AC: Round 1 - Group 6

[Zack Blaze]

Zack now found himself in the one position he had not wanted to be in; leading the party. The youth sighed, finding it annoying that he had to issue orders out rather than just mindlessly follow them. Of course, after Ceidon had lead them astray and then almost inadvertently gotten them all killed, the street fighter felt somebody had to fill the void. He felt a lot safer with his life in his own hands than that of any of his team mates.

The cave was dark, and quite humid. To help pass the time, Zack used his miming skills to mimic holding a flashlight, his vision concentrating very hard in the dimly lit settings. It wasn’t until about a mile in that the boy had finally caught sight of something. Around the corner, past some jagged rocks, was a light. Zack’s first thought was lanterns, which then brought him to the conclusion that there was intelligent life just around the next turn. Excitedly, Zack took off in the direction of the light, sweat starting to pour down his face as he did so. Just before the boy bounded the corner though, he felt a hand grab him and throw his backwards.

Zack fell on his bottom, looking up at his attacked to find a tired and sweating Ceidon wiping away the sweat from his forehead; Moreso a gesture of relief than a way to actually clear the wetness from his features. “What the hell, man?!” Zack demanded, standing up and looking at the would-be adventurer, who seemed to be heaving and wheezing pretty hard. Even after being healed by Inwuhou, it seemed that the sheer humidity of their surroundings was taking a lot out of the older man. As such, Ceidon just pointed, straight towards where Zack would have been if he had not run interference.

Lava. A huge pool or orange and red liquid sloshing back and forth in a trench that looked about teen feet deep and three feet wide. If the fighter had continued his fast paced trek, he would have fallen directly into a liquid death. Zack looked to Ceidon once more, nodding his appreciation for the man. “Death traps seems to indicate that we’re getting closer to forbidden treasures, I’m assuming.”

The youth scratched the back of his head, Itera and Inwuhou starting to catch up with the men of the party. He looked to Ceidon with a newfound respect for the man, nodding once more. “Alright, so do we push on or do we retreat, boss?”

[Ceidon]

“Push on,” Ceidon replied nonchalantly, “it's just lava!” The adventurer was unusually chipper considering his unexpected fatigue. “Hey Zack Blaze?” Ceidon asked. “Why are we in a cave?” Only moments before they were perched on top of a cliff overlooking a valley, but maybe he had made that up. Either way, Ceidon soon realized that finding this cave was probably the best thing that could have happened to the wayward party. “You know what, never mind,” he paused, “this is really good!”

Suddenly the scree, the zigzagging ranges, and the cave made sense. These weren’t mountains, they were volcanoes. In Ceidon's mind, it was almost as though this island was created specifically for the tournament. Ceidon was no geologist, but every instinct in his body suggested that if the party kept heading upward they would eventually arrive at their goal. “This island is a baby,” he said. “Earthquakes, eruptions, excitement! All we have to do is keep going up and we’ll arrive at the Omega Infinitum in no time.”

When no one moved, Ceidon realized that it was his turn to lead the party. “Oh fine,” he said. “Come on guys, follow me.” He started up the path. Although Zack continued to use some type of magic to illuminate the way, the lava managed to keep the cave bright and warm. "Put that away, silly. You're wasting your energy," he told Zack. As they were walking, Ceidon noticed that Inwuhou was dragging behind. She was sweating, and for some reason this made the nun inexplicably attractive to him. Ceidon let Zack lead temporarily, using the nun’s pace as an excuse to drop back.

“Hey, are you okay?” Ceidon asked. When she didn’t respond, the adventurer offered his shoulder. She reluctantly took it. “So, tell me about your order. Are you allowed to fall in love, or is that forbidden?” Ceidon didn’t realize it, but Inwuhou’s chronoprojection dissonance had completely altered every chemical in the adventurer’s body. His journey through time had left him unquestionably fascinated with everything he set his eyes upon.

[Inwuhou]

One arm draped over Ceidon's shoulders, Inwuhou stumped along while trying to maintain her concentration on three things at the same time. The most important thing was to keep her feet moving along and not stumbling. It was surprisingly easy because the floor was surprisingly smooth; There had been much more mountainous work by novice masons. Worse, she was fighting paradox, running her personal time slightly slower than the world and very gradually relaxing her twisted-up temporal footprint. It was going to take a while.

All of this effort meant that the scarce free little bit of her mind reacted autonomously when Ceidon's question arrived, "Love leads to worldly thoughts and inevitable loss."

She blinked and sniffed at the air. The sulfurous fumes outgassing from the fast-flowing lava was starting to make her lightheaded. Then she realized what she had said and just barely avoided clapping her free hand over her mouth. She avoided it because that hand was still holding the staff and quite the embarrassing episode of pain would have ensued.

"I don't mean... that is... erm. We're not forbidden from doing anything. The precepts are there as guidance; if someone violates one, the only one truly hurt is their own progress towards enlightenment. The damage will have already been... done. I'll... I'll be okay. I just need time to unwind. Mukuu!" She coughed.

"What is that smell?"

[Itera]

"Burnt sulfur and the like." Itera answered, vigorously fanning herself with fresh air from her rift. It was working, for the time being. She turned grinning eyes towards Ceidon, "You've got a nun fetish, isn't it? Innocent girls who haven't any experience? You like the vulnerable."

The tone was playfully accusatory, but had a real streak of insulted pride behind it all. How dare this... this human act as if she wasn't here? She was a fairy, high above the measly existence of these animals. The nun didn't even wear fashionable clothing!

Itera's train of thought was suspended while the group made a concerted effort to jump across one of the thinner branches of flowing magma in the floor of the cave. Well, the three humans did, anyway; she just rode along in Inwuhou's backpack. Then she decided to be perfectly honest with herself and everyone else, "Tell you what, Ceidon. I've got mine and you've got your pick. How about I show the girl a few basic things beforehand? It'll be more fun that way. I've seen how human mating can be all sorts of awkward the first time."

And then Inwuhou will never be satisfiable again.

Up ahead, the cavern widened into a high-ceilinged chamber, its walls still smooth as before and its gently sloped floor crossed with a few streams of lava. The air was sweltering hot from the convection and heavy to breathe from the volcanic gases. In the center of this chamber, the ceiling had a great hole knocked in it, the rim filled with stone stalactites frozen from old, dripping lava. Centered below the hole was a many-layered conical pillar, the frozen remnants of an old lava falls. Two streams flowed through tunnels in the bottom of it and the surface was, judging by the air roiling above it, quite hot to the touch.

"We wanted to go up?"

[Zack Blaze]

The leap had been relatively easy to make, now that he knew what to expect. Yet, even Zack’s confidence in his own abilities did not stop the sweltering heat from seeping into every pore of his body, forcing out sweat beads in their place. Zack took a hard swallow, only to realize that both his mouth and throat were drying from the intense humidity of the cave.

“Guess that’s what being locked in a lava cave will do to the body,” Zack grinned, but his voice came out rather hoarse. He looked to the lava falls with an admiration of sorts. After all, it wasn’t every day one got to marvel in the beauty of waterfalls made completely of molten lava. The bubbling sounds of the cave reminded Zack of that of a stew, when boiling a hearty variety of meat and vegetables to perfection. Zack licked his lips at the prospect of liquid food, his rough tongue feeling like sand paper across his mouth.

“The way I see it…” Zack took another minute to swallow, trying to steady his words so he could speak clearly. It was tougher than expected. “We can either go up right now, or get out of this cave, find some water, and try again in a little while. While I’m not…” He paused once more, taking a deep breath and swallowing once more. “Sorry, while I’m not opposed to climbing, I don’t think any of us would make it. Now, if we could leave, on the other hand.”

Zack took another swallow, fully prepared to finish his sentence, when the pause in his observations gave way to a new sound. It had a steady rhythm to it, an almost thundering sound as it got closer and closer to the group. Zack looked around for a minute before looking at his party, his eyes starting to grow wide with fear. “Can someone tell me what the hell that noise is?!”

[Ceidon]

“Tea,” Ceidon replied to Inwuhou with a grin. He was about to continue when he was interrupted by Itera. This absolutely delighted the adventurer. Like a child peaking around a tree Ceidon let go of the nun and moved her body until he was face to face with the fairy. As she spoke, he became more interested in her glittering eyes than her proposal. “No way!” Ceidon said, moving his head towards hers, “I personally prefer ridiculously gorgeous intellectually superior omnipresent multi-dimensional beings.” Then, before she could respond, Ceidon kissed Itera on the cheek.

Immediately thereafter, Ceidon became distracted by Zack’s annoying banter about the volcano. “Yes, up, up, up,” he said, pulling away from the females. “We have to go up.” Ceidon moved towards Zack in a pace that started with a skip and ended in a sprint. “Ooh,” he said, clenching his fists. “I can’t wait until we get to the top of this mountain and I get to destroy the Omega Infinitum.” Ceidon shook Zack and then jumped up on a nearby rock.

“Yes! Do you hear that? That’s the sound of victory. It signals the end of our quest and the beginning of our lives as heroes.” Ceidon yelled, extending his arms. Suddenly a large pain shot through the adventurer’s temple. It felt as though Letho Ravenheart had just shot the Lawbringer at Ceidon’s head from point blank range. “Ahh,” he said, grabbing the side of his head. “What the hell is happening to me?” Then things got even worse. Ceidon felt like a heartbeat: every second a new emotion swept through his body. He thought for sure he was having a heart attack.

At some point, Ceidon looked at his left hand and counted ten fingers. It was like double vision, but he wasn’t dizzy. “Did, did I just get a fairy STD?” No one responded, so Ceidon focused on his hand. In a few moments, ten fingers became five, and his heartbeat of emotions ceased. “What was that?” he asked. When he looked up, no one was looking back at him. They were, in fact, looking behind him with horror in their eyes. “Oh no,” Ceidon said, “There’s something behind me, isn’t there?”

Zack Blaze managed to pull Ceidon out of the way just in time to avoid being incinerated by the flaming breath of a dragon.

[Itera]

Itera blushed and was surprised at herself. With all that she was planning a moment ago, embarrassment seemed like it would fit in about as well as a deaf-mute at a choir recital. Was it the outlandish praise? To the fairy, that was just telling the truth. Was it the kiss on the cheek? Itera had tried to intercept it with her own lips but the newly-energized Ceidon was too quick. Was it the confession? Itera had rejected more and better, especially since coming to Althanas, than she cared to count.

To her personal astonishment and annoyance, Itera found that she wanted to reciprocate. It was that sudden and very visceral skipping of the heart when Ceidon leaned in that drove the blush. There's no telling when her fancies might fly off somewhere else, but right now she wanted Ceidon. If she could just get him to drop all that iron, she'd spirit away the man in an instant; lust or not, iron was still mostly prohibited in Itera's realm. She looked up, opened her mouth behind her fan to ask Ceidon which watch he was taking tonight, and stared.

She stared in horror, in fact. There was a very large lizard of some kind staring cross-eyed down at Ceidon. It looked like a small mountain, if mountains could be made of molten rock covered in a crust of black stone shot through with cracks. On second look, they appeared to be scales: black, glassy scales over flesh glowing red-orange hot. The eyes were a molten orange and the pupils were vertical slits of glowing white. Fierce heat emanated from its body, like standing close to a blacksmith's oven.

The dragon opened its mouth; staring down its white-hot throat was like finding out that the light at the end of the tunnel was on fire. Zack tackled Ceidon off of the latter's lofty perch, then a roiling plume of flames wrapped in a shroud of red-hot ash melted said lofty perch into a runny mass in passing. Well before the dragon's breath had reached Inwuhou, the radiated heat was intolerable. The entire chamber was lit like day.

There was no time for words. Itera stuck one white-socked leg out of the rift and kicked Inwuhou in the head. The nun went stumbling aside, leaving the fairy floating in mid-air half out of her rift. She enlarged it all the way and turned it vertical, the far side facing the oncoming doom.

The flames unceremoniously vanished into the rift. The accompanying hot ash swirled and a few flakes landed painfully on Itera. Then she fell out of the vertical rift and landed with the dull thump of backside to stone smouldering in places. That offensively frilly dress is probably ruined.

She sprung up screaming and crying. The stone floor was quite hot from the settled ash. Her words were mostly incoherent, but the general idea was, "Get it off!"

[Inwuhou]

One of the lessons repeated throughout the years of Inwuhou's life at the temple was how to handle being kicked in the head. It usually went alongside other lessons such as how to handle being punched in the head, headbutted in the head, and wrong in the head. All of them were intended to teach holding concentration on what you're doing at the moment because losing control could mean getting stuck one second to the left of yesterday or being spread fractally across all of history like a sort of chunky, screaming pâté.

Fortunately, Itera's foot hit Inwuhou while the latter was still occupied with staring down the white-hot dragon throat. While was no danger of making any people sauce, Inwuhou almost brained herself on the cavern wall before she had recovered. Then there was a stunningly bright gout of fire and a choking, eyes-watering cloud of ash and smoke.

Eyes watering and squeezed shut, the nun picked a handful of needles from inside her robes and hurled them at the dragon with great accuracy. It wasn't as if she usually used her eyes, anyways. Fleshly senses can be deceived. The needles hit its face with a sad plopping noise and dripped away, softening and a little melted. A few reddening dents on the scales marked where they had struck so ineffectually.

The great tail swung around, trailing hot air and attempting to decapitate the nun. She fought the paradox-induced sickness while slicing thin and jumping over the blow. She hung in the air for a few seconds, slicing thick and slowing herself time. The only good that it did was that it gave her temporal whiplash; she came down from the jump and landed right on the dragon's tail.

Her shoes started smoking. They only avoided catching fire because Inwuhou was now racing up the great big tail towards the great big buttocks.

[Zack Blaze]

Zack was never typically one to do something outwardly heroic, but if he had watched Ceidon get friend by the giant rock-like dragon before them, he would have likened it to watching a mental ill person drown in a pool. He could feel the temperature of the cave getting hotter as the dragon bellowed his fire about, causing Zack’s eyes to see ‘heat ripples’ nearly everywhere. He now knew what it was like to be a turkey in the ovens of Alerar.

Zack positioned himself upright, and helped Ceidon do the same just in time to watch Inwuhou charge straight up the back of the beast. The monstrous lizard withheld using his flames against the girl, choosing instead to rear its head back and snap at her. Zack sighed and slapped his hand against his head, shaking it furiously. Why was he stuck with a team of complete morons?

“Stupid, stupid stupid…” Zack said with a sigh, following Inwuhou’s suit and attempting to run up the dragon’s tail as well. Unfortunately, with the first step the youth took, the dragon reacted violently, flinging its tail forward and catapulting Zack onto the face of the beast. He slammed into the nose of the creature with a thud, trying not to lose consciousness over the brutal throw. He could feel the heat of the beast’s skin all over his body and he looked down to his comrades, hoping one of them could give…

“A little help here?!”

[Inwuhou]

Inwuhou had no illusions about the possibility of actually hurting the huge creature with her fists, feet, and staff. It was like the old saying about trying to learn Shield Breaker Style, which focused on breaking the enemy's equipment with your head, fists, and feet before they break your head, fists, and feet with their equipment. The saying went like this: don't.

It had to have its weak points. The eyes would be vulnerable to a well-placed blow. The claw-bones could be crushed, the teeth broken, and presumably somewhere there were nads that it could be kicked. This all assumed that the dragon was an overheated living being rather than just some mobile pile of rocks, lava, and violence. If the eyes were big gemstones and the nads were actual rocks, then things would go rather poorly for Inwuhou.

Things went poorly for Inwuhou. She was halfway up the dragon's back when it decided that that it didn't really want a massage. A lot of teeth went towards her very suddenly. She struck for them with her staff and was rewarded with a loud crack, a howl of angry pain, and half of her staff missing. The half still in her hand had a few bits of sulfrous-smelling teeth embedded in it.

Zack's cry of surprise dopplered past Inwuhou from behind. He hung tenaciously onto that snout and yelled something about help. The dragon violently shook its head to try to dislodge its new, meaty bridle. There was nothing for it. Inwuhou picked out a piece of dragontooth and slung it at a great yellow eye.