Jump #982: Pyre

[Pyre]

Drawbacks: Fire In The Veins, Sung-Gries' Tenacity, Endriga's Temper, Limbless Arizech's Reach, Khaylmer Rope-Caller's Ire, Yslach Astral-Born's Attention, Unfathomed Plurnes' Peril, Linked By The Stars (2300)

Scenario: Light in a Starless Sky

Rites Participant, Nomad, age 25

Burning Resolve (Free)
Shared Tenacity (2200)
The Reader's Mind (Free)
Nightwing's Glory (Free)
Eternal Hope (2100)
Follow The Stars (1800)
A White Lute (1700)
Handful of Stardust (1500)
Book of RItes (Free)
Blackwagon (1300)
Sun Serum (1200)
Star Serum (1100)
Moon Serum (1000)
Beyonder Crystal (400)
Dapper Moustache (350)
Fellow Exiles: Alessa (300)
-Reader, Savage, Moon-Touched (Free), Blessings of the Eight Scribes (300), The Reader's Mind (Free), Gaze Above (Free), When The Stars Align (0)
The Nightwings Themselves: Pamitha, The Reader, "Bae" (0)



So one minute, I was web(?)slinging from one building to the next, and the other OH FUCK THAT'S NOT A BUILDING, THAT'S THE HORIZON, WE'RE FALLING, HOLY SHIT ALESSA GRAB ON GRAB ON GRAB ON ARGH.

...and HELLO, sweet divinity! I'm back! What did I miss?

"Thank the Scribes you're awake!" said Hedwyn. "Your friend carried you over to the blackwagon, did you know she's a Reader? This is a bad time, but we're in dire need of her talents and she said she wasn't going anywhere without you"

Oh, that's perfect actually! Alessa, how d'you feel about your new telepathic powers?

"I have superpowers that don't remind me of my trauma! WOOHOO!"

And so, we set off to complete the Rites! I taught Alessa everything from the living words of Elloge to the lie-smithing of Loki to be the BEST Reader. Jodarael grumbled a bunch and smiled out the window when she thought nobody was looking, and Rukey took everything in stride.

I made us do a little detour through the wastes, though. We picked up two Readers.

(Cont'd)

Which wasn't as weird as you'd think. Alessa kept an eye on the stars and decoded the book, while the Reader handled the battles. It DID lead to some friction between them over who was the OFFICIAL Reader of the Nightwings but these guys were the best surrogate family. So it never got beyond petty bickering until Bertrude found an excuse to teach Alessa forbidden magic or Jodarael cheered the Reader up with a pat on the head.

But me? I just went with the flow.

Well, I had to hold back a LOT. And I was still basically a big dumb cheat character just because I could fly indefinitely while still casting my aura, AND heal Pamitha's wings. Off the court my biggest contribution was taking on cooking duty and using Undertale's fire magic to brute force everything Hedwyn (and Ti'zo) caught into 5-star delicacies.

The Accusers freaked out because the Reader tagged in a Messenger Imp into our team. The Chastity sweated increasingly when two team members just flew over their totally-not-cheating. The Dissidents and Tempers were based. The Essence spent more time complaining about how unfair our team had a healer than actually playing. The Fate were cool dudes. The Pyrehearts were cringe.

And the True Nightwings broke our damn hearts. But as I told the Reader, picking up the pieces is a winner's prerogative. She still gave Oralech her place afterwards.

Just like Bae had let Almer have a win, Alessa (through Pamitha) let Tamitha have a taste of freedom, and Ti'zo had told our other imp to join Dalbert's side just to give him a win too.

We shared drinks and stories around the fire, drank that good Harp liquor to Volfred seeing his dream firsthand, got to know the Beyonders and even when most of us had left for the surface there was never a dull moment in the Blackwagon. If only because every now and then I'd open a portal to see how the revolution was going. Hedwyn nearly had a heart attack from relief.

Alessa and the Reader finally bonded over a shared love of Spider-Man and made me wear the handmade costume everyone had pitched in a little to make, which meant I looked like a Spider-Man who had to go dumpster diving. Well, that and them both coming from broken homes and being persecuted for things they couldn't help. There wasn't a lot of open sobbing and hugging, but once things warmed between them they'd talk together long into the night, and while honing her powers Alessa would ask me if you could ever really find a home again after losing your first. And I'd tell her, home was where you made it.

So really, life in the Downside wasn't that bad! I didn't even have the heart to keep my team focused on winning. So instead, I started keeping a diary. I used inks harvested from the one court we had no opposing team to play against to write it, thought about a certain photograph in my warehouse, and wondered if the book I was writing our times together would one day join it on it's invisible place over my warehouse door. I put some real magic in it. The best magic of all, even-the magic of a tired team dozing together in front of a campfire while a white lute played gently into the warm night.


It didn't.
Because we found out why the Withdrawn never showed up.
Their god had told them to sacrifice themselves for a greater cause.


(Cont'd)

As the stars faded and the Titan Rites begun, I told some old friends to make a delivery.

Barker and Ignarius signed up happily. A few days later, Oralech showed up and told us he wanted to earn his way back up. Then a woman called Erisa showed up to volunteer. She seemed really on edge and Oralech made a point of ignoring her, but she was a pretty good player so I helped cover up the wisps of Scribe magic maintaining her form. And well, let's just say we filled out the total team positions with summoned Nightwing after summoned Nightwing.

Lord Gandroth's team was made of Yuan-Ti, whose foreign magics made the battlefield ripple even as their patron's glare dampened our players' flames. But Manley of all people stepped up to the plate off the battlefield by bribing them, and left the team too distracting bickering to strategise.

Bialanthus faced us with mad shit-throwing Silithids. Which just proves fighting dirty isn't always fighting smart when you can't keep your hands on the ball.

Shax's team was fire giants, who simply demolished most of the court, which Alessa restored with her powers. But were too wearied from Ragnarok to return quickly when our imps banished them. After a few rounds, our other Reader talked them into throwing in the towel once she convinced them burning this world wouldn't bring back their home.

Time-Singer Harn pushed us to the limit, an imp and the remaining Essence wreathed in thunderstorms. But the stars struck her down once, and the hour was so dire our Ministrel and Gatekeepers stepped up to play while I distracted them by being hit by lightning and getting up.

Plurnes fielded the Lornest Flukes, whose strategy was mostly just charging. So Pamitha and I flew over them. Brighton gleefully pointed out Endriga's Daevite slave-warriors got themselves disqualified by trying to kill their opponents, and the Tattered Mantle's imps kept wandering off. As if it wanted us to win, but needed to keep up appearances with the other Titans.

(Cont'd)

The Archbeast's sheddings were so tall our smaller teammates slid under their limbs. The Pyrehearts and Accusers firebombed Arizech's saplings for jeapordising the rites (and because they were the slowest looking targets). Dornis' living ash was fast and burned terribly, but vulnerable to wind.

But Xilvas was worse than Harn. She fielded Nuckalavees that couldn't be banished, and were so freaking looking only Barker and I didn't lose our nerves. We had to be more agile, and often I just threw Barker at the ball mid-air. Which he found hilarious, and I thought she'd be the worst we faced. Until we saw who Yslach's one-man team was.

The Black Pharoah smiled, walked onto the court alone and said "You know, I never did pay you back for that game of Big Brother. I mean, I WAS coming back to see my baby nephew's coming of the end times-day, but this is just the cherry on top"

YOU.

"Ah, ah, ah! No fighting! Or do you want to fail your precious Liberation Rite so close to the finish?"

And he was right. So our team stepped onto the court, braced ourselves-
-and lost retroactively because Nyarlathotep unfurled in a thousand directions and doused our pyre before it was even lit.

As Yslach literally rose from his grave, Nyarlathotep laughed at us, one eldritch tendril playfully rapping it's relative on the mantle with a touch that scarred reality to make it awaken quicker.
Because we'd lost the game.
Because the Reader and Alessa had looked into it's mind and come away screaming.
Because it had proven even if you hold onto everything dear to you, the world can still take away what actually matters.

(And elsewhere and elsewhen Hedwyn, Jodarael and Rukey looked down at an ankh-shaped button connected to many wires, some of which seemed to be made of math)
("I can't believe it" said Rukey)
("This is it" said Urd, "the cosmic metabody of a shamanistic thanato-system infused into the sword that carved dawn from endless night, sublimated into Blackstone-Mania energistics projected from a theofeline processor". Something meowed, deep in the complex)
("I didn't understand a word of that" said Jodarael)
("It's a weapon that can kill stars" explained Galacta)
("And Anon wants US to press it? Why?!")
("I'm sorry, I don't know! He just told me to promise you, that even if he's going away for a while one day you'd all meet together again in the stars. And that this was his way of showing it in spirit")
("Then we press it together" said Hedwyn firmly. "Besides, we didn't free the Commonwealth just to let monsters eat it!")

But as I backpeddled against the million maws of the Crawling Chaos reaching for my friends, I looked at the eyes it didn't have and said: You never did learn to mind your surroundings.

The Star Titan SCREAMED, crumbling to ash, as it's stars turned black and writhed like dying worms. And the Crawling Chaos began to glow with green flames, the eldritch forces that stabilised it's presence fading away. Barely flinching, it said "You think you've won? You think I wouldn't know you'd use your friends to fight dirty? You think you can just walk away from your little lesson in defeat? I'm still here enough to end this PATHETIC world in one blow!"

Then DO IT, faggot!

"HA, seriously? You got it!"

And as the terrible, grinding chaos apocalypse bore down on us all I drew out my handiwork from a pocket
It was more than just a diary of our adventures in the Downside.
It was more than just a crude way to ape forbidden knowledge.
It was the very Downside we'd lived and loved in, written into a story.
And when I threw it into the way, it hit Nyarlathotep's destruction edge-first, focusing it's ruinous power into the unbreachable border the Scribes had once challenged.

The Crawling Chaos had one more second to look utterly flabbergasted before our Readers struck at it with pure hope, glory and presence-not even a blast, just mind and will. And off guard, it finally dissipated.

Things weren't all well in the New Republic afterwards. A huge hole had been torn in the atmosphere leading all the way up into the stars, and none of the bog-witches knew how to fix it. Where once there was a barrier between it and the Downside, now there was a terrible jagged landscape of broken angles filled with many pitfalls and nameless things that moved yet weren't truly alive. But as Manley and Lendel found out, with a really good navigator and a hot air balloon you COULD find your way through it if you followed the shattered star-path that gently eased your feet through the worst parts. They were so happy at finally getting out, neither minded being arrested all over again by our friends on the other side.

It was said later that the Eight Scribes themselves were seen helping the sun and moon build that path into a proper bridge. But there's always a twist to the old myths.