Chapter Text
The Page makes the first move. Before you appears a glowing red clock face as he attempts to place you within one of his time-traps. The world around you fades to a static grey, as time slams to a standstill from your perspective. However, before the status debuff of the ability can take hold, Outlaw’s Aura negates the freeze effect, allowing you to continue on despite being caught within the trap.
You juke back just as Jason comes swinging in with that excavator of his, aiming straight for where your nugbone would’ve been. Fucker’s going for the kill, it seems. Can’t say you’re surprised. His thinkpan’s rusted all the way through, leaving the floor staring back up at him.
“Wha-“ He exclaims, shocked to see you ignoring the effect the time-trap should’ve placed on you. With him as close to the disregarded limiter, you activate your counter.
“Outlaw’s Detonation.” You proclaim, clamping your grabber closed. Upon activation, the clock face behind him explodes, the intended limit of the ability collapsing under the weight of itself, cascading outward as a wellspring of energy barrels forth. The kinetic blast of the explosion sends the Page flying off to the side. “Obligational Shrug.” The world around you washes away with a static -zap- reorganizing itself to position you in the path Jason was catapulted in. Readying for him to arrive at your doorstep, your steppingpole bursts with a flaming power, and you reel back, kicking upward just as your opponent reaches you. Your broken pole slams into the underside of Jason’s human jaw, the force of which causing a minor air pocket to expand and collapse in a quarter of a second as he’s launched upward, flying high into the sky. “Unlawful Slam; Velocity Negation.” You slowly lower your stepper as the energy dissipates from the limb, watching as Jason limply spirals to the heavens. You have to squint to see him up there. Between the bad eyes of Amvinn’s body and the heavy cloud coverage, you can only just make out the red blur that he is in the sky. Suddenly though, that red blur disappears into the storm. You scan for where he could’ve gone off to but find nothing. It isn’t until you notice something announced in the subtext that you realize what’s happened.
Fate Cries Foul
As the ability registers in your thoughtsponge, there comes a -zap- in the space before you. Bringing your attention back down, you see just in time for that excavator to slam directly into your face, knocking you back. Fuckin’ redo buttons. As you’re staggering, Jason takes an overarching plunge with his weapon, aimed straight for your windtunnel. You manage to catch the spear of his excavator before it can tear into the partially decayed flesh of your body, stopping the thing in its tracks with Amvinn’s corpse strength. With his free grabber though, Jason balls his fist, delivering a punch into the gaping wound in your torso, slamming directly into your tattered bellowsac. The revolting stimulation sends a jolting recoil through your entire corpse, nearly causing you to break possession of your corporeal form. You manage to endure the sensation, but a cough of Am’s olive green blood gets hacked up from the damage done to you. As you’re stunned from the hit, your opponent rips the point of his weapon free from your hand before stabbing it through your shirt, straight through your open wound. Twisting around, he maneuvers his excavator so that its spike is hooked around your torso piercing, and using it as leverage, he tosses you over his shoulder. The pressure upon what remains of your bellowcage is agonizing, and you’re left defenseless as the Page rips you off your steppers, flipping you over with an ungracefully slam upon the ground at his feet.
“Not so smug now…!” Above you, Jason’s done something to his excavator, causing it to open its exhaust vents, activating some kind of explosive effect to charge within. Raising the device up then swiftly swinging it down again, he aims to vaporize your host body’s cranium. Plummeting at you like a spearing arrowhead, you only just manage to catch the Page’s atomizer attack, grabbing hold of the dig-device by both of its prong points.
“Seismic Disruption.” You announce, channeling the exploding power in the weapon out through both of its ends. Shooting out beside you, an enormous kinetic blast shreds the ground at your sides, turning the stone into gravel in an almost confetti-like explosion of sediment flung into the air.
“Huh?” Jason pulls away as he watches the dirt rain back down, confused why his attack split in half the way it did. The space allows you to get up from the ground, flipping off your back and facing back around to your opponent. You go to get to your feet when he stops questioning his last attack and goes in for another, charging you while you’re still down on one knee. “Raaahh!” He bellows, his excavator trailing behind him in tow, ready to send it through your chagrintunnel.
“Phantom Summons,” You reach out through the Final Curtain and snatch a player back for your defense. “Diversion.” Conjured forth a half pace to the left of the Page is the Witch of Light, a pickaxe of her own in-hand as she jukes backwards, cutting him off mid-charge. Jason screeches to a halt at her sudden appearance, the spectral Elf jutting her excavator out into his path as the roulette wheel at the top of her weapon flashes its 0 outcome. Your opponent takes a half-second to observe the Summoned fighter, unsure what their purpose in the Strife is. Before he can figure out its intentions, the Dragon that had killed the Witch comes sweeping down from the sky.
“Ha-!” Is all the Page manages to say before the torrent of black fire comes spewing out from the drake’s maw, raining upon him like a torrential downpour. While he’s busy being roasted like a flavor disc, you take the moment to get back to your broken steppers and collect yourself, reflecting on the data you received when you took the Perspective as you do. According to the records logged by the POV, Sara was able to see something no one else had up until this point. This being that Jason has some kind of constant smoke seeping out from his non-existent hornstems. According to her, it looked as if his entire upper-half was shrouded by it, completely hiding his face behind the smokey veil. It sounds similar to the person the Dragon turned into after killing the Witch. The weird smoke-head dude who wandered off after the strife. Only he was made entirely out of smoke. Jason on the other hand is only producing the stuff from his cranium. Something must be going on up there then. Some kind of subconscious subroutine winding his thinkpan endlessly, burning his thoughsponge out like a malfunctioning engine. Would something like that be within your purview to dismantle? Will you even get the chance to try?
“Still alive?” You call out to the Page, letting the Witch and her vanquisher vanish back to the great beyond, leaving behind only the trail of haze the dragon had regurgitated which obscures your view of your opponent. Suddenly, a hand slashes through the burning mist, tossing the clouds out of its way as if attempting to grab hold of the smoke and physically move it somewhere else. Revealed once more is the Page of Time, his fury riding its way to you by way of his glare, your attack leaving him frazzled and all the more toasted looking.
“Enough of these tricks!” Jason bellows as he marches forward, shaking off the crisp you’d left on him. “What the hell are they?!”
“Oh, still curious under all that crazy, huh?” You chuckle, much to Jason’s furious chagrin. “They’re Phantoms.” You tell him before he can work himself up again. “Replications of the souls of the dead the moment they perished.”
“Morbid bastard.” He mutters before continuing on with his charge. With a spark of crimson in his eye, his speed seems to double, reaching you faster than you anticipated.
“Like you have no room to talk!” You say while dodging out of the way from his attack, taking note that he had aimed for your right sightglobe with his swing. “Throwing everything you’ve got behind every attack. I’d say I was flattered if it wasn’t so platonic.” He follows up with two more swings, one that tries to rake across your chest in an upward slash and the second a downswing in the same path reversed.
“Traitors aren’t meant to be treated with mercy!” He barks through his attacks. “Cheap tricks or not-“ You uppercut him, mid-rave. Unlawful Slam; Excelled Strength.
“My tricks aren’t cheap, bulgemunch.” You boast as the Page recoils, grabbing hold of his face with his free grabber, backing up a step. “You wanna talk about cheap, what about your powers. Crying Fate Whatever.”
“You’ve been going through my ability index?!” He snaps back up, out from the shock of the hit.
“I’ve been poking around everywhere, you ain’t special.” You sneer.
“Gah!” He snarls, getting at you again. Even faster now, he throws swing after swing with his excavator at you, forcing you back as you attempt to keep up with evading the hits. On one swing, he continues on with his followthrough, barreling into your flank and swooping past you like a bullbeast being toyed with by a Domatador. You double back in time to dodge with his next attack, but he continues on with the followthrough again, attempting to confuse you, coming at you from every angle. Again and again, he swoops in and out, his path blurring into a triple-sided lemniscate as he swerves around you like a pestering insect trying to get at guarded food. Though he hasn’t landed a solid strike yet, his attacks have been getting close enough to leave you scraped up, the deepest of which leaving a large gash in your proteinchute, an otherwise lethal hit had you still been counted among ranks of the living. At this rate, it won’t be much longer before Amvinn’s body is too damaged to keep possessing. You’ll have to adjust somehow.
“You didn’t use Crying Fate after ol’ dragon’s breath, so I’m assuming it’s on cool-down.” You comment, trying to account for the Page's rising pace of attacks. Even still, he’s managing to deepen the cuts his prong points are leaving on you. “Which means-“ In a quick deployment of your abilities, your stepperpole is engulfed with power, and you flip around and plant a kick firmly into the Page’s acidtrack just as he swoops in for another swing. Unlawful Slam; Velocity Negation. As the laws of momentum shatter around him, Jason is sent tumbling away, hurled towards the Gala. “You don’t have another one up your sleeve at the moment.”
“Faaaah!” He shouts, passing between Frank and Creed as he goes flying by, continuing on to the other end of the valley your group divides. Looks like the strife-grounds have expanded.
In the time it takes you to make your way to the Gala, you dive into Amvinn’s inventory for something that might be able to better fend off Jason’s attacks long enough for him to come down from his hissy fit. His Strife Deck has deactivated, as per usual for the deceased, funneling all his weapons into a general subspace. How quaint. Alright, thumbing through his inventory listings, you’re able to find one of his Weirdly Blade-shaped Keys he used as weapons. Come to think of it, didn’t the Prince of Time have a really big blade back on the Forge? But when you summoned his Phantom, he was using that large timepiece. Does that mean that enormous hunk of metal he was flinging around was actually just a clock? Do all weapons just… gravitate towards being Blades after enough alchemization? Like how everything turns into crabs? Questions for another time. For now, you summon to your side Locks on the Gated Garden and- oh, right. With the Key being drawn from the Captchalogue Deck itself, his Fetch Modus activates a retrieval prompt. Wh-… What is this, a Summoning Circle? Enter in five sacrifice totems that contain traits of the item you wish to conjure? Fuck, Orrick, where the hell did you get this thing? Yeah, no, you don’t have time for this. You just break the data pack of the modus with your psionic ability and extract the Key directly. Arming yourself with the keyblade, you reach the Gala.
“Haugrr, what the hell is going on?” Dallra asks you from behind her mask. “Why are you and Jason fighting?”
“Don’t know. Gonna go find out.” You tell her as you pass through the group to the side Jason landed on, finding he’s already back to his feet and ready to face you. He’s a durable little fucker, you’ll give him that.
“Be serious, you two could really hurt one another!” She protests. You shrug it off and continue on.
“This isn’t a game, Haugrr.” Sara hurries over to you as you continue on, walking with you as you approach the strife once more. “Something’s wrong with Jason. He’s not himself right now.”
“Hate to disagree with you, human, but I’d say he’s more himself than he ever wanted to show you.” You tell her, familiar with what it looks like when people like this let their mask slip. “It’s just that something is forcing him to.”
“Please, just… try and calm him down before you do anything too rash.” She pleads, stopping at the confines of the Duchess’s Decree. Along with her proposition comes a sudden invigoration behind you, as if the wind itself were trying to carry you in the direction you’re going. Huh. Guess she’s serious about wanting things to settle if she’s backing you of all people.
“Don’t worry, I think we’re close to a breakthrough.” You semi-sarcastically assure the Sylph. “I can feel it.” With that, you leap forward, your form carried by the momentum of the buff Sara had lent you. Charging you himself, Jason barrels forward, his excavator burning red-hot as he powers it up again. The two of you meet in a duel, your respective weapons clashing as you fly into one another. The concussive blast his weapon houses is discharged upon contact, knocking away what remained of your Outlaw’s Aura as you resist the blast unfazed. The ground around you, however, is dented downward, leaving you and him standing on a small plateau raised up in the crater the explosion made. “You ready to calm down yet? Everyone’s real worried about you, after all.”
“Traitors. The lot of them!” He growls as he tries to force past your guard, not getting far against your strength. “Colluding with the likes of you!”
“You’ve got some pretty serious hang-ups, don’t you?” You ask the boy as you push him back the ground he had taken, leaving him at the edge of your little plateau.
“I’ll hang you up!” He snaps, using the curve of his excavator’s top to roll past your flank. Before you can react, you’re face down on the ground, and it feels like your lower back’s been pierced through and torn open. Shit. Looking across the diagonal-facing horizon, you spot the crater you were just stood in several yards away from where you lay now. He must’ve managed to get you in some kind of time-trap while Outlaw was down. You place your grabbers against the ground and push yourself up to get back to the strife. At least, you try to, but before you can, you’re suddenly spiraling ass-over-kettle through the air, a distinct and heavy soreness in the underside of your chin. He got you again, it seems. You expect to land with a thud, but suddenly, like the two times before it, you’re thrusted without warning into an entirely new situation, as if jump-cut from attack to attack, now hurling through the air, knocked off track from your fall with a new deep gash in the lining of your lower acidtracks. He can be pretty vicious with those time exploits of his, you’re coming to find. You touch down into the ground once more, skidding across the rock and graven on your front, eventually scraping to an undignified stop.
“Ah…” You groan as you try to push yourself up onto all fours. Just as you do, you feel a boot kick into your side, tumbling you onto your back. Standing over you is the Page, his weapon swinging up over his shoulder as he readies to bring it down on top of you. You’ve got no idea where he’s aimed for, but regardless, you have no intention of letting it land. “Phantom Summons, Desecration.” Reaching past the Final Curtain once more, you call forth someone familiar this time. Conjured before your opponent is the Seer of Heart, stopping Jason in his tracks. After the split-second it takes to register what it is in front of him, his eyes widen, and he flips around as the tendril that embedded into the Seer’s posturepole springs up from the ground.
“Hn!” He grunts, bringing up his excavator to guard as the tendril plows into him. While he’s turned away, you kick his stepper out from under him, throwing the Page off balance enough for the weight of the tendril crashing into him to fling him to the ground. This close and on the same level as you, you take advantage of the split second of stun Jason’s caught in from the hit, powering up another punch. You push up on one hand and with all your might, deliver a fist into his fangfold as you fall back down, slamming his head into the ground upon contact. Unlawful Slam; Locking Effect. “Gah… AH…!” He gargles as the stun status is artificially prolonged by your hit.
“Alright, now to take a look at what’s going on up top.” You say to yourself as you allow your soul to peel from Amvinn’s body like you’re a wriggler shedding their first exoskeleton.
Back in the land of the dead, you reach back and slam your grabber into Jason’s cranium, a glow of deep green luminescence erupting from his forehead as you try to force your way into his form. You aren’t able to possess the living the way you are the dead, but you can at least take a peek at what’s going on behind the scenes this way. Just as you thought, he’s got an infinite loop lodged within his thinkpan, sending his mind into a spiral. You reach deeper, attempting to get at and destroy this thing, but whoever designed this did a hell of a job ensuring it was made to last. It’s lodged in the squishy part of the human thoughtsponge responsible for motor control, meaning you’d probably end up crippling him if you try to brute-force the program out, and the constant loop it’s going down ensures that you can’t peel it back level-by-level with it producing more and more complicated subsets as it continues on. You contemplate, for a moment, purging his thinkpan of all forms of inhibiting thought to flush the loop out, but you think better at the last second. You’ve seen one too many goldbloods do just such a thing trying to chase a high, only to develop voidrot when their thoughtsponge burns a hole through their pan, releasing preservation-fluids at ungodly rates because it thinks that it’s dying. Mutant brains can hold out for a while after such an event, but there’s no telling what something like that would do to a human’s squishy center. Bastard’s lucky you give enough of a damn not to go scrambling around his insides to cure him the way he deserves. Damn it, it looks like he’s coming to again. You’re out of time. Pulling out from his human skull, you dive back into your friend’s corpse, grabbing hold of the keyblade as you repossess the form. Jason looks around confused, unsure what’s been done to him. You slam your key across his jaw before he can get his bearings.
“Fuckin’!” He curses as he rolls away. You do the same, rolling into a maneuver to get back upright. You’re both halfway up when you see one another, pausing as you wait for the other to make their move first.
The Page does so, leaping the rest of the way to his feet as he lurches forward, weapon swinging for your head. You parry it away with the key, letting it ride against the metal spire as it whizzes by. The momentum of his attack continues on and nearly takes him off his feet with the weight of his weapon throwing him off balance, and he has to forcibly snap back to recompose himself. He’s still moving at what’s probably 5.4x his normal speed, so you don’t get much of an opening before he’s swinging again. This time he’s punching at you, using the top of his excavator like a weighted mace to barrel through your defenses. You just manage to block it, using the side of your blade’s guard as a wide face to absorb the impact, but the weight of it still pushes you back a good ways. It continues this way, with him throwing attack after attack at a speed you’re only just able to keep up with to the point you can block the hits, but you’re allowed no time to counterattack or go on the offensive yourself. How the hell did Am use this damn clunky hunk of scrap with such ease? The thing is all shaft, it’s like trying to fight with a piece of over-extended rebar.
Before you can complain any more about your improvised weaponry, Jason steps back for half a beat, pulling away from his bombardment against you as he levels his excavator down by his side. You’re half expecting him to say something smart during his pause, but all that comes is the hum of his weapon, its internal engines roaring to life as he funnels a river’s worth of power into its system. The exhaust vents on its sides flick open and poured out is the burning excess. He spirals the excavator at a blinding speed, setting its sights on you, showing it off to let you know what’s on its way to you before dashing forward. You take your pose, readying your Key in a single hand to free up your other grabber, prepared to Disrupt the explosion once more. On his approach, he switches his dig-tool to a low-hold, ready to swing it up into your body’s death-wound from the floor. You adjust accordingly as he slides into the space before you.
“…!” You don’t say anything. You don’t even have the time to grunt some unintelligible response to the maneuver. He was too fast. He knew you wouldn’t be able to keep up. Just as he was about to bring the spear of his tool up at you, he slams his grip down, bringing the point of his weapon up in the opposite direction, swinging it over his shoulder instead of up from his side like you had expected. Your reflexes are too rotted away in this form to catch it in time, and the kinetic explosion rings out as he slams his excavator into the ground at your feet. “Kah!” You yelp as you’re blown away, scraping across the hard stone of the ground until tumbling to a stop. Propping yourself up on one arm, you wipe away the blood oozing from your scentreceptacle with the back of your grabber, realizing it was probably broken in the blast. Scanning the area around you, you search for your keyblade, hoping to arm yourself before the Page can get back on you again. You find it, unfortunately just as Jason’s strolled up to its place on the ground.
“Feh.” He scoffs, looking down at the armament with unimpressed bemusement. Extending an open hand aimed out at the weapon’s place on the stone, his palm flashes a crimson red, and a small etherial clock face flashes over the key before it vanishes into thin air. As your weapon blinks out of reality, you notice announced in the subtext;
Time-Capsule Jump
“Time-capsule, huh?” You mumble to yourself, watching as Jason’s focus shifts from the disappeared combat-utensil to you now. “Well, I doubt I’ll be seeing that again…”
“…” The Page, seemingly having no more words for you, talks a deep breath in before exhaling out, calming whatever demented jitters happen to be running through his human mind, and lets his sightglobes close shut, focusing on his next offensive. Seeing the brief opportunity present itself, with him needing a moment to power up, you whisk open the Final Curtain once more and go searching for another Phantom to conjure. Before you can, though, another update appears in the subtext.
Dilation Close Off
Shit, he’s not just buffing his temporal movement with this ability. Fate’s bending towards a focal point, blocking out any sort of paracausal tamperings. And this guy had the gall to complain about cheap tricks. You’ll have to focus entirely on dodging with the Key gone. You might get banged up in the process, but you’ve just about acclimated to his heightened speed blitzes. At least enough not to-
(40 sec. augmented time =1 sec. local time)
Okay, fuck, he might actually dismantle you with this maneuver. Time to deploy some form of safeguard or countermeasure against this. Outlaw’s Aura would only help you ignore the effects of the damage he’ll do for so long. Princess of Havoc then? No. A power up like that won’t do much for you with him going that fast. Before you, the Page’s sightglobes open once again, settling upon your form. His excavator aims out at you, as if to signify a physical promise of vivisection. With that, he bolts forward, his physical body blurring into a crimson stream as he barrels towards you. You’re officially out of time and officially shit out of luck.
“Phantom Summons…” You announce, doubling down on the ability you’d already begun casting. With the Final Curtain already open, you desperately reach beyond and conjure forth… fuck, someone! But who? Who the hell do you summon?! Fuck it, random draw. “Phantom Summons, Devastation!”
“DIE!!!!”
You’d be lying if you said you didn’t flinch. Even being dead already, you can’t help but feel an unsettling chill shoot down your disconnected posturepole at such a deranged and manic declaration of murderous intent. Wincing in anticipation of kissing Amvinn’s body goodbye, a little less literally this time, there comes a strange expression from your opponent.
“-!” It was an expression of shock. Of almost terrified surprise.
Looking back to the enemy you so carelessly allowed to advance upon you without so much as a watchful eye, you find the Page of Time frozen in place, his form shimmering and shuttering as the effects of his time enhancements still course through his veins. The stranglehold he held his excavator in now a loose and flimsy grip that only just holds the device within his grabbers. And before him stands the Seer of Space. Arms stretched out as to better block the incoming strike against the one she aimed to protect at her rear. Despite proceeding at a rapid pace for the Page, time seems to hang still for a long, shaky moment. You don’t dare move as the look of befuddled on the Page’s face slowly morphs into a panicking stagprey-in-the-headlights expression, his mouth left ever so slightly agape at what he’s been presented with.
“……” Silently taking in the scene as it unfolds before you with bated breath, two very particular realizations enter into your mind in a rapid succession. The first being that the Seer of Space you know is alive, standing only a paltry few yards away from your place in the valley, along with the others in the Gala. Having first set sights on the Hero you had summoned, your immediate thought was that through some fluke or malfunction of your powers, you’d accidentally conjured forth the visage of a living entity by mistake, and that this was just a replica of your Jadeblood comrade. However, the second thing you realize kills that theory where it stands. This being that the Phantom you’ve summoned doesn’t have horns. She isn’t a Troll. The Seer of Space standing before the Page of Time isn’t Dallra Heimda. Who… Who is that?
“Ha…” Jason exhales out as the effect of his ability runs its course, returning him to nominal time. Even still, you remain practically invisible to the human despite being the conduit of his ire not even but a moment ago. Lost in his own little world, he continues to gawk at the ghost before him, eventually lowering his weapon down to his side, as though it were too heavy a burden for him to bear. As he does, you can’t help but notice the shake in his weapon, rattled ever so slightly by the tremble in the hands that hold them. “Ha…Ha…” Your opponent exhales, his chest starting to rise and fall at an uneven pace, as whatever human organ that regulates airflow spasms in the same tempo as his quaking fingers. Looking closer at the Page, you discover that the wells of his eyes are beginning to mist, causing him to clench his jaw into a pained grimace in an attempt to keep the tears at bay. Is he alright? “Tch-!” He suddenly tisks, before blinking out of existence. You jump when it happens, unsure of what’s even happened to begin with. It’s only after a half-second of thought that you realize to check the subtext to see what’s happened. Lo and behold, sitting in the Action Log is the activation of the ability; Full Time Stop, by user pageTime. Tricky barkgnome still wants to brawl! You scours your surroundings, anticipating the Page’s sneak attack to come at any moment, only to find that you are alone. He’s absconded. You’ve… won?
With the strife over, you allow yourself a sigh to decompress, testing the limbs of your body to ensure it hasn’t been banged up too badly. There’s some startlingly large cuts embedded within the sides of your grabberpoles, and a few broken calciumshafts that you aren’t exactly a fan of. Not to mention whatever damage that’s been done to your lower back that you’ll have to inspect the next time you’re out of Amvinn’s body. All-in-all, you got pretty fucked up.
“Obligational Shirk.” You declare, charging your corporeal vessel with anti-antilife, ensuring you have no obligation to observe the limitations of such injuries. With the confines of finality that come with having a hole in your windchute gone, some of the more dire injuries stitch themselves back up, no longer needing to physically represent a constraint that’s been deleted from your form. With a bit of vitality back in you now, you take note of the Phantom that got Jason all up in a tizzy. Huh… normally they don’t stick around for this long… Slowly, you shamble over to the ghost’s front, observing the face of the creature that could spark such fear into a pie-dived nut job like the Page. Getting a look at her ethereal visage, you find nothing out of the ordinary. She’s a human. Not much else to note about her.
“Haugrr!” You hear the Gala call to you. A sudden spark jumps through you, as you suddenly remember you still have Duchess over them. As you turn back to your allies, you spot out of the corner of your sightglobes that the Phantom vanishes, as if dismissed by you looking away. Putting the anomaly at the back of your pan, you focus once more on your team. It was Sara who’d called for you, approaching with Creed and the living Seer of Space, Dallra, in tow. You snap your grabberprongs and the masks hanging over their faces disappears into the ether.
“Told you I had it.” You greet the three upon them reaching you. Behind with the rest of the group, Leah kneels by Ragnaa’s side, who’s collapsed into a bawling mess by now, while Ryder awkwardly hovers over them, trying to look tough and as though he were their sentry guard but really just kind of generally staring down at them like a dweeb. Mary discusses some unknown topic with Esspin while the Frank-thing idly stands by next to the grey scalebeast.
“What the hell was that? A-at the end there?” Sara asks, looking around at the scuffed up strife-grounds around you. “Why’d he freeze up like that?”
“How should I know? Crazy is as crazy does.” You shrug, feeling like she’s about to start berating you for knocking some sense into your ‘leader’. “I guess one of my Phantoms scared him off or something.”
“You have Phantoms?” She asks like it’s a bad thing. Like it didn’t just save the whole-ass day just now.
“Yeah I got phantoms, what of it?” You confirm for her, feeling the faintest bit protective of your summoning techniques. “And hold your musclebeasts before you go getting all bent out of whack, they aren’t slaves or anything like with that blueblood Thief. They aren’t even people’s souls, they’re just ghosts.”
“There’s a difference?” Dallra inquires, curious of the distinction.
“Yes, they’re… they’re more like snapshots of a person’s essence right before they die.” You explain before anyone can start clutching their pearls. “The pain they leave behind that haunts their final resting place. If I’ve seen a soul before, I usually can conjure up this moment at my discretion.”
“And this last Phantom you conjured?” Creed asks this time, a distinct light behind his eyes, signifying he’s got something brewing in his thinkpan. “Who were they?”
“That’s the thing… I’ve got no idea.” You say, turning back to glance at the last place that ghost Seer had been, a quiet paranoia that she’d somehow returned there once more passing over you as you look. “Someone I’ve never met before, that’s for sure.”
“Why’s that?” Creed follows up, chasing after a mental lead he’s got.
“Because it was a Seer of Space.” You tell them. “And it wasn’t Heimda here, either. She was human. I think I’d remember if I ended up coming across duplicate Heroes in the Arena. I’d never met them before, so there’s no way I should’ve been able to summon her Phantom…”
“Can you describe them?” Mr-fuckin’-questions continues to pepper you.
“I don’t know, humany?” You shrug, unsure what features might’ve been distinctive to a human. “Summoned entities don’t exactly have a lot of distinguishing characteristics under all that glow. The less I know about them, the less descriptive they become, and seeing as I knew zip about mystery girl, I’ve got nothing.” Creed taps his stepper, the cogs in his dome chugging along as they come to some unseen conclusion. “… I guess her eyes were strange.” You mumble, recapturing his attention. “Blacked out, with little flecks of white floating in them. Kinda like snow globes.”
“You know what a snow globe is?” He condescendingly asks.
“Why the fuck wouldn’t I know what a snow globe is?” You sneer, feeling like the comment was somehow intended as an insult. Before he can respond though, Sara jerks, looking off to the castle nearest you in the valley as if she knows something.
“I need to find him.” She declares, already heading for the structure.
“Do we know where he’s gone off to?” Creed brings up, partially asking in general, partially asking if Sara even knows where she’s going. “We only saw him blip away.”
“I’ve got a beat on him. He’s… well, he’s nearby. In the entranceblock of that highblood hive, in fact.” Dallra answers, turning to watch as Sara hurries off before taking a step towards the place herself. “I’ll come with you.” She calls after her.
“Uh, n-no!” Sara gently declines, turning back to face the Seer, halting her through her gaze. “I… I think you might just confuse him right now, Dallra.”
“Oh… o-okay.” She nods, agreeing yet unsure as to what reason she’s been excluded.
“Hey, you’re welcome, by the way!” You call after the girl as she wanders off without a care. “All things considered, I was pretty gentle with the ungrateful gnome!”
“Ah-“ She takes a breath in, almost like she’s looking to speak before she thinks. “…Thank you.” She says, stopping to look back for the briefest of moments.
“Yea-“ You begin, pausing when you realize she actually did genuinely thank you. “Yeah, well… we’re gonna have a serious talk about all this at some point, too! …Alright? Jason’s been getting more volatile and I’m not gonna sit around and let him pick this group apart!” She doesn’t respond this time, getting smaller and smaller as she ventures off after the loose-screwed Pageboy. “…Damnit……”
“Are you okay?” Dallra asks after a moment of you standing there, watching the Sylph wander off.
“Not really.” You huff, feeling bad for yourself like a schlub. “Doesn’t really matter, though.”
“I don’t like that we’re starting to fight each other.” Creed says from beside you, looking out at Sara as she goes as well.
“What, you saying I should’ve stood by and watched while he put a spike through Ragnaa’s bloodpusher?” You nip at him, standing by your decision to step in. “You saw him. He would’ve tore her windchute out.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong for what you did.” He clarifies, glancing back at the rest of your group. “I’m just saying that I don’t like that things are going this way.”
“Is Jason… okay?” Dallra asks you.
“He’s got something in his brain.” You tell her, crossing your grabberpoles. “Some kind of virus running amuck in his thinkpan.”
“A virus?” Creed peers over at you. “You think that’s what’s making him act the way he’s been acting?”
“No. I checked the data stamp on the program. He was already headed down this path before it was uploaded.” You sigh, turning and heading to rejoin with the group. “Whatever it is in him is just hurrying the process along.” As you walk, your grabber reaches up into the center of your cranium, and extracted out from your skull is the POV. As you glance down at You, held within the palm of your hand, you ponder how this is all going to end…
“Hey, Haugrr. Just so you know, part of your posturepole is sticking out of your torso.” Dallra mentions. Hearing this, you reach back, feeling the part of your back Jason had torn into, discovering through probing grabber that a columned calciumstack had been partially degloved from your rear torso, leaving you with a short, inverted tail.
“Christ, is that your spine?!” Creed calls after, noticing the injury to your vessel. You let out a disgruntled sigh, letting your sightglobes close. No point in holding onto this anymore.
***
You had run off in such a hurry before, searching after Jason, you hadn’t thought of what you’d say once you reached him. Initially, you had been angry with Haugrr for being the one to take the first swing, but as the strife dragged on longer and longer, you realized that, just as you do right now, you had no plan to get your friend to calm down. The most you could’ve possibly offered in ways of peacekeeping was to try and remove him from the situation, and you supposed Haugrr did a better job at it than you ever could’ve… But now? You have no idea what sort of thoughts could be spinning through Jason’s head now. What kind of inner machinations are turning, grinding, springing him out of place!
Greg was the same sort of way. Cagy with his feelings, isolating himself for large swaths of time after receiving unfortunate news. You had made it a practice of letting your session mates go off on their own to clear their heads in situations like this, but often times you’d find Greg in particular would return in a much worse state than he’d leave in, which is why you felt it so imperative to track down Jason as soon as you could. You had never aided Greg in his journey, and lately that’s been bugging you a lot. You feel that you have failed in some regard this way. Greg was his own individual, accountable for his own actions, and he himself would’ve felt the sentiment at least on some level insulting to his sense of independence, but you were responsible for him. For all of your session mates, for that matter. They were your friends and you were supposed to have each other’s backs after the end of the world. And what did you do? Sit on the sidelines, too afraid to bog them down with the problems you’d cooked up in your head while they sank to the bottom away. You’re a fucking Sylph for god’s sake! You were supposed to keep them afloat! Made sure they kept kicking no matter what! You were supposed to push them towards the future where you could all just be kids again… where you could all be free… And now they’re dead, because you didn’t act.
You are a failure. You know you’re a failure, that’s why you’ve ended up here. But the repercussions of your shortcomings didn’t end at the property line of your person. They bounced off each and every one of those you kept close to you, bringing them down with you as you crashed and burned, spiraling into some sick finale Twister that you yourself had weaved to come pouring out of the sky. So when you saw which way Jason had gone, you just started walking. He was easy enough to find. That smoke that’s been burning its way out of his skull left a trail behind him after his brief jaunt through time. Haugrr said he summoned a human Seer of Space with his ghost powers, and that she had eyes like snow globes. Mia had told you the same thing about the Seer from her own session. That she had eyes that looked like the stars themselves. She also told you that Jason once had a thing for the Seer, back… back before he killed her. You can’t imagine what seeing a literal ghost from his past might’ve done to his already degrading mind, but you know one thing is without question. Jason isn’t okay to be alone right now. He needs guidance, not solitude. And you refuse to stand by while another of your friends tears himself apart again!
Finding the end of the smoke trail, you reach the steps of the castle, gently leaping up and gliding to the top step. Here, you find the doors to the stronghold have been left faintly ajar, making it clear somebody’s entered recently. You take one last self-assuring breath as you pause before the enormous threshold, eventually stepping forward, quietly pushing the door open enough to peer in. The first thing you see is Jason’s pickaxe buried in the floor off a ways away, nailing the fancy red carpet to the stone beneath it. You notice afterwards that the entire foyer has been wrecked to a significant degree. Large portions of the walls and floor pulverized, art pieces torn from their places on the various mantles about the place and cast aside, and a large mirror spanning the entire right corridor wall has been smashed, scattering glass all about the place. Several of the light fixtures have been destroyed as well, leaving the room in a partial darkness. Entering the structure fully, you begin to hear a distant weeping echo through the castle halls.
Slowly progressing forward, you continue to look around, taking in all the wreckage of the place. You stop by the shattered remains of the mirror, startled to find a significant amount of blood staining the backboard of its former frame as well as the floor beneath it, the unseen bleeder himself continuing on down the corridor, leaving a red trail of ichor behind. You continue on, taking an awkward glance at Jason’s pickaxe as you pass its place in the hallway, disconcerted to find that it still quietly hums with the last revs of a dynamo’s engine, its side flaps still giving off its excess heat from whatever tech is concealed inside. Deciding to hurry along after seeing this, you momentarily pick up your pace, worried as though the weapon itself would come alive and give chase after you, looking to plunge its pointed pike through your pitifully precious life, piercing through into what lies beyond.
After you’ve escaped the reach of living axes and dreadful thoughts, you’re confronted again by the weeping echoes as they clash against the walls. It’s a disturbing cry, one that puts needles on your neck the closer you get to it. A heartbroken sort of cry, shameful of the way it sounds, with deep sobs trying to fight themselves from coming out for the world to hear. Tottering after the red trail, you eventually come to and round the corner of the corridor, as its hall leads to the landing of a staircase and breaks off into a T split. Here you see a doorway left wide open, or rather, torn open, with its door pulled halfway off its hinges and folded to the side, light pouring out into the dim hall from within. And within as well, a figure moves about, casting their shadow out the door each time they pass it.
“Jason…?” You quietly call, fully rounding the corner as you attempt to alert your friend to your arrival so as to not ambush him by mistake. “Jason, a-… are you alright?” Startlingly, that weeping you’d been hearing shifts into a rageful and unintelligible roar, accompanied by several number of things within the room being thrown all at once. You feel yourself flinch away from the sudden outburst, but quickly remember Jason had been on a rampage through the castle, and the most recent of his lashings in fact had not been aimed at you. Onward you continue, until you stand before the open threshold, leering at the light rays it casts out as though they were a blazing barrier keeping you away. You only let it pause your headway, and not outright kill it in its tracks. Crossing that barrier, you stand now in the threshold, finding a small library in the room you’d tracked Jason down to, most of the shelves in the room having been stripped of their contents, tossed all about the place in a fit. At the far right of the room is a fireplace burning with parts of the room’s collection thrown halfway into its flames, immolating the totality of books entirely in its grasp and singeing the bindings of those only close enough to be warmed by its glow. There was a table in the room with an assortment of things that must’ve been on it now tipped on its side, scattering its former burden across the floor. And at the other side of the room is where you find him, facing the stone wall between wooden bookshelves, firmly knocking his head in a rhythmic pattern against the unwavering surface.
“fuck… fuck… fuck…” He mutters with each plunk against the wall, his head making a meaty thumping sound as it hits against its target. Ticking and Tocking like he’s trying to keep time. For some reason, his head has ceased smoking, letting you see him clearly for the first time since he exited Gin and Uk’s RV. “fuck… fuck… fuck, fuck, fuck, Fuck, Fuck, FUCK, FUck, fUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Again and again he knocks his head, eventually diversifying his hits by punching his fists against the wall in the stead of his crown, the strikes beginning to smack with a wetness as he paints the stone with red splotches, his skin splitting further apart as the hits keep coming and coming and coming. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!!! FUCK-“ He reels back, his spine threatening to sprain from the weight of his next hit.
“Jason!” You call, taking your first real step into the room, realizing how stunned you were beholding the display. Your call worked as intended, halting the Page in his place, his neck still cocked back, ready to plunge him headfirst into the castle’s masonry. Eventually he does turn, facing you only halfway, peering towards you from the side of a single eye. ”…Jason, what are you-“ You go to walk closer to him when suddenly he snaps around completely at you.
“Hey, you Stay Away from me!” He barks, pointing a crooked finger at you. “You just stay the hell away from me Sara. Don’t think I’m not on to your games!” Facing you now, you’re able to see the large gash across his forehead he’d carved open, banging it all those times, leaving it a wide red mess upon his temple. Blood’s trickled down from the injury, dividing like a river at the bridge of his nose. The left-most of these streams breaking off, conducting into his eye and down a majority of his cheek. He looks like a madman… You also notice that the hand he’s pointed to accuse you with has bits of glass embedded within the knuckles, likely being the one he smashed the mirror in the foyer with.
“W-what games, Jason? I’m not playing any games, I just wanted to make sure you’re alright.” You shake your head to assure the deranged boy, slowly but surely stepping further into the room towards him. His breathing seems to quicken at this. Or maybe it was already like this? Uneven and panicky, like the way you’d get in the extreme colds.
“You’re lying!” He angrily affirms, his pointed hand starting to tremble more and more. “You’ve come here to finish the job! I saw you helping him, that fucking traitor! You’ve been against me since the start, since she got to you first!“
“She? Who’s-“ Before you can finish your question, Jason whips around, flinging a brick from his lowered hand to clatter against the bookcase to his right. A brick he’d somehow pulled out from the wall before him, and a brick you’d somehow missed, clutched there in his hand.
“Mia!” He shouts as the chunk of stone slams against the barren wood coffers, plummeting to the floor as the momentum wears from it. “She found you, filled your head up with lies about what happened! She turned you against me! What did she say?! Huh? That it was my fault?! She’s the monster, not me! Not Me!!!”
“Mia…?” You question, unsure why she’s come up all of a sudden. Starting at him as he paces back and forth at his small space between the bookcases, his breathing growing more frantic as he goes on, you realize what he’s talking about. What happened… “Your session…” You mutter, getting the gist now. He watches you from the corner of his eye still, paranoid you might leap out at him at any second. “Mia didn’t talk all that much about it… She only told me a little of what happened. About the party. About how you lost control, and that all of them were dead when she found them…”
“It wasn’t me… It wasn’t Me! She-! She-!!!” He points out towards the door, as if Mia herself were to appear in its threshold upon his gesture. His chest is jumping up and down like he’s just run a marathon. You think he’s starting to have a panic attack.
“She also told me that she wished she could take back what happened!” You interject before Jason can double over and die from his heart popping like a balloon. “She said her greatest regret was doing what she did to you… That it was the biggest mistake she’d ever made.”
“S-… she did?” He halts his pacing, turning to face you head-on again. “…Why?”
“Because… Because them dying is what landed her in the Arena.” You tell him, recalling your first conversation with Mia after Greg had died. When she told you all her friends were dead as well. Jason’s head does this strange little fidget, as if he’s losing control of where he’s looking, eventually settling with him gazing off at the fire as it gnaws on what remains of the books he’d fed it.
“Is that all she told you…?” He stands, unlooking at you, too ashamed now to meet his eyes with yours.
“…She also told me that the Seer’s name was Lexie, and that you loved her.” You answer him. He grunts, as though he’d just choked on something caught in his throat, and you see his stomach tremble as his diaphragm wobbles under spasming lungs that've ejected all breath from his chest. He slams his eyes shut in one last ditch effort to keep the tears at bay, eventually opening them up to gaze at the fire again when he realizes he can’t bottle them up anymore.
He’s sobbing now, silent save for a slight hiccup as the liquid escaping his sockets wash away partly the blood that’s painted his face. All the while, still looking away from you, trying to pretend he can’t see you there in his peripherals. Reaching up to clutch his head, Jason partially covers his face, embarrassed and leaving the eye with his scar to face the world. Reaching over to clutch his heart, he takes hold of a knot’s worth of his shirt, curling his fingers tightly to his chest as if he were to press the feelings out of him with pressure alone, both of his hands expressing vastly different forms of the pain he’s got wrapped up inside. Finally, the full weight of the panic attack hits him, and your friend drops to his knees, his entire torso looking like it’s mired with spasms trying to keep itself under control. Collapsing to the floor entirely, he plunges his face into the stone, still clutching his heart as he bellows uneven cries against the ground, bearing his soul to the shag of the rug while twitching and convulsing from the involuntary throws of his fit, folding him into a mound-like state. He’s curled into himself, as though he were bowing down before some great effigy of ice and terror. A pilgrim and worshiper of a frozen god. After a moment of hesitation, shocked by what you see, you approach your friend, crossing the eternity that’d separated you in the library.
“hr… hr…” You hear him mumble through short-drawn breaths as you arrive at his sorrowful place of prayer, coming to the side of the Page as he tries to bury himself into the earth below him.
“Breathe. Just breathe…” You tell him, laying a hand upon his back and focusing a zephyr to pass over his spirit. Like a raging sea being tamed into a still drift, the spasming chest of Jason’s softens to only a slight tremble. Kneeling there, down by his side, you notice that Jason's gotten blood on his sleeves, the stains of which nearly vanishing into the red of his god tiers. He must've gotten them dirty after he cut his fist on the mirror. That has to be it... Finally, Jason lets out a deep and gasping breath, able to regulate his panicked lungs again. Yet still he remains there, prostrated and unable to face the world. So you stay there with him, waiting for when he can stand on his own again.
“It was her out there…” He says so quietly you think he’s telling his secrets to the floor. “I saw her eyes… she looked at me and I knew it was her… watching me… asking me why… why did I do it…” He continues, his head raising just to the point where you think he might sit up from his place on the floor, only to thump his head against the stone once more. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Three times, like a tic or a hex ward. “it was her… it was her… it was her…”
As Jason continues to repeat himself, a sputtering toy on its last drop of batteries, you look out through the broken-open doors across the room. You don’t know who you were looking for to be standing there in that threshold, but they hadn’t come regardless. And so you sit there, next to your friend as he flogs himself with words and stone, only wishing you weren’t so fucking pathetic. If you weren’t, maybe you could’ve done something more for him. For all of them. Maybe… maybe you should be someone else for a bit…
Sara, be Someone Else.