Apocalypse RP #3: The Vanishing

[Marvelous Miscreant]

Ben's mind raced, nothing that had happened in the past few minute made any sense and he was desperately trying to piece it together. Unable to understand he defaulted to panicking. He was good at panicking.

And when the voice echoed up from the creek bed with no visual source, Ben nearly lost it. Against all survival instinct and logic, Ben began screaming at the top of his lungs.

"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!"

Having got that off his mind, Ben tried to flee. Forget Nix, forget everyone else, forget all of this he thought.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Ben begins running in place as Jeff tries to grab him down. However, no matter how far he seems to reach he can never touch him. Jeff's mouth is moving but Ben can't hear anything.

Wulf:  "Hey man, hold on calm down. Calm down!"

[Philote]

Vault:  Nix could not manage getting lucky twice in a row in this fight. The dagger flying towards his face is too much to allow him to overrule his instincts, so despite subconsciously knowing it would fail, Nix jerks away to dodge the blade.

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[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Phi:  You jerk your head. Pretty far. Unfortunately, just not far enough. You feel the tip of the blade puncture your cheek and and fall away. He was, after all, just spitting it. You see moonlighting glinting off his free arm as blades grow up out of it like grass, around two dozen in all. Then he shuts his eyes. He swings his arm out as though trying to catch himself from a fall, wild and randomly. Totally without purpose. The blades clink together as he swings, sounding like the worlds angriest wind-chime.

You all hear what sounds like people sharpening knives down in the trench. A lot of them.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

"Hey, man, calm down!" Tyler calls back to Ben, "Calm down! I can't even hear myself think!"

There's simply too much to think about right now. In the depths of these woods, a monstrous mutant dog could emerge any moment, a weirdo with some strange power, and now...a sound like blades being sharpened in the distance?

Tyler crouched over, putting his hands on his knees. He just needed one peaceful second. That was all. A second, perhaps, to calm down, and think straight. Somehow, the sight of his own two shoes, not running in a fit of terror, was something helpful toward the comfort he sought.

GV:  "Is Tantalus' power something like Action Reversal? Anything you want to do, it does the opposite? If so, I may be able to think of something useful for the situation at hand."

[Philote]

Vault: Nix hollers in pain as the blade slices him. He begins to panic, this day was still getting worse and there were only so many close calls with death that he could take, but the fear does not quite seem to be able to take him over.

Adrenalin pumps through Nix's body and time slows as he focuses only on surviving. A crazy idea pops into his head.

He could just kill the guy, couldn't he? The monster's power would keep him being successful and close to death was as good as Nix needed, but could he muster the will? He would still have to act with the intent of killing this man.

Nix moves forward, raising his steak knife to phase his arms through the man's defenses and strike his heart, still not believing what his own body was doing.


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[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Phi:  You feel the knife slide through flesh like a ghost directly toward the heart, but instead of feeling it slide in to meat instead an impact with something hard causes a little tremor to shoot through it and up your arm. You feel another impact as the thing you hit is seemingly pulled away. He raises up his other arm, and you can't help but notice a strange bulge in his forearm, like the sort of muscle you see in a cartoon. He flexes the muscle and all of a sudden a tea kettle explodes out from it and goes flying past your head. Then you see needles, like the sort you buy at a hobby shop, come sliding out of that same muscle. Not just pointed at you either, pointed in all direction. The muscle in his arm is doing its bet impression of a sea urchin. He grins at you.

Phi:  When you acted to strike the heart and kill, but missed, nothing impeded you. Your arm stayed directly on course the entire time with no deviation. In fact, for the first time since you came down here, you felt like you were getting something done. Like you were moving normally.

[Philote]

Vault: Nix jumps towards the needles, trying to hit them and still acting on instinct.

(I'm going off the idea that Nix was about to panic earlier but was unable to fully panic due to the power in the area, forcing him to act.)

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[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Phi:  Nix's fingers come this close to bushing the needles, but there may as well have been miles and miles of difference separating his intangible hand and the mans arm. He flexes, curling his arm in a classic strongman way, and the fired out by the muscle pressure in all directions. Most of them end up in him, peppering his neck, forearm, shoulder, and burying themselves into the side of his face. But he doesn't seem to mind. Even as you can see the blood trickling down from around the silver shafts buried in him he doesn't see to mind.

Something comes flying at you up out of the trench, a few of them burying themselves in each of you. Jeff catches the worst of, being speared in the the side of the head by three and letting out a yell, but Ben and Tyler don't get out unscathed.

Pins. Little metal needles, like you find in sowing kits. You see a few buried in the mud of the bank, twinkling the the moonlight, on both sides of the trench in most places. Some are even glinting in the trees around you. Like they were fired. Something in the trench definitely fired those needles.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

Tyler rears back, with a shriek of pain.

"AUUUGH!" he tries to pull the needles free, one by one; he looks at them, terror growing in his eyes, "Wha--what the hell are these things?"

He looks toward the trench, and thinks to have a peek further over the edge. He stops short, though; this might be superpowers at work. Someone maybe with a power like Ben could call the things up from a distance, perhaps further ahead of them, or further behind. Somewhere in the trees, maybe?

One never could be too sure, things being how they were. He called over to his friend that he would try to help as he could, but he couldn't risk putting his face down there and being a direct target. For all he knew, those needles were already working a lethal poison through their systems as they spoke. So whoever was targeting them had to come to the light first, before he knew how best to come for Nix.

He turned to every side, and called out as far through the forest as he could.

"Hello?! ANYBODY OUT THERE?!" it was all he could think to say, "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?"

GV:  Assuming he's trying to reach his voice PAST Tantalus, it should fall short, and he should unwittingly contact Tantalus, no?

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

"Angels." rumbles a voice behind him. "Angels....afraid.....trying to abandon as sinking boat."

The voice is deep, and so tired you can feel the literally feel the weariness as the vibration rattle around in your bones. A gnarled old tree, dead and growing on a hill overlooking a graveyard, the sort of tree that was once used for hangings, would have a voice not far off from this. Old, ugly, and with a hint of malice. The sort of voice that would call up to you from the pit of hell.

As you turn you find that the owner matches his voice. He is huge, easily double your own height and so broad that your arms could only barley reach around one of his own. His face is man like, but horribly scarred with one long slit down the middle dividing it evenly in two. He has no nose, not even nostrils, and his eyes are black as pitch. As he brings up one of his huge apelike arms you notice that, despise his great size, he is also emaciated and skinny with the remnants of shaggy black hair hanging off him like moss on a tree. He opens a mouth containing more teeth than you have ever seen in one creature and tosses in a small pine-cone, which he chews with a familiar crunching sound.

It's him. The thing that was sitting on the log. But that's completely impossible. There's no way a monster this size could get this close without you noticing. Without anyone hearing something, not with the brush in the woods, not with the low hanging branches of the trees. Jeff is speechless and collapses onto his read backing away. You can tell from his features that he's been taken completely by surprise.

And there are no footprints left by the creatures....

The creatures hooves. It has hooves, like those of a horse. They would defiantly leave prints in the soft earth but there just aren't any. None at all.

This thing, this ugly hellish thing that has appeared before you, it's eyes work like it's trying to figure out what to say.  It stares intently down into the creekbed and them, with clear effort as though choosing its words carefully, continues. "A angel has become.....a tick.....a greedy thing......fighting another.......another angel.....there."

[Philote]

@Vault: Nix thinks. And thinks. And thinks as the man stands there looking half dead and punctured with needles.

Nix was out of his element. He had held his own so far, but he needed to get one of the others before he got himself killed. The large Tantalus was worrying, but so far he had done nothing to try and kill them while this psychotic man clearly had and was going to continue to do so.

@NotMarv: "Ben! Get yourself down here now or I'm going to die!"

@Vault: He quickly slaps his forehead and turns to look at Sam instead.

@NotWulf: "Ben! Get yourself down here now or I'm going to die!"

[Marvelous Miscreant]

Ben stared at the huge hairy creature before him. He tried to think, tried to process what he was seeing, but his mind was a whirlwind of confusion. Most of all Ben tried not to panic. He tried to hold down his fear. He tried to remain calm.

He failed.

Ben stopped thinking, he just acted. Fear had gripped his mind and directed his actions. The scraps of metal in his pockets rose up and swarmed about the area. Once again, the his panic created a swirling storm of metal.

 "Ben! Get yourself down here now or I'm going to die!"

Nix's voice cut through the fog of fear briefly and Ben's eyes shifted, unseeing to gaze vaguely towards the ditch. He didn't hesitate, he just jumped. Anything to flee the monstrosity nearby and to join his friend. The swirling wind of metal follwed like a swarm of bees.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Instantly, everything comes into view. Like some veil shattered, there is Nix down in the trench, as though he were always there. And he isn't alone.

Standing opposite him, face upturned toward you in surprise, is a man not much older than yourself. He has a plethora of needles sticking out of one side of his face, some of them bleeding, and as you fall closer they start to wiggle and pull out. They pull out and join the trail of metal behind Ben.

As Ben unintentional lands right on top of the man you can see that that's not all. He starts to scream as shapes rise up under his skin, pressing themselves outward. He begins to rip, smaller bits of metal tearing themselves out of him, knives and spike slowly shoving their way out all over his body.

"Damn, what is this power!?" He shrieks out to no one. Its the same voice from before, the spectral voice from the trench. "PUUUUUUURRRRRGE!"

Up on the ledge, the huge creature reaches down and picks up a fistful of mud, hurling it into the trench in one motion. The Mud slams into Ben, a ball of it big around as him. It hurts, but it throws him off the man just as a torrent of metal erupts from his body. Knives, crowbars, tire irons, coins, small sheets of metal, all is expelled like a shotgun spray directly upward through the place Ben just was. He's wounded, the shirt he was wearing sheared away by the blast and showing the multiple bleeding wounds where the metal had been torn out of his body by Ben, but he seems remarkable unwounded considering everything that just blasted out of him. He tries to stand as the items rain down around him. He almost gets up, almost, but it seems like he can't quite push himself far enough. He flops back down on his back in the muddy creekbed, staring up at the behemoth in anger.

"This is what you wanted, right Tantalus? Tantalus, Tantalus, wants everything but can't have it. Can never do what he wants. Even if you do nothing I'll still starve to death."

He tilts his head back until he sees Ben, before looking at Nix.

Everyone but Phi: "Tell the boy congratulations on managing to kill me. I'm a dead man, laying in a muddy creek. But I think I still have enough left to arrange two escorts to hell for me!"

The mud of the creekbed begins seeping, no, being sucked into this mans body. He grins at the two that are with him down here, and yells, "They are not worth of ascension! They lack the will!"

The man clenches his biceps, and a bevy of high speed shoot out of them at Ben and Nix.

[Philote]

Nix goes to jump behind Ben's wall of metal but stops himself as he remembers how events work in this area. Instead, he leads towards the incoming debris, trying to hit it.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

He doesn't move far enough. Not a single one of the rocks manages to find their mark, some shooting bare inches from his skin and still missing entirely.

The mans eyes widen, all the anger drains from his face, and he laughs.

"Well, maybe one of them does have the will after all." He says to himself, feeling around until his hand finds one of the knives that had earlier poured out of him. He touches the blade, and the weapon just slides into his hand bloodlessly. "I'd be careful if I were them, though. The climb is hard!"

He flexes, and the knife goes spinning up into the air. "I'll be going on ahead. They should look me up, if they can't reach the next limit. It's been fun, Tantalus!!!"

The knife comes down, blade first, burring itself deep in his forehead. He gasps once, then his open eyes go blank. Nothing more.

The creature up on the back says nothing. It's only response, if it is a response, is to pop another pine cone into its mouth and start crunching away.

[Philote]

Nix falls back and rests on the ground, letting some of the adrenalin run out of him.

Looking at Tantalus, he says "What now? Are you going to go at us too? Can you even hear me when I talk like this?"

He turns his head to talk to Ben. "Can you hear me Tantalus?"

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

When you turn to talk to Ben, the behemoth nods its head.

[Ericus Europaeus (Bug)]

CONTENTS DELETED

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[Philote]

Nix continues to talk to Ben. "So....Uh....What now? What are you?"