Match starts 4-15-14 at 12:01AM. Good Luck!
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Match starts 4-15-14 at 12:01AM. Good Luck!
“Don’t hurt him, husband.” Ruby’s words cut Leopold’s confidence into pieces. They tore at his calm, faltering façade like raking talons. Since dawn, the red headed matriarch of Scara Brae’s dwindling noble populace served her purpose. An angel on a devil’s shoulder, a guiding light.
“Hurt him?” Leopold puckered his lips. “I think you need to check a dictionary for a definition of ‘fighting’.”
“Which need not be with swords, spears, and side-steps,” she quickly rebuked. Resting hands on hips, she tapped her boot’s tip on the flagstones of the castle courtyard. The buttress and towers of Castle Ixian served as a grand backdrop to her theatrics. “Winning is everything to you, I understand. But…,” she trailed off in thought.
Guards marched back and forth along the battlements. The blazon tapestries of the Ixian Knights fluttered in a light, jubilant summer morning breeze. Maple and oak leaves were thick in the air, their warming trunks vibrating with the forest’s ascension to its zenith of life. Winter was a distant memory. Failure, long-forgotten parable.
“What would you have me do?” he asked. He turned slowly. His black overcoat felt as though it were made of steel plates. His back bent. His spine creaked. His pallid, sunken eyes strained against the clarity of daylight.
“Show Ciato that you are not like other people. Show him his reputation does not, for once, precede him.”
“Forget he’s a monster?” Leopold snarled. He would not.
“Not at all,” Ruby sighed. “Just don’t show him what you think of his past deeds and duties neglected.”
The truth in her words silenced the merchant’s doubts. Finally, he saw her point of view. He clenched his fists, whitened skin taught over bruised bone. Come sundown he would be either one-step closer to victory, or finally freed of his wife’s insistences. He loathed this tournament. He had done what Sei Orlouge asked. He had seen to the sand bastard, or rather, been seen by, and yet somehow he still felt enslaved. He felt ensnared. He felt weak.
“If by some small miracle I cross paths with Astarelle again I will treat you to a diamond from the Ataman vaults.” The reference to the giant king’s legendary riches brought a smile to Ruby’s face. She knew that he knew that she knew no such promise felt kept. All the same, it brought peace between them. Words, Leopold now realised, did more fighting than his spear arm or livers against whiskey ever could.
A glance across shoulder messages through the castle. Cracked stone, polished steel and dutiful souls fluttered back and forth. Guards ran through corridors of art and statues ancient before the words ‘ready Misery’ were whispered in the deep dark forgotten places of the Orlouge bastion. Leopold smelt the sulphur, the sacrament, and the salience of the creature’s magic long before it engulfed him in a sorcerous green cloud of vapour. As the world fell away, he conjured his sabre-spear and bid a fond farewell to freedom once more.
"They say that when a scorpion is surrounded by fire, it would rather end its own miserable life than be consumed by the flames," Ciato Orlouge, brother to Sei and Steppenwolf, spoke to nobody in particular. The mutiliating Mystic had cut a swath through many of his siblings underlings. He defeated the shadow general, and trained the boy with an absurd name, yet his request to duel with his silent kin was still met with no reply. Now, he stood, once again ready to face another pawn in Sei's grand schemes in order to finally have a match to settle which of the Orlouge brothers was strongest.
Ciato stood in a plain circle of dirt. Sporadic gusts of winds would occasionally take plumes of dust onward to unknown locations, which slightly reminded the nobleman of the restless Fallien sands. The circle was about twenty feet in diameter, and surrounded by several large bales of hay. Each straw had been meticulously coated in lantern oil, ready to go up in a wonderful inferno at any given minute. He could smell the fumes of the oil as they tickled his nose, teased the notion of premature immolation.
In truth, Ciato Orlouge once had a severe fear of fire. e would regularly have visions of flames that consumed his entire body and burned him to death. These nightmares had become a thin of the past for the alabaster bastard however, and now he sought to truly conquer this fear at the expense of his brother's elaborate game. Sei surely thought that if Ciato ran through this gauntlet, this proverbial who's who of Ixian past present and (knowing Sei's charismatic nature, probably) future, the pale Orlouge would be weakened to the point of easy victory for the strategist.
Ciato closed his eyes and imagined how satisfied he would feel when he ripped Sei's lungs out and fed them to him.
The tip of his sword, the beloved Asterodeia, stood just an inch from the ground. The blade glistened in the hot sun, and Ciato was careful not to settle the reflection of the weapon onto the hay bales. From what he had heard about this opponent, he would be comfortable standing inside the fire. After all, this Leopold Winchester was married to Ruby, formerly of the La Roux family. Ruby Winchester was renowned as a daughter of the heonix herself, and the oportunity to slay the loved one of a fire bird was too good an opportunity for the vicious Mystic to pass up.
There would be no fear today as he fought the man who married fire itself. Instead, Leopold would come to find that suicide would be much more preferable to whatever heinous torture Ciato had planned inside their proverbial personal hell...
Through aeon and aria, Leopold travelled leagues in less than a second. Appearing in the meeting place, the promise of fire and the parable of failure assailed his senses. He cough. He spluttered. He realised the danger and baulked.
“I should have known…,” he spat. Clearing his nostrils of the oil was one thing, but it linger in his lungs for days to come. “Fight me like a man, Ciato!” he roared.
Standing in his typical military garb outside the circle, Leopold took on an air of malefic that was brooding and distrusting. His pallid form and sickly vigour stood in stark contrast to the buoyant sun and the life riddled atmosphere about him. Cold air, spring-like goose bumped his skin and sharpened his senses. Liquor on the tongue was his only defence against the toxins whipping through the arena.
“You’re not toying with squires and harlots anymore!” The reference to his past encounters, his supposed ‘victories’ came on the wings of gossiping little gibber birds. It was Leopold’s only reference to the man’s past deeds, and then he would fall in line with Ruby’s wishes. He was here to fight. He was here to win. He was not here to suffer at the hands of a lunatic’s illusions of grandeur.
The nauseating roar of an unseen crowd swept away the tension. Leopold assumed Ciato was close, and made to launch himself up the natural steppes formed in the hay battlements. As he crested the ridge, there the maniac was.
White fangs glistened upon the ivory canvas that was Ciato Orlouge's face. He met with the eyes of his foe and saw a green hue not unlike a meadow in his pupils. Leopold Winchester stood above the straws of hay like some sort of self righteous champion. Ciato knew this particular type of reluctant hero all too well; they were the kind of people that seemed all too eager to participate in things such as tournaments, but when push came to shove, would approach each foe with shaky knees and sweaty palms. Leopold was one of the many kinds of 'Knights' the house of Ixian produced in that vein.
The Mystic raised his blade into the air, the tip aimed towards the chest of the Winchester Lord. the hay gave off waves in the distance and made Leopold seemed more contoured than what he actually was. The alabaster bastard sneered as Leopold made his way off of the horse food. A small cloud of dust drifted in the mans wake as he landed upon the ground. Ciato jolted his head to one side of his neck and then the other, which caused loud cracks to vocalize from his bones. He was more than ready to cut down the meadow in his foe's eyes.
"Before we begin," Ciato's voice as smug, as if he had already thought this battle as won, "do you have anything you wish for me to tell that whore wife of yours? Thaynes know it would not be the first time an Orlouge had to talk about the death of someone she loves." The Mystic referred to the death of Duffy Bracken, one o Ruby Winchester's first loves. It was moreso a way to sow the seed of discontent into his fellow nobleman, and make him question not only Sei, but Ruby as well.
As he finished his taunt, the bales of hay were set ablaze, and a tower of red shot up to the sky, as if trying to strangle heaven itself. Ciato closed his eyes and took a deep breath to allow the sent of the burnt straw to enter his nostrils. Nothing added to a symphony of chaos like the roar of a good inferno. The wave of heat almost instantly formed sweat beads along his ghost white complexion. He awaited for Leopold's answer before this clash of husbands, a duel of royals, the fight of the internal fires, could begin.
“Reformed whore, actually,” Leopold chuckled. His eyes betrayed his supposed sense of humour. He descended a level and forth from nowhere the Sable Spear appeared.
The flames rose tempestuously and enclosed the merchant in the carnal arena with the miser. He advanced another step, and then with a hop dropped to terra firma proper. His boots, battered beyond recognition as master crafted flattened the oiled earth. Black rod of sky’s bane in his right hand, he clenched his left into a tight, white-knuckled edifice of power.
“I’m surprised at you,” he erred cautiously. He wanted to rile the Orlouge, but he was cautious. A nest of vipers he could not weather was the last thing he wanted to see. “You think you can kill me?” he chuckled softly. He cowed his head in intrigue, rolled it forwards and stared earnestly at the tips of his toes.
“If Duffy can perish, then you easily can!”
Leopold let lose his laugh proper. It was a deep toned and belly born show of amusement. The thought of Duffy’s death being a source of humour amongst the Cult, and all the enemies of the Ixian Knights was a by-product of ill-gotten gains it seemed. Many a long night Raven, God of Death had dreamt of that umbra sleep. It was a source of contention amongst the Old Gods that he and he alone would outlive the others. When the world fell to ruin, or burnt in tyrant’s ire, Leopold Winchester would watch.
“Please try, I hav earned a distraction saving crumbling empires and ailing leaderships of late.” He clenched his right fist until it whitened as his left about the shaft of his weapon. “You’ll find me,” he chuckled again, without meaning to. The flames rose higher. The heat on his back, unbearable; the fire reflecting a growing rage born of frustration. He could not show his disgust as he intended; wife’s accord, but he could show Ciato Orlouge that, as black feathers sprouted from his arms and back – that to kill Death himself, you would need more than fell words and witticisms.
“Quite the challenge.” Three purple spheres, crackling inverse, formed, fluttered, and fell upon Ciato at the behest of Leopold’s wishes. In their wake, he followed. Eyes reddened. Nose hooked. Teeth protruding, the half-mad God left to sleep in the wake of Thayne and fallacy charged.
"Not really," Ciato yawned and allowed the pellets of sweat to drip off of his chin and down his exposed chest. His hair, normally slick from various expensive oils, was now matted to his face with strands carefully positioned in front of his eyes, "I have slayed monsters and Gods alike, as well as men who have silly preconceived notions of being one or th---"
Ciato's monologue was broken by the four spheres of purple that slammed just in front of him and shattered his glass barrier. The strange colored auras were poised to strike at the exact same time, apparent from different angles. The Mystic assumed that even if he had dodged the attack, there would have been some form of powerful explosion follow-up to make him lose his balance. Leopold Winchester thought with the mind of a tactician, thought with a mind similar to that of Sei Orlouge.
It dawned on the Devil of Dheathain that the utter defeat of Ruby Winchester's beloved would almost be as sweet as the dissection of Sei's butterfly wings.
The glass around him exploded outwards and negated the would-be attack of his foe. The shards of crystal that remained stood at the ready not unlike a soldier that wished for a command. His eyes met those of Leopold once more, the entrepreneur mere feet from his quarry. He shifted his eyes back towards his fragmented soldiers with a crocodile-like grin upon his features. "He has some very pretty eyes, make sure he can never use them again."
The weaponized glass obeyed ts master nearly instantly and charged towards the pupils of Leopold Winchester. Ciato hoped that the advance of his opponent would prevent any kind of dodge from his counter. He once more pointed his sword towards the businessman, his vicious grin still plastered on his ghostly features. "The real challenge is making sure I don't kill you too quickly."
A single ocular injury stole any advantage Leopold Winchester had over his opponent. Blinded by loathing, he forgot that the man before him, though no saviour of Corone, was every bit the Mystic as Sei. The first shard to reach the Raven lacerated his cheek. A second stole the litheness of his shield arm. A third tore through his overcoat but left no lasting impression on his supple skin.
“Gyahh!” he cried. Exasperation, pain, and realisation tainted his voice.
A fourth, long, skeletal, and piercing ruptured his eyeball and scraped the ridge of his socket. A lasting impression on the skull aside, blood smothered the right side of his face like a blanket of silk. Ichor venting his strength, what little remained. He teetered, knocked of his stride. He wavered, left bereft of gusto.
“You do it an injustice,” he spat. Blood dripped down his cheek. A gobbet stained the straw. Rising smoke clouds bellowed like devil’s tails and hellfire standards about him.
Left with no hope of engaging Ciato in a fair sword fight, and with the shard still protruding from a bloody socket like the shaft of an arrow true, Leopold waved his spear right to left. A single arc, rainbow-esque in form conjured a second wave. This time, the orbs laced with black phantasmal feathers.
“I hope you gain pleasure enough in life from my death. Ominously, the Raven licked his fingers and though shaking with pain the fragments of the archaic Tap shot at the mystic.
I can't stress how disappointed I am that this battle didn't finish. Leopold was the far superior writer due to multiple capitalization errors & omitted characters by Ciato. Judging from the lack of smart quotes, Ciato probably used the text editor and Leopold used a work processor. His exchanges with Ciato were drab, but the dialogue with Ruby was great. On the other hand, Ciato generally controlled the RP elements. The irony in his choice of setting was particularly powerful and helped both his setting and persona scores. Ultimately, the battle came down to who posted more frequently. Leopold kept Ciato waiting twice as long for posts, and that made the difference in this battle. My breakdown is below:
Edge to Leopold in dialouge (+1), mechanics (+2) and clarity (a first!) (+1).
Edge to Ciato in persona (+1), pacing (+1) and setting (+1).
Even on action, story & technique.
Ciato left Leopold waiting for a total of two days (in excess of a day). Leopold kept Ciato waiting a total of five days (in excess of a day). This is two times as much (-2).
Ciato advances.
Leopold is eliminated.