Had a game today which was so good that I figured I’d use it to get a little practice with writing game logs that are a little more entertaining to read than my OblivAeon log of a few weeks ago; that one had too much information not to just do it as a filedump, edited only to be able to fit in the maximum post size, but this ordinary thrashing of an unlucky Apostate will be much easier to translate into a narrative. The game takes place in an Environment from the Cauldron fan expansion, but specifically it’s the FSC Continuance Wanderer, a space-time ship whose entire backstory is that it isn’t supposed to exist, so its inclusion in an otherwise all-canon game is justifiable enough, I figure. And as long as we’re talking about a ship that never was, and I had a flirty feeling between the last two heroes right at the end, I figure I might as well lean into Princess Cool’s gimmick a little. Let’s see if I can pull this off.
“You can’t possibly stop me, heroes,” laughed the self-proclaimed Fallen Archangel Bezaliel, as KNYFE and Mainstay and Young Legacy and Original Recipe Haka found themselves transported aboard a strange ring-shaped vessel traveling through the dimensional interstices of the Multiverse. “Everything I say is a lie, including this sentence! Nothing is true unless I decide I want it to be - and, with the Paradox Crystal at the heart of this impossible spacecraft, I control the very cosmic definitions of truth and falsehood! The possible and impossible alike are mine to command! Beg me for mercy now, for I am now your God!”
As Young Legacy and the two male heroes rolled their eyes at the Apostate’s posturing, KNYFE was a little distracted trying to comprehend the FILTER symbology all over the ship’s bulkheads and control panels. Obviously, the agency she had until recently worked for had offices in every documented reality of the Multiverse, and coordinated pan-dimensional police actions from their headquarters in the monolithic prison outside of time, known simply as “The Block”. So “impossible” wasn’t really a word in the company vocabulary, but it was still mind-boggling to think that her old employer could have possibly had spaceships without her knowing about it. Protecting the Earth from aliens was their entire mission statement; nothing about her exhaustive history of mission briefings had even hinted at the concept that they were considering leaving the planet and looking for trouble out among the stars. Her instinct was simply to assume that the “FILTER Space Corps” couldn’t possibly actually exist, but that was a hard gut feeling to trust when she was standing in the thing…then again, this was the self-proclaimed Lord of Lies talking, so who knew what was possible. She couldn’t let the pompous jerk mess with her head, as was so obviously his favorite hobby; with a final shake of her fiery ginger locks, she threw off existential quandaries and got down to business.
As a wave of eerie pinkish-purple flames leapt from the sword Bezaliel was brandishing dramatically, washing across the heroes and leaving them feeling strangely chilled inside even as their skin blackened with ash from the “hellfire’s” touch, Haka stepped forward to intercept the brunt of Apostate’s attack. The Maori warrior knew well of his Prime Wardens teammate Fanatic and her “Exorcism” attack, where she would slap or grasp or otherwise touch an “evildoer” and then cause her otherworldly radiance to blaze forth from within their “tainted” body. He was now, for far from the first time, suffering the “unholy” variation of this attack from Fanatic’s self-proclaimed opposite. Though the far less muscular frame of Bezaliel couldn’t grapple with the enormous Aata for any length of time, he managed to hold Haka’s wrist for just long enough to also clock him upside the head with the flat of “Condemnation”, his enormous rune-carven “demonic” sword.
Shaking off the psychic damage of her existential uncertainty about the FSC, KNYFE ran up to Bezaliel and tagged him with a Primed Punch before following up with her energy blade, parrying the sword as it swung back to strike again. Her insubstantial blade shattered as quickly as it had extruded from her wrist, but it had left a noticeable crack in the metal of the demon sword.
Not to be outdone by the even larger man, the burly Jackson Bravo charged into the fray, determined to teach Apostate a lesson straight from the School of Hard Knocks. The quick scrimmage between the two left Bezaliel staggering back a few steps, with a noticeable bend in the middle of his sword. Though the steel was an etheral conjuration that he could reform with only a modest effort of will, the Deceiver was still irritated that he’d have to bother undoing such damage to something he’d willed to be mostly solid and unchanging. He began to think regenerative thoughts in the Host weapon’s direction, but before he could concentrate, a couple lashes of the Void Guard hero’s chain caught him across the knees and disrupted his focus; the blade would remain damaged for now.
Pauline Felecia Parsons was the Next Evolution of the Legacy line; her and her dad had been fighting bad guys of every stripe since before the century ticked over to 21. This latest scheme of Apostates didn’t impress her any more than the latest fad musicians or political pundits; she was having none of such flash-in-the-pan spectacles, because Paul the 8th didn’t raise no fool! With a sniff of derision, Young Legacy speared “Condemnation” with the beams of her Atomic Vision, melting a chunk out of the massive sword’s overcompensating girth. That would teach him to pass her over and aim his first attack at the mountainous Maori; Legacies were supposed to lead from the front, and she wasn’t used to her near-invulnerable form not absorbing the brunt of an attacker’s first blow.
Nowhere near as upset that he had been modestly wounded as Felecia was, not that he had yet realized it, Aata brushed a bit of ash off his arm where Bezaliel had grabbed and scorched it with his “infernal” blaze, and did a quick Haka dance of Shielding to ensure he would suffer less from another such attack in the near future. Then, to show the Deceiver how little impressed he was, the Maori stepped forward to give him a disrespectful flick to the back of the thumb joint with one finger, causing him to drop his sword for a moment at the pain of the Crushing poke. Though he reclaimed “Condemnation’s” hilt a split-second later, Apostate found the weapon even worse for wear, as its partially-melted tip had hit the floor of the spaceship corridor and was a little bit more blunted yet.
Finally managing to concentrate for a moment, Apostate reached his Host essence out to draw upon the energies of the Paradox Crystal, and performed a quick Temporal Reset on the envelope of time around his sword; this would be faster and easier than reweaving the weapon’s enchantments as he usually did, though it was a feat inherently resistant to duplication. The entropic pulse given off by the crystal would make things a bit more random, and external forces might occasionally repeat themselves as a result, but the timeship itself seldom performed any of its tricks twice in succession.
Having not wasted his innate magical reserves on that feat, Apostate was free to perform a different dark miracle instead, though it was a minor one; he reached into his metaphorical bag of tricks with one hand, and withdrew it again gloved in the Gauntlet of Perdition. Under other circumstances he could have conjured half a dozen such relics simultaneously, but the fires of Hell were spiteful even to their masters, and sometimes gave their dark blessings as stingily as they could get away with; thusly, with his body-jumping abilities limited by the supply of dread artifacts he could afford to dispense with, he wasn’t happy about having only one relic besides his sword within easy reach. Still, every little bit helped when fighting four heroes at once; since the blonde girl seemed to be thrusting herself to the front of the battle line, he threw a mighty punch at her while the remains of his sword continued to press his attack on Haka.
KNYFE had positioned herself near the Maori, and with her Punch fully Primed, she grabbed the partially disintegrated, then partially un-disintegrated blade, and snapped off about the last half of it, or slightly less than half. She then thrust her other arm into the holster-like loop on the belt of her power suit, causing her Focusing Blade-Conduit to constrict about her wrist, and with the longer, sharper energy blade she then expelled, slashed off about a third of the remaining length, leaving just enough of Condemnation that Mainstay’s teammate Writhe would barely be able to Swallow it in Shadow.
Speaking of Mainstay, he had found himself traveling many a Lonesome Road in his day, but with his teammates standing all around, he couldn’t quite find enough self-pity within his soul to take an extreme action…that is, unless he were to Drop the Hammer on himself real quick. Having hurt himself today and seen that he could indeed still feel, he was left with the proper motivation to take that pigsticker away from the black-winged dingbat, and maybe carry off a bit of skin from the hand it was attached to! Or at least it would have, had he not quickly grabbed at him with the other hand, causing him to damage the weird metal glove it had suddenly sprouted. As the smug liar danced back away from ticked-off Jackson, he was too slow to avoid being caught a couple more times by a sudden whip of chain.
Pulling her dad’s ring out of a pocket in the pleats of her skirt, Young Legacy flew forward and fired off more eyebeams, taking Apostate square in the chest and leaving a pair of scorched lines across his bare pecs (so much less impressive-looking than Aata’s!). She prepared herself for his counterattack, knowing that he no longer had a sword with which to strike, but still figuring that Melee was slightly the more likely of his likely attack forms.
As he thought momentarily on the time he held Dominion over a tribal village in what is now called New Zealand, Haka stepped forward again to try and Crush Apostate.
This time, it wasn’t Bezaliel who did something to the Paradox Crystal, but rather it acted on its own, creating an abrupt Time Freeze around KNYFE, the likely target of Apostate’s next attack. The stasis field immobilized her completely, yet also made her impregnable to any attack.
An Imp Pilferer scampered out of one of the side chambers of the ship as Bezaliel drew the battle further into areas he’d previously prepared for an ambush, albeit that the heroes had arrived well before he’d been truly ready for them. Though he was unable to damage her frozen form, somehow the imp was able to scamper up along its surface and reach a control button on the Focusing Conduit, switching it to a defensive mode which reconfigured it into an Overcharged Null-Shield.
Mainstay drew on Shard Strength to be able to batter Apostate more effectively, then Legacy performed a Flying Smash just past her frozen teammate, squishing the Imp Pilferer into abyssal goo and then smashing into Bezaliel, who tried to intercept the tackle with his Gauntlet and thereby shattered it to bits. With him sent flying away from her impact, she immediately hammered him with more of her eye beams, leaving the Deceiver in worse shape than when Fanatic had last Exorcized him (which had specifically been on one of the Obsidian Fields of Insula Primalis).
Legacy floated triumphantly above the fallen “fallen angel”, clearly utterly unaffected by his Infernal trickery. Haka then danced his way up to the momentarily felled foe; he’d never been one to Punish the Weak, but this seemed to be a different sort of battle, and so he aimed a Crushing kick at the Deceiver’s side, doing yet another chunk of damage similar to the two which Legacy had dealt him.
As KNYFE emerged from the Time Freeze, a Combat Cyborg appeared from behind her, firing a spray of flechettes at Mainstay, whose Shard-hardened body intercepted about half of the needling missiles.
Apostate realized he needed another Relic to ensure his protection, and this time his quick summoning ritual gave him the Periapt of Woe; as the redhead had just emerged from her annoying momentary invincibility, he sadistically relished the opportunity to deal her a particularly grevious wound with his Infernal Touch. Sadly, his minion had accidentally granted her a degree of protection, which she quickly interposed, thereby blunting his attack back down to about its usual effectiveness if neither Periapt nor Shield had been in play.
KNYFE didn’t know what exactly that cyborg thing was, other than one thing that an Infiltrating Obfuscator like her always loved seeing: a distraction. With Bezaliel momentarily glancing over to see what the newcomer might be, she gave him a quick sucker-stab with one of her insubstantial knyves.
Feeling the Shard-Strength slowly poisoning him, Mainstay casually picked up his favorite motorcycle Sweet Rhonda in one hand, and then with the other he gathered up another couple of lengths of chain to toss at the downed Deceiver.
Legacy attempted to Bolster her Allies by striking a triumphant pose, sending more eyebeams into the still-defiant Bezaliel, and daring him to try and inflict any more Melee damage on her. At this point, the self-proclaimed dark angel wasn’t half the man he used to be, and he certainly wasn’t the specimen of masculinity that Aata was! Hm, that was the second time in a few minutes she’d found herself thinking about the Kiwi beefcake more than she was used to doing him; even more than the rest of Dad’s friends, Mr. Wakarawarewa was waaaaaay too old for her to be thinking about that way, and yet…well, when he brandished his Taiaha as he was currently doing, and smashed it down on the ruby-resilient Periapt and the substantially squishier hand holding it, could Felecia help it if she felt a Surge of Strength from the butterflies in her stomach?
Suddenly, there came a querulous trumpeting sound from further down the passage, and from amid the shifting pink shadows of the crystal’s coruscating light, an enormous form lumbered into view. The Prehistoric Behemoth wasn’t quite a mammoth or mastadon, just as the lizard-like Raptors of Insula Primalis weren’t quite real prehistoric dinosaurs; they had evolved over recent millenia to look like something not quite normal, and so had this shaggy Dumbo relative. Though not moving aggressively, the creature was clearly excited to see newcomers into the domain it had presumably haunted since the ship had somehow scooped it up; as Bezaliel brandished the Periapt at the newly menacing Cyborg, the Behemoth blundered into Apostate and sent him flying again, as Legacy merely laughed and looked up at the elephantine creature, finding him not at all intimidating and in fact rather cute. There was just something about huge primitive beasts of burden, she supposed…
Actually properly rattled for the first time in what he had supposed would be an easily triumphant fight, Bezaliel finally took his summoning ritual seriously for a second, and managed to grab an actually dangerous item for the first time since originally producing his sword: the Tome of the Unknowable, a book that consumed knowledge instead of disgorging it. Though the leggy blonde that hovered in front of him was physically indestructible, even she couldn’t resist the grimoire’s infernal powers forever.
KNYFE reached around her Null-Shield and touched another control, causing the Prototype Servo-Gauntlet within her armor’s sleeve to pop out and clamp around her hand; winding up a haymaker, she clocked the book out of Bezaliel’s hand before he could do anything with it - but of course, he had known she would do so, and that was part of his plan! One of the contingencies he’d woven into that infernal relic long ago was that its destruction would immediately allow him to reclaim his sword, however thoroughly it had been dispelled earlier. As the Shard-Strength faded from Mainstay’s now-free hand, Apostate suddenly thought to wonder where the Void Guardian’s chain had gone, just before it struck him firmly in the face.
Acting like a maniac, Mainstay charged up to Bezaliel and swung Sweet Rhonda like a baseball bat, sending the villain flying in a way that had nothing to do with his wings. As the Behemoth turned its head to track the humanoid body shooting past him, Mainstay caught its eye, pointed, and yelled “Hey Dumbo! Fetch!” before pretending to toss the motorcycle after Apostate. Having a brain only slightly larger than a walnut, the woolly mastodont fell for it and went scampering off down the corridor in pursuit of one or both of the fugitive “toys”.
With Apostate now being substantially worse for wear, Felecia decided a little Heroic Interception was in order, and took the risk of separating from her teammates to press the attack on a foe that was quite probably now running away from the fluffy pachyderm. While she didn’t find Apostate, she did notice that he had dropped the Periapt, and she did an about half adequate job of melting it with her eye lasers. Unsure what to defend herself against at this point, she remembered the needle-shooting cyborg behind her and decided to prepare for projectile evasion over other potential threats.
Haka jogged up behind Young Legacy just in time to see her eye beams fail to annihilate the discarded relic, and with a big beaming smile said “Allow me, Milady!”, having no idea that his cheekily ironic display of white-knightery would actually quicken her pulse in the mood she was currently finding herself in. As the cyborg closed in behind the pair of them, Aata absent-mindedly clonked it with the other end of his Taiaha as he jauntily hefted it over his shoulder and posed triumphantly over the shattered ruby remnants.
The entire universe suddenly turned inside out and upside down before righting itself again; nobody on the team had enough temporal science expertise to understand this fact, but in reality the FSC CW had just entered a Slipstream, and while nearly all of the ship’s interior was protected from the quasi-inertial effects, the human brain was not quite built to handle passage through a multiversal membrane, and all their thought processes were left thoroughly scrambled as a result. All of Young Legacy’s plans for the rest of the battle, in particular, were thrown into chaos as a result of this shift.
Returning to the battle just in time to get a needle lodged into the tip of his sword, Apostate decided it was officially time to stop screwing around, and called down the Apocalypse upon the whole battlefield! Haka was too busy flexing for an involuntarily blushing Felecia to even notice Bezaliel’s attacks.
Even more uncertain than before of where she was or what was happening, KNYFE decided she’d better stick to what she knew best, which was being a Kinetic Neutralizer. She had no way of stopping whatever ritual Apostate had set into motion, but she could certainly clock him one, adding one more goose egg to the baker’s dozen he’d already earned.
Mainstay grabbed the Cyborg in a Headlock, ripped out some crucial wires to ensure it would quit moving, and then threw what was left of it at Apostate. Locating his bike again, the former Southwest Sentinel mounted the saddle and then hoisted his Void Belter aloft, ready to make short work of the sword-wielding Deceiver in the immediate future.
Unable to stop the destructive power that was once again washing across their surroundings, Legacy settled for striking another heroic pose to inspire her allies and Bolster them against the inevitable “start over from square one” that they were threatened with. Not seeing it as worth the bother to rebreak that damned sword, Felecia simply blasted its wielder with her eyebeams, while preparing herself to absorb his Infernal energies even if it would likely burn out all her remaining resilience to do so.
With the entire ship seemingly about to disintegrate around them, Haka rushed forward and tackled Apostate with a flying Elbow Smash before Crushing what was left of him; the sword had more structural integrity than the body that had been holding it, so Haka shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was when he discovered that he’d just tackled a barely-animate corpse, puppeted by infernal necromancy to be able to carry “Condemnation” to the battlefield…the deceiver-spirit was actually inhabiting the sword, not the humanoid body! Surely nobody has ever thought of such a trick before.
(To be continued as Apostate flips and resets the board…)