Round 1: Shadar Vs Ceidon

[Silence Sei]

You each have two weeks to complete your battle. May the best man win!

[Shadar]

The shop door clicked shut behind Shadar and Brigitte, sparing them the posh, pastel aura in favor of the Bazaar's sun-baked and colorfully frenetic avenues. Bright banners snapped fitfully in the breeze, replacing the hawkers that infested the lower streets. Here, merchants attracted attention with their two-story buildings and immaculate facades alone, and even the most cheaply dressed of shoppers had some hint of frill or embroidery in eye-catching hues.

To the locals, the duo looked like foreigners who had just broken from their starkly-toned lifestyle to embrace a bit of color, even if it wasn't the most appropriate piece for a day of shopping.

“I didn't want you to actually buy it,” Brigitte whispered, somewhere between fright and anger, as she jerkily hitched her hood farther over her face in spite of the noon warmth. “I just wanted you to see it.”

Shadar didn't respond. His eyes were as shocked and distant as hers had been in the shop. He studied the mask in his hands as if it would explode at some unknown cue, though the costume piece itself couldn't look any more benign than it already did.

It was the face of a canine with pointed ears. He wanted to call it a jackal, though the artist's aim could have been any wild dog. All he could say with surety was that realism hadn't been a dominant concern. The snout was a simple cone with a flat, non-threatening mouth drawn across it; the hollow eyes were wide and comical; and the color was a rich, if ridiculous, purple. Add a hungry snarl and fire in the sockets, and you would have the face of Brigitte's creator. He might as well have been Shadar's creator, too, given all the changes that Diamond Jackal had made to his body, his mind, and his mortality.

“It's just a coincidence,” Shadar said sternly, “Jackal's gone.” His grip creaked tighter as if he expected the mask to break and fade like one of the dream demon's illusions.

“Exactly,” she snapped, though there was no weight behind the assertion. “Why couldn't we just leave it there?”

Shadar looked up with an exasperated shake of his head. “I wouldn't have seen it at all if you hadn't said anything.”

The crowd diverted around them by a greater margin, some chortling at what they suspected was a lover's spat. A constipated face appeared between the window mannequins behind them, the shop owner willing them to clear out for his paying traffic. Neither of them noticed.

“I didn't...” The peevishness in her voice melted with a stutter. “I didn't want to be the only one who saw it. What if I was seeing thing? What if he-”

“Gone,” Shadar cut her off by pressing a finger to her lips. There was a barely perceptible quiver to them. He turned and began walking up the street, his first two steps slow so that she could take her usual place as his shoulder. He stood the mask on his palm and balanced it with small twitches. “I know how to make it official, too.”

Brigitte leaned closer as she walked. Her haunted emerald eyes peeked from under the hood, meeting the sudden jovial twinkle in Shadar's blue. “How?” she asked guardedly.

“With fire,” he intoned dramatically as he used his other hand to make a fidgety, crackling gesture over the mask. “Lay 'im to rest. Burn 'im in effigy. Whatever you want to call it, it's what he would have wanted.”

“-to do to us,” Brigitte added bitterly. His grin broke her, though, and she found herself laughing at the irony.

Shadar stopped balancing the mask to perform a far more impressive trick. He pressed both gloves against either side, and it melted into the fabric like water into a sponge.

They made a bee-line for the outskirts of town, as it would only please the demon's ghost if his funeral also sent part of Radasanth to a fiery grave. Away from the press and pomp of those who could afford to spend most days shopping, Brigitte lowered her hood. Hair as red and brilliant as rubies tumbled down over the earth-toned cloak, making Shadar look monochrome in comparison.

His spectrum went from the silver of his hair and the bone white of his long-sleeved shirt to the obsidian blackness of his sleeveless coat, with not a hint of color in between. His gloves, encompassing fingertip to elbow, seemed so dark that the light must have either made a conscious effort to avoid them or been consumed upon contact. He was a decidedly unfunny harlequin to the deity of fierce womanhood beside him. On the height of a step, he could almost see over her head, but he doubted that anyone they passed would assume him to be the leader.

Bodyguard or jester, he thought to himself with amusement instead of bitterness. Embracing the latter, he summoned the mask once more from the inky darkness of his gloves and tossed it flippantly with each step.

Brigitte eyed it warily. He put it away.

[Ceidon]

Anthropologist, librarian, blacksmith…

Ceidon Lore had taken on a number of professions in his never-ending quest to protect Althanas’ greatest secrets, but nothing compared to the absurdity of his current role. Two weeks ago, Caduceus Grimaldi, Ceidon’s best friend and co-founder of the Order of the Golden Dawn, asked the young adventurer to infiltrate the Corone Rangers to find traces of a rare material called osmium. Ordinarily Ceidon would have been fine with the mission, even considering how useless he thought it was, except that his only entry point to the heavily guarded depot was disguised as a member of the circus sent to entertain the Rangers in Radasanth.

Ceidon was a clown, and naturally everything had just gone wrong...

Ceidon ran through the streets of Radasanth as fast as his penguin-toed clown shoes would allow him. Cradled in his arms were several metal casings, each one no longer than an inch long. “Dear God…” Ceidon cried out as an arrow whizzed by his head. After his daring escape of the Ranger depot moments before, at least 10 guards had given chase. “They’re just used casings!” As he cut around a corner, a piece of curly green hair fell over his eyes. Ceidon moved his head from side to side trying to clear his vision, but the strand refused to budge. In a final act of desperation, Ceidon lowered his head mid-sprint and attempted to grab the hair with his fingers. The task was made much more difficult as Ceidon struggled to hold onto the casings and maintain his balance in his clown shoes. After fumbling for several moments, Ceidon finally gave up and lifted his head only to find he was on a collision path with Shadar and Brigitte.

“Look out!” Ceidon called. When the two did not respond, Ceidon had no choice but to avoid the collision by face-planting on the cobblestone. Ceidon’s wig and the casings flew everywhere. Unable to move his hands quickly enough, Ceidon’s face took the majority of the fall, leaving a baseball sized strawberry on his cheek. “Ugh.” Ceidon said, pushing himself onto his hands. Groggily, he looked up to the people he had just avoided. One of them, Ceidon was sure, was a ruby-haired angel. “Oh...oh hi!” he stammered.

Then reality set in. In addition to an instant headache caused by the whiplash of the fall, Ceidon realized that he was about to meet the girl of his dreams dressed in a puffy lace shirt, duck-shoes, and with his face painted like a rainbow. “I’m…” Ceidon was cut off when a loud “He’s over here!” boomed from around the corner, “...being chased.” Frantically, Ceidon searched the ground for as many of the casings as he could find. “Oh, bother,” he said, as another arrow clanked against a nearby metal door. He jumped to his feet with a few casings in both hands and took off down the road.

Before he broke off down an alley, he turned and called out to the pair, “You might want to run!”

[Shadar]

“A clown,” Shadar mumbled as the rainbow-faced stranger scampered away. He left a mess of tiny metal pieces and one green wig in his wake. A breeze made it flutter on the ground like alien roadkill.

Neither wig nor metal had touched the two, and if a witness squinted from just the right angle, they would see why. Ethereal wings almost as transparent as glass wreathed them where they stood shoulder to shoulder. “That was...,” Brigitte stammered as her wings, nothing but faint gossamer shimmers in the bright sunlight, relaxed and shrank toward her back. Her cloak appeared unaffected by the stems sticking through it and showed no damage after the two ghostly limbs retreated into her shoulder blades. She finished weakly, “Odd.” The man probably hadn't seen the wings, but he had stared in a very disconcerting way, like looking at an outrageous monster. She wasn't. Anymore.

Shouting filled the street as the man's pursuers neared. Brigitte gave Shadar a sharp nudge with her shoulder and shot him the “Do we get in involved?” look.

He woke from a bewildered daze and answered tensely. “Nah. We've got an appointment.”

Brigitte's eyebrows inched higher. “Since when do we-”

Shadar's stomach exploded.

She reacted before he did. A high, piercing cry blasted from her in a tone almost as bird-like as her wings. He looked down and blinked stupidly. In hindsight, the loud pings he had heard were far too heavy to be made by the bits of scattered metal. They had sounded like arrows, which corroborated with the half-inch thick sample taken out of his right side just below the rib cage. “Bloody heeeell!” he screamed and stomped as the pain hit and blood, turning to mist upon reaching the air, concealed the wound behind a shroud of crimson haze. “Now, we're involved,” he added, angry yet calmer. His nerves had already begun to dissociated themselves from the entry wound, as well as what felt to be an exit wound out the back. Nothing but a scratch... that you could see clear to the other side through.

The herd of guards stampeded around them, only a few glancing at the innocent they had injured. Their uniforms snapped violently and their bow strings hummed taut to the ready again. Brigitte's face, previously a portrait of surprise and anguished sympathy, snapped to one of bestial rage and locked on the nearest oblivious guard.

Shadar seized her elbow before she could take blood for blood. “Wrangle the clown,” he commanded through clenched teeth. The hand that held her was already changing. Red fibers of muscle grew from the glove's black surface like a spreading mold. The anger darkening her eyes didn't fade; it just changed target; as she darted to the side of the street amid a whisper of rigid, invisible feathers.

The very last guard, huffing more than the others, slowed to a standing jog in front of Shadar. He shouted over the clamour of frightened citizens and furious armsmen, “Go to the healer up the street!” He offered a heavy slip of paper bearing an insignia -a rifle crossed with a sword- to the bleeding man. “Show this for her to waive the fe-”

The last word turned into song of pain in high “eeee”, and the breastplate performed a chorus of screeching metal. A few of the guards turned. The song ended with a crunching thud that left the singer on the ground, limbs askew, a good three strides behind his previous footing. He moaned an encore. More of the men joined the first group in their frozen gawking, then they all applauded with the drawing of bow strings that had been as lax as their jaws.

Shadar's right arm was still extended, encased in what appeared to be the borrowed limb of a pallid weightlifter. The new flesh continued over his shoulder and ended in a supportive hump. “Six,” he analyzed aloud as he craned his neck to see above the bulging bicep. With a quick twist on his heel, he faced them. The insignia card, forgotten, landed lazily behind him.

“I hope you all have the discount, because this could get expensive."

[Silence Sei]

Shadar advances into Round 2