or unfortunately kinky. She’d become used to ankle monitors during the couple of odd stays she’d had in a Crossroads prison or rich mark’s dungeon; at this point, it seemed like just a peripheral bother to her, rather than anything threatening.

Of course, she didn’t expect it to vibrate and start talking within minutes.

“Hello out there.”

“Fuck—”

Fennec leapt into action, immediately crouching into a fighting stance and readying herself to use her bag like a weapon. Why the fuck — on a murder island — would the host start loudly broadcasting audio from her location?! She bit her lip, scrambling to look for a hiding spot, but knowing it was futile: anyone who heard this racket would be onto her location within seconds.

She fell to the ground, frantically reaching for the ankle bracelet and trying to claw it off. A few tugs later, the realization that it wasn’t going to budge set in, along with the realization that if it had, she’d be as good as dead — she heard what happened to people who tried with any degree of success to remove their collars. Her chest heaved up and down with frantic, anxious breath, when suddenly, a thought popped into her head.

He was broadcasting to the entire island.

If she couldn’t hear anyone else’s collar going off… then no one could hear hers.

She blinked, remaining where she was on the cold, gray, rocky ground, listening to Karl Jak’s ‘unfortunate news.’ So they’d been sent not to the paradise-adjacent island where all the killing had taken place before, but to the actual, real-as-hell wilderness of the Cevanti Wastes? That seemed, well… highly illegal, to put it mildly. Fennec didn’t mind; she’d come from Cevanti, after all. But it certainly made things just a bit more… complicated.

It was also absolute bullshit. She’d already practically been forced into this competition, and now she had to tangle with the unmade whilst trying her best to beat the twenty-odd other scrubs into submission?

“Ta-ta,” Karl Jak sang, signing off from his first broadcast to his wary contestants. Fennec’s whole body relaxed as his message ended; she knew, ostensibly, no one was around, but she still couldn’t shake the feeling that having the lilting voice of the game’s host playing from her ankle was not a good thing. After all, there might not be a contestant nearby, but — what’s that noise?

She spun around toward a rustle in the nearby trees. She slowly started to back up towards the opposite side of the clearing. An unmade monster, perhaps? Or a swarm of them? She didn’t know for sure, but she knew one thing: she wasn’t about to tangle with them quite yet.

As softly as she could, she backpedaled into the brush, her journey on the island — or, well, in the Cevanti Wastes — just beginning.

By the Arbiter, she really was too old for this.
 

Karl Jak

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#16 Kolith vs #24 Doctor Caustic

Was it going to be this easy?

Doctor Caustic, from a vantage point high up among one of a spattering of trees in the area, held dominion over this little patch of death. He imagined that this had been a forest at some point, before the firefight between the unmade monsters and the now smoldering marine corpses had reduced the natural beauty of this place to a figment of the past.

Down below, a fool had wandered his way through the area. Feral zoids still smoldered beneath the moonlight as the good doctor observed his intended quarry slinking around, his eyes surveying the mounds of broken cyber-flesh and peaking about the heaps of shattered humanity. Caustic couldn’t quite recognize the man’s name, but he recognized him for what he clearly was—some sort of primitive, tribal individual.

This would make for excellent data.

Soundlessly, Caustic slipped down from his perch. Pulling the hunter’s hoodie tight over his gray head of hair, the legend stalked his prey. As he gradually closed the gap between himself and Kolith, the doctor paused for just a few moments to scoop up a twisted piece of metal lying near its former owner. A cursory glance showed that this was likely some sort of zoid rib, but the jagged point was really the only aspect of the implement that interested the doctor.

Caustic was nearly within striking distance when Kolith suddenly paused. A few yards away, something had shifted within a pile of metallic debris, and the noise had stolen both their attentions in the process. That indication that, perhaps, there was more out here, was enough to cause Kolith to tilt his head just enough to spot the clown.

“Assassin,” Kolith rasped in the moments before Caustic was upon him. Even without the moment of surprise, the doctor nearly had enough time to finish the deed, but the improvised blade missed the belly of the tribal man and scraped the side of his abdomen instead.

Wincing in pain, Kolith shoved away Caustic, and with that opening, the bearded man had all the time he needed to yank something from his open bag.

The weapon’s barrel immediately began to glow.

“I’ll remember this,” Caustic seethed as he started to take small steps backwards.

“Good,” Kolith growled as he fired the weapon. Caustic dropped to all fours and sprung sideways as the ground beneath his feet erupted.

Kolith has the BFG

Kolith has a scrap along the right side of his stomach (Story Injury)
Caustic will have some 1st degree burns but otherwise no real damage (Story Injury)
 

Anders Nazret

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Anders activated the teleportation fob and felt his insides shift within him. Teleportation was not something wholly unfamiliar to the swordmage. In fact, it was one of the first techniques he had experienced in his training. Under the best of circumstances it was uncomfortable. Under the worst? Well, he had seen people boil from the inside out as their blood became supercharged by the latent energy required to transport matter. Syntech’s purely technological expression of such a technique left much to be desired and fell firmly between “upset tummy” and “flash-fried insides.” Anders popped into existence, falling to a knee and gasping for air. As he collected his breath Karl’s announcement cried out from the collar strapped around his neck.

There was little familiarity to be found in the rubble of Cevanti. Brutalist architecture surrounding him, long since abandoned and forgotten. Despite the apparent similarity one might expect to the ruins from Arcadia’s golden age, this place was far from the elegance that Anders had expected of ancient civilizations. Crumbling concrete corpses of long lost infrastructure sat as slothful leviathans underneath the planet’s dark moon. Harsh angles and unpleasant designs seemed so vulgar in the face of Arcadian architecture. Anders scoffed. No wonder Cevanti had perished, its previous denizens were little better than barbarians.

Quietly he stooped low, opening his survival bag. What he found seemed to fit right at home in such a haphazard environment. It was a bulky thing, cobbled together with brazed pipework and shoddy mechanisms. Still he dutifully followed the provided assembly instructions and within minutes had assembled his weapon. There was a pressurized hiss as he adjusted the proportioning valves and leveled the weapon’s barrel towards the horizon. With a squeeze of the trigger the machine sprung to life, belching out a stream of oily black smoke and fire. The greasy flames clung stubbornly to whatever surface it made contact with and filled the air with the putrid scent of melting tires.

“How primitive,” Anders remarked. Despite this, however, he had no doubt it would be quite effective in the coming days. Weapon in hand, he traveled north. Behind him whorls of thick black smoke traveled into the atmosphere, heralding his arrival.
 

Karl Jak

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#04 Father Gasciogne vs #17 Nearl

Nearl, after adjusting to the unforeseen hostility of this sprawling new map of mechanized monsters, had barely just processed that when she came across the battlefield that was marked on her map. Having only been in this part of the universe for a small period of time, the Radiant Knight had no idea what the game’s eccentric host had been discussing when he had mention ‘the unmade.’

Stretched out wide in front of her, Nearl had her first minor exposure to the Unmaking. The battle that had played out at this location had been little more than a glorified slaughter. The impaled corpses of men encased in heavy suit of armor could be spotted around the landscape, and a wrecked spaceship served as the focal point for this twisted and depressing tableau.

With her spear confiscated by the Syntech people, Nearl strode out into the killing fields. With the utmost respect, she examined the slain soldiers, and when those yielding no discernable weaponry, she even turned to the number of rotting, oil-fleshed monsters that likewise lay dead on the barren earth. As she wove her way through the battlefield, her ears picked up signs that she was note alone. Resting a hand upon the armor on her chest, she narrowed her eyes as she crouched down on the far side of the derelict spaceship. On the ground nearby, she scooped up two pieces of debris from the vessel and pressed herself a little further into its scalded hull.

The footfalls drew closer, until Nearl spotted their source. A hulking beast of the man, his features seemed more monster than man, and his eyes were wrapped heavily in bandages. One of the survival bags hung at his side, but there was an aura about him that filled Nearl with unease. Friend or foe?

Call it the yips. Call it the ails of still settling into a foreign sector of space filled with countless individuals who blurred the line between what was good and what was not. Call it what you will, but Nearl made a choice in that moment of unease.

She opted to withdraw.

She had nearly pulled herself around to the far edge of the crashed ship when she heard that deep, unsettling voice. “Usually it is the hunted who slink in the shadows.”

Nearl threw the piece of debris in her right hand. The chunk of bent steel smacked off the side of Gasciogne’s head, and in that moment, it was the hunter who made his own choice.

Gritting his teeth, Gasciogne lunged forward—his massive hands vying for the woman’s neck. He missed, as Nearl slipped down and managed to slam her forearm into his leg. The hunter lurched sideways as Nearl tried to escape, but he hooked her lithe figure with one of his elbows and threw her back into the ship.

Reaching up, Gasciogne grabbed a broken piece of the fuselage, tore it free, and brought it crashing down onto the knight’s back.

Nearl winced as she dropped to her knees, but the woman couldn’t miss a step as the chunk of metal slammed down through the ground just a few moments after she’d rolled sideways. Once back on her feet, she quickly armed herself with what looked like half a melted tire.

Before the pair could settle their affairs, their focus was drawn toward the ship, which was now shuddering loudly on the ground.

From the shattered walls of the ship, a screeching horde of gibbering creatures started to free themselves.

“Fall back,” Nearl muttered as she quit the scene.

Father Gasciogne used 1 application of Focus

Gasciogne has a bruise on his leg (Story Injury)
Nearl will have some lingering shoulder pain and bruises along her upper back and neck.
 
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Chara Dreemurr

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The place I lived happily ever after, for a short time.

The place my happy ending died.


Chara had not seen Cevanti since she’d fought in the Siege of Markov. There was no love left in her for the planet where she’d lost both her parents, had been separated from her brother, all for the Mad Titan’s twisted schemes - but she recalled enough to know she had likely better take of her parka before snooping around. Luckily, there was enough spare fabric to tie up into a travelling bag of sorts, so she was quick to take off the sweaty, heated, insufferable parka and friends, and actually feel air strike her skin. She stripped down to a simple shirt, a tight hoodie and her layer of jeans, and tied the rest up… once she’d wasted an hour finding a solid enough stick for her makeshift bindle.

The glasses, of course, stayed on - this was the only place she could look stylish around people who would appreciate it for the next little while, after all. As she adjusted them, she looked around the ‘rooms’ of the scavenged fortress.

“You know, this place isn’t so bad.” Chara commented, admiring the room, which got a stern look from one of the marines.

“Not really looking for your optimism here, kiddo.” The woman growled, and Chara looked up with a surprise. “Or are you going to tell us the story about how you lived beneath a garbage dump?”

“That would be unreasonable. That Garbage dump was fantastic.” Chara snapped back evenly, “This place definitely couldn’t compare. But still, it has - walls, protection from the environment, Chairs. Better than I could have expected.”

The woman went to snap something, before a large man behind her gave her a friendly pat on the back.

“Don’t mind Garn’s friend! Leslie is very tired from being out here a very long time. Garn is too.”

Chara thought about that, and gave a quiet nod. “Really feels like my life might be repeating after all. Trapped in a place no one can see the sky, with the only path out a perilous journey…” Chara murmured, giving a slight smile.

“Okay, kid. Don’t need to know your hero’s journey.” Leslie snapped, looking Chara straight in the face, where she simply gave a shrug.

“Hero? I am not the type.” Chara replied with a soft sigh. “The only thing I contributed was slacking off at my job… it appears I cannot do that here, though.” the teen offered, stepping forward. “If you would like to vent frustrations, by all means. I am a teenager, so insults go in one ear and out the other.” Chara would offer with a childish smirk. “Might even be therapeutic.”

Chara studied the woman’s face, and for a moment, as heat filled it, it looked like she might do that. She had a strong bet that one of Sergeant Swift’s was not going to be the type, though, and as the woman gave a sigh, letting the moment go, Chara simply gave an impish smile.

“Well, I will be around for the day if you need me. It was good to meet you, Leslie, Garn.”

“Garn is glad to be meeting you, too!”
 

Aster

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At the signal to go, Aster was already going. She was as ready for this as she was going to get, anxiety about possible death and or maiming aside.

The teleportation down to what should have been the island left her stomach churning once again, but it only resulted in some minor stumbling and collapsing. No more expelling of stomach contents — which she didn't have very much of, at the moment, anyway.

"Hurgch...hate this...hate teleporting so much..." she groaned, rolling over onto her side and weakly massaging her gurgling stomach.

"Okay..." Once that settled, she rolled over back onto her backside and sat up. "Let's see what kind of stuff we got handed."

Practically ripping her bag open, she dug through the contents with glee. "Lessee...food, water, compass. Some kinda tablet...maybe for map or updates? Useful stuff. Think I remember how to navigate with a map and compass from scouts when I was younger." Then she dug out the last item, and grinned. "Now this...this thing I can get behind."

With a cackle, she shoved everything else back into her bag and zipped it shut, hopping up to her feet and hefting her new toy. "Gonna stab all the shit with this." Fiddling with it for a moment, she extended it and pieced it together into full 'not stuck in a bag too small for it' size and gave it an experimental twirl and thrust. "Kinda heavy...but not more than I can manage."

It was about that time that Karl Jak's voice came through her collar, and she yelped in surprise with a muffled "Fuckin' hell!" as she tried to pay attention to the surprising announcements. Looked like shit had hit the fan, big time, but...the game was still on? Cool. Cool. Great. Fantastic. Anxiety was plateauing at all new heights. Super.

Scooping her bag up and slinging it over one shoulder, she took a look around at her surroundings. "Alright, which way to go now..." she murmured, squinting around and trying to will her breathing to stop coming in such sharp, anxious huffs.

Eventually she gave up and just started jogging off in a random direction.
 

John Connor

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0030 Hours- 12:30 AM Day 1

“Baum” eyed the transportation fob on his belt, eying it as he grabbed the bag containing his survival gear. He gritted his teeth and pressed the transportation fob. Sure time travel was a common occurrence in his timeline but these mini fobs were somewhat different.

Time travel worked in certain ways in his world. The soldier in question would bend down in the time travel machine, usually naked and let the machine send them years in the future or back in the past. However there was one problem with that, John was usually the one sending the soldiers frontwards and backwards in time, not the other way around.

Today he’d be a guinea pig of his own time travel experiment.

Seconds later, after bending down, he grabbed the fob, pressed it and winced from disappearing so fast to…

John mentally cursed “Wait a minute, This isn’t the place I had in mind.”

The terminator followed behind the soldier and reappeared next to the man.

“I’d advise we get moving if we want to keep ahead of everything going on.” The metal menace looked up and nodded.

Seconds later, a blaring voice of one host named Karl Jak, came out of the leg speakers with a rather unfortunate announcement. They were no longer on the usual island but a version way outside their usual scope of view. “Where are we?”

The terminator eyed John as he held onto his pack carefully and tightly.

“There.” John nodded and pointed to the map before moving again.

John looked in the bag for a second, looking over the various rations of food and water he had gotten along with a compass.

“Hm.”

The terminator eyed John and said “Sensors indicate something nearby we should watch for. The soldier dusted off his boots and kept walking. Finding extra water shouldn’t be too bad if he needed it.
 

Dr. McNinja

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“See,” Dr. McNinja grunted, “That’s just poor showmanship.”

Doc kicked a nearby smoldering rock, which tumbled down the jagged mountainside. It clacked pointlessly as the good doctor marched, grumbling the whole way. The whole place was grey, and dead, and boring. Doc was always under the impression he’d end up in a jungle or a sprawling desert or-

Actually, the weather here was pretty nice. Cloudy, but it certainly wasn’t a jungle.

Dr. McNinja continued to grumble as he deftly hopped over a particularly large boulder that obstructed the rough hiking trail he was following.

“And also! Also!” Doc shouted at nobody in particular, “You gave me croissants! CROISSANTS! Now I’ll get to have a lovely picnic while I get mauled to death!”

Dr. McNinja stopped in his tracks, wagging his fist in the air.

“AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN GIVE ME A LATTE”

Dr. McNinja waited, watching the heavens for some sign of corporate apology. When he received none, the physician lowered his head to grumble some more as he continued down the hiking trail. No grappling hook, no sword, no ninja stars, no nothing. And apparently, Sparklelord didn’t feel like making an appearance.

“I’m gonna punch something,” Dr. McNinja groaned as he marched along, “I’m gonna punch something real hard.”
 

Kopaka

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Now it was time to figure out how these rations worked for this year. Sure, Chara had been through the Abyss before, and sure, it was barely past fuck o'clock in the morning...but the teenager was currently running on nothing but booze and popcorn. Even the hardened reliability of her teenage body was insisting on some level of self care.

So, Chara loitered around the safe-zone for a while, looking for somewhere low-key where she could poke at the MRE slop...maybe take a breather after hiking through a few miles of shattered, oozing hellscape. Eventually she settled on a small bunk room that seemed empty, and sat down on a mattress to go through her things.

"Hey there, marshmallow."

Chara was on her feet in an instant, scanning the room for the source of that deep, raspy voice. Sergeant Swift had assured her this was a no-violence zone, but the Abyss had a habit of hard-wiring some serious paranoia. Suddenly she spotted him: Riddick was lounging in the darkness of a top-bunk at the back of the room. His silvery eyes flashed down at her, barely visible in the halogen lamp above the door.

"Oh. It's Vin Diesel again. How long have you been here?" Chara asked slowly. Riddick sat up on his cot, slowly and deliberately.

"I been here for a while. Before you, actually. Just didn't feel like broadcasting it." Riddick said idly. Chara shouldered her bindle again, and edged towards the door. Had this clown actually managed to sneak in here, past all those Cevanti super troopers? She doubted it. Someone had to know he was here. But more importantly, he knew where she was.

"Say, you were getting real close with that Lilith lady, right? Now..." Riddick said, slipping off the cot and landing on the floor with a barely audible thud, "...she didn't happen to put a bug in your ear about...someplace to meet up, did she?"

Chara scoffed.

"Even if Lilith was capable planning ahead like that, why would I bother telling you?" the teen snarked.

"Don't play much poker, do you?" Riddick snarked back.

The two held a deadpan stare for a few moments before Chara blew a fluttering sigh out through her lips.

"I don't have to put up with this. I was looking for an empty room. This room is not empty, so bye." Chara hummed. She turned on her heel and ambled back into the hallway...but she could feel Riddick's sly smile following her.

Nice girl. I should probably bother to learn her name one of these days, but I wouldn't expect her to last long.

Hell of a thing, this homebase zone. Used to be my favorite game as a kid...that is...I used to love tagging the idiots hovering around the safe spot, thinking they could game the system. Why bother running around this bubbling shithole when all of the cash has to walk into my lap? Especially when I'm packing some serious shit in my bag here. Never been much of a reader, but, this book I got is a real page turner.

We'll see if it plays out the way I want, but for now, I'm gonna give optimism a chance.


The towering rogue slipped through the door frame, and leaned against the cool, metal bulkhead. Of course he hadn't snuck in completely unnoticed, but these Markov grunts were surprisingly eager to play along with the ruse. Anything in the name of good prime-time, right? He gave Chara a small wave as she turned the hall corner, and glanced back at him. Her gleaming red eyes complimented the otherwise drab gray bulkheads of the bunker perfectly.

Bet there's gonna be a whole lot more red around this joint before this game is called.

Wonder if they got tea around here?
 

Karl Jak

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Face to Face
#07 Anders vs #15 Josuke​

You would think that, after an event spent stressing and obsessing over battlefield engagements, that the participants of Dante’s Abyss would opt to avoid those locales.

Not this batch, apparently. They had gone three for three when it came to battlefield scuffles, and that meant that, for one more time, Karl and the crew found themselves watching two unknowing people mill through another massacre sight, albeit one that had happened decades ago, rather than just recently. The corpses that Josuke frowned at were, while not ancient, looked like they had been rotting out here in the wilderness for a long while.

Then again… can mechanized monsters really rot? Rust?

It hurt the young man’s head to contemplate the processes that occurred, so he just opted to try and cut the quickest path through that he could.

That path, naturally, led to him nearly being blindsided by a screaming puff of fire.

Josuke yelped as he backpedaled away. As the heat in the air faded, a figure stepped out from behind the nearest overgrown robot carcass.

“You’re… another contestant, right?” Josuke asked with a sigh of relief. “Oh, boy, I thought I was in danger.”

Anders Nazret grinned from ear to ear as he hoisted the steampunk flamethrower up and pointed its business end at Josuke’s chest. “You don’t know the half of it,” he whispered as he pulled the trigger.

His hair’s life flashing before his eyes, Josuke flopped hard onto the ground.

The wizard scowled as he let off on the ignitor switch.

TINK

Glancing down at his feet, Anders tilted his head slightly at the small, baseball-sized black creature with big white eyes, happily swaying feet, and an actively burning wick on the top of his head.

Wick!

Anders turned, trying to shield his body and his weapon as the explosion threw him from his feet.

By the time he had scrambled up to his feet, the adolescent was gone.

It mattered little. Much like Arcadia itself, the fool teenager—and the rest of the filth on this island—couldn’t outrun the flames of purification for forever.

Josuke has the Bombomb Launcher
Anders has the Mustank Gun

Anders has some scrapes and bruises (Story Injury)
 
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Rebecca Chambers

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“Ah,” Gascoigne purred, voice trailing off into a rumbling growl as the little pale beast scampered away behind him, stones and debris skittering under her boots as she fled. “Beasts and beasts and beasts…”

Turning, the hunter lifted his gaze to regard the horde of jibbering creatures peeling off from the old ship’s walls, their metallic bodies clamoring like a swarm of ants over the ruined hulk of metal. Their true number was hard to distinguish in the shadow cast by the towering wreck, what sounded like the grating rasp of dozens of bodies vibrating within the confines of the ship’s crumbling bulkhead, but he could guess that he was horribly outnumbered.

From one hunt to another, then. He had arrived only a few short moments ago, the smooth voice of a man reverberating in his skull from the metal band strapped around his neck, informing him of what was to come. A strange device, to be sure, but that wasn’t his main concern.

The hunter had no proper weapons with which to arm himself. He hadn’t even had the occasion to examine his allotted equipment, rendering him truly defenseless… apart from the puny scrap of metal now clutched in the white-knuckled grip of his right hand, that is. But surely it would be useless against the likes of these creatures, with bodies composed of metal themselves.

Squaring his shoulders and lowering his body into a wolfish lean, Gascoigne openly bared his teeth at the oncoming swarm of beasts, every muscle in his body tensed for battle.

It would have to do.

One of the creatures broke off from the swarm, drawing the hunter’s ire as it crashed into the vessel's floor with a jarringly heavy thud. Tilting his head to the side, Gascoigne watched with keen attention as the beast—which appeared almost dog-like in its construction, despite its wiry silver skeleton—prowled forward, thick claws forged from tarnished steel grating sharply against the grimy metal floor.

Glowing blue eyes glared from within the beast's hollow metal skull, a raspy snarl shivering throughout its artificial frame as it met his blindfolded gaze. Even from afar, the pungent aroma of metal and oil burned at the hunter’s nose, his eyes dropping to track the progress of slick trickles of greasy black oozing out from between the creature’s metallic joints. An automaton of some sort…?

In a flash the strange creature had lunged for him, its glinting musculature whirring in an attempt to rip his throat out. It let out a beastly wail, high-pitched and utterly ungodly, echoing in such a way to suggest a disjointed mimicry of laughter.

Fortunately, Gascoigne was quicker. Surging forward, the priestly man seized the metallic creature around the neck with one hand, gritting his teeth as the beast twisted like a live snake in his grip, thrashing wildly about in a desperate bid to free itself. Its talon-tipped hind legs immediately curled up into a feline defensive posture, the claws there digging into his arm— heavy gouges sinking into the flesh and leaving weeping tracks of agony behind.

Lips peeling back into a snarl, Gascoigne tossed the creature to the ground, where its metallic limbs slithered for a moment as it attempted to scramble away— a short, horrible crunch following as his boot impacted against the side of its skull.

He barely had time to recover before another had leapt at him from his other side, the creatures clearly attempting to break his defenses by assuming a pincer-like formation. Pivoting, Gascoigne grasped the body of the felled beast by the leg, forcefully slamming it into the newest challenger making a lunge for him. Their bodies collided, shattering into a mess of wiring and more of that unsettling oily substance, vibrant electric-blue sparks sent flying as delicate internal components were ripped free.

Still holding onto the limp form of the first slain beast, Gascoigne turned to regard the rest of the pack, chest heaving, the body swaying like a makeshift flail in his grip. Blood dripped from his other arm in thick, sticky rivulets, pooling on the ground beside his boots and perfectly at odds with the grin on his face.

“Hahahaha…” the hunter rasped darkly, enlarged canines sneering from his lips. “A thrilling hunt, indeed.”
 
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“At this time, I want to ask all of our contestants to suit up with their gear if they have not already. Each of you has a teleportation fob that I am going to ask you to pick up and activate. It’s quite simple… you just press the button, but I recommend you make sure all your possessions are on your person at the time. The trip is one-way, and we will not forward your belongings to your final destination.”

While some of the contestants were likely ready prior to the announcement and now firmly on their way, Karl knew that not everyone would have been as on the ball. “If you fail to activate your fob within the next … thirty seconds, I just want you to know that it’ll activate for you, but I can’t promise the landing will be as smooth as it would otherwise be.”

As the first words came over the loudspeakers, Slurt was already feeling the panic set in. Wrapping himself around Christine’s leg, his body shook with fear. He knew what was coming; he had seen it on T.V. Soon… very soon, he would be alone. Alone, and in a place where he might die. The thought was enough to choke him with terror.

There was a sense of urgency in her voice as Christine gently pried his arms from around her leg and said, “C'est bon, petit prince, but we must hurry, yes? I will find you, ne t'en fais pas. I promise, fleur précieuse."

“Yeah, squish face! Don’t worry, we won’t let anything happen to you. But we have to get moving, or Karl will send us all off without anything in our pockets! The Traveller let me in on some of that guy’s secrets and, well, he probably isn’t the type to lie about that. …Probably.” Jester said, as even her casual grin began to slip with the urgency of what was going on.

Christine… Jester… they were always looking out for him. Always making him feel better when he was scared. And he was always scared. But they never yelled at him about it, or made him feel bad. Even now, they just wanted to make him feel better, even though they needed to hurry themselves! But… he wasn’t a baby anymore! And he didn’t want to be a burden to them either! Taking in a deep, only slightly shuddering, breath, he raised his chin and looked at them with a tremulous smile.

“O-ok!”

It was a fight to get the words out, but he pressed on, determination battled fear and prevailing.

“I’ww see you dere! Don’t wowwy about me! I’ww be safe!”

As his two guardians shared a brief look, it seemed as though something unheard was said between them. A new panic set in as he watched his two guardians rush off towards their own rooms, but he didn’t have time to pay it any mind; he had heard the announcement as well as they, and knew that he had to hurry! Turning, the little Goblin dashed into his own room, snagged the strap of his bag, and slammed his palm onto the teleportation device.

Suddenly, the bright lights and warm air of the Barracks were replaced with a biting cold, and a deep darkness. Slurt’s head was spinning and only a force of will kept his beloved cheeseburger within his gullet. He fell to his knees, and pressed his tiny hands to his middle, fighting desperately with vertigo and light-headedness. There was something off… a feeling as though there wasn’t enough air to breathe, and his tiny body shook with both the cold and the struggle to take a breath that felt full. It almost felt like he was drowning, and that now-familiar panic seized hold of his heart.

As his eyes became adjusted to the dim light of the moon and stars, the sudden shock of what he saw drove all his ailments to the back of his mind. He was near the peak of a tall mountain, moonlit and shining with a cap of snow. Below him, a valley lay bathed in shadow and mystery. It wasn’t anything special, just a mountain in the middle of a range, but something about it caused the bile to rise in his throat; an otherworldly anger that had no discernible source. It’s not as though he had ever been on a mountain in his life, but it felt like something he’d gotten very upset with before. Maybe it was from another life.

Something inside Slurt told him that staying there would be a bad idea. That his momentary reprieve from feeling sick wouldn’t last forever, and that something… monstrous could happen upon him at any time. And so, before the cold and thin-air could take him again… before the fear could take him… he slipped his slender body under the strap of his bag and began his trek down the mountain. He'd be brave. For Christine. And for Jester. Well... brave enough, he thought, as he scurried from shadow to shadow, dragging his bag behind him.
 

Sandor Clegane

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The terrain had gotten dicier the further she walked. When she’d landed, at first, the terrain was nasty. It was as if the landscape had flourished, once, in pubescence before an unfortunate onslaught of teenage acne had decimated the once beautiful surface of the Cevanti planet-scape. Left in its place was only ruination, a planet’s acne scarring that would likely never recover on its own.

Jester whistled happily as she passed by wreckages big, small, and colossal. Twisted hunks of metal made ruin decorated the Tiefling’s trail, and every once in awhile she couldn’t help but stop and admire. Giant animal shaped monstrosities, now in pieces, were strewn about close together but separate enough to tell the story of some great calamity that had befallen them. The scenes she put in her rearview were sad, but in their ruination there was also a certain beauty.

“I guess all things have to come to an end,” she told herself out loud, glancing back over her shoulder at a particularly desiccated wreck of a machine. “...though, probably not such a messy end. There is not really a lot of joy in this place.”

She stopped, pursing her lips, and looked around cautiously.

I guess I should not really be walking around and talking out loud like a doofus. I should probably do most of my talking in my brain. …oh, Traveler, I wish that you could hear me. I know that you’re like, a really cool God and stuff, but with this ankle thing on I cannot feel you with me anymore. I do not even know if you know where I am - maybe all of this weird techno-stuff has pulled us apart for a little while.

While her boots padded along leaving dusty footprints in their wake, Jester Lavorre’s tail drooped sadly. To think that the Traveler was not with her here…well…she hadn’t been without him since…

Since like, ever. Since I was just a little girl. …and there were times, back then, when I couldn’t really feel him. Technically, he’s always with me, I think. Technically. And I know that he’ll show me some kind of sign that he’s here with me in this weird place, too. I am sure of it!

Gathering up the natural pep that made her the dazzling Tiefling all of her friends back home loved so much, Jester trundled on, determined to keep her own morale up. For herself, for the Traveler, for the viewers who needed to see what the Traveler’s chosen were made of, and for the little squish-face out there that might need her help.

Wherever he was, Jester was sure that little Slurt would keep his head down. As long as he kept it together long enough for either Jester herself or Christine to find their way to him they should probably be able to piggy-back him all the way to the end; life or death…whatever it took.

Probably.

Pock-marked barren terrain wrought with signs of Unmaking slowly began to give way to slopes and hills, also bearing the same signs of unnatural deconstruction. Sometime in the past, Jester was sure, this may have been a lush land of plenty. That time, however, was no longer.

Off in the distance she saw the tall peak of a mountain and felt herself drawn towards it. In the back of her mind she felt it likely that others were probably drawn towards it, as well. After all, mountains were like, the coolest! Jester sprung off towards it in a skip before she caught herself, slowed down, and forced her jubilant body into a careful stride. It was all she could do to remind herself to check her peripherals frequently, and to keep her peaked ears primed in case some tell-tale sound might alert her to lurkers in the shadows. The blue Tiefling began to stealth her way, double time, over sloped hillscape with her pink eyes roving and her long ears listening.

The moon dangled high in the inky night sky.

She’d been walking for some time.

About half the distance between her starting location and the mountain she’d set her mind towards scaling, Jester heard something strange. She’d just descended a gradual slope, and another one loomed up ahead which placed her firmly in the bosom of the pair of hills.

Up ahead in the direction she’d been moving towards there was a distinct sound of something dragging across the ground. Someone hauling a body, perhaps? The hairs on the back of Jester’s neck stood up, so she hunkered down low, stopped moving, and began listening.

The dragging sound was getting closer, and she could see a small silhouette pulling something along. Was it a sack with a body in it, maybe? And was that some kind of tiny…

“Little squish-face?” she whispered aloud, voice low and incredulous. “No…effing…way.”

She cupped her hands around her mouth and whisper-shouted: “LITTLE SQUISH-FACE! IT IS ME, JESTER!”

The figure stopped, and she could vaguely make out the shape of its head turning.

“Miss Jestaw!? MISS JESTAW!”

The tiny scampering form of Slurt bolted towards her like a robin sprinting across the grass towards a worm, feet pitter-pattering one after the other with joyous exuberance. The boy took a leap, Jester caught him, pulled him close, then she wrapped her arms as tightly around the precious little gift as she could.

...Traveler. You are here with me, aren’t you? …this is my sign.

“Miss Jestaw! I’ve been weawwy, weawwy bwave! I was on a whole mountain, and I made it all the way down hewe, and now hewe you awe! I’m not awone anymowe!” Slurt rushed over his words in his excitement; his voice was muzzled against her chest.

“You have been really, really brave,” Jester agreed, while her heart melted in her chest. “Neither of us are alone anymore, and you’re not going to be alone again! I’m never going to leave you alone here, little squish-face. You are my best squish-face, and you’re my favorite little squish face, and I am oh. So. Glad. That I found youuuu!”

The Tiefling clutched the goblin so tightly that she heard the wind whistle through his lips, then let go, remembering that she was rather stronger than your average woman, and that the goblin was exceptionally tiny. She did rub her own blue, freckled cheek against his small green one, though.

“I’m going to make sure nothing can hurt you. Just you wait and see. Wait until somebody runs into me with this bad boy.”

Jester unzipped her pack, realizing at that moment that it was the first time she’d done so, and began rummaging around. The Traveler had seen her to Slurt, though, so he’d probably give her some kind of really cool weapon. …Probably. Even if Karl Jak didn’t realize it, the Traveler always had Jester’s back. He was like, the coolest and most handsome God, after all.

She felt something in the clutter of her survival bag, wrenched it free of the bag dramatically, held it aloft for both she and Slurt to see, then felt her jaw drop.

“A spork!?” Jester actually exclaimed. “A spork!? You brought me all the way to the squish-face just so I could protect him with a spork!?

…from the Traveler’s perspective, Jester imagined, that might actually be pretty funny. There was a certain cosmic irony in all of it. Despite herself, the absurdity of the situation made her blue lips split into a wide grin.

“Ha! I’m going to beat everything we come across with a spork, and everybody watching this silly little game is going to see exactly what the Traveler is about,” the Tiefling whispered almost fanatically, clutching her spork with two white knuckled fists, and staring at it. …she glanced over at Slurt, who was still looking up at her reverently. “Oh. Right. Uh...what did you get, little squish-face?”

Slurt shrugged his little shoulders.

“I don’t weawwy know.”

“Well! Let’s find out, then!”

Jester shouldered her pack, held the goblin boy’s hand with her dominant hand, clutched the spork in her off-hand, and led Slurt back to the place he’d left his bag. One of her blue hands waved him flippantly towards the bag while she grinned at the child and nodded frenetically in approval.

“Go on!” she encouraged. “Do it!”

Slurt unzipped the bag hesitantly, then rooted around inside. His eyes widened as one of his hands clasped on it, but because of his size he had to double up with his other hand to clutch whatever he’d found. Through his struggle he ended up half in the rucksack with his waist and aft end dangling out while his feet scrambled for purchase. To save him further trouble Jester slipped her hands under the boy’s armpits and tugged him up out of his pack.

He was holding a gun…but it had some kind of strange glow to it.

“Woah. Little squish-face…I think, maybe, I should hold onto that,” Jester mumbled, eyes locked onto the weapon. “I don’t know if kids should have guns. I mean, I don’t think anybody should have guns, but definitely not kids.”

Slurt practically shoved the gun at her, apparently sharing her sentiments.

“Okay, but Miss Jestaw? …can I have that?” Slurt asked, pointing at the spork.
 

Rogue

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It looked like some sort of barricade, military types from the gun and armor the pair of people on watch looked to be sporting. Ah was pretty sure that they weren’t contestants, not unless the gear we’d been provided with was extremely one-sided this year. Well, it was either introduce myself or keep wandering through this nightmare of a jungle until something decided to try and make a morsel of me! Ah stepped out of the brush, duffel bag strapped across my back and hands already up.

“Hey there! Ah’ve got my h-”

“Hands up! Halt! Identify yourself!”

Ah stopped short, making sure my hands were a bit more raised just for good measure. They were real jumpy, which meant that there had to be something real bad out there in the wilds. Ah’d only heard a bit about Cevanti in the Hinterlands. Stuff that was happening on other planets didn’t really come into the lifestyle of your average farmer all that much. Didn’t this place explode or something?

“Honestly, The fact that ah’m not a robot should really make it pretty clear that ah’m not a threat out here, doesn’t it?”

The pair of soldiers relaxed just a bit, motioning her forwards.

“You’re also here to check on the item then?” One of them asked, warily glancing towards the surroundings.

“Ah think so? Ah’ll be honest, ah don’t have much more in the way of information then you lot ah’d expect.”

They didn’t look particularly impressed, glancing at one another.

“You’ll need to speak with the Sergeant about that then, Miss. We’re here to guard the perimeter.”

Ah gave a casual two-fingered salute and moved past them.

“Thanks, Sugah. Don’t worry, ah won’t try nothin’!”

“You couldn’t, even if you tried, Miss. The thing that Syntech sent us projects a field that prevents violence.”

Ah paused, squinting as the soldier’s words sunk in. Now hold on just a moment…

“Why’d you go and point a gun at my face, then? That’s how to scare a lady!”

The soldier hesitated for just a second then waved me off, turning back to face the perimeter. Fine, ah could take a dismissal. Ah didn’t have time for this, there was more important stuff to focus on.

The bunker wasn’t large inside, just a few of what could generously be described as ‘rooms’ and the hallways that connected them. A few more soldiers waited inside, along with a big old mess of something that looked like a really broken piece of electronic gadgetry. Ah paid a half-ear’s attention as the situation was explained to me. This wasn’t really what ah was expecting from Dante’s Abyss. Ah was here to try out how well ah could measure up to the roughest sons o’ guns in the Crossroads, not play mechanic

“So we’re here to fix this thing?” Ah furrowed my brow, “That’s a good deal less interesting than fighting in wars or…”

“You need to calm down.” Sgt. Swift cut in, “We didn’t ask for you all to show up, but if you want to get out of this place you’re going to have to work with us.”

“Fine, fine.” Ah shrugged, “You all can wait here where it’s safe with your weapons and your armor. Ah’ll go exploring by myself without a weapon. Ah’m sure it’ll work out splendidly.”

“Trouble follows me.” Swift scowled back,” There’s a few other Abyss loiterers here already. Maybe one of them will keep you company.”

Without a better idea ah left the good sergeant to go look. At the very least ah should wait until the sun was out. There was nothing good about wandering in the dark when there was danger around. My powers wouldn’t protect me from anything robotic, and ah wasn’t entirely sure how wise it would be to try and absorb the powers of something that was unmade anyways. In that case, ah needed to make some allies, at least for the moment.

In a building this small it didn’t take too long to find the one who didn’t look like a military soldier. The small girl didn’t look all that threatening either, couldn't be more than a few years older than a child. But ah suppose you don’t go and sign up for something like Dante’s abyss without good reason, so ah'd withhold any judgements for the time being. Who knew? maybe she'd turn out to have something neat for me to borrow in a fight?

“Some nice shades, Sugah. Worried the early morning sun will get in your eyes?” Ah smiled, leaning against the frame of the doorway with my arms folded. “Ah’m guessin’ you’re about to be heading out into the wilds to help these soldiers out in a bit? Care for some company?”
 

Ganondorf

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The competition got off to an explosive start for Kolith.

The Elder Spirit Vessel walked through the Cevanti jungles, the feral, untamed trees growing wildly and with abandon all around him. In some ways, this Cevanti felt natural to him, like it was an extension of his forest home but even more primitive and wild. If he survived this ordeal, he would have to find this place.

Kolith felt the wind penetrate his cloth tunic through the slash that another contestant had tried to turn into a mortal wound. The metal shard left a thin cut along the right side of his abdomen, but it had been shallow and already scabbed over. Mere moments into arriving and his entire journey had almost been cut short.

The dense foliage provided a great deal of shade and cover, but the pedigree of entrants was likely better than Kolith had first estimated. The one who slashed at him fell from a place unseen, as Kolith would do to his prey in his home forest. He moved into the thicker brush, skulking as if tracking a spooked rabbit to minimise the sound he made.

After some time of travel, Kolith sat behind a thick trunked tree and removed the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Unzipping it, he pawed through its contents again, shifting the strange metal weapon that blasted fire magic. Ready-made food packs and bottles of water held the most interest otherwise. A metal rectangle with a glass front displayed a map when pressed, somehow displaying Kolith’s location on it, likely through some wizardry. The compass was near useless to him – he didn’t need a constructed aid to know which direction was north.

As his eyes settled on the magic map, he remembered the words of the organiser. The lands around them were slowly falling to the Unmade corruption. Had the Elder Spirits realised he could face the Unmade in this tournament? Wasn’t he training to battle the corrupted monsters, not to battle them right now?

Or had they misled him, testing his initiative and determination in a way they didn’t express? Was this all another test of will?

Mind games upon mind games, Kolith thought as he unscrewed the lid of a water bottle and took a swig.

Regardless of the circumstances, Kolith was here to hone his determination. To do what must be done. To make decisions and be confident in them, and to deal with the fallout, if any, later. It’s what he had to be.

It’s what he would be.
 

Gildarts

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The spectral shadow found herself amid darkness. The last moments she’d spent with Slurt had been spent just gazing with care into the small creature’s innocent eyes. That had reminded her of the good in life. She’d reached to hold his hand just as the curtain of the murder show fell. Then, those feelings had been ripped away.

The slippery sound met her ears as Christine unzipped the black duffel. Saw the very human items inside and pursed her lips in disappointment. She’d save the food for Slurt when she found him again. Which, if you didn’t know it, was this bloodthirsty murderer’s number one priority.

Something caught her eye. That would come in handy later. She wondered where she could stash it on her black jumpsuit for easy access. She chose a snug little spot for it between her scapulae, right along her spine and hidden by her hair.

The thought of it began to itch in her mind.
 

Sigmund Vrell

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Sigmund furrowed his brow as he glanced around, still a little baffled despite the explanation sounding from his collar. He was no expert in teleportation technology, or really any technology at all, but it was a little disconcerting that the contestants could be thrown that far off course. Really, he didn’t know why people were so obsessed with tech when some arcanery did the job just as well. The odds of being driven mad by contact with an Old God weren’t even that high when you knew what you were doing!

Sighing, the cultist dropped his bag and began to rifle through it, searching for his weapon. Being dropped into the middle of Unmade territory was… inconvenient, if a little exciting. There would be plenty more chaos in the event than he had initially anticipated, which was a pleasant surprise. Gods, the scion was almost tempted to believe that Karl did this on purpose, which would have been a praise-worthy move on his part. But, nonetheless, if he wanted to survive, he was going to need the weapon that Mr. Jak had graciously imparted upon him.



Where was it?

His bag had the standard supplies. Food, water, a map and compass that would be of dubious use in unknown territory, and…

Sigmund removed a small item from his bag, all covered in bright decoration and plastic, encasing a small action figure if someone who was, apparently, named ‘Mirage’. The priest stared blankly at it for a few moments, in utter disbelief. By Gal’skap, why?!

His weapon in his last DA was fantastic, a weapon that was practically custom-made to spread terror. This, though, he couldn’t see any sense in it. The cultist scanned his eyes over the action figure again and again, trying to make sense of it, until he glanced over the name Mirage again and something clicked in his brain.

He had heard that name before.

He had idly caught wind of a contestant who Karl hated more than anyone else, who he had literally cloned just to kill, and that contestant’s name just maaaaay have been Mirage.

The whole situation made a kind of morbid sense to Sigmund. An effigy of Karl’s most-hated person, his nemesis, a manifestation of madness that drives a man to spend untold resources just to kill someone’s over and over. When the high priest looked at it like that, the weapon felt kind of fitting, in a bizarre way. But no matter how fitting it was, he could hardly kill someone with an action figure. At best he could probably try to beat someone with it, like a toddler having a tantrum, but he felt that the results would probably be about the same.

Stuffing Mirage back in his bag, Sigmund huffed to himself and got walking. Looking in either direction, he could tel that one way looked rather mundane, while the other was distinctly more twisted and unmade. Naturally, he decided to walk towards the latter. The unmaking was incredibly unsubtle in its creeping blight, lacking the beauty and elegance of Aesir-touched lands such as Ranvier, but really any sort of corruption was enough to make him feel a little more at home.

“Ah well, time to cause some chaos or die trying. How about it, Mirage?” Sigmund asked dramatically. Mirage didn’t respond, but the cultist just decided to assume that he agreed. He seemed like an agreeable guy.
 
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