Kobold King

Yes! I mean, uh... is that a good thing?

Glamour, Backtrack, and Deathwish posts up. With an extra update with Arsenal, no less. I think I got a little carried away writing Deathwish there at the end, but I kind of like the way the scene turned out. It's both karmic and it lets me showcase another element of his slontze-y character.

You found me You found me You found me Glamour bobbed his head with the music--but paused when the next few lines starting echoing themselves. It was like Taylor singing the lyrics twice and recording herself over them. But he'd listened to this track before and there wasn't any kind of remixing like that going on. So why...? He was suddenly aware that the second voice wasn't playing from the iPod at all. He cast a suddenly frightened glance over his shoulder... and dropped his iPod. Cute face. Blonde hair flowing down to the shoulders. A stylish outfit that almost but not quite showed her belly button. Standing beside him--right where that other woman had been--was the artist behind some of his favorite pop songs. "Taylor... Swift," he stammered, staring in blank shock. "You... how..." He barely even noticed that he'd smashed his iPod, instead pulling one of his dozen extras from his pants pocket and starting a soft instrumental version of 'Blank Space.' Then, he started laughing. "O-Ok," he chortled nervously. "I get it. I've actually gone insane, right? I've just been hallucinating all day. That... that would actually explain a lot. So are you my repressed anxiety or something? My conscience, maybe?" Backtrack winced as MV closed her eyes, letting go of her hand and taking a step back. Here it comes. I messed up, she's gonna get mad, I'm gonna take a sudden trip through the nearest wall... Instead, his sort-of-girlfriend-who-could-kill-him-in-a-heartbeat only shuddered once again, opening her eyes looking once again on the brink of tears. "Something bad's happened to her," she stammered, looking panicked. "She's... I can just tell that something's happened." Um... ooookay, Backtrack thought, blinking in confusion. Are they psychic or something? Would it be rude to ask? Before he could respond, she had his hand again, gripping tightly as she pulled him down the street in the direction they'd been going in. "You seemed like you were sure before," she said determinedly. "Let's just keep going this way until we can find something else." "Sounds good to me," Backtrack managed to stammer. His powers coming back to him, he managed to isolate Impact in the past again. As before, she appeared as the spectral shadow of a girl, hurtling through the dark sky like a Barbie doll thrown by an enraged toddler. Not for the first time, he suspected that her flight ended with a sudden splat against the pavement, though he didn't have the nerve to tell her sister that. And then she stopped. Her past-shadow stopped in mid-air, pausing at the height of her flight for a moment as if she were taking her bearings. Then she sunk out of sight, dipping under the cityscape somewhere downtown. Backtrack managed to resist MV's efforts to pull him down the street, instead managing to stop and face the direction she'd landed in. "She landed," he informed her, smiling a bit. "She had a rough flight, but she managed to land. She's only a dozen or two blocks away. She's probably looking for you right now!" Deathwish smacked the side of his head a couple of times as his eardrums filled, stopping the ringing and filling his ears with the sound of an agonized scream. It wasn't as good as hearing her explode into a million squishy pieces, but it still brought a genuine smile back to his face. He quickly pulled himself out of the pile of guns he'd been blasted into and and flew a few feet into the air. Impact knelt on the fort floor, voice wrenched in a rasping, drawn-out scream as streams of blood boiled down her face. She clutched at her ears as if for dear life, momentarily too adrift in her own sea of pain to pay attention to her surroundings. Deathwish pulled a pistol from his belt, fixing its sights right between the chick's clenched eyes. "You're cute when you're in undescribable agony, but I think it's time to cut this date short," he drawled quietly. "Hope you've got your affairs in order..." Before he could pull the trigger, the girl blindly rocketed up through the skylight, sending him flying into a wall with the wall of air that was suddenly surrounding her once more. Oh no you don't, he thought furiously, throwing his gun across the room and taking off again. No one calls the sirens on me and just flies away. He soared into the dark night sky, singling out her steadily shrinking body. She was headed towards Portland, and fast, but if he stayed on her tail he could be right on top of her when she landed. He began pushing through the air after her. I'm gonna make those ears feel like papercuts, he fumed savagely. I'm gonna make you beg me to kill you. I'm gonna take a knife to you in ways you couldn't even imagine, little girl... Vaguely, his ears picked up the sound of an ambulance siren from far down below him. I'm gonna leave pieces of you scattered from here to Corvallis! I'm gonna... ...wait. Ambulance siren? It took a police siren to cancel the full strength of his powers, but any siren could knock him from the sky and put a layer of torment into his normally painless healing. His vision instantly went blurry, Impact disappearing completely into the gloom. He lost control of his body, plowing forwards from the force of his momentum but with no volition of his own. A scream echoed from his lips as found himself hurtling inexorably to the hard streets below. "STORM YOU, YOU CONNIVING LITTLE--" Smack. =============================================================== Undescribable agony. Deathwish rolled over slowly, wanting to scream but not having a throat to do so. Tears rushing to his eyes, he managed to reach a hand to his neck and pushed a broken bone fragment back into his body. At a snail's pace, his throat stitched itself back together, forming an untorn set of vocal chords as the rest of his body healed. He took a deep breath into his one unpunctured lung. "STOOOORMS," he wailed miserably. "Storms storms storms storms stoorms. This--storms--why--storms--you miserable slontzes--" His swearing was interrupted by a steel-tipped boot into his rib. The force of the kick made him roll over twice, every broken bone piercing in protest as he howled in pain once again. Blinking through the wall of tears that clouded his vision, he managed to get his eyes open to gaze upon his attacker. Standing over him with gun in hand was Arsenal, his face contorted into pure, incandescent rage. Arsenal had two types of rages. The first was the tantrum of a grumpy old man, the butt of constant jokes from the likes of Edgerunner or the more venturous Guards. What was etched across his face was now was something else entirely. Standing here in the dark, his face lit only by the flashing red light of an ambulance, he looked exactly like what he was. An Epic who had been defied, weapon drawn and ready to dish out retribution. "I received a report," the officer growled icily, "that you were engaged in the slaughter of Guards in my armory. Explain yourself, now, or I will fill this street with squad cars and terminate you here and now." Deathwish groaned, trying to pull himself to his feet. Arsenal's boot connected with his side again, knocking him back to the ground. His body was mostly together by this point, but still hurting like hellfire. "I was framed," he managed to rasp out, not meeting the other man's eyes. "That witch with Frequency's gang. She killed a Guard and took his radio. Put out a false alarm. Ask the survivors and they'll tell you everything." He winced as a gunshot exploded through the air--but rather than spraying his skull all over the pavement, it apparently blew out the ambulance's sirens, as the sound died at once and the lights died with a flicker. The pain died away across his body, his last cuts and bruises fading away without a twinge. He let out a deep sigh of relief, pleased to note that he had the use of both lungs again. No longer racked with agony, he pulled himself to his feet and glared at the old man in front of him. "You couldn't just use my radio?" he snapped incredulously. "You had to throw me out of the storming sky in the middle of a chase? What the sparks is wrong with--hey!" As he was ranting, a pair of handcuffs materialized out of thin air, clipping around his right wrist and a streetlight in a second. "I'll have a squad retrieve you and bring you back to HQ," Arsenal informed him, ignoring the look of incredulous outrage on his face. "You will wait here until their arrival, and will comply with their every demand en route to your destination. If you fail to do so, I will fill this city with enough sirens to make this city shine as bright as Calamity, and teams will be deployed to terminate you within minutes. Do you understand?" Deathwish stared unbelieving for a moment, before rattling his cuffed hand against his post furiously. "You think you can just do this?" he demanded in a shout. "I'm an Epic, you slontze! I could have a whole city bowing to me before--hey! Don't walk away when I'm talking to you! You can't just leave me cuffed to a storming streetlight!" "Arsenal to Game," the other Epic droned over him through his radio. "I will arrive at your clinic momentarily. Inform the new arrivals to be at their best behavior." With that, Arsenal clambered into his ambulance and started its engine. "I'd advise you not to let any of those words reach the commander," he said, casting a glare at Deathwish. "You may believe that you are worthy of some kind of respect, but in this city you're nothing but a common criminal." "What the storms did you just say to me? I'm--" "A common crook," Arsenal finished. His eyes still flashed dangerously, but he seemed satisfied with the description. Swinging the door of his noiseless ambulance shut, he began driving down the darkened streets in the direction of the clinic. Deathwish stood incredulous for a minute more, feeling like the delinquent teenager that used to sell bags of pot in Lincoln City. The useless little slontze who couldn't even pull off a booze sale without sirens blaring and hauling him back to a youth detention center. The common crook. "I'm not just a crook," he growled to himself. "Not any more." He raised his voice, and repeated himself louder across the empty street. "Do you hear me! I am an Epic! I'm a sparking, storming god! I AM NOT JUST A CROOK!"

I agree with Edgedancer. I think I'd get bored quickly with nonstop Stormlight installments, awesome as they may be. I just can't get Calamity fast enough, and I'm dying for my next Wax and Wayne fix.

Oh my gosh TwiLyght you can't just an Epic if he has a nose.

I like it! ...and now I wonder what an Epic named Morsmordre would be like.

You know someone's a slontze when the lower part of their Scumbag Steve meme has text that small.

String theory, as we know, is just a bunch of subatomic Brian Greenes knitting furiously at the quantum level. My Bad Luck Brian memes for Deathwish and Backtrack were blocked at first.

Depends. How prone are you to nightmares?

Wouldn't work. Nobody asks about the other countries on Nalthis or the political climate of modern Scadrial--the Cosmere-focused fans mostly ask questions about obscure traits of Investiture. We'd get a lot of questions about whether or not the Cognitive intent of Epic powers matters, or whether Steelheart's steel can be Soulcasted, or what would happen if you sliced one of Regalia's projections with a Shardblade. ...which would be kind of interesting, actually, but not at all what we need.

I think you just killed my last couple of optimismspren. On the other hand, I'm mainly asking for the Reckoners RPG, and once we the third book comes out we can revel in all the wildly implausible fanon we want without fear of being directly contradicted.

Yeah. I'm usually an optimistic dude, but I'm afraid I'll just have to wait until Calamity for the answers to my Reckonerverse questions.

There's a correlation between my receiving their backstories and them being favorite characters of mine--that correlation mainly being that I found them even more awesome after hearing it. Fun fact: Slaughterhouse has an entire hallway filled with the still-living faces of vanillas who've defied him, always screaming in perpetual anguish. It's probably for the best that "What Happened in Calamityville" didn't go anywhere.

I look forward to it. (Seriously. The momentum twins are a couple of my favorite characters in any thread. ) Yeah, Impact's best bet would be to contact an Epic like Slaughterhouse or the Panda. Not than either of them would be particularly helpful.

Should we start teaching her sign language? Koschei and Panacea are both gifters. A healer whose primary power is healing other people could definitely heal others though, like how Backtrack's not a gifter but can still Show others what he sees.

I'd say that such things didn't happen here, but there was that time Voidgaze got killed in the bank... Voidus, now that Impact's in the general vicinity of Portland, will her posts be going in the "What Happened in Portland" thread, or will her posts stay in The Dalles? Will she be coming back to The Dalles, or is that a secret?

I'll be honest, I'm not too keen on games with complex rules most of the time. That's one of the reasons I've avoided the Sanderson Elimination games. (The other reasons being that I hate being backstabbed, I'm not keen on the amount of PM time they take up, and I can't guarantee the consistent posting that they require. ) Um... how handsome Lightwards looks in the dim lighting?

Will she be inclined to share the Sam tidbits with Lightwards as well? Oh, you mean the boring kind of RPG. It does sound interesting.

OK, that shouldn't be too hard to write. It'd be best for you to actually bring them to the Museum anyway, since Lucentia's in charge of the diamonds. Nope. Not at all. Why?

Refresh me on what exactly I need to show in my post, and I'll make that my priority for today.

I only know one story from that time, so... The Witch of Blackbird Pond?

The Salem witch trials?

You know you're a Sanderfan when someone mentions a 17th Shard swim calendar, and you can't stop yourself from assigning a Sanderson character to every month. I am so sorry. Cosmere 2015 A Year of Physical, Cognitive, and Spiritual Beauty! Vin in her corset as Ms. January! Picture taken just moments before she beat our stealth photographer into a pulp! These Newcagoan girls prove just how stylist steel swimsuits can be! Setting aside the obvious discomforts and glaring design flaws, of course. Eshonai's carapace swimwear as Ms. March is beautiful as it is mildly unsettling! You might think Regalia's past the age to be modeling in a swimsuit calendar. Ms. April proves you wrong! Satisfaction and sanity not guaranteed. Ever wonder what a lady Inquisitor in a bikini looks like? If we've spiked your curiosity, you'll love Ms. May! Shai as Ms. June! No, she isn't a model. But her nifty diagram will tell you how to stamp any article of clothing into swimwear! It's great at parties! Navani Kholin might raise a few eyebrows with her line of transparent swim-gloves... check out Ms. July for more info, wink wink. You know the Lord Ruler is immortal, invincible, and inexorable... but did you also know that he looks fabulous in a leotard? We can't see her, but our friend Stephen Leeds assures us that Ivy's modeling quite the one-piece as Ms. September! If you could see Ms. October's attire, you'd be amazed. Unfortunately you can't see her. As a White Sand character, the page with Khriss' modeling is available only on special request from Team Sanderson. Did you know there are female chasmfiends? Do you know how hard it is to design a swimsuit for a giant flesh-eating crustacean, let alone getting the storming thing to wear it? Maybe if you did, you'd appreciate Ms. November a little more. Just sayin'. And last but not least, Ms. December--surprise, it's Stick! This piece of waterlogged wood may not be fire, but that doesn't mean it can't be hot! ... Again, I am so, so sorry. Not very sorry though.

The gag could work, but he'd eventually shake it loose after flying into enough buildings. And I doubt the clerks at the DMV deserve such a terrible misfortune as having Nighthound and Deathwish entering their building at the same time.

Answer: none of the ladies, after they loudly start telling him to stop groping them.