the sky is falling.

[baedalites]

Who: Everyone.
What: Part two begins.
When: Evening, a few hours before the end of the 24-hour siege period.
Notes: Feel free to thread in comments here or make your own posts! NPC your own monsters, team up in locations anywhere you like, and feel free to plot things at the plotting post, which has the relevant details. Remember that this is city-wide, so you are free to do what you like with locations.

Just after dark, the air of Baedal seems to change. While it was tense before, with the stand-off in Mafaton, a new kind of electrical energy begins to spread through the city, leaking from the sky itself. The horizon is clear tonight, even starry where the city lights don't obscure the view, but soon enough it begins to blur with color, and at an alarmingly rapid pace. Bright streaks of pink and green begin to spiral across the sky, in an approximation of the auroras, though it is much nearer and brighter than any common demonstration of an aurora should be. The geomagnetic storm swirls and dances, initially beautiful, but its intensity is ominous.

It's also growing. Most geomagnetic storms stay to one corner, but this spreads across the entire sky, green-purple-pink-red illuminated and inching further into the dark, leaving the city of Baedal tinted with a dim, eerie glow. This continues for about a half an hour, until that tension reaches its breaking point.

The magical boundaries holding Mafaton crack and then completely shatter. It is audible, and the backlash sends flying many of the Candlelighters trying frantically to preserve the borders of their siege. A few of them are killed by the backlash of their spell's combustion, but more are simply shaken; having one's magic work so thoroughly broken is not a pleasant experience. The sound covers another tearing, this time a metaphysical one that rips the heavens open in places the common eye can't see. Those whose vision allows them to observe different layers of reality will notice, but others will only see the incoming flood of creatures from other universes.

One siege has ended, but another has just begun, and this time, it's not just Mafaton at risk.

Comments

[fuckrobertfrost]

Having long since dropped the habit of screaming FUCK! whenever something terrible happens to someone, John only gapes for a second before he's moving again. There are a lot of mutants more physically powerful than him, and even if he's figured Laura has to be one of them, seeing someone flung into a building is simply not something he's used to. It's only thirty seconds of thinking he's on his own, but that is a long thirty seconds for him.

To his credit, he continues the fight. The entire Sentinel's head is wreathed in flame, a giant walking beacon. That doesn't stop it from knocking into buildings or firing indiscriminately, but John is on the move, and is able to defend himself from monsters on the ground simultaneously.

[23rd]

Fire won't melt her claws no matter how hot it gets, but it will sear her flesh and take forever to heal. She skips the head and drops onto its shoulder, her foot claws sinking into it to keep her holding on as she uses both hands to start sawing at the arm socket, severing it at the base; the arm drops and hits the ground, leaving a dent. That's one, but it's still got the other.

And it's caught on to her; after a moment it starts emitting a high-pitched whining, nearly too high for human ears to hear, but she hears it plain as day. Her hands clap over her ears as it keeps screeching (horribly distorted by virtue of the fact that its face is mostly melted off), the sound reverberating in her head. It's not high or loud enough to burst her eardrums and render her deaf, that would defeat the point, but just enough to disorient her.

She lets go and drops the ground, breaking both ankles on impact, but they heal almost immediately and she's running, putting distance between them until the noise stops. She's thinking they could really use a third backup. She finds him -- oh, good, he's not dead -- but spins immediately to look at the Sentinel. It's blinded and flailing, one-armed, its head burning and interfering with its ability to sense the world around it. They have a few minutes -- maybe a few seconds -- before it figures out which direction they're in. She needs to cut that damn head off, but getting closer is going to be a problem now that it's figured out a good strategy to disable her.

By the way, hi, John, she's still not dead, somehow.

[fuckrobertfrost]

Though Laura hasn't been rendered completely unrecognizable by blood, there's still a second when she's heading toward him that his instincts jump and yammer to blast fire at her too. It's the sort of twitchiness that's saved him a few times already, but he manages not to set his best chance of staying alive on fire.

He's still trying to melt the head, but he's never actually encountered anything that has resisted this long, and he's starting to get that weird sort of hollow, burnt feeling inside already. It doesn't hurt him or affect his abilities, and as far as he knows it's not even an indicator he should stop or there'll be consequences. It's just weird.

If John were thinking better, or less afraid of Laura, he might ask her why she stopped attacking it, as he can barely hear the high pitch himself. But he's not and he is, so he just looks at her for direction.