((My work schedule DID change, I got assigned dayshift tomorrow. Yay. So have the first 2/3rds of the post now; I'll try and post the last bit, and sheets, after work tomorrow. Assuming I feel conscious, after staying up late. -.-
Also, Paris, that spoiler makes me smile every time I read it. Thank you.))
(Speaking of speculation, I'm wondering if L3 Flagellation can have painful but beneficial effects on someone's body, as it doesn't require wounds.)
(You've got Mob 3, Nakéen. I know self-depreciation is a character trait, but there's self depreciation and then there's becoming an anchor for no reason.)
"So this witch is pretty powerful, Pumsy? We'd best be on our game, then."
<I can jump down there fine, can the rest of you help me?>
Board the vessel. Lead one of the victims off the boat. They seem pretty passive, there shouldn't be much resistance.
"Uh-huh! Witches of Mania are always dangerous if you aren't careful, but I think you'll be okay." Pumsy responds, a little bit of worry audible in his voice.
You nod, then crouch down and gather yourself, before leaping directly to the boat. You land in the center, between two bulky-looking dock workers, and stumble a bit as you stand up--the boat's strange motion and angle makes it difficult to balance on. You find your metaphorical sea legs quickly, however, and grab the hand of the man to your right, tugging him upwards as you hurriedly move to the boat's edge. The man gets up and follows without complaint, a bemused and distant expression on his face. You climb out of the boat easily enough, but the man half-tumbles out, and you have to catch and steady him as he balances himself. You let him go, and he immediately just sits down on the concrete, dazedly looking up at the sky.
You clamber back onto the boat, and grab the shoulder of the second dock worker, but you've only just gotten him to stand up when everything goes dark, and you're hit with a strange sense of weightlessness as the boat tips forward into a horizontal position. A moment later, you're thrown off your feet as the boat dives forward, slamming you face-first into an unoccupied seat. You start to fall
upward, over the back of the seat, and flail for a handhold. You end up hugging the seat, uncomfortably pressing it into your face, but it's better than being thrown free. You can hear Tooru and Mina screaming, but they're not getting further
away, so you decide to stay attached to the boat rather than try and rescue them or something.
You don't think the ride lasts even ten seconds, but you're immensely relieved all the same when you feel the boat hit water and return to a level position, lazily floating forward. You cautiously let go of the seat once you're sure the boat won't be falling any more, and look around at a world filled with color. [Continued at bottom of post]
"G-Got it! I'll keep an eye out, too." Mina says, as she follows after Alida.
Hop onto the boat as well, and start getting people out.
You leap just after Alida, but land near the rear of the boat, next to the clay man. His body enters the range of your sixth sense while you're in midair, and you can't help but find it intriguing; there is virtually no differentiation of the clay-like substance making up his body under the mundane tuxedo he wears, aside from it being somewhat less soft towards the center. You wonder why he hasn't collapsed in on himself, but before you can come to an answer you gracelessly collide with the boat and tumble into the back row of passengers. The clay man barely responds to your arrival; all he does is shift his torso towards you, drawing your attention to the shiny glass tie he's wearing. You find yourself distracted by the tie--it's an impossibly fragile object, the structure of the glass
feeling like it's ready to burst at the slightest touch--but shake your head and try to focus on the issue at hand. You can look at fascinating shiny objects
later.
[Bravery]
You squirm around until you're upright, and then immediately seize the shoulders of the nearest person--a large sailor whose bulk is mostly fat--and
with one motion fling him behind you, off the boat. You don't even turn to watch, but can sense the clay man stretch out one arm to catch the man, stopping him dead in his tracks. A part of you feels miffed that he could do that, since by all rights the flimsy clay limb should've been torn away by that force, but you don't dwell on it. Instead, you grab the next two people--a teenage couple a bit older than you--by the backs of their collars and haul them off the side of the boat.
You smile with satisfaction as the couple lands on the concrete, safely away, and turn to the next passenger, an older woman. It takes you a moment to realize you can't actually see anything with your eyes, and then you stop in your tracks when you realize the boat is floating in a featureless void. Almost as soon as you notice the darkness, the boat starts to tilt forward, and drives you down to your knees--and then it rushes forward and down, and your feet leave the surface. You let out an involuntary scream as you realize as the boat falls past you, the clay man somehow stuck to its surface, but just before you're out of range the familiar snaps out and arm and grabs your ankle, dragging you along.
The rest of the fall downward is downright
terrifying for you. You scream and flail blindly in the air the whole way down, too scared to have any idea what you're even trying to do. You can vaugely sense a flowing waterfall next to you, and two parts of your mind are split between grabbing at it in hopes of somehow slowing your descent, and trying to climb out down the clay man's arm, back into the boat. Neither side wins out before the boat hits the bottom, and you're slammed back into the man, smushing his lower torso into a lump and then tumbling forward into the back of the seats. You lay there for a moment, breathing heavily and panting as you collect yourself. You can sense everyone in the back half of the boat, and your own body, and everything seems blessedly unharmed--even the clay man reforms after a couple seconds, as if he was never harmed. Eventually you even manage to open your eyes, and you realize light has returned to the world around you. [Continued at bottom of post]
"The boat!" shouted Asha. There is no way she could let it and its passengers head into the witch's labyrinth. She first thought about jumping on it, but then she would probably get separated from the others if they couldn't stop the boat. (How to stop the boat? No... maybe we don't need to stop it. Just save the people...)
Through telepathy, Asha quickly shared her idea. [Is anyone agile enough to jump on the boat and, how should I put it, throw the people to me? I'm confident in my strength, but not in my mobility. I can also alter my ribbon's properties a little bit to ease landing, I think.]
Asha attempts altering her Ribbon's shape to form a sheet, and stands at the ready.
You slide down into the concrete canal as the others leap across to the boat, quickly trying to extend your ribbon into a sheet. After the cloth in your hands starts to widen at a glacial pace, you change your strategy and
summon three more ribbons, which you start to weave together into a single sheet. You're distracted for a moment as you splash into the dirty water at the bottom of the canal, but still manage to finish the net within a few seconds. You look up from your work to see a single young man tumbling down the slope, and rush to place the net in front of him. You easily catch him just before he falls into the water, looking him over to make sure he didn't hurt anything during his tumble. He looks somewhat bruised, and grabs his forehead with both hands, but looks relatively fine.
After you're sure the guy is okay, you look up at the boat... and see that it's entirely disappeared, somehow already through the labyrinth's entrance. There's two people sitting near it with dazed looks: a strong-looking old man, and a young woman who looks about as old as the guy you rescued. You hear the guy painfully mumble something about 'Liz' as you extricate him from your net.
[I can get there, but um, I'm not really any stronger than I was.] She was definitely going to follow that boat in, though. Tooru took a few moments to judge the leap, and a step or three back to get a running start.
Tooru leaps onto the boat! She doesn't throw anyone, though.
You jump after Alida and Mina, aiming your jump carefully between the two, and landing with grace, right in front of an empty seat. You immediately sit down as Alida starts pulling the men sitting in front of you off the boat. There's a shaggy looking guy sitting next to you, with a half-eaten pan of brownies in his lap. He smiles and nods at you with a dreamy look on his face, before taking a large bite out of one of the brownies. You lean away from him, and notice Alida clambering back onto the boat, then grabbing a muscular man's hand
Being the only person watching, you can see the prow of the boat reach the labyrinth's entrance, and watch as it sinks right into the darkness, without shifting orientation at all. You grab the edges of the seat as the unnatural shadow rapidly swallows the boat in front of you, and then you're past it, and you butterflies in your stomach as the boat finally starts to slow down and tip forward. And then you're forced into the back of your seat as the boat falls forward. For a moment, surprised, you grip the bottom of your seat, but you quickly realize you're in no real danger, and you let out an unintentional shout of happiness. The ride downward is scary, but it's also
exhilarating, and you can't help but enjoy it. You can hear Mina shouting similarly, somewhere behind you, while Alida and all the passengers are utterly silent, but you don't let that ruin the experience for you.
Halfway through the ride, light suddenly surrounds you, and you see that you're falling down towards a garishly, fantastically coloured forest. You look around and marvel at the environment, seeing all colors of the rainbow covering the ground everywhere, and just barely notice a patch of gray in the distance before it disappears from view--and the ride suddenly comes to an end, slamming heavily into a river with a massive spray of water. You relax as the boat starts to drift forward, and start to look around at the world around you, now moving slow enough to really get a good look. [Continued at bottom of post]
Sasha just awkwardly stands where she is, looking at everyone do super jumps to the boat. She's also a little envious of everyone having awesome powers.
You get ready to follow the other girls, only for almost all of them to immediately leap across the canal, landing flawlessly in the boat. Only Asha stays on the ground--maybe she can't jump like that, or something?--but she instead slides down into the canal, pulling a bunch of ribbons out of thin air and weaving them into a net with preternatural speed.
Figures. Even the girl who can't jump at least has super-weaving powers. You're not envious at all, no...You hesitate before falling, mindful of the loaded gun you're carrying, and then cautiously start picking your way down the slope after Asha. You watch as Mina roughly throws two people off the boat, one of them landing roughly and tumbling down the slope. You're about to shout a warning, but then you see Asha, already spreading her net out to catch the man. These girls really do work well as a team, it's like they know what the others will do even before they do it themselves. Maybe it's a magical girl thing.
The boat passes through the labyrinth just after, it's sorta creepy to watch. The darkness inside the hole isn't natural, it's more like a wall of inky black that
ate the boat or something... but you're sure the girls know what they're doing, they're probably fine. You eventually get down to the bottom of the canal and cross the shin-deep water, and look over Asha's shoulder at the battered man she saved. He's holding his head and muttering, with a mildly pained expression, and Asha seems to be looking him over to make sure he isn't wounded. You worry for a moment whether he's dangerous, but he seems too out of it to do anything.
((Labyrinth desc tomorrow maybe. No later than Sunday at worst.))
Author
Topic: Pumsy's Seeds - A ~MAGICAL GIRL~ game inspired by PMMM (Read 149225 times)