==========
The Labyrinth
==========
[X] Be Both.
The Witch's lair ends up being an alleyway. There's a man sat just outside, his back pressed against the wall, wearing several layers of dirty, crusty clothes. He's trembling violently, a raggedy beard covering the lower part of his face. He catches sight of us (or, rather, the two magical girls in costume) and gapes.
Rachel looks
incredibly uncomfortable; either at the attention, or at having to deal with a person while in costume.
"Um..."
In the end, she just gestures towards the alleyway and skirts past the man. Sarah and I follow suit, with the other girl grinning at the homeless man, a fingertip pressed to her lips.
Hush. He nods, and crosses himself as we pass.
<<... What was that?>> I ask.
<<Witches target the homeless just as much as they do anyone else,>> Sarah butts, in, <<More, even. Some... well, they might not know
exactly what's going on, but they know
something's going on. Most just think they're crazy.>>
<<... How do
you know that?>> Rachel asks.
<<I have
many secrets~!>> Sarah gives as a non-answer. I didn't have to look at her to
know she was sporting that stupid smile of hers. Rachel just groans, and raises her hand, her gem coming into existence there, glowing
brightly.
Magic flashes, and then Rachel's holding a machine gun almost as long as she's tall in one hand, and Sarah's wielding that same tower shield I'd seen before in one hand. The other is holding a sword, three or so feet long. And it's
hollow in the middle, for some reason. Following suit, I dig into my backpack and pull out the crowbar; it
shouldn't have been able to fit inside there, but... well,
magic.
A pulse. Another. Rachel's magic tears a hole in thin air. Without a pause, as if she'd done this thousands of times before, she steps through. I hurry behind her, Sarah bringing up the rear.
There is darkness. So much I can't even see what's in front of me. And then...
A thump. Thump.
Thump! A deep, slow, steady beat. Lights flicker on and off in time with it, letting me catch glimpses of the world around me. Rachel. Sarah. Me. Around us; silhouettes, never in the same place twice. The beat strengthens, more lights seem to awaken, pulsing to the beat as it grow.
"Oh..." Sarah whispers behind me, her voice filled with glee, "Oh
yes!"
"Fucking hell...," Rachel mutters in front.
The beat becomes a relentless pounding that shakes my chest, the lights a blaring strobe that hurts to look at. Louder and brighter and more and more and
more-
It stops. A second of silence and dark.
And then the world
explodes in light and noise. The floor lights up. Scalding, multicoloured lights flare into existence above, revealing the endless, rolling, eye-tearing dancefloor we're on. And we're far from alone; pitch-black figures surround us in a crowd that has no beginning nor end. Squares of light float in midair, holding more figures, these dressed in glowing outfits that would've been revealing on something human.
Others are
speared by glowing, sizzling poles, or strung from neon chains, that vanish into the smoky nightmare above, bright red blood flowing freely from their wounds to drizzle down on the dancing crowd below, moving to the relentless beat of the music of the world around us, the lights making it look like they're snapping between one pose and the next, stop-motion-like.
Sarah whoops, bouncing on her heels. "Best Witch!" she cheers, and I look back to see her grinning widely, dancing to the beat as if she wasn't lugging around a shield that looked like it weighed as much as someone's
car, "Best Witch!
Best Witch! Hahaha!"
"Knew you were some sort of party girl..." Rachel sighs. And even though I'm
loathe to agree with Sarah of all people, I have to agree that the beat is... more than a little catchy, in that wild, primal sort of way. And, trust me, I'm the
furthest you can get from a 'party girl'. I find my head bobbing almost against my will.
Every beat of the music hammers into me, drumming like something more physical than noise. Every flash of light sears into my brain, even thought I close my eyes, the afterimages bearing the cruel smirk of Emma Barnes.
Worthless.
Worthless.
Worthless!
Worthless!
Worthless!
"Worthle-."
Sarah
moves, dancing to my left in a blur of green and gold. A noise, half nails-on-chalkboard and half feedback loop, tears through my reverie hard enough to make me jump. The hollow of her sword glows with some unidentifiable color. Between flashes of searing light, I see her swing her sword in a short, sharp arc that splits a silhouette from hip to shoulder.
"Eyes up, Tay-tay~!" she chirps, and in between the strobing light of the Labyrinth, I see that the care-free grin she always seemed to have now has an edge to it. And then she's right
there, an inch away from me, and even through the heart-pounding beat of the music, I can still hear the harsh whisper Sarah gives me.
"
Time to show what you're made of."
She moves away with a flutter of green cloth, leaving me standing there, crowbar in my hands, gasping.
"
FEUER FREI!"
And then there's a horrible, tearing wall of
noise.
==========
Your weapon roars into the psychedelic chaos around you; a stream of firepower that lights up everything in a cone in front of you like a searchlight. Glowing tracers scream through a swathe of Familiars as you sweep it in front of you, scything through them like wheat.
... If, you know, wheat was rave-dancing shadow things that bled neon, and you could reap it with a machine gun.
Yeah. Metaphors.
<<LET'S
GO!>> you roar into the psychic network, and you advance into the path you've made, trusting (hoping) that Taylor and Sarah are keeping up. The moment you stop firing, the crowd
rushes to fill the empty space, trampling over the fallen, quickly-evaporating broken shadows in their haste.
You shoulder your weapon, squeeze the trigger, and clear the path
again in a hail of screaming tracers that briefly drown out even the Witch's pounding music. This time, however, you keep firing, sweeping from left to right in an arc to cut into the crowd itself. The Familiars
screech with inhuman rage as you cut them down, but you note that they don't
move while they're being lit up, not even to rush at you.
Convenient.
Behind you!
You
feel something at your back, and are forced to let go of the trigger to swing your weapon around like a club. The mass of dark, magical gunmetal clips a vaguely-humanoid
thing with a crunch, sending it staggering away from you.
... where a tall, rail-thin teenaged girl beans it from behind with a crowbar. The head just
poofs out of existence, and the Familiar collapses in a melting heap. Taylor looks at her own handiwork as it was the
last thing she expected to happen.
You decide you ought to buy Susan something nice.
<<Good!>> you call out to her, <<Keep doing that!>>
==========
My heart is hammering in my chest. It's something that I'm only half-aware of, drowned out by a combination of adrenaline and... and...
How do I even
begin to describe this? It's as if someone took a bucket full of insanity, used it to paint a
rave club, gave the DJ every drug known to mankind and turned every single knob as far up as they could go. The dancefloor seems to just
stretch on forever, the murderous crowd around us keeps rushing at us even as Rachel and Sarah cut them down (
literally, in
both cases), we're following a path that seems to twist and turn and go back on itself and I can't even tell if we're moving or not, and I'm
almost completely sure that the chorus that comes in every so often is a hundred Emma Barneses calling me worthless.
At one point I realize that I'm
screaming at the music to
shut up because my throat starts to hurt. Some distant part of me realizes that this is gonna
suck in the morning.
And as for Rachel and Sarah...
Sarah is closest. I
hate... fine, "hate" is a strong word for what I feel about her. I
really don't like Sarah; she had the power to stand up for other people from the very start, and she still sat in the sidelines watching it all happen with a smile. She's a
terrible person, and her
one saving grace is that she knows it and owns it, at least.
As a
Magical Girl, though...
Between the lights, trying not to get my head cut off by the few things-
Familiars that manage to get past the two of them, and how fast she is, I can only catch
glimpses of her fighting: she's almost
dancing through the crowd of Familiars following us, blocking clawed, red hands and crooked needles with that massive shield, and then carving a swathe with a swing of her sword. And sometimes she's throwing that sword
through several familiars at once, pulling another from thin air. And sometimes she just...
summons long, tall walls made from copies of her shield, leaving the crowd to crash against them and waste time going around. The more I see her, the more I start to realize that there's
something connecting her sword (swords?) and shield (shields?). The more hits the former takes, the stronger the latter gets.
She's
good at this.
Really good. And she says she got
run off by someone else?
And then there's Rachel.
If Sarah's dancing across the battlefield, Rachel is driving straight through it. In a way, she's
exactly what I expected her to be; pure, direct, blunt force, applied directly at a problem until it goes away. Rachel is
not a large person by...
most standards, and even having known her for this long I'm
still not entirely used to how strong she is, but seeing her forge a path through the horde with pure, overwhelming firepower is something else entirely. She alternates between dashing ahead, and then moving at a walking pace, her machine gun blazing through everything in front of her, sending down a stream of bullets so intense it almost looks like a laser beam. I can see it
cut things in two when she sweeps it around.
She doesn't stop. She doesn't pause. She doesn't even run out of
bullets; magic-ing the belt of ammunition feeding her weapon to be longer with a wave of her hand whenever it gets too short. She's
relentless, hammering through everything between her and where she wants to be with that
bullshit machinegun, and even though she's definitely moving slower than Sarah and I'm sure she's slowing down for my benefit on top of that, it doesn't take long before my lungs feel like they're on fire from the pace she's setting.
<<We're almost there!>> Rachel calls out over telepathy, <<It's gonna get
really crazy now!>>
I'm bashing another Familiar with the crowbar, the area I hit abruptly going inside out in an explosion of glowing neon red. The crowbar, I've realized, does something different every time I swing it, because
magic. If I showed up in public swinging this thing around and wearing a mask, people would think I'm a
Cape and they wouldn't have much reason to think otherwise. And Susan just
gave me this?
It takes me a second to realize what Rachel just said.
<<IT'S GONNA
WHAT NOW!?>>
==========
Dash forward, cut down the familiars, punch anything you missed, give yourself more ammo, and repeat, following the part of your soul that's pulling you towards the center of the Labyrinth. It's not the most elegant way of getting through the barrier, and
definitely not the most efficient; you don't
have to kill every Familiar you find.
But it's a nice, steady advance that generates an area of
relative safety --you occasionally glance back to see Taylor bashing a Familiar with that crowbar and revise what you're gonna give Susan for giving her that-- behind you, and that's much more important to you right now than pure magical efficiency.
It's hard to keep track of time inside a Labyrinth, and even
harder to keep track of where in space you are, but you know that you're coming up to the endgame. Something about the dancing crowd, something subconscious or magical, but you just
know, that you're approaching the threshold to the very heart of this nightmare rave world.
<<IT'S GONNA
WHAT NOW!?>> Taylor screams back at you in pure disbelief when you give out the warning.
Sarah
cackles loud enough to be heard over the chaos. <<Whooooooo!>> she whoops over telepathy, <<Come on, girl! Show us what you've got!>>
<<You're
cheering for the fucking Witch?!>> Taylor asks, dumbfounded.
<<Why not? I like her style!>>
... Yeah, you're gonna just...
ignore that.
And then something
changes in the world around you. The crowd evaporates. The music quiets. The lights dim.
Smoke rolls in around the three of you. Taylor steps up beside you; she's panting heavily, her grip on that crowbar tight enough to make her knuckles turn white, her hair's a mess, and her face is dripping with sweat. But, other than that, she's perfectly fine; for someone who's never been inside a Witch's personal universe, she's handled it pretty well, keeping up with Sarah and you without needing a break.
You're smiling, you realize.
There's a dull, ground-shaking
boom. Then
another. And another. Light
pulses to the beat, lighting up the fog around you in psychedelic patterns. Through the gloom, you see
things rise up from the ground and then ark over your head, and parts of the ground just separate from the rest, lazily rotating in random axis. You can
feel the anticipation building in the air, the feeling of something about to-
Back!
You grab Taylor and throw yourself to one side, just in time to avoid something crashing down where you two were. Pulling yourself to your feet, you turn to see what it is.
It's a massive construct. Gleaming girders festooned with multicolored, blazing lights that look as bright as the mid-day sun while not lighting anything at all. Towering stacks of speakers that range from the size of a person to the size of a three-story house. Music mixers with impossible angles that just seem to fold and unfold, their controls
twitching with
hate. A bloody nightmare of cables, twisting and turning all over the figure, and white-hot spears piercing through the entire mess to hold everything together.
At the very top of the thing, connected to the rest by a twisted, knotted cluster of cables as thick as a bus, is a hap-hazard array of screens you could watch an IMAX movie on, showing mad, angry, frantic streams of images; people dancing even as they're torn to shreds, even as they scream and bang against the screen, even as they beg to be let go, even as they hang lifeless, legs dangling below.
You glance at Taylor, and swear, helping her back onto her feet. Even with the hellishly terrible lighting, you can see her go
pale the moment she sees it.
The Witch.
"Rachel..." She breathes, "What the
fuck is that?"
"That-"
Above! From the right!
You pull Taylor down, and a handful of jacks, sharpened to the point of madness, hiss as they pass over through where her head was. You growl, lips curled back in a snarl, and whirl around to level your weapon at the Witch.
You squeeze the trigger, and the Witch
screams hard enough to compete with the roaring, tearing noise of your magical machinegun pouring out a torrent of lead into it.
<<That's the Witch!>> you tell Taylor, switching to telepathy because there's absolutely no way she could hear you otherwise. <<Sarah!? Where the
hell are you!?>>
A figure leaps down from the lights above. A swarm of blood-soaked cables with needle-sharp connectors at their ends shoot up to meet her, bouncing off against the shield she's holding underneath herself. The swarm regroups, twists around itself to become a larger "limb" that swings at the intruder, intent on swatting her away like a fly. Before the blow can connect, though, the figure leaps
up from the shield, twisting in midair. The sword she's holding suddenly grows twice as long, and it slices through the bundle as it passes underneath her, making the Witch
screech in equal parts pain and rage.
Sarah falls the rest of the way to the ground, crouching low to cushion the impact, and gets up with a flourish of her sword and cape, summoning her shield again.
<<Present~!>> she chirps.
Taylor and you
stare at her.
<<If we ever meet Mouse Protector, I'll ask if she can put her autograph on your
face,>> You tell Sarah, not nearly as impressed as she was no doubt expecting, <<
Next time, don't wait for a fucking cue.>>
Sarah
pouts. She keeps the expression even as she makes a wall of shields snap into existence, just in time to absorb another swarm of weaponized AV connectors headed for all of you.
You
sigh. Honestly...
[-] You have a machine gun with a fire rate of 'Yes'. You can beat this thing into the ground by yourself; Sarah can stay here and keep Taylor safe.
[-] You've been hunting with Sarah occasionally. You know her fighting style well enough to work with her; why not take advantage? There is the problem of what to do with Taylor, but if you keep the Witch's attention focused on yourselves, she should be safe.
- [-] Maybe Taylor has something in mind?
.
