AC: Round 1 - Group 6

[Itera]

Itera glanced at Ceidon as if he was some curiously insane breed of animal and cocked an eyebrow. If it were something like a pouch, a human might have drawn it open, rifed through it, and started pronouncing the contents as they came up. If she had an excellent memory, she might have started listing off things directly. Itera wasn't human, it wasn't a simple purse-bag, and she had a memory as lazy as she was. So as to give herself time to think and because she saw absolutely no reason to rush anything while being carried around on Inwuhou's back, she drank her tea.

The pocket dimension created by her manipulation of the Boundary of Inside and Outside was, strictly speaking, of finite size. It was very small, too, only about five feet on a side. The unusual thing was that it was a tesseract and so the quantity of cubes that could be fit into it was partially infused with infinity. Every place in that pocket was suspended in a deep violet abyss and surrounded by numerous red eyes. They were Itera's eyes, because this realm is part of her. The exact physics behind someone sleeping in a room that is inside the same person presently eludes written description.

When Inwuhou set off after Ceidon, Itera refilled her cup set off on the very long list of things that she's stolen and bought. Mostly stolen. There was no order to the list because she sees everything inside her at once.

"My tea kettle, a porcelain-covered pewter bathtub sized for two, with feet in the shape of half pumpkins, a pair of mummified rabbits that starved to death after I forgot about them, two large bottles of pickled radishes, a pinewood cabinet holding my moth collection, my moth collection, a dead weevil I threw out of a cob of corn, a set of bronze fireplace tools minus the poker, a tin washtub, my third-best towel, a dustbin, a dessert bowl with moldy pudding, a cob of corn that I threw away after finding a weevil in it, a breadbox, an empty wooden barrel, a wooden step-ladder, throw rug..."

She stopped at this point and downed her tea. It has been a long time since she's taken inventory, with 'never' certainly qualifying as a long time. When you can always find new floor to throw things on, spring cleaning becomes a mythical thing.

"A broken clock, a book titled 'What I Did On My Holiday' ..."

[Inwuhou]

It is more difficult than usual to concentrate when there's an endless flowing of words coming from a few inches behind one's head. Inwuhou's patience stretched like mochi: incredibly distorted, resilient, and never thinning. She had more important things to focus on, like keeping her awareness of the moment, watching where she was putting down her foot, and making sure that her tea didn't slosh out of the cup.

The landscape ahead was awash in muted greens and browns. The island had torn its way out of the sea barely a few thousand years ago and all of the scars still showed. The four adventurers had been on the natural seawall or its scree, formed from a graywacke ridge thrust aside mere millenia ago. The slumbering, snow-capped stratovolcano that Ceidon had pointed towards had contemporaneously spawned hundreds of fissures and cinder cones all around the island and turned the place into a low-lying, alpine maze.

Thin soil supported dense scrub interleaved with tall grass. Here and there, hardy, gnarled trees tried to get a start on a decent forest and make the island look the part for any future migratory aborigines. Very little life had rafted its way to the islands and it was an isolated sanctuary for avians. The very nearly deafening dawn chorus filled the air with countless variations of "this is my lawn", "I've got a great big pecker", "crush kill destroy", and "help, help, I'm being oppressed."

A migrating pigeon, more or less a tourist to the island, burst out of the bushes nearby and fled in extreme haste. A murder of pygmy crows chased after it while shouting avian profanities about egg-snatchers. Inwuhou paused in her walk long enough to politely allow the lynch-mob to pass.

"... toast rack, an unopened jar of pepper sauce, another bucket..."

The nun directed her attention towards the blond man, perhaps as a means of distracting herself, "I can't help but notice that you seemed to have spent some time in the fairy's company. It might be dangerous."

[Zack Blaze]

Zack found himself dumbfounded by Inwuhou’s words. What exactly did she mean by ‘time in a fairies’ company’? The boy scratched his head for a moment, shifting his gaze over to the girl now listing a long stream of items that seemed to also be in the backpack with her. It took Zack a moment to connect all of the dots, and when he did, he gasped in utter horror.

“You mean, I slept with that….that thing, and worse still, don’t even remember it?!” Zack seemed genuinely mortified at the prospect of not getting to enjoy himself during a typically enjoyable event. He rubbed his temples in frustration, sighing as he followed Ceidon to where the adventurer was leading them. After all, someone who had such knowledge of the book surely must have known how to reach it.

~~~~

“What do you mean we’re lost?!” Zack exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air. This had been the third dead end, or rather, drop-off to a cliff, that Ceidon had lead them through. Zack rubbed his eyes, his annoyance with Ceidon’s leadership, as well as Itera’s constant ranting of items, finally starting to irk him. The youth calmed himself for a minute, placing his hands together before holding his left hand out as if it were holding something cone shape.

The boy jostled the ‘cone’ up and down, balancing his body as if to distribute his weight properly for the event. Zack shifted his gaze over towards Inwuhou, and suddenly felt the need to explain himself. “Whenever something comes up that irritates me, or I’m bored, or whatever, I do this trick I learned from mimes. Basically, I create a toy or object to play with in my imagination, and try to act as if the item is actually materialized. Right now, it’s a ball-and-cup.”

As Zack explained, he realized how much dorkier he was becoming with each passing word. He stopped his actions for a moment, to look at all of his team mates. “Come to think of it, I know little to nothing about you guys. Since Ceidon’s going to get us all lost again, how about we tell some stories about ourselves while we wander? Might kill some time until we actually get where we’re going. After all, even a broke clock is right twice a day.” Zack shifted his head towards Ceidon with a grin upon his features.

[Ceidon]

“Not lost,” Ceidon mumbled, “just unlucky.” The flickering mountain stood as a beacon in the distance, but every time the party managed to scale one precipice they were met with either another crevice or another cliff too steep to ascend directly. As a result, they were forced to zigzag across the island to reach their destination and everyone was getting frustrated, Ceidon included. Each detour they took gave the other groups an opportunity to reach the Omega Infinitum first.

Ceidon stood on yet another rock overlooking yet another crevice and scratched his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his jaw was rough to the touch. Below them was another valley containing a few trees and more annoying birds. To descend and ascend would only take about an hour, but it would require a good amount of rock climbing and posed a real threat of falling. Alternatively they could stay on the edge of the precipice and walk around the valley, but that would take at least three more hours.

“We don’t have time for that,” Ceidon said in response to Zack. “We have to make a decision. We can either head down into this valley then climb back up or we can go around it. Heading into the valley is a lot quicker, but it doesn’t look very safe.” He turned around to face his crew. “What do you…” Suddenly Ceidon’s eyes turned wide. A mountain lion had emerged from a rock directly above Inwuhou.

The mountain lion gave a low growl, signaling to everyone else that she was there. However, instead of worrying, Ceidon grinned. Finally, he had an opportunity to prove to everyone that he wasn’t a buffoon. This wasn’t the first time the adventurer had come face to a face with a mountain lion. His first encounter happened two years ago in Raiaera. There, he managed to save Cadeacus’ life by putting an arrow through the beast’s heart. Ceidon was sure he could do it again.

“Don’t worry,” Ceidon whispered. “I’ve got this one.” Slowly, he reached his arm behind his back to grab his mahogany bow. After grabbing around a bit, Ceidon discovered, much to his dismay, that the bow was not there! Oh no Ceidon thought to himself. Then he remembered. He never brought his bow with him to the briefing, only his sword! “Uh, on second thought, you take this one Zack Blaze.” Ceidon hopped off the rock, scurried on over to Zack and hid behind him. “Well, go on!”

Suddenly, the mountain lion jumped down from the rock and landed in between Zack and Inwuhou. The rapid action startled Ceidon and he took a few steps back not realizing how close he was to the edge. When the lion growled again, Ceidon jumped and lost his footing on the cliff. “Zack Blaze!” he called out while falling backwards. “Help!” Ceidon reached forward and tried to grab onto Zack’s belt before he fell.

[Itera]

Itera, thankfully, had stopped listing things perhaps two hours back. It wasn't that she ran out of things to list, but rather that she had become rather suddenly and inexplicably seized with the desire to clean out her room. She hadn't done this in a long time, with 'never' also qualifies as a long time.

It was the colony of aborigine termites that finally propelled her. Itera had little problem with knives, armoires, or the occasional starving fly, but when she spotted the six-foot-high termite mound and the thinly-spread carpet of workers slowly carrying bits of drifting bones and furniture from all around the expanding colony. The knowledge that millions of termites were running around inside your private spaces is fairly upsetting.

Cleaning the space is not a physically intensive task. In fact, Itera was accomplishing all of this while comfortably reclining in a chair and with her head poking out of Inwuhou's backpack. She was moving a gap around underneath all the things that she didn't want, starting with the termite mound, and they simply fell through. The good news was that every time the group needed to backtrack due to geographical disagreeability, there was a ready trail of garbage to follow. The bad news was that much of this trail was made of things considered, correctly or not, to be edible by the general avian population.

She was in the middle of distractedly telling a story about the sculpture of a duck made from much-gnawed and quite ancient bones. It had fallen out of the rift several minutes ago, preceded by its pedestal, which was also made of bones. The story went something like this: "There was this one time when Itamera's barbeque stand came out with this new barbeque duck. It was something in the sauce, I think. It was really delicious and I think I ate two every time I went there. I like the legs best. Then she suddenly stopped making them! Turns out that she had just captured some minor fairy of ducks... I think it was ducks, and was just using the fairy for ingredients. We all had a good laugh at that."

Itera giggled softly to herself, then added, "They come back quickly. The duck fairy didn't remember it, the newspaper interview said."

Suddenly, lion.

Inwuhou was facing the lion, which meant that the rear-mounted Itera simply got a view of Ceidon running backwards off of the cliff. It was very nice of him to drag Zack off of the cliff with him, very entertaining. At about the point when Ceidon was ten feet below the edge of the cliff, Itera remembered something about humans not really taking kindly to falls off of fifty-foot cliffs on account of 1) Not being able to fly, usually, 2) Not able to regenerate, and 3) Not being able to emulate the fairy of ducks.

That wouldn't be fun.

The tip of her tongue poked out while Itera twiddled the Boundary of Here and There and tore open a pair of rifts. It was a good plan, if spur-of-the-moment, and she was proud of it. The first one, opened under the falling pair, would scoop them in neat as you please. The second one, opened right in front of the momentarily confused mountain lion, would expel the two at the same speed as they went in the first. Then they can have a fight!

She missed.

Possibly spouting inarticulate invectives, Zack and Ceidon plummeted right past the poorly-aimed 'catch' rift and into a thorny-looking bush. The hardy branches broke their fall, true, but the branches also broke. Since the bush was growing halfway up the cliff, there was some more falling to do.

Itera leaned a little out of the rift in her pack and hid her mouth with her fan, "Oh dear~"

[Inwuhou]

Inwuhou looked at the mountain lion with some trepidation. Scratch that, she was experience what it was like for a big feline's growl to completely bypass the ears and grab the ape's nerves directly. She had some training in hand-to-hand combat and could hold her own in a bar brawl, not that she would be caught dead or alive in a bar brawl in the first place. A big cat was all the wrong shape for that training and had no hands, just a lot of sharp bits, powerful muscles, and a nasty temperament.

Still, she had a stick. It was a very solid stick, not the light, bendy stuff that the nunnery training rooms provided for the neophytes. She liked her staff because presumably all the pain happened at the other end and getting smacked by five feet of oak would discourage just about anything that didn't like having small trees falling on it.

Inwuhou assumed the stance of the Coiling Ancient Roots. That style was the only one that she knew to heart, though she realized that a style relying on tripping up two-legged opponents was significantly less useful on something with rather more legs. Still, there was one thing that she could do that the lion couldn't. The nun started slicing time thin, then charged. In the back of her mind, she registered and failed to process some yelling that sounded like Ceidon.

When one slices time thin, one can do many more things because there are a lot more moments packed into each second for things to happen in. Theoretically speaking, there was no limit to how thin one could slice time and therefore it was possible for everything to happen in practical no time at all. This is generally regarded as a sort of unapprocheable ideal to strive towards by the elder nuns and silly nonsense by the younger ones. Inwuhou sliced one second into four and had crossed half of the rather short distance to the lion by the time that its catlike reflexes had registered the blur. She lowered her staff and swung for its jaw.

Then she went right through a purple-rimmed rift that had suddenly popped open in front of her.

Suddenly, Inwuhou found herself falling down next to a cliff, a short distance above Ceidon and Zack. The surprise broke her concentration like a pebble dropping into still waters. Instinctively, she began contorting in midair and prepared to roll with the landing. Itera retreated back into her rift.

Something shaped suspiciously like Inwuhou's shadow started growing on the entangled pair below.

[Zack Blaze]

Zack blew the strands of his hair out of his face as he and Ceidon flew through the air, the other man now covered mostly in thorns from their last altercation with a mountainside bush. It would have been pretty funny, if not for the fact that the fall was probably going to hurt a lot. True to his thoughts, when Zack and Ceidon touched down on the ground below, the boy could feel jolts of pain all over his body. Ceidon appeared worse for wear, as he had not only hit the ground, but broken Zack’s fall as well.

The teen got up just in time to look at Inwuhou’s shadow getting larger and larger over Ceidon’s form. The young street fighter sighed and held open his arms. Closing his eyes, Zack’s entire body was nearly thrust down by the falling weight of Inwuhou’s body. Zack smiled as he looked to the girl, surprised at his own ability to keep her from slamming into their team mate.

“I’ve had girls falling for me before, but this is ridiculous,” Zack snickered, setting the woman back upright. He grabbed Ceidon’s hand, pulling his fellow adventurer up with a sigh. “Well this is just peachy, now we’re all lost, hurting, and are even further from the goal. Why do I have a feeling this tournament is a lost cause?” Zack rubbed the back of his head, where a sizable lump was already forming.

I wonder if it’s too late to be assigned to another team… Zack thought to himself, looking around the area. There was the smell of pine in the air, so that gave the boy the sense they were near a forest, and the fact he could see Inwuhou’s shadow being cast told the youth that the party had made it to the opposite side of the cliff they were reaching. Maybe Ceidon wasn’t an idiot after all, but merely playing a part to accomplish his goals, much like Zack.

The boy looked towards the ‘team leader’ as the youth had appointed Ceidon in his mind (Zack tended to shy away from leadership unless he had absolute control). Just beyond the man, Zack could make out the darkened room of what appeared to be a cave mouth. Zack pointed towards the entrance, looking to his comrades individually before speaking. “Unless someone is opposed to the idea, I think hiding that our book of untold power was probably hidden in a cave.

[Ceidon]

Ceidon instinctively wrestled with Zack during their free fall, but his intentions were far from sinister. The adventurer was making every attempt to grab onto a rock, bush or anything that would slow their descents, but all of his efforts ended up in vain. Unable to stop his momentum, Ceidon eventually slammed into a large thorn bush. The shrub managed to hold his weight until, of course, Zack fell directly on top him.

The remainder of the fall was a blur for Ceidon, but fortunately the valley settled at an angle and by the end of their plummet they were tumbling instead of falling. It didn’t take long until the adventurer landed on solid ground, and once again, Zack slammed into him. The pain was immeasurable, but it wasn’t Zack’s weight or the force of the blow that hurt him; it was the fact that Zack had caused every thorn that was previously stuck in his jacket to pierce Ceidon's back.

Ceidon lay motionless for the next few moments as Zack got to his feet. He could feel blood pouring from his back and temporarily lost all motivation to move. If Zack hadn’t helped him up, Ceidon probably would have lay there forever. “What?” Ceidon asked as his eyes began to focus. “How are all of you here?” He asked, shaking his head. The entire party was somehow at the bottom of the valley with him. Was he dreaming? Ceidon couldn’t hear their responses and he fell back down onto his knees. The pain was insane.

While Zack was scouting their situation, Ceidon used all of his remaining energy to grab the Shards of Dreniak from his pocket. The shards weren’t sharp like glass, but rather were small pieces of rock. They were part of an ancient artifact called the Dreniak Stone, which Ceidon had recovered on his first adventure. The completed stone had immense power. It could guide the wayward, feed the poor, and even resurrect a man. Its shards had healing powers, or at least that was the extent Ceidon had ever used them.

With the shards firmly in his grip, Ceidon moved his hand in an arcane motion and whispered “Fiato Ramudo.” Anthropologists would recognize it as the tongue of the ancient Berevarians, but Ceidon doubted any of his team members would know the language. After a few moments, the needles that were stuck in Ceidon’s back began pushing to the surface. One by one the popped out and the tissue began to close behind them. It was a painful process, but Ceidon masked his pain behind a grimace. Soon the pain became numb, but the adventurer was still largely out of it.

Meanwhile, Zack had decided the best course of action was to lead the party into a cave. “No,” Ceidon mumbled. “Not cave…lava…must stay in snow. Mustn’t go.” But after leading the party off of a cliff no one was listening. Zack eventually noticed Ceidon was struggling, and offered him a shoulder. “No, no.” Ceidon continued to mumble to himself up until the point when the party entered the cave.

[Inwuhou]

Inwuhou was unexpectedly composed for someone who had spent the last minute charging a mountain lion, rifted headlong into thin air, falling down a cliff, and being neatly caught by a man. She briefly reviewed the event and then decided on the correct person to blame. It's a shame that the person wasn't here right now, so the lecturing would need to be banked..

What she could do now, though, is see to it that her team wasn't limping around on account of something as mundane as a cliff. That, at least, was simple enough to do. Inwuhou stared at Ceidon with her historical eye and started reaching back along that thread. It wasn't actually a thread, not in the sense of something tangible. It was like staring along a line of waves on the sea's surface; the waves weren't connected to each, just shared a phase. She followed those temporal ripples back, watched Ceidon stumble up, watched Ceidon pull out and use his shard.

She watched him hit the ground. She watched him hit the bush. Falls may be terrifying but they were harmless; it was all the sudden stop that was the most unpleasant. Inwuhou reached out to that split-second of sudden stop and erased it from existence, then carefully welded the two free-flying ends together. The memory and impact of that event on Ceidon disappeared; to him. he remembered falling towards a bush jutting from the cliff, then suddenly he was inexplicably past the bush.

The tumble was more difficult, lasting five seconds or so altogether. By the time that Inwuhou had swept these away, she was feeling that distinct sensation of temporal dissonance. Every action had a reaction and in the process of manipulating history, she was also her own place in the timeline. The accumulated paradox pulsated in directions that no common tongue had words for; it was like having constipation and diarrhea at the same time in every particle of your being, which were all trying to twist themselves free of each other. There were very precise and technical terms for the effects amongst the Wuji nuns, but using them would be as meaningless as the words of colors to those born blind.

Ceidon's injuries vanished. His body had no history of ever having hit anything in the last few minutes; one second he was falling and the next he was laying, uninjured, at the bottom of the cliff. Inwuhou, through the haze of paradoxical chronoprojection dissonance, smiled wanly and wondered if the fellow's mind was strong enough to remember the erased events. Then she turned and quietly did the same for Zack, a sheen of cold sweat erupting all over her.

[Itera]

Clack.

Inwuhou's pack opened and Itera's head peeked out. Once assured that there was not in fact an immediate danger of being hit very hard with ground moving very fast, she poked the rest of the way out - that is, up to her waist. There was a broad smile on her face.

"Oh! I see that everyone made the fall just fine. Nobody hurt, hey? That's pretty good." She snapped open her fan and idly applied it, "I thought someone was going to break their neck fo sure. It would have been a shame, of course."

About then, Itera noticed that her ride was not really looking well. Inwuhou smelled wrong, she smelled like too much sweat all of a sudden. She also walked wrong. Instead of that sure-footed, metered gait that the nun usually had, each of her steps came heavily. As stupid as some humans were, Inwuhou didn't strike Itera as being to sort who had to concentrate hard just to walk. This just won't do. Who'd willingly ride a sick horse?

Itera decided to check. She extended one hand and slipped it down the front of Inwuhou's robes.

There was a slight intake of breath and the nun said, "No... stop that. It-" Itera took her hand out. The glove was clammy with cold sweat. More telling was the fact that the nun hadn't smacked Itera across someplace painful already, like the last couple of dimes that Itera had molested the poor woman. Something was definitely wrong.

Itera didn't care. As far as she was concerned, Inwuhou was the mean person who lectured Itera at every meeting, whether it was about theft, callousness, laziness, opulence, sadism, or any number of very human 'sins' being applied incorrectly to the fairy. If Itera knew the word, she would be replying 'anthropocentrism' to every last charge.

"So... where are we going?"