Osiris Open 2020: Round One (Philomel vs Gum do Mugu)

Since the Siege of Radasanth and the coming of the Calamity, much has happened. The majority of the city is as it was before; a buzzing metropolis rebuilt from the blood and sweat of many citizens, a melting pot for many cultures and creeds, but just south of the center lies the ruins of an urban district hit hardest by the Brotherhood's siege and the meteor strikes.

Devoid of the warmth of the rest of the city, the district is now a field of smouldering debris. Devastated buildings and annihilated roads have spilled their concrete waste for miles, leaving only barely recognisable features.

Banners hang with slogans to be read only by the dust-laden wind. Against the wall of an old court house is a bicycle, the chain dangling on the only distinguishable pavement in the area. Ahead is the clock tower, forever stuck at half past noon.

Its only redeeming feature now is as a proving ground for those whose powers would otherwise endanger a populated area...

An elusive trickster, with arms twice the length of his body, swept through the city's arboretum, swinging from branch to bough. He was charging for the city's rubble-strewn southern district, buoyed by the dawn's cool light. The shapeshifter felt refreshed, washed clean by the virtue of a reborn day. The night's trials, burdensome though they were, faded as he raced to the park's boundary. Ravaged by gods and war, verdant trees gradually gave way to broken trunks and burnt stumps. At its edge, the arboretum met the abandoned wreck of the south side: it was deemed unworthy of reconstruction, while its dead had been judged unworthy of burial.

The night before, cultured in the darkest hours of the night, precious information had loosened. Gossip, the milky sap of a choking vine, consumed the concerns of a privileged few. Do Mugu, the shaman shapeshifer of the Xangu Nation, had received a mild dose of their poisonous words; it was via the halls of power that he came into contact with this noxious chatter; dangerous players toyed with a nation, gleefully proud of their canny stratagem. While acting as a diplomatic champion for his people, he had found himself before this uncomfortable rash of Radasanth's nefarious powerbrokers.

Assassination for military favours?

One life represented a small payment for a signed guarantee of his nation's survival.

And so, fueled by the night's task, he found himself coursing towards a violent dawn. Philomel's battle with the Castigars left little to the imagination; Gum do Mugu knew he was small compared to the rising shadow of her potent majesty. Yet, he came with confidence, anchored to an unshakable core of equanimity. Moreover, to the shaman, death was harmless; a servant of his death god, Gum felt at ease with brittle mortality. After all, he had travelled the blood rivers of the Underworld many times. So, the shaman's thoughts were, instead, with what fear his haunting talents could inflict on Van der Aart.

The night before, Do Mugu's conniving taskmasters had presented a patchy, but useful dossier. "Stay away from the ground," they had warned him. So naturally, their advice informed the shaman's choices.

Despite leaving the trees behind, the shaman stayed in the form of a forest trickster. While in that transformed state, his body was best-suited to swinging through the trees. Swapping branches for eaves and trunks for towers, the adaptable shaman repurposed his monkey-like body and began to climb the perilous remains of a crumbling cathedral.

As he scaled the steeple, a murder of black-feathered squawkers pierced the morning's calm, drawing unwanted attention to his position. Those crows took flight, circling the cathedral's jagged spire, while its wretched gargoyles mocked the lively birds with a mute vigil. A cerulean dawn was swept aside by a flourishing squall and its blanket of gloomy clouds. Rain was on the way, and its arrival would make slick his precarious perch.

On the cathedral.

He was on the Drys-damned cathedral.

"Ugh," the Matriarch spat, rounding up a wild roaming of saliva with her tongue and shooting it straight with the hearty skill of an outback ranger.

Beside her armoured, adorned and hooved form a black nose pierced into the sky. it belonged to an eager-eyed fox - earth-spirit, flame-hearted, soul-twin - who was worth as much to her as her own daughter and heir. Veridian Ryuusan swung his snow white tail against the dust of the sorrowful ruins, A swift tongue flickered out and tasted the stale air.

Wrong Osiris was to choose this arena got your fight, he murmured directly into her mind. Insensitive, cruel, wrong ...

"You said 'wrong' already," Philomel grumbled as she fingered the hilt of one of the sheathed blades at her belt. Bared at her hips the enchanted Rabbit and the legendary Nameless swords had saved her many more times than she cared to admit. Keeping her eyes upon the long-armed creature that inelegantly dangled from the bell tower of the cathedral she tried to ignore the fact that around them was the broken bricks and melancholy mortar of the very city she called home. One that had been cruelly struck by the double-edged weapon of War and Flame - a war only ended without resolution because a forking doomsday meteor fell from the sky.

Veridian didn't reply to her sarcastic comment. He was still furious at the fact that the creator of these so-called 'games,' this 'Invitational,' had 'randomly' given Philomel her destroyed home as an arena for pain and passion. Where Osiris himself had betrayed her, fought her, almost died for her.

"Ugh," Philomel cursed again, running a hand through her thick chestnut locks. Once more she focused on the objective at hand - the fight, and the odd being high above them. Up the air, away from her sacred ground, where her power was truly at its most potent.

Following her line of thought and sight, the golden eyed companion of her heart, soul and mind huffed, before he rose up from his hackles. Gently he nudged her hoof with his tail and nodded towards a set of steps in a nearby wall - ones half mangled but that led to a fallen tower that made a bridge directly to the cathedral's pitted and ragged roof.

There, he encouraged her. We to up from there. Earth may not be easy under your feet, but the power over dust and stone is still yours, and that holy house is still just a pile of rocks.

Philomel took in a breath, her eyes dropping past her professionally armoured breasts, torso and shoulder. Slate grey met icterine gold, and for a moment their hearts breast in perfect synchronisation.

Boom, boom, boom.

"Hmmm," she sighed - but, persuaded, nodded. And her hooves began to move to ascend those stairs and climb the pathway to the skies. Without much difficulty she sent her awareness into the ground as she did, letting the dirt and debris speak to her. It told her of the plants, creatures and earthly make-up of where she still, the weaknesses and strengths, where her hooves might be best placed, less she or Veridian tumble.

Slowly, they began their way towards where the one known as 'Gum' awaited them, a being they knew very little about. But one, it was certain, would cause some, if only brief, entertainment into their dark and currently shaken lives.

Elevated, the Xangu mystic felt his advantage as keenly as he felt the temperature drop, chilled by the onward roll of heady rain clouds. "Try to be quiet," he begged of the sky's grumbling spirit.

From his lofty perspective, the transformed shaman observed that famous faun, armoured and accompanied by her swell familiar—they were making for the cathedral's entrance. With scant time to meditate before battle, Gum do Mugu's focus cracked (just a little) under the weight of her very first choice. He had expected his counterpart to display reluctance, to avoid separating her solid hooves from the ground's power and security. He had expected to manipulate from a distance.

And so, his little body slipped, wind-whipped, against the sloping tiles. The trickster form was a draining state to maintain, and he was beginning to waver. His inability to predict his opponent's choices compounded the duress. A gust clanged the tower's iron bell, and his grip faltered from the shock. Gum was going to have to revert to human form. He had to focus and regenerate his mana.

Before the metamorphosis, he would have to strike at Van der Aart's psyche. He would have to slow her, buying time. The Xangu shaman needed to shift and recover before he could risk mortal combat.

The swirling crows spiraled the steeple, wrapping its conical edge with their ominous presence. Do Mugu felt his bones begin to ache while he clung to the rain-dappled spire. "Relent, dear spirits," he commanded, but the rain only worsened. Then, the bell clanged again, shoved by a second violent blast. He was hardly hanging on. As Do Mugu clambered back onto the rooftop, a single crow emerged from the murder. Relieved from the gaggle, its distinction became apparent: the knowing bird was Gum's three-legged crow. Born from the Underworld, the lucid bird squawked sombre secrets at the ailing shaman.

Gum's giant trickster eyes shrank to a human squint while his body grew rapidly, the transformation was gaining momentum.

With a desperate gasp, Do Mugu summoned something horrible to keep his foe at bay. His magic had come moments before the exhausting return to human form took hold.

Informed by the three-legged crow, he summoned a rapist. He conjured a foul man from Philomel's distant past; vermin she had long since discarded as food for the crows and nightingales. The undead spectre of her swordplay trainer lurked in the dank stairwell, waiting in the dark while she climbed.

The gruesome projection lurched at her from the shadows. The ghost's eyeballs were pecked and deflated, but still, he stared at her accusingly. The soft flesh from his body had been stripped and digested by the past's hungry flock, leaving just sinews to loosely bind the bones together. As grim as the dead man's appearance was, it paled in comparison to the rotten stench: rancid shit spilled from his torn intestine while bile dripped from his dangling spleen.

Its projection gave the look of flesh and blood, but it remained just a whisper from her past. The ghost could only frighten her, it had no real power in the Overworld. Nevertheless, the shaman's survival depended on the ghost delaying Philomel long enough for him to revert to his original state.

Dressed in the ragged remains of what had been the finest velvet and silks, Hessiod the Deceiver rose before her, a phantom of an ugly history. A man who was not just a simple brute of a pimp from under whose wing she has liberated one of many brothels - no, he was hers. He was personal. He was the very beast of a man who had been the first to unceremoniously wrestle her to the lucious fleece rug when she was but fourteen and -

But that was over now. Surely. He was one of the few breaths she had specifically chosen when she had begun her personal emancipation to strike from the world. Indeed, she could even remember the thundering of her heart in her ears as her hand flashed that steel dagger across his throat, and watched his body twitch like a flag in a dying breeze. So certain had she been of his death. So sure. Yet here ...

Here he was, pale and gaunt: a haunt from history she had never wanted to relive. Horrific eyes sucken into shadowy sockets. Thin limbs barely clinging to the torso with stringy flesh. Stinking. Wretched. Evil. Pure evil, that made her blood begin to boil once more, as it woodshed from the cathedral towards her, hovering above her path.

"Fffuuuuucck-"

Philomel! Veridian screamed inside her mind as he felt her panic, fear and anxiety. Nostalgia, and not the good kind, flooded her as she suddenly froze, her sword Nameless hallway drawn from it's sheath.

Her grey eyes were as wide as saucers, her brows high into her chestnut locks.

"Hnnnhh ..." She managed.

Dammit, beloved, Veridian hissed. He chattered, irritated to himself, and took a breath in. Rearing quickly onto his back legs he began to belong, his muzzle reaching into the air, his torso twisting unsubtly into a more upright form. The russet fur, the brush tail, the paws and unmistakable head still remained, but he moved from four legs up to two, and grew from two feet long to six feet tall in a single, defined and glorious step.

"Veridian ..." Philomel whispered, caught in astounded emotion.

The humanoid fox looked unamused. Coming in directly behind her on the stoney, fallen tower of a bridge, he plucked the sword known as the Rabbit from her other side. Yawning a wicked toothy expression of boredom the earth-spirit stepped lightly around his companion, and entirely ignored the spectre that had made her rigid so.

His eyes pierced the low-lit gloom, watching for the bell steeple, where he could now see the long-armed beast had disappeared from. A fluttering wings though told of a flock of ravens and their ilk flying across the rooftops. No other movement, besides an abandoned battle standard.

"Snap out of it, Philomel," he barked as he rose the white sword, prepared to defend her until she could be herself once more. "He's not real. He's a ghost. We are at war."

Do Mugu rattled into the loose roof tiles and writhed like a trodden worm. With his grip compromised, he slid towards the tower's eave. The roof wasn't the only thing he lost his grip on; stress, at once, wrestled the ghost of Hessiod the Deceiver from the shaman's control. That vile spirit could linger for a moment, but before long, the Underworld would hungrily reclaim its putrid denizen.

For the interim, Hessiod was Philomel's to deal with.

Meanwhile, Gum had become fully human—and typically frail, too. Moreover, he remained drained and disorientated. But, at the very least, his shapeshifting spell had handily bundled his garb and trinkets into the transformation. The latter, he was going to need. Only novice shapeshifters relinquish their clothes in an inconvenient pile when they transform!

It would be a few minutes before the exhausted witch doctor could regain his modest strength and robust focus.

So, his tumbling ride towards the drop was all the more perilous.

Then it happened: he fell from the roof.

As he went over the edge, his stinging eyes were captured by the sprawling disasterscape below.

He had to resist the lure of that heaven-sent chaos. It wasn't meant for him.

Do Mugu averted his gaze; and in looking away, he found his spirit soothed by the grey expanse overhead.

It was his recurring choice: below or above.

Urgently, the falling shaman snatched at the roof's dripping lip and tipped his body inwards. He crashed into the narrow set of rotting rafters circling the cathedral's bell. It was "safety". Painful safety. From there, he could hear the echo of Philomel's ghastly encounter haunting the crumbling sanctuary. Something made the dilapidated structure shake; was it the roaring gale outside or the unholy bastard within? Something made the mortar crumble. Something made the odd stone brick fall.

It was that same something calling the shaman to combat. So Gum crawled towards the stairs leading down to the stairwell, he was heading towards his opponent. Do Mugu knew that if he could reach Van der Aart before Hessiod disappeared, then he had something to leverage.

Determined, keen-eyed, red as a bulrush. Veridian lifted his upper lip and showed his teeth as the bring who had seconds before fallen, now clambered up towards where he and Philomel stood. Bipedal as a human he swung up the white blade of the Rabbit sword, and stood in a simple Akashiman Juichi Re-di stance, whilst his beloved shivered in fear.

Hessiod. That man. Cursed, haunting her mind as it became filled with the screams of his terror. His snarl, his gleaming evil eyes. She had been so young, so naïve, a mere scrap of the woman she was today.

A figure began to ascend and appear on the broken tower pathway before them. Still, Philomel trembled, her hooves quaking, barely able to hold her standing steady. Soon, surely the mirage would finish.

But would it's effects on her?

He had been cruel. He had been savage. Hessiod was everything she had built the Gilded Lily to reject. Now she was forced to face him, with his wicked manner and evil ways. She could have fallen to her knees then, even as the vision began to shudder and reality call to her. Because she was reminded of the darkness, reminded of the night. Reminded of everything she abhorred.

Veridian gritted his teeth, feeling her true emotions. So, it would fall to him for now, while the Matriarch was faced with her nostalgic pain. Lowering his form he braced himself and began to call on the might of the sword he held. It's power met his needs, and as the enemy came into sight a series of vines and vegetation began to shoot out from the end of the blade. It spun and blossomed as if in spring, answering to its wielder.

"You won't touch her," the fox hissed. Ready to fight to the death for his soul's partner.

Round 1 is now closed for judging.

Thread Title: Osiris Open 2020: Round One (Philomel vs Gum do Mugu)
Judgement Type: Basic Rewards


Gum do Mugu receives:

480 EXP
40 GP

Philomel receives:

720 EXP
40 GP

Rewards to be added momentarily.

Rewards Added