((@RGU
I can indeed! It'll get written when I stop procrastinating about it, which will happen... probably eventually, if I'm being honest. Y'see, I originally said I'd write a post about that slot, because at the time I had been procrastinating about writing the turn by thinking about what exactly to say in that post. Problem is, as soon as I mentioned it, my subconscious reshuffled it into the "DO ANYTHING ELSE" folder, and now I'm procrastinating about it. Yes, I'm procrastinating about doing the thing I was doing to procrastinate about the game. Send help.
@Everyone
Apologies for the long delay. I have been unusually busy for the last week... but I really should've had this posted four days ago. It's just hard to get back into writing after a long break. With luck, I should be able to maintain a more regular schedule again.))
..bastard..
"Where are you, why did you ditch me here? Couldn't spend one moment helping me fight.. too busy following and running away and jumping, not doing things.."
Escape from here, and regroup with the other girls, as best as I can find them, through the telepathic contacts and the magical senses.
(("Escape from here"? That's ambiguous, so time for an Inn roll!))[Innocence]You glare at the monster with your more-injured original body, leaning on your clone while it looks behind watchfully to guide your slow retreat. The wire-wrapped man remains utterly still as you hobble away, but you soon realize there's a major flaw with your plan; the largest roadway through the labyrinth, and the one you're nearest, is still choked with wire figures--and unlike the aimless, ambling crowds that you passed through earlier, these ones have linked arms and formed into a continuous wall across the roadway. They don't move either, though they're all staring at you with their empty hoop faces. You
could try to push your way past, but you have the feeling that if they're putting this much effort into blocking you, they won't just ignore attempts to pass through anyway.
Steadying yourself, you inspect the other three paths into the empty arena around the machines and wireman. All three have similar blockades of wire people, and if anything they're even more thick with the things due to being thinner. That leaves climbing as your only option--you're pretty sure you could jump into the net of ribbons and lanterns above the nearby roadway, without coming within arms' reach of any of the figures. Such a plan would be dicy since your main body's arms are near-useless. You'd have to catch yourself with your second body, and hobble through the wire net, and even then you can't really be sure you'd end up in a better position. At least where you are, all the monsters seem content to wait for you to act. Waiting is easily the safest plan... at least if Mina
is coming back...
[Creativity]
You're pretty sure Pumsy mentioned something about sending messages mentally, back when you first made your wish, if that's true then you could just call Mina. Problem is, he never told you
how to do it, just like all the other powers you've gained. You stand there for at least a full minute, fruitlessly trying to figure out how to
think into someone else's mind, while slowly growing more and more worried about the wire monsters which
won't stop staring at you. Eventually, you give up and close your eyes, blocking out their stares. You then focus on just detecting Mina with your senses, hoping that you'll at least discover whether she's coming back for you.
After a couple of seconds, the glowing beacon you remember from before becomes... "visible" isn't quite right, but it's the closest analog. She's almost directly above you, and her light is faint, choked out by the smog of misery that permeates this place, but she's clearly there. You focus, trying to sense whether she's moving, or how far away she is, and gradually you realize that she's next to two other beacons, both dimmer and of slightly different... flavors? None of them are moving, and you grumble in frustration at the useless little lights hanging far above you.
You open your eyes, deliberately trying to flush them from your mind, and nearly lose your balance when you see that the wireman has closed most of the distance between you and him while you were distracted. He's paused mid-creep, one hand held inches above the ground, just outside of pouncing range. The wall of wire figures hasn't moved an inch, but they're still behind you, watching.
Everything in this place feels like it's watching you...
Crap crap crap crap crap
Not good. Not good not good! She had no idea where the thing that took her - it wasn't Alida, couldn't have been, Alida wouldn't have done something like that right? Right? She didn't know her but she didn't seem murderous! Mostly!
Focus, Focus! She's alive, she's alive, she's probably unconcious so you can save her you're MAGIC for crying out loud!
"S-She's alive! I can h-hear her heartbeat! We need to do something and fast!"
Standby action if I can't think of something better later/after interaction (learning from mistakes!) - try to get her down ASAP to Tooru, assist if possible, she's alive and that means we can save her!
[Joy]
You pull Tooru's body upward, at the same time releasing your grip on the wires to shift yourself down and under it. She lands bonelessly on your shoulder, head behind your back, but you don't try and stop her momentum. Instead you let yourself fall too; it's the fastest way back down to Asha, and you can easily control the fall by lightly kicking off of wires as you pass them. You get back down to Asha's level in almost no time at all, and easily land just in front of her, only a little lower. You turn away to steady yourself without disturbing the wires she's clinging to, and immediately get tackled from behind when Asha overbalances into Tooru's body.
Asha's clumsiness nearly sends the three of you into an uncontrolled fall, but you manage to catch yourself by quickly grabbing two wires in front of you. This leaves you in an awkward position, supporting most of the weight of three girls, while Asha shifts to hug Tooru's body. You're tempted to say something to Asha, demand that she get off of you... but you can sense her form, and the utter grief painted across her face, even though she's behind you. You decide to stay silent; you're not sure she'd actually be able to hear you, even if you did speak.
After a couple seconds, Asha's posture changes slightly, her weight shifting away slightly as her expression hardens. Then... you're not exactly sure what happens, but her form becomes fuzzier, somehow more unreal and harder to distinguish from the air around her, almost like she's slowly fading out of existence, though she doesn't get any lighter. Worried, you try and twist around to look at her with your own eyes, but it's impossible to get a look at her without potentially losing your balance and sending all three of you tumbling.
"Asha, wh-what are you doing?"You speak to her, but she doesn't react. Your worry only increases as the indistinct fuzziness starts to spread to Tooru's body, crawling off of Asha and across Tooru's skin. As it covers her torso, you stop being able to hear her heartbeat, and you nearly jump away to get Tooru away from whatever Asha is doing to her--but you hesitate, and the indistinctness spreads to her legs, which you
can see with your actual eyes. They don't seem to change in any visible way, even though your magical senses tell you that they're dissipating in the same way as Asha. So you just nervously wait, hoping that this resolves itself.
Eventually Tooru's entire body is consumed by the strange aura. Asha's cloudy shape seems to send out a few pulses of energy, each one subtly changing Tooru's cloudy form, and then all of a sudden they both snap back to normal. Tooru's heartbeat returns, and more surprisingly, her arm and clothes are back, as if she never suffered any wounds at all. Asha pulls back, returning to her perch, and you sigh in relief. Both of them seem fine.
Tooru starts to move, her eyes blinking a few times. She twists around to look at her surroundings, apparently confused. You're about to say something to her, but your're interrupted by a foreign grumble invading your mind, with the voice of Alida.
<...ditch me here? Couldn't spend one moment helping me fight.. too busy following and running away and jumping, not doing things..>The moment she saw Tooru's lifeless body, Asha's emotions disappeared. Fear, sadness, courage... All were gone.
It was like that day. Everyone she cared about died, and she just stood there, watching. And today, it happened again. It was her fault, it was-
"S-She's alive! I can h-hear her heartbeat! We need to do something and fast!"
Alive. She heard it right. Alive. Which mean there was hope. She managed to do something when Tooru's arm was broken, maybe she could still save the girl...
Asha recovered her spirit.
"I am a magical girl." she muttered.
Lifting her head toward Mina, she shouted at the top of her lungs:
"Tooru! Hang in there!"
Run toward Mina and Tooru's location, and put my hands on Tooru. Focus your energy, wish for her wellbeing, hug her... Do something with your powers Asha!
[While doing that, Asha's mind was filled with only one though "I must save her, even if it costs me my life..."]
You can't exactly run towards Mina, since she's suspended in the wires a good twenty feet above you. Even staying balanced where you're currently perched is fairly difficult, actually. You clench your fists around two wires while anxiously watching Mina, trying not to think about how high up you are. Your heart skips a beat when the green girl seems to lose her balance and fall, but she skillfully controls her descent, slowing herself with quick little kicks, while her hands hold tight to Tooru. She's level with you in moments, and she flashes you a quick worried look before turning away to catch herself.
Up close, Tooru's wounds look so much worse. She's hanging facedown over Mina's back--mercifully, you can't see her face--but a lot of damage is still evident, particularly the damage to her right arm. Her white sleeves have mostly been charred black, and the right sleeve is almost entirely gone, letting you see the mottled red burns covering what remains of her arm. Blood freely flows from the arm, already starting to stain the back of Mina's outfit. You have to do
something, so you reach for her, but you promptly overbalance and fall into Mina's back, nearly knocking her over.
Mina seems to be able to handle your weight, so you don't even try to recover, instead hugging Tooru. You close your eyes and bury your face into the back of her red shirt, trying to focus your magic, like you did before to heal her shoulder.
After a few seconds of concentration, Tooru's body and wounds start to become more
visible in your mind, more than they had when you fixed her shoulder; you can feel her wounds, as a kind of distortion in the magic that makes up her body, like fraying string at the edge of a cloth. Seeing her like this, not as a person but as a intricately-woven web of magic, comforts you--she's mostly whole, with almost exclusively superficial damage. Even her right arm, which is outright
gone below the elbow, seems almost whole to your magical sense. It's less like her arm has been blown off, and more like it was... unwound?
Shaking your head, you clear your thoughts. Seeing her like this, you know you can
fix her.
You let your magic flow into her, knitting Tooru's scattered threads back together, and stitching your own power in where there isn't enough to fully piece her back together. It's almost beautiful, in a way, to watch her strands come back together, more of her own accord than your own. You're momentarily struck by a desire to change her slightly, weave her back together in a better pattern, but it passes; you just need to
fix her, not
improve her.
The whole process is completed in seconds, and you pull away as it finishes, examining Tooru. You're surprised by how pristine she looks; there's no trace of the severe wounds she had mere moments ago. Even her clothes are fully repaired and cleaned, the only remaining hint of her injuries being the streak of crimson across the back of Mina's green shirt.
Tooru soon stirs, looking around at her surroundings in confusion. She quickly notices you, and visibly relaxes as soon as she meets your gaze. But before you can say anything, a unfamiliar girl's voice enters your mind, grumbling about something.
<...ditch me here? Couldn't spend one moment helping me fight.. too busy following and running away and jumping, not doing things..>Tooru wanted to cry, but seemingly had no eyes with which to do so. Was she really dead? Already? But she was only thirteen. . . This was her first witch hunt. She hadn't even gotten killed by the witch or its minions; she'd blown herself up like some stupid cartoon character. She moped for a moment or three (it was hard to tell,) drifting aimlessly in this non-place. A notion came to her after some indeterminate time; maybe she could somehow. . . go back? She was magical, now, all.
Try to go back to reality. Focus on trying to move something, even though I can't actually feel anything.
You try to move your arms, to wave them around, or hug yourself, or... anything, really. As far as you can tell, nothing happens, there's still a complete lack of any sort of sensation or feedback. It's very strange to be without a body; you can still try and move your limbs, and
almost trick yourself into thinking that you actually can feel something, but there's simply nothing there.
[Innocence]
[Creativity]
Still, you don't give up. You have to get back somehow, you can't just leave Asha and that green girl alone, without help! You focus on visualizing the network of wires that you had been carried through, hoping that maybe you can drag your spirit back to the area or something. Immediately, the nothingness around you changes; you can sense just a hint of the misery engulfing that place, invading the space around you. Undaunted, you focus on that depressing feeling, seizing it like a lifeline back to reality.
The misery gradually thickens back into the choking miasma that you had almost gotten used to, and then you spot a light in the darkness. A shining beacon, so very different from the despair all around it. You focus on that beacon's glow, mentally dragging yourself towards it, and as you get closer it gets sharper. It's actually two lights, both close together--the duller light is clearly Asha, you've seen her shining enough to be sure--but the brighter one is unfamiliar, someone who you've never seen through your emotional sense. They're both
so close, if you had a body you're sure you could reach out and touch them, but still you just can't feel
anything, at all,
it's--You gasp and awaken, a sudden rush of sensation overwhelming you. You can feel a thousand little prickles across your entire body, slight itches that feel completely alien, yet nostalgically familiar at the same time. Your skin crawls as if it's someone else's, or as if it forgot its owner. After a moment, you start to get a handle on the sudden rush, and try to figure out where you are. You're still thrown over someone's shoulder, that's for sure, but this person grips you much more lightly than your kidnapper did, plus she's wearing green rather than blue and white. Though, she does have a streak of fresh blood soaking into the back of her outfit, about where you jammed your talismans into that girl...
You lift yourself up a little, looking around. Wires block your view of the ground below, making it impossible to tell how high you are, and the two walls that you can see don't have any recognizable marks--only a few empty windows, which look identical to every other window in this place. You groan and look a little higher, almost immediately meeting Asha's hopeful gaze. She's just a couple feet ahead, just behind the girl carrying you. She looks... tired, but happy-ish? It's hard to tell, and you're still somewhat overwhelmed by everything...
<...ditch me here? Couldn't spend one moment helping me fight.. too busy following and running away and jumping, not doing things..>You flinch and your eyes go wide when you hear the voice of your kidnapper, angrily speaking from somewhere close. It's like she's speaking through every wire in this place, her voice coming from everywhere and nowhere.
((Yay, someone used telepathy! IC, it should really take y'all a couple minutes to figure out how it works and how to talk through it--have to know where someone is, and focus on them while thinking hard--but I'm just gonna say you can use it freely now. Mostly because a turn of everyone asking "how do i shot word" is uninteresting. Powers starting completely alien and unknown worked a lot worse than I had hoped. 
))
Soul Gem: Glowing with a warm light.
Age: 14
Hair Color: Salt-stained blonde.
Health: Both forearms have essentially been flayed, she has severe gashes along her left side, her throat is partially crushed, and her ribs are in agony. Her effigy merely has deep slashes along the forearms, debilitating head pain, and a lingering feeling of nausea.
Inventory: Two clubs, each held by one body.
Totem: A fishing club.
Stats:
Bravery: Talented~
Joy: Skilled!
Innocence: Amateur...
Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Skilled!
Creativity: Cursed ;-;
Love: Cursed ;-;
Abilities:
Mobility Lvl2
Close Combat Lvl2+1
Totem Manipulation Lvl1
Berzerker Lvl2 - Active; Crippled! (Cheap discount to power use)
Painless Lvl2
Effigy Lvl1 - Active; One Effigy! (Cheap drain)
Soul Gem: Glowing with a
dull light.
Age: 13
Hair color:
Ashen Health: A bit banged up.
Inventory: ...Clothes, one would assume?
Totem: A Ribbon. The one her late sister wore.
Stats:
Bravery: Skilled! Joy: Cursed ;-;
Innocence: Cursed ;-;
Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Talented~ Creativity: Amateur...
Love: Skilled!Abilities:
Mobility: Level 2
Close Combat: Level 2
Totem Manipulation: Level 0 (+1)
Heal and Steel: Level 2 (Active: Mercy++)
Soothe: Level 2
Flagellation: Level 2 Soul Gem: Glowing with a shining light.
Age: 14.
Hair Color: Bright green.
Health: Fine!
Inventory: Her halberd (which is apparently in hammerspace or something?), and Tooru (who definitely isn't, of course. Hammerspace is a horrible carcinogen.).
Totem: A halberd.
Stats:
Bravery: Amateur...
Joy: Skilled!
Innocence: Amateur...
Purity: Skilled!
Mercy: Cursed ;-;
Creativity: Talented~
Love: Cursed ;-;
Abilities:
Mobility: Level 1
Close-Combat: Level 1 (+1)
Regeneration: Level 2
Sixth Sense: Level 2
Semblance: Level 2
Projection: Level 2
Soul Gem: Glowing with a vibrant light.
Age: 13
Hair Color: Bright scarlet.
Health: Fine!
Inventory: No talismans, which is probably for the best.
Totem: Ofuda talismans, primarily thrown as manabolts.
Stats:
Bravery: Cursed ;-;
Joy: Talented~
Innocence: Skilled!
Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Cursed ;-;
Creativity: Amateur...
Love: Skilled!
Abilities:
Mobility II
Mana Bolt II (+I)
Regeneration I
Gourmand I
Outburst II
Duet with Reality II
Author
Topic: Pumsy's Seeds - A ~MAGICAL GIRL~ game inspired by PMMM (Read 149808 times)