Round 1: Venessian Vs Logan

[Silence Sei]

You have 2 weeks to complete this battle. May the best man win!

[Logan]

"Hah Hah," the psion laughed to himself, "Is this some kind of joke?" He recognized the hallways lined with what could best be described as childish playthings. His hand reached out for one such object, pressing the tiny red button and it sprang to life with flashing lights as it spoke out magically, "To infinity and beyond!" Oh yes, he remembered this place well.

The last time Logan had found himself in such an environment he was still quite close to Ryan Kale. The two were inseparable at the time in fact. He recalled the arena fondly, smiling at the memory of the plastic expanding sword of some sort of other. The plastic sword had a button on it if he remembered correctly, and if you pressed the button the sword made the funniest little "FWOOM" sound. He chuckled out loud at the reminder.

It had been some time since he last participated in a tournament as well. He couldn't shake the feeling it had been quite some time since he hadn't taken himself seriously either. There was the reason why he chose this place as the battlegrounds for his first return to tournament combat. No other place would work to bring him out of his bloodlust trance and let him be free to enjoy what made the tournaments as famous as they were.

He made his way down the first aisle, grabbing a couple of rubbery looking mittens filled with air. He recalled using them to punch Kale a few times before he realized they did absolutely nothing except annoy his friend. Truthfully, the whole point of this place was to remove Logan from his shell, to try to bring his sense of humor and his sense of who he was deep down.

No memory could justify what had happened to Logan before, but even still he had begun to realize he needed to stop taking himself so seriously and start focusing on what he had already. There was no sense in focusing on the things which he could not have. Sure, he could work hard and waste away his days doing so, but then he would miss out on the memories.

The memories brought him back to a simpler time, a time where even the best Althanas could offer were on even footing. Time has a way of changing people and places, and Althanas was no different. Every place Logan had been, everything he had done, amounted to very little in the grand scheme of things. If he were to sit down to write an autobiography it would simply say, "Logan arrived. Logan did some stuff. Logan died. The end."

It was not as if he had done nothing with himself. Quite the contrary actually. He had become well-known, perhaps even famous. In his time he had met many wonderful friends, and as many equally malicious enemies. There was the power group he ran, the epic journeys he'd taken, and the battles some would call epic. Yes, he had a good past filled with many good things, but it felt incomplete. He felt incomplete.

So he found himself standing and admiring the place filled with toys once more, fondly recalling his checkered past. A smile once again crossed his face as he stumbled across the plastic sword with the button. Flicking it outward, the plastic pieces expanding one by one, he pressed the button.

"FWOOM"

[Venessian]

“Are you sure that thing's on right?” a deep voice questioned in the dark. His words were muffled, reverberating through the visor of his steel full-helm.

“Yup. It ain't biting anyone until we tell it to,” a similarly muffled voice replied.

Tired of the continental in-fighting that had been taking place in the previous months, two imperial soldiers decided to abandon their posts in Corone and make their own fortune. As luck had it, however, the deserters invested the last of their money to bribe their way onto a cargo ship to the mainland, and when they arrived, they were really quite penniless. Although their arms and armour were adequate, the two men had very little actual experience in combat, preferring instead to stay back and let others do the dying.

That was also the case when their greedy ears caught word of the Serenti. Neither willing to take a sword or claw wound for glory or gold pieces, they instead turned to slavery. Of course, none of the free peoples of Althanas would have stood for such a thing, but a stroke of genius dawned on them when, while roaming through the small city of Karakas, they spied an old bounty notice detailing an unnatural beast that had been spotted in the nearby hills. The very next day, the pair of fortune-seekers made their way into the hilly region beyond, seeking out their quarry. Their luck took a turn for the better on the first day of the search, as they stumbled across a great man-goat, slumbering in the afternoon sun on a makeshift bed of leaves and shrubbery.

The Ibixian people were not nocturnal by habit, but Ven's dark pursuits required the moonlight, and so he took his respite in the daylight hours. To his great misfortune, he awoke only briefly enough to watch a well aimed sap strike descending on that sweet spot between his eyes, and then he returned promptly to his macabre dreams.

So the duo entered their monster into the Serenti, the grand prize far outweighing the pitiful bounty on its head. They guided him down the dark, cramped corridors to the arena, proud of their ingenuity. Standing before the great set of stone doors that served as a portal to a battlefield of limitless possibilities, they prompted their gladiator forward with a smack on the rump with the butt-ends of their standard issue voulges. Having little choice in the matter, Venessian stepped forward through the portal.

“Good luck, you stupid, ugly beast,” the knights called at his back, laughing and applauding each other for their brilliance.

Muzzled with an iron mask that seemed as if it were derived from some form of horror-fiction, Ven tried his utmost to protest, but merely issued a throaty grunt. He wheeled about on his captors, but the dark hallway had been replaced with a line of low shelving units. The necromancer was livid. For one thing, he certainly was not planning on biting anything. He was a herbivore, as were the rest of his race. And the garish contraption they had placed on his face made it impossible to complete the vocal components of any spell in his repertoire. He searched about frantically in his new surroundings for anything to use to his advantage, and his hope soared when he spotted a useful tool, perfectly preserved behind a thin, pink, cardboard box with a clear, cellophane window. He tore the box asunder with his large, powerful hands, and clutched his weapon of choice:

An impossibly proportioned voodoo doll of a beautiful female human, with long blonde hair, and whorish make-up. Her breasts were impossibly large, and her long, slender legs would have snapped under the weight of her buxom endowments. Such a horrible thing MUST have contained only the darkest of majicks.

Voodoo doll in hand, Venessian began to cautiously quest for his would-be opponent.

[Logan]

At any given moment Logan had at his disposal at least one hundred various objects with which he could easily distract himself or another for quite some time. The plastic sword, for instance, kept the psion's attention for a good couple of minutes before his attention span had reached its end. Tossing the sword aside, he grabbed at another object hanging upon a metal pole of some kind.

Unfortunately for the psion the object of his attention was sealed inside some sort of clear prison of plastic. The plastic posed little problem for one who possessed dual Prevalida shortswords, however. He slipped one sword from its sheath and began to violently rip the plastic apart. Within a moment or two the object was freed from the prison which bound it, and Logan had found a new object to focus his affection. He tried to read the words on the packaging, which found itself on the floor almost completely torn to shreds. "Why do they have to write out the directions in something other than common? Do the elves think this is funny," he bemused questioningly to himself as he pressed buttons, pulled little levers and twisted dials until finally an orange sphere shot from the device. "My oh my, this is going to be fun," he quietly cheered to himself.

With a wide grin across his face, Logan made his way down the aisle to the end where orbs of brightly swirly colors awaited his touch. He scanned up and down the monstrosity containing the orbs and grimaced just slightly. "Strange, yet familiar," he mumbled to himself as he tugged one from the stretchy barricade. Rolling the orb in his hand and then tossing it into the air he smirked. "Holding an entire world in my hand feels rather," he looked from one side of the aisle to the other coyly, "rejuvenating." Out of the corner of his eye he spotted more brightly colored wonders, and continued on to the next aisle.

As he made his way down the walkway his ears caught sound of footsteps of the non-human variety just a short ways away. A grin pursed his lips once more as he had wondered how his opponent would come to find the particular environment chosen for their contest. Logan turned the corner and made "pew pew" sounds as he pulled the lever, twisted the dial, and then pressed the button of the gun in his hand. A couple of neon orange spheres left the barrel of the gun at a rather lazy speed and headed straight for the creature. The psion could only muster a chuckle and a grin.

"Won't you play with me," he asked the creature.

((OOC: Yes, that's the arena. And yes, that's a nerf gun.))

[Venessian]

The [i]clip-clop[\i] of Venessian's hooves echoed on the freshly waxed, hard tiles of the strange arena, giving away his position from the instant he arrived. The white-furred necromancer stalked up and down the isles, passing brightly painted scale model wagons that allegedly had “hot wheels”. A brief examination led Ven to believe that they had since cooled down.

Reaching the end of that isle, he began to turn down the next, but paused warily as he noticed the contents of the new corridor. Brightly colored beasts were stuffed by a novice taxidermist, and for all the wizard's arcane savvy, he could not identify most of them. In all his life, he had never seen a purple rabbit of such immense proportions.

The goatman shuddered and decided to avoid that isle, and made a mental note to torture the next human he saw, for it was only they that could dream up such nightmarish fates for the noble, obviously magical beasts. It was true that Ven spent most of his time in the company of the undead, but he was an animal at heart, as far as the humanoid races of Althanas were concerned anyway.

This-One will never be on display for the amusement of humans. No no...

Ven pawed at the contraption on his face again, cursing his misfortune. Two leather straps bound the iron box to his elongated face, and although he didn't mind the smell of the iron (it reminded him of blood), his jaws were beginning to cramp.

A torrent of bright orange projectiles stole the dark wizard from his private misery, and he raised a powerful arm defensively, but not nearly quick enough. One after another, the darts struck him all about his torso, and Venessian instinctively recoiled, waiting for his pain receptors to explain exactly what was happening.

But there was no pain.

The newcomer could not have seen the scowl on the Ibixian's face through the muzzle, but his bestial jowls were pulled back in a fierce expression of anger.

“Murphle MURPHLE!” came Venessian's stifled battle cry, which just further frustrated him.

Then he remembered his buxom voodoo doll and a knowing twinkle glimmered in his soulless eyes. He brandished the doll at his opponent, like an other arcane focus...

And nothing happened.

He shook it, and the dolls blond, shiny hair flopped about. He shook it harder.

Nothing happened.

And then he spied a small ring poking out of the dolls back. An activation device! He thought. He tried to fit the smallest of his large fingers through the ring, but it was, at best, it was meant for a very small adult human. He pinched it between two fingers and pulled, and laughed an almost mechanical sounding laugh of triumph as a small lead of string came with the plastic ring.

Prepare to meet your doom, Human!

He pointed the doll at the man toting the terrible weapon, and in a screechy voice, not entirely unlike the sound of breaking glass, the doll began to speak.

“Let's go shopping!”

[Logan]

Shooting did not come natural to Logan, so it came as quite the shock when the projectiles actually found their target. Granted, the projectiles were made of styrofoam and did exactly zero damange when they hit, but they did seem to annoy the displeased creature. Even with only succeeding in annoyance, the psion was still proud of his successful shots and in the heat of the moment let out a loud cheer, "HOOAH!" There was no rhyme or reason to his outburst, just the sheer joy of his monumentally tiny victory. As he raised the gun once more he cocked for another shot and quickly realized there was no more ammunition. With a hrmph he tossed the toy aside and began to survey the opponent before him.

A good bit of fur, a pair of horns and hooves for feet most caught the attention of the psion. Sure, Logan has crossed over a thousand different creatures in his days on Althanas, but a goat humanoid thing with somewhat discernible features? Well, that might very well be a first. Unfortunately, the thought sent another one to rack his brain. This would be the same old, same old Serenti; humanoid versus humanoid with the occasional comic relief oddball thrown in to keep things light. It was in the moment a thought struck him like a bag of bricks.

"Oh that's rich. A goat thing with a muzzle playing dolly," he motioned at the creature. As he looked up at the roof, he noted a few missing tiles and then shook his head for a moment. "The gods must be laughing their arses off at this one. Talk about a misfit," he whispered to himself as he motioned at the opponent once more. With that he did the only thing left he could do. "Let's have some fun," Logan smirked slyly as he asked, "shall we?"

His eyes locked onto his opponent's for just a split-second, and then he proceeded to project in the most feminine voice he could, "My name is Cassandra. Will you be my friend?" He knew there was a strong possibility his tactic would utterly fail, but if he didn't at least try then he had already lost anyways -- not just this round, but the entire tournament.

The one thing Logan knew, and knew well, was how to manipulate the mind. He only hoped it wasn't his being manipulated.

[Silence Sei]

Logan advances to round 2!