War of the kingdom of Peaches: A Royesland spin off [Completed]

[TrashRabbit]

Tom stopped and titled his head as if listening to something far away and began to look more and more concerned: "Oh," He said.

And then he winked out of existence at the same moment the tower began to shake.

What do you do?

 

[CelticSol]

As her physical support vanishes, Jackie falls on the ground. She looks around, Tom nowhere to be found, and her heart starts to pound.

"Tom? Tom?" The tower shakes, a tremor from the ground up beginning to violently quake, and she shouts louder, as if he can hear above the sound of the tower trying to come apart, "Thomas!"

The jokes are gone now, and her mortification at her imagined rejection by Vidya are forgotten as she kneels in front of the princess, "Do you still think you can fight? I need to know if I've got to get you out, or if you're gonna come with us upstairs to fuck up this clown."

 

[TrashRabbit]

"What are you talking about- get out?" Vidya says giving her an insulted look. She is not taking the situation anymore serious than she was a moment ago, however her temper has returned full force at the mention of killing Xanth, "I just called dibs on him. I did, Fin, right? You were there. Some one give me something sharp quick, we're doing this. Think's he can just disapear 1 wizard and knock the tower down. Idiot. Now: Give me something sharp," She says holding out her hand expectantly to Jackie.

 

[CelticSol]

"I just gouged out your fucking eye, princess - so, y'know what, yeah, I'm going to ask you if you feel well enough to fight! Damn. Fuckin' - here," She hands Vidya the dagger that she had just used to stab Vidya in the face, "There. Let's fucking do this. Nicola, you got anything on stopping him from bringing the tower down on our heads?"

 

[TrashRabbit]

"Your so kind," Vidya says and rolls her eye. It was words like that and "stop playing with knives" and "sit still" and "you have a pour constitution please stay out of the rain" that had driven her to become the queen of cats. Granted she did have a poor constinution and rather should have staid out of the rain, but she was in no reality likely to stop being feral just because a pretty girl stabbed her eye out. She tests the blade on part of bangs and is pleased when she's able to ruin her bangs and send them sprinkling to the ground. Satisfied, she springs up, leath as a faerie who calls herself the queen of cats, glances at the rest of them and says "I was serious about dibs," and darts up the stairs.

 

[theunearthlyfool]

Nicola had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching with amusement as her comrades flirted and picked on each other.

And then everything went to shit. Again.

Something buzzed the edge of her awareness, raising the hair on her arms in a "something's very wrong" kind of way. She glanced over at Tom for confirmation, as had become her habit, and the concern on his face made her suddenly feel very cold- and then he was gone.

"Um, hello??" she exclaimed in tandem with Jackie's shouting. Nicola was glad her voice sounded more offended than scared (which is what she really felt) as she tried to jump to her feet and instead stumbled, bruising a finger on the marble floor. "What the actual fu-?"

The entire time they'd been within the time dilation barrier, Nicola had been experiencing an ongoing case of the heebie-jeebies. Sometimes it was worse than others, and they'd been here so long she'd mostly managed to absorb it into the background noise of her mind. This was different from what she'd written off as overexposure to reality-bending fae magic. It was still faerie nonsense, that was for sure; but-

"Oh, that's... hey! Not fair!" Nicola glared up at the ceiling, shaking out her sore hand. "Fuck off, cheater! He shouldn't be able to do that!" she added to the rest of the room, as if that explained anything to them.

She picked her way over to Jackie, offering a hand to steady her as they watched Vidya disappear up the stairs. "Ooookay, then. Well," she answered Jackie, her thoughts racing, "I can certainly try."

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

There were surely more alarming things than seeing your friend and wizard wink out of existance while the tower rumbled around them, but Finn failed to think of even one.

“Highness,” he said, and knew it was useless while Vidya guilted a knife out of Jackie. He looked from Nicola (furious) to Jackie (eerily quiet) and back to Vidya. His princess took the offered knife and immediately sprinted deeper into the tower. Finn had three thoughts in rapid succession:

1) He could do fuck all for Tom.

2) Jackie and Nicola were more than capable of handling themselves.

3) He couldn’t live with himself if he let Vidya get killed again.

So, with hardly any hesitation at all, he followed her.

 

[theunearthlyfool]

Finn dashed after his princess, as she hoped he would. Nicola was kind of relying on the two of them to get rid of Xanthielex before she had to confront the spooky bastard herself. It was bad enough trying to deal with his magic: every time she thought she'd figured something out, another wrench was thrown in the works.

She closed her eyes, concentrating. Whatever banished Tom had the vague shape and feel of what you'd use to ward a place against faeries, except… wrong. In a hilarious turn of events, it was keeping away their human wizard instead, and this was not something that she knew fae magic could even do. That was part of why she was so mad: even with the spell forge down, the Goblin King was still just screwing with them. Must be that godsforsaken book he's got. I am going to pry it from his cold, dead hands.

Holding one hand in the air, she kept her eyes closed as she poked and prodded the shape of the banishment. Hell's bells, even having this much figured out didn't tell her squat about how he'd done it. Without knowing that she couldn't really undo or counter it, or at least not as safely as she would've liked. But it's Tom, so he'll be fine... Nicola frowned. ...Probably.

With another particularly violent quake of the tower, a wave of indignation washed over her. "Actually, no. Fuck this," she said aloud. "I am a sorcerer. I'm a sorcerer of the Court of Royes, and two can play at that game. Sorry, Jackie." Nicola threw her hands out, taking the longest step she could to put her right in the center of the room. Summoning all her fear, annoyance, discomfort, and every other emotion at hand, she channelled it out through her hands: one pointing at the place Tom had been standing before he vanished, and the other up at the ceiling, straining under a great weight like Atlas carrying the Earth.

There was a pop as the magic affecting Tom burst at the same time as Nicola, apparently actually holding the tower up through sheer force of will now, tentatively ceased its shaking. "Yes!" she exclaimed, her eyes snapping open triumphantly to reveal…

Jackie looking at her like she was nuts. "....Tom?" Shifting the weight of the tower to both hands, Nicola looked around the room. "Wait, he isn't- ?"

The last fragments of the banishing effect on Tom splashed at her feet. She stiffened as she realized three things: one, that Xanthielex had actually removed Tom from this reality; two, having disrupted that means she had literally no idea where he was now; and three, she could feel the worst migraine she'd ever had drumming to life in her temples.

"Well… he's probably all in one piece. But if I'm gonna do this-" the floor trembled ever so slightly as Nicola shrugged a shoulder, indicating her supporting the tower, "I can only do this. I'm so sorry, you're gonna have to help them fight Xanthielex without me." She winced. "Jackie, for the love of God, please wipe the floor with that bastard."

 

[CelticSol]

She'd never proclaim to understand magic, despite the voice that whispers it's secrets in her ear. But the physical weight of the tower she sees on Nicola's shoulders tells her that she won't be aiding them in the battle before Nicola even says so. Jackie pulls out her remaining dagger, grinning crookedly, "I'll beat the shit out of him, but only for you. Don't tell anyone, but you're my favourite."

Jackie ducks her head down, pressing a chaste kiss to each of Nicola's cheeks, then takes Nicola's chin in her hand, "You've fucking got this, kid. Good luck."

With that, Jackie spins on her heels, sprinting up the stairs to follow Vidya and Finn into battle.

 

[TrashRabbit]

The stair case opens up onto a large round room covered floor and ceiling in a dark reflective metal, the outer walls are ringed with windows that reveal the dusky sunset vista of the kingdom of peaches. It would be a beautiful sight if you were not here to fight a faerie wizard. At the rooms center is a crystal housed in something like a light house keepers lantern and besides it, with the spell forge below disabled the crystal and its time dilation field are now inert.

Standing on the far side looking out of the rolling hills is a tall, narrow hooded figure dress in a long gauzy robe embroidered with stars that shift and change. his long hair is dark red and elaborate braided nearly to the floor. The crown atop his head glistens and shimmers with color, a sort of oxidized steel that seems to burn the air around it like a corona. He looks every bit a lonesome terrible faerie king should from the back.

"YOU SUNNUVABITCH!" Vidya shrieks at him.

He turns and the look on his face is a comical muppet frown, "...I thought you at least would understand."

"You put me in the ARMOR OF FORTITUDE AND MADE ME FIGHT FIN," She gestures at Fin.

"The man-rats were gone!"

"OH SHUT UP!" She says to him, "I WANT A DIVORCE!"

And that makes his face go dark and murderous. Like he's about to vomit up a pile of salamanders or summon a rain of slag. "You ungratefull, peevish, soft minded, fickle, foul mouthed, ill begoten, unseemly, devil gotten, fucking piss poor, cadevar shaped, garbage ass, ugly, Hobby horse looking TOAD!"

"OH!!" Vidya gasped clutching her non metaphorical pearls.

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

Vidya might have called dibs on killing the king, but if she was going to waste time being offended by theatrical insults, Finn decided to get a shot in first. He swept in close and socked Xanthielex right in the face with his entire shield. It was enough to rattle knights in full plate, and Xanthielex went down like a sack of potatoes.

"I'm going to have to ask you not to speak to her Majesty like that," Finn said.

 

[TrashRabbit]

There's no warning before the explosive blast hits Fin's shield. Its not as powerful an attack as he migh have expected from a faerie wizard- but...oh no....something is wrong. Something is very wrong? Fins boots are suddenly a very painful problem. Xanths magic was like a finely constructed rue Goldberg machine and having removed the Elysium apple from his spell forge had set his abilities into a chaotic maelstrom of unpredictablness.

Xanth pulls himself up to his feet slowly, "YOU ruined my SPELL FORGE?!"

 

[CelticSol]

Jackie has never been one to miss an opportunity to stab a bitch; even as he rises, Jackie runs forward, driving her dagger deep through his abdomen, grinning as she rips out the blade, “I don’t think the spell forge is your highest priority right now, dude.”

 

[TrashRabbit]

Xanth hisses and whirls away from her, faster and darker as smoke as he glides away. He shoots a sizzling blast of thunder at her and only nearly misses. Vidya ducks past Finn's elbow and skips after the wizard despite his gaseous maneuvers and throws her knife expertly after him. He howls and vanishes, reappearing behind all three of them.

"YOU THINK YOU CAN DEFEAT ME SO EASILY!?"

its then that a presense makes itself known to Nicola, and strikes her, attempting to dislodging her from her physical and magical position preventing him from taking the whole castle down with him.

 

[theunearthlyfool]

At Jackie's touch Nicola's cheeks flushed so hot and pink that for a moment she feared she'd faint and bring the tower crashing down on them all. After a breath it cleared: she was alone in the room with the shattered armor and disassembled spell forge.

She couldn't stop the embarrassed grin that spread across her face as the tsunami of twitterpation crashing through her funneled directly into her spell. The weight of the tower seemed to almost lift off her shoulders completely. She was buoyant. She could and would do this all day, if she had to.

So when something appeared in her peripheral vision and tried to strike her down, she simply sidestepped it, keeping her hands steady. "Not now, asshole, I'm busy." She took a deep breath and blew a cutting wind in the thing's direction. It blasted the presence into fragments of energy and slammed those against the wall, where they dissolved sadly into thin air.

"But two can play at that game, creep!" Nicola's normally brown eyes glowed purple as her shadow split away and dashed up the stairs. It made a beeline for Xanthielex, walloping him right in the nose. Her voice echoed eerily in the upper chamber: I'd say that was for Tom, but I'll save that for when I can get my hands on you properly.

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

Whatever Xanthielex had done to his feet, Finn couldn't look at them now. But they sure did fuck with his footwork. He took the distraction with Jackie and Nicola as time to figure out how to sort himself out at least someone, and then darted in after Nicola's shadow, his sword flashing in after Jackie's knife.

 

[CelticSol]

A blast of thunder cracks the air and leaves her ears ringing, lightning singing her clothes as it just barely skips across her side. She winces, taking stock quickly - the injury is shallow and the electrical burn is not too painful, but considering that this could've been dead on and stopped her heart, Jackie can't help the bark of victorious laughter that bursts from her. Jackie lifts her blade aloft again with a grin, "Your aim is shit!" She slides back into the fray, going for another stab through Xanthielex's torso.

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

Finn moved as Jackie did, his sword and her knife flashing in perfect tandem.

The sooner they killed this guy, the sooner he could look at his fucking feet.

 

[theunearthlyfool]

Her heart swelled with pride at the synchronization of Jackie and Finn's blades. For once she didn't overthink it: feeling the weightlessness of the shadow and how it wasn't bound by gravity, Nicola drove it forward. It leapt above the dagger and sword, piercing directly into the mad faerie's heart.

 

[TrashRabbit]

Three blades penetrated the fairy king at once. And maybe it was the amount of cold iron in his physical form or the sudden synchronization of the power of friendship. But he shrieked and thrashed- dark tar bubbled up out of his mouth and eyes and kept bubbling up like a geyser. The krud oil filling the room stank and burned and as his physical form popped with a surge of wild magic then deflated like a wretched balloon and the petroleum sloshed around there knees and it began to spill out of the tower's high window- it became apparent that there was something in the viscous liquid.

The tower redoubled it's attempt to crumble apart, as Xanth's magic holding it together seeped out of the working entirely.

The thing lurking in the petrolum filling up the room doesn't wait long to strike, it surges up out of the dark sludge with a roar- a Salamandar of monstrous size- large enough to eat Finn whole- with dark slick skin and red running lines and yellowsplots. Its eyes are filled with stars and its mad as hell! It lunges, maw open bearing down on Finn attempting to do what it is large enough to do.

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

This was rapidly becoming the worst day ever.

Finn moved in to try and make himself too difficult and prickly to be a meal, but whatever was going on with his feet had finally become bad enough to override decades of training and practice, and instead of sticking his sword though the salamander's oozing skull, Finn went down like a sack of potatoes in a suit of armor--heavily, and with a great deal of clanking. He still had his sword, but he was at the wrong angle to use it, so he raised his shield instead.

The salamander turned out to be large enough to eat that too.

 

[TrashRabbit]

The slamander pulled him beneath the crude oil and shook him like a dog with a toy, taking his arm and sending him flying.

 

[theunearthlyfool]

With no warning, Nicola's shadow was ripped from the room above and slammed back into her own body.

It took a moment for her to become aware again, although she couldn't say how aware she really was, for something was horrifically wrong. It was like going from bright sunshine into a pitch-black room, like all her senses had been muted. Nicola took in the room around her, smelling acrid burning tar as the tower rumbled and quaked, determined to shake itself to pieces.

Her hands hung limply at her sides. In a panic, she held them up again, willing the tower to cease its shaking.

But nothing happened.

She tried again, harder, drawing on every bad feeling coursing through her right now (and there were plenty of them to pull from). Still, no response.

No.

Unaware she was starting to hyperventilate, Nicola cast a dozen little enchantments: making the broken pieces of armor dance around the room, shattering every mirror on this level, even summoning one of her endless supply of handkerchiefs.

No, please, no-

But every time, nothing. It was as still and quiet as being in a collapsing building could be.

There was a great noise above, like a pile of metal crashing to the floor. It broke Nicola out of her personal crisis, remembering Finn, Jackie, even Vidya. Oh, gods. Oh gods, not Finn-

She sprinted across the room, tripping over herself to get to the stairs, not noticing her hat tumbling to the floor. It rolled quite neatly to where she had been standing a moment ago, before her magic had left her.

Nicola had been alone for most of her life. Her inattentive parents had shipped her off to boarding school as early as possible; she had no siblings besides a sister who'd died when they were infants. She'd never really had friends, at least not human ones; just creatures as odd and lonely as she was. There was exactly one thing she had always been able to rely on, and that was her magic. Through all her years, Nicola's magic was always there for her. It was the only thing she trusted, the only thing she believed in… before she had been assigned to the Royesland Irregulars, that is, and against her better judgement found herself caring for these three fools.

Tom was gone. Her magic was gone. Xanthielex would not get the others too. Even if stopping him was the last thing Nicola ever did.

 

[CelticSol]

This had to be the grossest fucking tantrum she had ever seen.

"Fucking yikes," Jackie hisses, stumbling back a step as an onslaught of oil-like liquid bubbles rushes past her shins. The tower is rocked violently by tremors that send Jackie to her knee, further submerging her body into Xanth's thick and disgusting Mystery Magic Jungle Juice. Dust shakes loose from the ceiling, raining down over there head as the brick and mortar holding to tower together grows weak, groaning in an effort to stay together. A thought strikes Jackie as dust begins to mix thickly with the oil into an even thicker sludge, and it turns her blood to ice in her veins - if the Tower was on the verge of complete collapse, what had happened to Nicola?

"Can someone get a fucking update on Ni-"

Nicola's mystery condition is not the greatest of Jackie's problem, she realizes, as something rises like a viper from the muck and drags Finn underneath the surface. It bites down on Finn, skin taut and stretched by the ferocity of it's bite as it rips it's head to and fro like a furious bull shark. Jackie trudges through the muck, raising her legs high to avoid the viscosity of Xanth's oil, when something huge flies out of the oil in Jackie's direction.

She throws her arms up over her face to protect her face, but no impact is made, despite her certainty it would make contact. Her heart does a backflip with a mix of stomach churning vertigo for a split second in the moment it should have hit her, which was weird, and when Jackie looks around, she sees Finn's decapitated arm, still twisted up in the enarmes of his shield, sink below the surface of the oil.

"FINN!" Jackie shouts, withdrawing her dagger and dragging herself with all her strength through the oil. The salamander hisses at her and strikes, aiming for a sizeable bite across her stomach. Jackie throws her weight back - a move that should've put her flat on her ass in a normal combat situation, but in this case, gives her enough momentum to get clear of it's teeth. Jackie lurches forward, winding her arm around it's head in a fierce hold that clamps it's jaws closed. Raising her dagger high, Jackie drives it through the back of the Salamander's throat, crying out in sheer fucking frustration, "Holy fuck, I fucking hate magic!"

 

[wickedlittlecritta]

Finn had been thrown before, but there was a significant difference between being thrown from a horse and being thrown from a salamander. Namely, a horse did not throw you from a limb and then keep it at the shoulder joint while you went to collide with a stone wall.

If his body had been kinder, it might have chosen intimacy with a wall as a good point to black out, but instead, Finn was fully aware as he slid to the goopy oil floor face first. Oil was not a taste he had ever wanted to be come acquainted with. He coughed and spluttered and spat it out.

This sucked. Everything sucked.

Making sure to keep a hold of his sword (if he dropped it, would he ever find it in the rapidly rising petroleum sea?), he pushed himself up with his elbow and then tried to get his feet under him, but whatever nonsense was going on in his boots meant that he merely toppled over to his left, with no shield arm to catch himself. He clattered and wiggled around until he managed to sit up, and then he paused for a moment with his back to the wall. He dropped his sword in his lap and then inspected the ruins of his left shoulder. His pauldron on that side was gone, and the chain shirt under it torn raggedly and awfully, but the wound itself didn't bleed. He might have been thankful for it if it wasn't so fucking creepy.

He took a deep breath that tasted like an oil slick, grabbed his sword, and struggled to his feet.

Fuck this.