Round 1 Group 9

[Silence Sei]

Round lasts for 2 weeks! Good Luck!

[Zook Murnig]

Lindqualme, the Red Forest, named as much for the sanguine trees drinking the blood of those felled by its magicks and monsters, as for the Red Witch Podë who cursed it. The trees grew in twisted shapes, their blanched bark seeming almost like pulsing flesh if your gaze settled too long on a knot in the wood. The beasts, too, drank in the dark witchcraft, and grew into grisly mutations, claws grown to talons, teeth to venomous fangs, and grown to dire proportions. And hungry.

Mushrooms lurked in the crevices of rocks, and a touch would burst them into choking toxic spores, at best. At worst, Podë’s witchery laced the air with figments, luring you deeper into the forest, or deeper into her mind.

Few safe paths made their way through the Red Forest, and rarely traveled despite the rare lumber to be found. Even on these paths, safety was relative. Woodsmen were like as not to leave the woods alive. Even living, Her curse had touched them. Some simply grew tumorous nodules and died in agony. Others returned from the forest untouched, unmolested, and happy. Their grins turned to rictus as their axes cleaved the support beams of their homes, the throats of their wives and children, and finally their own, their laughter turning to empty convulsive wheezing as their heads rolled on the ground.

But in the desperate times following war with one Forgotten One, the elves turned to the untouchable land of another. A call was put out for adventurers, sellswords, and freelancers to quell the violent magicks of their once-beloved Lindqualme, and save the blighted land for their blighted people. And who better to answer the call than Alma Waterstone?

A red witch now walked the cursed wilds of the Red Witch.

[Tankita Bananas]

I was running. The footsteps were closer and closer with each beat of my heart. I could feel the fear rising in my gut with each step and knew that soon I would vomit. My breaths were short and unsatisfying. I had nothing left. Then, suddenly I hit the dirt with more force than I believed possible. I could feel the creature's claws tearing into my flesh, I could hear each and every bite ripping me apart. I was fading. I cried out for help as I desperately held onto the last images my eyes would ever see, the bright red leaves of the forest of red.

Someone, somewhere took pity. That is how the story goes.

Tankita could just see the edge of the red forest against the sunrise. If she had not seen it before she may have believed it just a trick of the light, but she was all too familiar with the blood-stained trees and foliage. It was the first time she’d laid eyes on it in quite some time, ever since that fateful day when she lost her humanity.

Pode had indeed taken pity, even saved her. If one could call what happened next saving. Her soul was preserved in a piece of scrap metal. She would live on, in whatever form. The piece was found several months later by a group of merchants. Any form of metal could sell in Alerar, where everyone seemed to be searching for the next great breakthrough in technology.

Indeed, the scrap did sell. A bright young engineer had an idea. He planned to create a fully functional war machine that with the touch of a button could clear a battlefield. His entire career had centered around this idea, and as of yet, he had nothing to show for it but an empty vessel that refused to move. The man plugged away, but his resources were growing thin. Soon, the dream would be over.

That is, until he placed a newly formed metal grate into the vehicle’s inner compartment.

Tankita eyed the forest with unrest. Yes, her soul lived on. But at what cost? Somewhere within this forest lived the forgotten one, Pode. No other had the power to create the tank in the first place. No other could undo the damage done. Tankita needed to find Pode, alive. She needed to be human again.

[Silence Sei]

Christoph and Koko have been disqualified for not making the 24 hour deadline.

[Zook Murnig]

For two hours, Alma flitted between the towering oaks of the witch’s wood, dodging grasping branches and shrieking, desiccated ravens alike. She had tracked the strange, metallic beast from near the edge of the Lindqualme. Its rumbling, grunting noise was continuous and impossible to lose, even with the harsh screeching of the Red Witch’s ambient magic and accursed fowl keening in her ears. The witch pulled into a dive astride her staff, sunset hair whipping across her vision as knots and runes in the wood impressed on her palms.

The birds’ racket only grew as more of the feathered fiends leapt from their perches ahead. “A fucking murder of crows,” the witch muttered through clenched teeth, yanking on the gnarled rod to escape the ambush. “Wishful thinking!” With a kick to a passing elm, Alma ducked into a tumble through foliage, rolling over twice to escape the very same tree’s thorny embrace. A sweeping branch clipped her shoulder, however, and with a curse to Nikkal she was sent reeling straight into the trunk of a nearby tree, staff clattering to the undergrowth below.

Her breath left her on impact, and all thought of her steel quarry left her as she tumbled into bracken and darkness.

[Tankita Bananas]

She still remembered how her flesh felt as the ravenous beast tore into her soft flesh. Her pleads for aid were left unanswered as she felt nerves and veins torn from her bones. The snarls of the beast were so primitive that she could feel the saliva as it fell upon her exposed back and straight into her freshly created wounds. It made her think that perhaps it would have been better to die than to exist as she did now; as a war machine whose only purpose was to bring death and mayhem wherever she traveled.

She rolled through the trees with an unusual ease, the smaller plants left crushed in her wake. Birds scattered to the heavens as she made her presence known through the Lindqualme, her engine a telltale giveaway of her location. It felt as though she had went through the Red Forest for hours with no hint of her goal in sight,

She paused when she came across a woman with a most peculiar orange hair color was knocked away by what seemed to be a sentient tree. Such things seemed as ridiculous as a sentient tank, which made it not out of the realm of possibility. Tankita released magical blast from her cannon straight towards the live tree, which resulted in a loud thunderous echo throughout the woods and a large tree that quickly disappeared from existence. Without hesitation, Tankita followed the injured girl in an attempt to rescue her. She would not see another person turned into what she had become because of Pode's 'mercy'.

[Zook Murnig]

A blur of light greeted the witch as eyes fluttered open, and fuzzy reds and browns swam above her. A loud blast nearby made her start, and her heart pounded in her chest. Her dress and cloak tangled in undergrowth, she flailed to free herself from the thorns and brush. For her uncoordinated efforts, she was rewarded threefold: cuts and scrapes all over her arms and legs were opened by harsh branches; upon freeing herself, she fell unceremoniously into the grassy earth below; and finally, as she rose from penance, she assumed for blaspheming the forest goddess, she convulsed once more and burning bile erupted onto the forest floor.

Retching on all fours, she still struggled to rise as her surroundings came into stark clarity. The rumbling she had been following for hours was still there. Not only that, she realized with a further wrench in her gut, but it was growing louder. She stumbled to her feet, an already pounding heart threatening to leap from her chest as she clutched same tree that she had been concussed against, presumably only minutes ago. Hands grasping through the bush quickly grasped on the gnarled wood of her staff. She felt too dizzy now to fly, but if nothing else she could land a few blows with the lead-filled head of her weapon before she died.

Then, she saw it. A behemoth of steel, shining in the red-filtered light, with strange oblong wheels for legs, and a long cannon swiveling around on top. Too much for her enfeebled mind, she stood stunned and wobbling, staff raised against a monstrosity she could not even hope to dent.

[Tankita Bananas]

To experience death, True Death, was something few people on Althanas lived to tell about. The Citadel was home to its share of slain warriors, but there was always the notion in the back of their heads that they would be revived, returned to the world as if their fights to the finish never happened. True Death was different; there was an indescribable fear in the knowledge that you would never see your loved ones again, never get to laugh or cry or be angry or be able to use any of the five senses. The thought that you would become a rotting body in the ground and eventually forgotten by everybody. True Death was horrifying.

Tankita watched as the poor girl before her struggled to gain her bearings. The large roar machine rumbled as it advanced upon the witch, its cannon lowered to her as though she prepared to unload explosive justice upon the weakened woman. Instead of unleashing a fate not unlike her own, however, Tankita spoke to the poor soul.

"Rest now," she said as a fog began to roll in through the trees, a strange crimson midst that matched the horrific majesty of Lindqualme hue for hue. "I will not harm you, and you are safer with me. My name is Tankita, Tankita Bananas, and I am here to help." Despite her encouraging words, the tank could not help but feel drowsy as the red fog spread over her treads and seeped into her cockpit. She never saw whether or not her new friend decided to take her up on the offer, as the tank soon lost all consciousness.

[Zook Murnig]

The crimson fog spread over her before she could even register its approach in her addlepated state. Even so, as the droplets touched on her tongue, a far too familiar coppery taste told her what even her other senses couldn’t. “Bloodmist,” she whispered, recognizing the trademark of the Red Witch’s enchantment even as her nose filled with the sharp scent of blood, and her eyes clouded and became caked with the clotting fog.

—

“Alma!”

Blearily, the witch stirred, aware of large, rough hands about her shoulders, shaking her.

“Alma, wake up!” the voice cried again, familiar, like an old friend, and young. She shrugged off the hands, rubbing at her eyes to clear the dried blood and her vision. Peering sleepily up at the boy standing over her, there was something… She couldn’t place it, but she knew this strange boy, with flaming, curled locks atop a pale and freckled face. His features were long and sharp, with piercing blue eyes that seemed almost to glow in the dim light of the Red Forest. Glancing around, she saw no sign of the metal beast, Tankita, and so she returned her attention to the boy, pushing herself to sit up despite the ache in her back. Hempen overalls and a ruddy white shirt clad him, and even his broad, hands-on-hips stance was familiar as he leaned over her.

“Mal?” Alma ventured, slowly, hesitantly. She dared not hope. “Malakai? But…but you’re…”

“Dead? A rat, curled in a pouch at your hip? Buried in a grave across the world?” He laughed. “All of them at once?” He shook his head, orange and gold ringlets bouncing as he turned just a little away from her. “Aye, and yet here I am, whole and hale. And tall.” He groped at his ass like an idiot. “And tailless, I see!”

Impossible, she thought. A trick of witchcraft from the Red Witch herself, to torment me. She looked away from her dead older brother, now living. He’d died when she was but a child, burning with fever from pox. Young as she was, though, her budding witchcraft had yet to be honed or harnessed, and like all little girls, she never wanted to let her big brother go to that hungering god, Mot, swallowed to oblivion. Her powers, like those of many young witches in such desperate sorts, bound his soul as she felt his passing, and leashed it to the nearest life, a small rat under her bed, chaim burning bright and new. From that day on, her brother lived again as her familiar, doing her bidding, comforting her as constant companion, and never remembering the life he once lived. Until now, whatever the Witch had done.

She rose, carefully, and reached out to him, tears streaming down her face. Old wounds, thought healed and scarred over, reopened as she sobbed into his solid, boyish shoulder. He’d always been tall, and strong, and he looked nor sounded not a day older than when she’d last seen him seventeen years past. He stumbled a little, steadying himself against a tree with one hand, as she leaned into him, burying her face into his overalls. Her shoulders heaved shakily with each breath as she dug her fingers into his waist, and he wrapped his free arm around her slender shoulders.

“Mal,” she said, her voice muffled and nasal from snot running out her nose. “I missed you so much, Mal. I’m so sorry.”

“I know.”

[Tankita Bananas]

Tankita slowly opened up what many would consider her 'eyes' after her abrupt nap and found herself face to face with a person she never thought she would see again. A tall woman stood before the war machine with long blonde hair, hazel brown eyes, a red and white striped tank top and black pants. The woman craned her head top the side at the tank as if she attempted to gauge just what the large mass of steel was. After a few careful blinks, she shrugged her shoulders and walked off.

Tankita knew what the girl had to have thought because she would have thought the same thing; the large fixture was some sort of strange testament to Pode in this cursed forest, and would in no way harm her. The machine started to follow this woman, her treads a loud rumble upon the ground as she approached. The woman once known as Tamara Bananas turned her head to see the metallic monster come closer, and let out a shrill scream that could pierce the heavens.

"No!" Tankita tried to shout into the mind of the girl, "Wait! don't go that way! Tamara!" Her pleas were to no avail, and the woman darted off into the darkness of the forest, where the growls and grumbles of the creatures within soon fell silent. The innocent girl knew not what she headed into, but the death trap she would become knew all too well now the dangers of Lindqualme.

And so, Tankita Bananas followed her former self into both the unknown and the too well known.