Round One, Bracket A: Napalm Artisana vs. Outriders

[Christoph]

Congratulations for making it into the Tournament of Champions. Both teams receive two Fate Points for making it this far! Posting can begin at 1 PM EST on the 7th and the battle closes at 11:59 PM EST on January 28th. Good luck to both teams!

Arenas were arranged at random, and your prompt is as follows:

The two teams will meet from opposite sides of a violent, raging river. The river is wide, but there are enough rocks in the right places to get across, if you’re careful.

[Aeraul Smythe]

Out of the rift, down a long winding path marked with perfectly spaced cobblestones leading the way through thick, petrified woods, up to a threshold where even the grass didn't pretend to grow. Across that and onto some flat dirt that showed the signs of wear, both old and recent, covered in the faded patterns of a straw broom's movements. It would've been a perfect show of desolation, were it not for the river raging right down the middle of it for as far as the eye could see in either direction. Oh, it was wide too, but it the length of it was staggering: Try as he might, Aeraul literally couldn't see the source of it. The closest he came was a tower, so far away as to seem like an oversized pencil on the horizon. Its details were blurred by the distance and, he suspected, by the same magicks that fuelled the rift leading to this place.

"Best not to think about it," he mumbled to himself, turning his attentions back to the events at hand. He spent a precious few seconds studying the river while hoisting his still sheathed Greatsword up and planting the tip into the ground.

It didn't look too deep. Just deep enough. Fall in that and it'd be all on Lady Luck as to whether or not you got out alive, and while Aeraul was certain he could do it without breaking any bones or half-drowning, he wasn't so sure about the matchstick mage next to him. The rocks were sure to make that a little easier, once you'd been bashed into them too much for the current to pull you along any further. They were placed at seemingly random intervals along the river, just far enough apart to avoid hindering the flow of the water, but just close enough that a sufficiently surefooted (or suicidal) adventurer could leap from one to the other.

He sized up the opposition next: They weren't quite as much of an odd couple as Aeraul and Inkfinger, respectively a half-orc grave robber and an anorexic stripper pole, but they were close enough. The man was almost a foot taller than the woman, and while both wore a bit of what looked like leather armor, the woman had more of it. The man almost looked like a mage, but not quite, and the woman looked like she had more muscle in her pinky than Inkfinger did in his whole body -- not that this is saying very much, insofar as Aeraul was concerned. She had a buckler on one arm and a sword as well, while the man was apparently unarmed to start with; another hint that he was a mage, but Aeraul wasn't going to put much credence to that until the spells started flying.

His assessment completed, he raised his empty hand to the two in a silent greeting while attempting his best to look like your average half-orc: Big, slow, stupid and overarmed despite the relative elegance of his clothes and armor.

"I'm guessing," he said, relying on the surging river to keep his voice inaudible to the opposition, and upon the placement of his sword's handguard to keep his lips unreadable, "But I think the man's a mage and the woman's the fighter. Neither of them looks like they're packing any ranged weaponry, but stay within naginata's reach of me anyway."

Aeraul sighed deeply, bowing his head in what appeared to be a suitably orcish warprayer. He even dared to say it in his mother's tongue, the language of the Black Sun Orcs.

(Not that he'd ever tell anyone, but the 'prayer' amounted to a third-rate gibberish list of sexually transmitted diseases and the most acrobatic ways you could contract them.)

...and then he completely killed the act by taking a jump away from Inkfinger and punching a fireball at the opposing team, with a certain preference for whoever was lined up with him or whoever was closest. The chest and the legs were favored targets, followed by the hips and collar region; nothing aimed for the head or arms, as those were much too spread out and small at any distance for a good chance of a hit. Upon making footfall, he whipped the Greatsword up in a pre-emptive block, then took for the nearest occupied row of stones with every intention of swatting off anyone trying to cross them.

It should go without saying, but since this is a preordained fight and not some kind of surprise battle, Aeraul starts fully meditated.

[Inkfinger]

Bunnies approved by Smythe.

The brilliant blue sky above them was too big.

Cael stared at it openly as he followed Aeraul out of the rift, notebook and pen tucked under his arm, naginata hitting against his back. He had almost expected something like this. After all, it had taken him the time since stepping into the portal to now to even get used to having something other than a stone roof above him.

His boots kicked up clouds of dust and left footprints behind him in the carefully swept earth, but his eyes were too drawn to the sky to even give it a second's thought. The size of it was literally hurting his brain.

He bit back a whimper, fixing his eyes on his partner's broad back and leaving them there until the other man stopped on the plains.

The big orc and him. The team was like the ones in the stories Cael had always read back in Knive's Edge as an apprentice: the ha'penny weekly stories about the adventures of Corone Rangers. The rangers always came as a pair: funny man, straight man. Good ranger, bad ranger. Brains and muscle...

Except that in this case, one of the pair had all the brains and the muscle, leaving him with...

What, exactly?

"...stay within naginata's reach of me anyway."

Oh, that's right. Instructions.

Cael jogged after the half-orc, flipping his notebook open to the first blank page as he ran - close, but not too close. He didn’t want an attack that could hit them both to…well, do so.

He grabbed his penknife with his other hand, carefully cutting into the fleshy part of his thumb to reopen the most obvious of the thin scars there. He hissed against the sudden redness and the stinging pain as he coated his pen nib in blood, and began to write, trying to ignore the now-familiar FWOOSH of Aeraul's fireballs.

"Cael and..." Um. "Aeraul!" He called out, over the roar of the rushing water as he scrawled what he could in thin, quick strokes, conserving the ink. "How do you spell y'name again?"

"Aeraul." His partner replied, spelling it for good measure. "Ay-ee-are-ay-ewe-el!"

"Cael and Aeraul stood on the shore and watched as..." His hand stung, throbbing, but there wasn't much he could do about that so he shoved the sensation away. "...do we want the rocks t'stay there?"

"...um. Yes. Yes please."

"...as the edges and sides of the rocks scattered through the river suddenly became very...slippery." Oh, gods, this even sounded like those horrible stories, if made a tad more morbid by the red dripping onto his paper.

His old masters would skin him, right about now. Show, don't tell! They would have been yelling, or don't bother writing prose at all! He made the period ending the sentence into a series of ellipses, continuing the though. "Very... very slippery...coated in iridescent oil that sparkled in the light from above, though the center of the rocks remained clean." He didn't look to see if it was working, tongue between his lips, that same mentioned light glinting off the bloodied blade of the penknife.

Huh, writing's not that hard...I could probably-

He glanced up just in time to see Aeraul slide to a stop next to the first of the rocks with the dangerous grace of a hunting leopard. Cael let out a squawk, squashed down a sudden surge of jealousy at the sheer ease of the motion, and quickly amended the last sentence.

"But not every rock. Every other rock, as the warrior needed a way for he himself to cross safely."

Was he just imagining things, or were the rocks staying exactly the way they had been before he started writing? Cael grumbled beneath his breath, and, quite suddenly, realized he was out of naginata's range.

...oh, hellsteeth.

"The rocks not coated in the oil," He scrawled quickly, snapping the knife closed and shoving it in his pocket, "Stayed entirely normal, no less or no more slippery than one would expect rocks in a river to be. And thus the mage and the warrior found their way across..."

He blew on the red letters, trying not to drip any more blood on the white page, and flipped the notebook shut, tucking it between his cuirass and his coat. He pulled the naginata free of its harness and...well. Ran directly into Aeraul's back.. "I suggest," he called out after he backpedaled enough to speak, squinting against the spray of the river below, "Being very very careful on every other stone..."

The other man responded without turning, though there was the slightest trace of a tone in his voice. "...what?"

Cael waved the naginata towards the water carefully, feeling the first nag of doubt tug at his mind. "We're...uh. We're crossin', aren't we?"

Aeraul gave him an over-the-shoulder look from the corner of his eyes, the kind of expression that could really only be described as a Look. It was a Look that the sword only seemed to magnify into what would have been, on any other face, a very angry expression. On Aeraul it was just...there. "No."

"...oh." Cael glanced at the notebook with a badly-hidden wince before he forced a grin. "Then, uh. They might be over on this side a tiny bit easier than we-um. I mean, easier I would have liked." He took a step backward, pulling the notebook free to retrieve a handful of origami papers. Aeraul just seemed to ignore him, so he took another step back, already twisting the first paper into the shape of a crane.

"I'll...just be over here then." Aeraul gave a curt nod. Cael hurried back a few (quite a few, honestly) steps, and focused on finishing the blade crane before anything big happened.

Whenever that may be.

[Teal]

A light wind twirled through the high branches of the forest, receiving a quiet applause from the dry leaves as it passed. The thin foliage dropped from their high nests and spiraled erratically towards the ground. After a moment of head over heals flapping they landed, stroking the cobblestones with their papery sides. The wind, a cruel mistress, picked up again, sending the leaves on a bouncing path across the even squares of wood and then onto a poorly kept trail of packed dirt. They hugged against slim trees, made detours through bushes and then burst from the trees and scattered, now free from the constraints of the binding wind. Some fell onto a well used portion of dirt, but most glided gently down until they became slick with the water that splashed up from the raging river beneath them.

Shan had watched the leaves on the first leg of their journey, losing sight of them as they entered the crowded clump of trees ahead. Her head spun. The abrupt transition from a small stone building to that of a forest had had a sickening effect on her mind. She had seen magic before, and she had wielded magic often, but none to the extent of creating rifts from one area to another.

The treasure hunter's mind was flooded with questions. Was this just another part of the valley that she had entered before, or was a whole other world, created just for the purposes of this fight? Thoughts filled her head, each one providing an explanation and yet another question, all competing for her attention. It was like learning the arcane arts all over again. A mind reeling torrent of half completed thoughts paralyzed her.

She took a deep breath. Her right foot tapped slowly against the stones beneath her. Then it was over. The fighter that she had created within her had won out over the thinker. This wasn't a time to question how she arrived here, it was a time to fight. All it would take was a few battles, and then she could retire and live an easy life. And even without the prize money, her name was sure to spread. More recognition meant more jobs. More jobs meant more money.

The wind picked up again. Even with her armor, Shan felt chilled. She wore a studded leather cuirass on her chest and underneath that, a thin chain mail shirt. Her legs were only clothed in a thin pair of pants and flapped as the air pushed past it. Her head remained unprotected, a dangerous weak spot on her body, but one that she could accept.

The wind began to blow harder. The treasure hunter took that as a sign to start moving. She padded softly along the cobblestones, following the path of the leaves she had watched before. She heard the river before she saw it. A rushing sound was slowly introduced to her ears as she walked along the path, penetrating through the layers of wood and leaves, until it replaced all other sounds that found a home in a forest.

Then Shan could see it. A wide river, flowing at a high speed down to her left. A handful of rocks were studded in the water, forming a path from one bank to the other. The river itself didn't look all that deep, and she had swum in deeper water before, but it was the speed that frightened her. If she fell in, the only chance that she had of staying alive was to grab hold of one of the rocks and hope that she would have the strength to pull herself back up. The rocks themselves were spaced sparsely, but the woman trusted herself to jump from one to another given that she wasn't disturbed.

Shan's attention drifted from the river back to the opposing shore. Two figures were standing there. Her eyes interrogated the one in front first as her hands pulled out weapons and prepared for battle. He was taller then her, though that wasn't an uncommon trait among many. The things that stood out about his body was the green skin. First the skin, then the muscle. He was either an orc, or a half-orc from Shan's point of view. Most likely half-orc from the appearance of his teeth and nails. The creature carried two heavy swords, each big enough to to wielded two handed by any human, though he might have the strength to fight with one in each hand. If those weren't enough, he also wore what appeared to be an eight foot long blade.

The half-orc raised a hand. A slow, simple gesture. His actions and equipment screamed simple. An overkill of swords, simple clothing, a motley of armor. She could deal with his type. The short reach of her blades allowed her to excel in close ranged combat. Her abnormal speed gave her the opportunity to slip past the longer reach of her enemy's own weapons, and once close enough, she could kill with impunity. As the half-orc began to chant, Shan focused on the figure behind him. He was tall and thin, and while the larger creature blocked most of him from view, she could see that he wielded a glaive and was carrying something small in his arms. A book perhaps? His attention was devoted solely to whatever it happened to be, his arm making small, swift movements. Was he writing?

With a surprising amount of speed, the half-orc jolted out of his prayer and threw a punch towards Shan. She froze in the middle of drawing a dagger, right hand filled with her short sword and left at hanging at her side. The punch seemed harmless at first, comical even, but the half-orc had somehow managed to conjure a large orb of flame which seemed to have every intension of roasting the treasure hunter. Her moment of panic passed briefly. As fast as the orc has been to throw the fire, he was far enough away that she saw it coming and had a second to think.

First thought: Don't show them how fast you are.
Second thought: Where's Arc?

Shan took a controlled step backwards with her left foot, turning her right side towards the other bank. The orb whistled by her, the heat leaving black trails of soot on her armor. She felt a wave of heat strike her torso, but her skin remained safe under the leather. Her eyes darted to and fro, finally locking onto her companion, Arc. Taking advantage of the torrent of water flowing between them and their foes, she called out to the familiar. “I'll need you to distract them so that I can get across.”

Her head snapped back, eyes returning once more to her enemies. A few explosions in the right places could allow her time to dart across, making use of the veils of water and the fact that the pair she was fighting didn't know how quickly she could move. Shan's palms began to sweat, her sword hand rocking up and down. As much as she wanted to get into the fight, she could have to wait for Arc to help, or for one of them to make a mistake.

[Mikado]

Everything was simple. Five meter in front of him, Five meter behind him. That was his perfect range. Each detail that could’ve been noticed was, every movement that could take place had. It all flew through his vision. Like mathematics, like a very complicated formula, constantly changing numbers, shapes, variables and names.
The mouth grinned. The hands clapped.* The fun started. Arc moved.

A grand heat emitting object came from across the fast moving void. Off the bat. Before he could react his battle partner, Shan, decided to take this blow. She had asked him before the battle to keep their abilities secret for as long as possible, and she did keep herself to this strategy. Although he preferred the noble duel, this was no such thing and he had to rely on unhonorable tactics. At least, that what he thought that his former life would want- in reality was he just happy, just happy to be able to mean something, to be able in the only thing he could, to fight.

His hand reached behind his back and revealed itself again with a beautiful scimitar glowing softly, that seemed as if it was waiting for ages to be drawn. Gently he threw the blade into the open air, as if a sign of start. Like a bird the blade flew upwards, halted for a moment watching the ravaging waters under it, and descended, possibly, to hunt for its prey deep in the blue waters. But right before metal of the gentle bird hit the water -
With a loud bang, a fast flash, did the blade envelop itself in light. Like a bomb did it sound, like a bomb did it look. The water blasted into the air and formed a sort of water-wall. A light rain descended on both parties and vision was temporarily cut. For them.

The price of five senses is one grave one, yet he had paid it. He could sense his enemies - however the distance between them was rather big, and this vision was blurred. He took a deep breath and air began to whirl in his open hands, who were grabbing it like swords. With that both took the shape of Arcane weapons and Arc swirled them through the wall swiftly, breaking the flowing water. He’d gladly pulverize his enemies first but his lowered vision didn’t allow him to - the blades flew into the top of the trees above them. Maybe they thought it was a miss but it certainly wasn’t. Huge trees are easier targets and great attack channelers. Like the one before, the two blades exploded throwing hundreds of tree breaches at the interlopers under them. He didn’t halt then, he didn’t wait now - he tossed two more blades into the hissing of anger water and several more gazers spewed out.

He didn’t need to tell Shan that now was her chance.

[Inkfinger]

The wind was picking up. The dirt beneath their feet right now was too wet and too close to mud to blow and drift, but the thin powder on the far side of the river was rising and twirling in small cyclones; dust devils that seemed to glitter in the sun.

The woman moved fast, Cael noticed, half his attention still on the crane forming in his hands. One moment she was there, the next she wasn’t...

Though part (or all, perhaps, even) of her sudden disappearance may have had something to do with the abrupt, loud white-hot explosion of light above the river. He only hoped -as he blinked furiously to clear his eyes, his hands still moving out of habit, sketching the arcane symbol onto the paper- that the Blank Page spell had worked and made the rocks slick. He may have done it wrong, he wasn’t even supposed to know that spell, he hadn’t known it when he stepped into the portal, and yet…

Yet…

Right, Caelric, fight now, think later.

The cascade of water thrown by the explosion came splashing down on him, drenching over his back and shoulders, instantly soaking through the silk and linen beneath his armor. He let out an undignified yelp, and shoved the stiffened wing of the completed crane into his mouth, holding it and the pen there while he scrabbled for the notebook. If its pages got wet…!

He was so concerned with the book that he didn’t notice the second and third blades spinning through the air, not until Aeraul reached back with one strong arm, hauling him forward without looking. Nevertheless, he jumped half a foot when the tree tops exploded behind them, littering the air with twigs and leaves, splinters and sawdust.

He dropped the naginata, and hoisted the notebook, holding it over his head just in time to block a shower of the larger twigs from smacking down into his skull, though he felt the sharp sting of the splinters scraping his knuckles and wrists. He looked up just in time to see a branch even larger – closer to half a trunk – fall from the closest tree with a loud groan. The branch was large enough to take out both of them at one go, sheered off nearly as sharp as a blade, and twice as pointed…

And Aeraul calmly bisected the branch with a fireball-sword combination, searing the branch before the blade snicked through the blackened wood, neatly. It fell in two harmless halves on either side of the pair. He gave Cael a second, baleful look before he was moving again, back guarding the stones. “See if you can’t get rid of the splashes so I can actually see, right?” He said, over his shoulder.

Cael shook water from his eyes, pulled his pen from his mouth, and carefully opened the notebook. The pages were still dry, other than the thin, soaked stripes near the edges, and he avoided those as he began to scrawl in hasty, tight script.

"The water stilled on the surface, moving as fast as it had before, but the explosions in the water vanshing in a splash." He was about to continue with the next sentence when he spied the missing letter, biting down on his lip as he scribbled in the i. Vanishing, vanishing!

He didn’t look up from his frantic scribbling to see if it was working; he just kept writing, notebook tucked against his belly, pen leaving glistening red letters in its wake as it darted and scratched against the paper. "The hail of branches ceased to exist, and, for good measure, the trees did as well…"

That he checked, glancing at the treeline behind them. And then he gawped, mouth hanging open, for just a second. There was now a gap in the treeline, as if someone had taken an axe and carefully chopped a five-feet-wide, five-feet-tall chunk out of the wall of trunks.

Witness for a moment, if you will, the sight of several massive, formerly just topless, but now-rootless trees hovering in midair, nothing but air between them and the ground. Witness, if you will, Cael’s already-pale face draining to near-white beneath old bruises and a layer of dust at the realization of just how silly that idea had been.

…witness, if you will, several authors squawking about the misappropriation of writing styles, and the sudden smacking sound that occurs when the fourth wall rebuilds itself between the author and her tale. It probably hit a squirrel in the face as it did.

There was a groan, and the decimated trees toppled (away from them, at least) in a renewed wave of dust and leaves, expelling a flock of furious starlings that had survived the first explosion. They fluttered above the ruined swatch of forest in a chorus of angry chirps before flapping off into the distance.

Cael bit back a giggle around the origami clenched between his teeth before he slapped the book shut, tucked it and his pen behind his cuirass again, and held his hands out before him, palm to palm at chest-height. He drew in a deep breath through his nose, and pulled his hands apart as if to part the waters, exhaling a sharp breath at the same time. The horizontal blade of blue light of that flew from between them wobbled in its path. He was out of practice, out of breath and far from his target on the far shore, but it was there and that was what mattered.

[Aeraul Smythe]

"Nicely done," was all Aeraul could think of in response to Cael's show of power. He made a mental note to never infuriate the little mage without killing him very thoroughly and with the absolute element of surprise, then turned his attentions back to the actual battle at hand. Sheathed Greatsword twirling in his left hand like a heavy staff, Aeraul actually bothered taking aim this time. Visibility was still a bit poor with the lingering effects of Arc's distractions and Cael's attempts to stop them, but that didn't mean much to the half-orc.

He aimed for the enemy mage -- Arc, his name was -- and then threw a rabbit punch at him. Quick and measured in terms of actual physical effort, but that had no translation whatsoever on the fireball launched from it. The blast was almost solid red except for a core of bright yellow, and it went straight, fast and, hopefully, true for Arc's chest. Not the head. Never the head, because it's easy to miss that part. Same goes for most limbs. The chest is another matter, especially when your target is apparently wearing nothing but robes and leather.

That done, Aeraul turned his attention for the girl and rushed for whatever part of the river she was (probably?) trying to use as a means to get across. Greatsword still sheathed, he went for a good had smack with the weapon's blade, aiming for the hips this time. It didn't matter if he actually hurt her or not, only that he put her off balance and perhaps into the river. Opportunity willing, he immediately went for a follow-up with the Greatsword's tip, a much lighter smack or seven trailing up the side, to the armpit, then the neck and cheek. Again, the goal wasn't to harm so much as it was to off balance...and even that could go to seed, if the enemy mage was competent enough to get around Cael's shutdown efforts.

[Christoph]

Thank you for participating! Max Dirks will judge this battle within about a week’s time. Please do not contact your judge regarding the judgment until after it has been posted.

[Max Dirks]

No judgment today folks because this battle failed to reach the required 12 posts.

I’d like to copy/paste an easy to miss excerpt of the Battle FAQ that might be helpful later in the tournament: “It is possible that your partner or your opponent might be gone for an extended period of time, but it might be in your interest to keep the battle moving. In that instance, you might bunny (with permission, see below) [your partner out of the fight] or simply continue the fight with the remaining players.” The 10 day wait for Mikado’s post could have been circumvented by writing him out. As long as it’s fair, don’t worry about maintaining an A, B, C, D posting order.

Beyond that, I only saw a few mechanical errors (a “had” instead of “hard” and plenty of misplaced commas). Smythe, avoid run-ons. Your first sentence in the battle didn’t have a subject the way it was written and there were a few more slips later in that post. You had great brevity in your final post, however. Inkfinger, great utilization of intra-team bunnying to advance the story. However, your dialogue was not nearly as strong as it was in your qualifier. It was confusing at points. Also, though bathed in satire (I assume), your discussion of writers squawking about misappropriated writing styles was a slip into prose in and of itself. Make it what Inkfinger is writing (or thinking) and it’s perfect. Teal, mix up your sentence structure a bit. You were very particular with your character’s actions (i.e. “Shan did this; Shan did that”), which made me feel far more urgency with respect to your actions than I needed as a reader. Mikado, great use of the setting, but you should have contacted the other participants to allow them to write around your absence if possible.

Napalm Artisans advance to round two and no EXP or GP will be given, but they do receive 2 fate points by virtue of their victory (now you have 4 total). Outriders, you have two fate points by virtue of participating in round one that you can combine with fate points from the side events to potentially re-enter the tournament if you so desire.