Cats have much simpler desires than we angsty and picky humans.
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor (Worm/Nanoha)
- Thread starter Marsyas
- Start date
Cats have much simpler desires than we angsty and picky humans.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
That desire was simple only in description. "Turn into a giant"?
What about the square-cube law? And did it make more cells, and if so, what about the brain? Or did it grow them? That has its own problems. Maybe spatial warping was involved?
The cat wouldn't know to specify this, and neither would any of the seeds' users except for Precia. Ironically, Precia's wish was probably one of the simplest ones, it just had a huge power demand.
You could say "Magic!", but one of the base conceits of MGLN is that magic isn't. It's still a form of science, and someone, somewhere had to do math and biology research needed to make that scene work.
So yes, the Seeds are very safe. You can tell by the lack of giblets.
I think that cat "only wanted to get bigger," which probably meant the size of an adult cat or something like that but jewel seed didn't understand that and turned it into a giant just to be safe. My point being that the reason why the jewel seeds go out of control is that they don't understand a lot of complex ideas around the wish, so they try to grant the wish in an extreme and unpredictable fashion, which is what makes them dangers.
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Jewel Seeds get a bad rap. They are only trying to halp. I'm sure everything will be fine!
RexHeller
Title Incoming. Please Hold.
- Location
- Somewhere else.
Like Endbringers!Jewel Seeds get a bad rap. They are only trying to halp. I'm sure everything will be fine!
Like Endbringers!
and shards
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
So. You're Clockblocker. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. You don't know it, but you're about to have a wish granted. The granter of the wish is not cruel, but it will give you what you ask for, not what you want. You don't have time to think about it. No time to phrase it carefully. No time to make certain what you wish is what you want. If you wish for something beyond the Jewel Seed's available power, it won't work. It may not work regardless, depending on how badly the Jewel Seed's systems have degraded.
What is it that you wish?
What is it that you wish?
Maromar
Crafter of Fiction
- Location
- SpaceTime
Doubt the conversation would get that far before ClockBlocker and Taylor got Contessanated because freaking Cauldron.
Also, despite the jewel seeds' infamy, I'd still choose one over Kyubey, or the corrupted holy grail. I'd choose nearly anything over the corrupted holy grail.
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Do you think that is what the Jewel Seeds creators used the slogan in the adverts
"Jewels Seeds still not as bad as bunny cat abomination from space or evil cups."
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Bah. Contessa's busy trolling Coil by making sure that Taylor's stray shots keep blowing him up.
Coil: *shaving in front of the mirror* "Now how to advance my evil plots today..."
*distant sound* "divine... buster! Oh shit, I missed! Oh SHIT!"
Coil: *screams as the world goes pink. His bathroom is totally destroyed and he drops the timeline before (he is certain) his body would have been atomized*
Coil: *shudders, splits the timeline again* "God. Damn it. Once is coincidence. Twice is suspicious. But that's the SIXTH DAMN TIME that girl has killed me ON ACCIDENT. Am I Cursed? I must be Cursed. God hates me. It's the only possible explanation."
Dinah: *nods in agreement* "97.4447% chance God hates you."
Coil: *glares at Dinah. In one timeline, he stalks angrily out of his Lair ... just in time to get obliterated by another missed shot. He drops the timeline, immediately splits again.*
Coil: *in both timelines* "Ffffffffffuuuuuu...!!!!"
Contessa: *sitting at a cafe a few blocks away, sipping a cup of tea and looking way too pleased with herself* "Just as planned."
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The funniest thing about it is, this can be read as simply meaning he's never kept a timeline long enough to realize that it's nonlethal.
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Update-related news:
The chapter is coming along, and I will probably have it finished later today.
Does Clockblocker suffer any negative side-effects from what he just did? *sentai pose* Is Vista okay? *sentai pose* Can Taylor achieve the legendary state of "enough dakka?" *sentai pose* Is standing there on the sidewalk filming a Jewel Seed activation with your cell phone camera really a smart thing to do? *Sailor Moon pose* Stay right there, and I'll show you!
The chapter is coming along, and I will probably have it finished later today.
Does Clockblocker suffer any negative side-effects from what he just did? *sentai pose* Is Vista okay? *sentai pose* Can Taylor achieve the legendary state of "enough dakka?" *sentai pose* Is standing there on the sidewalk filming a Jewel Seed activation with your cell phone camera really a smart thing to do? *Sailor Moon pose* Stay right there, and I'll show you!
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That is good news, although your phrasing could be a bit better one that line. Anyways, my responses to the questions (no quote tags because screw having to manually format it on an iPad):
Does Clockblocker suffer any negative side-effects from what he just did?
He likely will, for one reason or another.
Is Vista okay?
She better be, or heads will likely roll, both in and out of universe.
Can Taylor achieve the legendary state of "enough dakka?"
Um, no. She can't be everywhere and everywhen at once, for one thing.
Is standing there on the sidewalk filming a Jewel Seed activation with your cell phone camera really a smart thing to do?
Not even remotely, so of course people are going to do it.
Weero
Taijiquan Initiate
Enough Dakka is an impossible state to reach, given that you 'Can Never Have Enuff Dakka'. You have guns stretching from one end of the universe to the other? Still not enough, because you can always add more.
1.9 - Stand By. Ready. Set Up.
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
C&C is, as ever, very much desired. Not sure if I'm happy with the current resolution or not. May have to do some revision, and a lot of it is going to be geared towards making Taylor sound more like Taylor. Definitely still planning to clean up the previous chapter.
----------------
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
1.9 - Stand By. Ready. Set Up.
----------------
Clockblocker touched the glowing jewel seed, and it froze in time; the concentric rings shifted from blue to yellowblue -- an impossible color that contained not even the slightest hint of green -- and Clock had just enough time to say, "Oh, sh~" before a brilliant yellowblue sphere rippled out from the frozen, floating crystal shrad. His costume froze, and as it passed through his body, he shivered for all that it had nothing to do with the cold.
Gundam Girl was the fastest to react, but not fast enough; pink wings flashed into being around both of her feet, and she was twenty feet up and ten back by the time the sphere caught her and froze her and her weird staff in midair. Then it caught Vista as she was stepping backward through one of her own spacial distortions, freezing her in an a position that stretched her body across the impossible dimensions of her power.
The sphere kept expanding, and the glow within the frozen Lost Logia grew ever brighter and darker. Clockblocker didn't see how far it went; he only saw that everyone and everything in his admittedly narrow field of view was frozen in place exactly as if he had touched it with his power. "~it," he finished.
Then the crystal pulsed again, and something...
{PARAMETERS}
The sound of a multi-tonal crystalline chime.
{DENIAL}
A sense of shards of broken glass grinding together.
{CONSIDERATION}
A second crystalline chime, this one an altogether different combination of jagged tones.
{AGREEMENT}
...happened.
Then the supposedly frozen jewel seed shot forward and buried itself in his forehead; it didn't hurt, but as he felt flesh and bone ripple and flow like water to ease the jewel's passage, he began to scream just the same...
----------------
Between one blink of the eye and the next, everything was different. One moment, Clockblocker was reaching through Vista's weird spacial distortion to touch the Lost Logia, the next, Clockblocker was gone; in his place was a humanoid… creature. I couldn't tell if it had skin or some kind of chitinous armor, but it was black as night save for the white or silver highlights giving definition to its features and to the bladed edges. It was hard to look at, and it made the eyes water to try to take in all the details; there was movement within its form; its teeth were silver-white, and they gleamed cruelly beneath the full moon. Something was shining inside of its head, in the middle of the forehead, giving off light that was simultaneously bright blue and a blue so dark it was almost black.
"What just…" I started to say, and the creature… flickered in front of me. All at once it was before me, with a literal ramp of motionless debris suspended in the air ascending from its last position to where I stood. It touched me before I could react.
The world flickered.
The creature was gone, and the debris that had been suspended in the air had somehow crashed back to earth and settled in between one second and the next with me not seeing or hearing it happen. I heard the sound of a heavy impact from behind me. I saw it hit Vista through one of my Sensor Spheres. Vista doubled over with the creature's clawed fist buried in the armored section of her suit that covered her sternum. She let out a little gasp, and then froze. Then the creature turned to face me. It sprang at me, its powerful legs carrying up into the air. It landed foot first on a passing, panicked bird that froze in place when the creature's foot touched it; the bird just hung there in the air, not falling, not moving forward, caught motionless in mid wing-beat. The creature used the bird as a springboard, kicking off the suddenly inviolable surface to get the distance it needed to carry it to me.
I held up a hand and willed mana into the equations I saw in my mind. "Protection," Raising Heart announced, and the familiar barrier sprang up. When the creature touched the barrier, the barrier froze in place, the mana I had committed to its creation still locked there. It was only a tiny portion of my reserves, but even so, when I realized what had happened, I felt a chill go down my spine. I kicked off the frozen force shield a split second before the creature could reach around it to grab me and the world…
Flickered.
Between one moment and the next, between tick and tock, the creature was suddenly grappling me, forcibly twisting my body as it leveraged both its superior strength and my own position against me, sending me plummeting for the ground. It almost absently tagged my foot with a finger as I fell, and…
The world flickered.
This was going to get real old real fast.
I hit the ground hard, and the pavement shattered beneath me. Yet even as I frantically scrambled to get a handle on the situation, even as Vista and I fought a losing battle against this thing that had replaced Clockblocker (that had maybe possessed Clockblocker?), part of me remained calm and collected. Multiple parts, even. I wasn't just one me; my mind was split into eight compartments, and each was equally myself, each running in parallel. Eight datastreams and I could devote my complete attention to all of them simultaneously: six sensor spheres, one from my actual body, one from Raising Heart's visual training mode. I devoted the six shards of my awareness in the sensor spheres solely to analyzing the sensory data coming through them. The me in charge of my body was trying not to panic; the me in the Visual Training simulator had repurposed the simulation and devoted it to providing my own realtime tactical analysis of the battle. Every second that passed gave me more information, a more complete model of what was happening.
There were two kinds of flickers. One happened when the creature touched me. When that kind of flicker happened, I got a sudden burst of compressed information from my sensor spheres showing me frozen in whatever position I'd been in at the time I was touched and for far longer than the no-time that I'd experienced. When the ClockMonster wasn't near me and things flickered, I got no such burst of information. Okay. I think I knew what was happening here. Now how best to counter it…
I willed one of my sensor spheres higher into the air, positioning it a good hundred meters above the battle. Meanwhile, I shot towards Vista with my actual body; I needed to get her out of the thing's reach as soon as I could.
The world flickered.
All at once, Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster were on the scene, the two former charging straight into melee combat with the creature as Armsmaster watched from a nearby rooftop. ClockMonster spun smoothly, moving with utterly inhuman grace, and caught Assault's fist in its open palm; he froze in place. The distance between ClockMonster's claws and Battery expanded ever so slightly: just enough to make the creature miss. Then Battery rammed her own fist into ClockMonster's face.
ClockMonster went flying backwards right into Vista's spacial warp; it blinked across the street, losing no momentum in the process, and slammed heavily into a frozen street light with a horrifying crack. Then it spat out a handful of silver teeth and glared at Battery.
My shield finally unfroze, and I was finally able to reclaim the mana I had been feeding into it. "DIVINE SHOOTER!" I called, forcing the relevant math into place, channeling mana through it. Twelve pink spheres materialized in formation around me. "SHOOT!"
The world flickered.
When it came back, ClockMonster was standing on the roof directly in front of Armsmaster, a hand extended to touch the man's chest. Armsmaster frozen instantly; ClockMonster took his halberd in hand and turned to point it at me.
Then the burst of data came in from the sensor sphere I'd moved upwards; unlike everything else, it hadn't frozen. While we had all been frozen in place, exactly 30 seconds had passed for the sphere outside the radius.
Meanwhile, my Divine Spheres pivoted upwards to follow ClockMonster, and it dove off the roof to avoid them; Vista compressed the space between my spheres and the target. One hit it in the shoulder and sent it into a spin, but the others missed -- mostly because I hadn't been expecting the distance to close so rapidly -- and it hit the ground hard. ClockMonster didn't let that slow it down, though: it was rolling and scrambling out of the way the second it landed, and three more Divine Spheres blew holes in the street. The remaining spheres closed in on their target; ClockMonster threw something into the air directly in front of it.
Dirt. A handful of dirt, which froze solid in midair; the absurdly inviolable barrier of dirt formed an impenetrable barrier that my Divine Spheres exploded ineffectually against.
More information put together. Inside the visual training mode, I told Raising Heart, [Tell me how many seconds there are between the time everything flickers without him touching us and the next time he does it.]
[Of course, my Master.]
I was almost to Vista, now. Another second. Just one more second. My hands were already extended, and she'd seen me. Her eyes widened.
The world flickered.
Assault and Battery were frozen in different positions, now. Armsmaster was frozen in mid-leap and had an ugly gash in his armor that blood seemed to be leaking through. All but a pair of bystanders with cameras who were still stubbornly filming the battle had fled.
ClockMonster intercepted my charge for Vista with a halberd strike to the face.
The world flickered, and Clockmonster brought the halberd's haft cracking down on the back of my head. The world flickered again. My barrier jacket took both blows, but I hit the ground, my body disoriented.
The rest of me was not.
I sprang to my feet and kicked off into the air and…
The world flickered. FUCK that was annoying. But it gave me the data I needed.
Vista had finally gotten away on her own; she stood on the roof of Arcadia High, and I joined her there, though I was caught in one more flicker before I made it.
Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster weren't doing so well. The three were frozen again, and Assault was bleeding from a head wound, the blood frozen just like the rest of him; I couldn't see how bad it was.
"That's Clock, isn't it," Vista said. There was no note of questioning in her voice.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"No," Raising Heart disagreed, "I believe it is malfunctioning. He is within, but it is not a living being; it is an entity from Lost Logia."
That made sense to me. It was probably running some kind of basic defense program. If it had been guided by a more advanced intelligence, there was probably no way what I was about to try would work.
Vista looked a little frustrated. "It's close enough to a living being," she said.
Inside the Visual Training mode, I finally had all the data I needed. Whenever it did an area pulse, ClockMonster froze everything except itself inside its radius for 30 seconds. After it had pulsed, it never used its pulse again before five seconds had elapsed. Its movement speed was fast, too -- it was sprinting at 32 miles an hour and showing no signs of getting tired. 30 seconds of potential movement when it fired off its pulse. 5 seconds between pulses. I could do this.
I multiplied its speed by the relevant movement time. Raising Heart made it easy, and projected a visual shadow over the area in question that she updated in real time over my HUD. And then I grinned. "I've got an idea."
"Okay," Vista said, "What's your idea?"
"The ClockMonster can stop time in a localized area for thirty seconds, and then it has a recharge cycle, right? And we've been losing mostly because every time it stops time, the creature is left free to act while we're all frozen, so it seems to just teleport to wherever it wants, and then it can touch us to refreeze us without using its area effect attack."
Vista saw where I was going, and she held up her hand. "You want to hit every possible spot it can occupy during its movement window."
"So all we need to do to guarantee that we can hit it..." I blinked. "Um. Yes."
Vista got a wide grin to match my own, though I'm pretty sure hers was way more manic and more worrying. "Not my first rodeo," she said. "Show me the movement window if you can."
I made an effort of will and sent a tiny bit of mana into the relevant math; a holo-screen appeared in front of her, highlighting the relevant area and updated in real time. Vista nodded. "If you can provide the firepower," she said, "I'll handle the rest."
"Can do," I said.
I'd been thinking a lot about the attacks I had available. They were pretty amazing, no question. Divine Buster was absurdly powerful, and Divine Shooter was just really good. But both were attacks intended to be used against Mages: people with barrier jackets, and with force fields to protect them. Those attacks were great against targets like that, but against normal people, even with Raising Heart set to stun, they were spectacularly inefficient. They wasted way too much power on their shield piercing properties, and that bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
So Raising Heart and I had been working on a variation of Divine Shooter. It completely removed the barrier-piercing aspect of the attack; it scaled down the attack guidance from 'active mode' to automatic and set to focus on gaps in armor and exposed flesh; and it scaled down the damage inflicted to something about as painful as a bee sting with about an equivalent amount of lingering pain.
All the energy savings went into a bigger salvo.
"Divine Stinger!" I called, accompanied by the now familiar Midchildan spell circle.
The most I could get out if a Divine Shooter was twelve bullets. Divine Stinger fired… more; as the spell finished, a full 1,200 firefly-sized balls of pink light appeared in the air around me.
"Now!" I told Vista, and then I spoke the trigger to fire off my spell: "Shoot!"
Twelve hundred tiny pink energy bullets shot out at the creature that had been Clockblocker at slightly more than the speed of sound, and space twisted with Vista's power, and everything became non-euclidian pink explosions.
The creature vanished, reappeared halfway down the block, and collapsed with the grinding crunch of carapace hitting pavement.
"Nice shot!" Raising Heart said, and there was a note of smug satisfaction in her voice.
My own reaction was less restrained. I started laughing. Maybe I cackled a little, but it definitely wasn't maniacal, no matter what kind of concerned look Vista gave me for it.
"All right, my Master." Raising Heart said after I'd had a moment, "Sealing Mode."
Raising Heart reconfigured; the staff-head extended away from her main body, and two pink energy wings snapped into being, spreading out from that gap. I took a deep breath. Inside the Visual Training simulation, she told me what to do, and in the real world, I did it.
"Jewel Seed Serial XI…" I called, feeling the rush of power through me as I blazed through the air towards the downed creature. "SEAL!" I brought Raising Heart down; ribbons of pink light sprang up around Clockmonster's body, and it writhed in agony, letting out a high pitched, keening wail as the Jewel Seed emerged from its forehead. The black carapace melted away, leaving an unconscious ClockBlocker in its place. There was a flash of light, and ClockBlocker collapsed to the ground.
Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster unfroze just in time to see Raising Heart absorb the Jewel Seed into herself.
"Receipt number eleven," Raising Heart said.
-------------------
Next: Interludes, then the next arc starts.
----------------
Magical Girl Lyrical Taylor
(Worm/Nanoha)
by P.H. Wise
1.9 - Stand By. Ready. Set Up.
----------------
Clockblocker touched the glowing jewel seed, and it froze in time; the concentric rings shifted from blue to yellowblue -- an impossible color that contained not even the slightest hint of green -- and Clock had just enough time to say, "Oh, sh~" before a brilliant yellowblue sphere rippled out from the frozen, floating crystal shrad. His costume froze, and as it passed through his body, he shivered for all that it had nothing to do with the cold.
Gundam Girl was the fastest to react, but not fast enough; pink wings flashed into being around both of her feet, and she was twenty feet up and ten back by the time the sphere caught her and froze her and her weird staff in midair. Then it caught Vista as she was stepping backward through one of her own spacial distortions, freezing her in an a position that stretched her body across the impossible dimensions of her power.
The sphere kept expanding, and the glow within the frozen Lost Logia grew ever brighter and darker. Clockblocker didn't see how far it went; he only saw that everyone and everything in his admittedly narrow field of view was frozen in place exactly as if he had touched it with his power. "~it," he finished.
Then the crystal pulsed again, and something...
{PARAMETERS}
The sound of a multi-tonal crystalline chime.
{DENIAL}
A sense of shards of broken glass grinding together.
{CONSIDERATION}
A second crystalline chime, this one an altogether different combination of jagged tones.
{AGREEMENT}
...happened.
Then the supposedly frozen jewel seed shot forward and buried itself in his forehead; it didn't hurt, but as he felt flesh and bone ripple and flow like water to ease the jewel's passage, he began to scream just the same...
----------------
Between one blink of the eye and the next, everything was different. One moment, Clockblocker was reaching through Vista's weird spacial distortion to touch the Lost Logia, the next, Clockblocker was gone; in his place was a humanoid… creature. I couldn't tell if it had skin or some kind of chitinous armor, but it was black as night save for the white or silver highlights giving definition to its features and to the bladed edges. It was hard to look at, and it made the eyes water to try to take in all the details; there was movement within its form; its teeth were silver-white, and they gleamed cruelly beneath the full moon. Something was shining inside of its head, in the middle of the forehead, giving off light that was simultaneously bright blue and a blue so dark it was almost black.
"What just…" I started to say, and the creature… flickered in front of me. All at once it was before me, with a literal ramp of motionless debris suspended in the air ascending from its last position to where I stood. It touched me before I could react.
The world flickered.
The creature was gone, and the debris that had been suspended in the air had somehow crashed back to earth and settled in between one second and the next with me not seeing or hearing it happen. I heard the sound of a heavy impact from behind me. I saw it hit Vista through one of my Sensor Spheres. Vista doubled over with the creature's clawed fist buried in the armored section of her suit that covered her sternum. She let out a little gasp, and then froze. Then the creature turned to face me. It sprang at me, its powerful legs carrying up into the air. It landed foot first on a passing, panicked bird that froze in place when the creature's foot touched it; the bird just hung there in the air, not falling, not moving forward, caught motionless in mid wing-beat. The creature used the bird as a springboard, kicking off the suddenly inviolable surface to get the distance it needed to carry it to me.
I held up a hand and willed mana into the equations I saw in my mind. "Protection," Raising Heart announced, and the familiar barrier sprang up. When the creature touched the barrier, the barrier froze in place, the mana I had committed to its creation still locked there. It was only a tiny portion of my reserves, but even so, when I realized what had happened, I felt a chill go down my spine. I kicked off the frozen force shield a split second before the creature could reach around it to grab me and the world…
Flickered.
Between one moment and the next, between tick and tock, the creature was suddenly grappling me, forcibly twisting my body as it leveraged both its superior strength and my own position against me, sending me plummeting for the ground. It almost absently tagged my foot with a finger as I fell, and…
The world flickered.
This was going to get real old real fast.
I hit the ground hard, and the pavement shattered beneath me. Yet even as I frantically scrambled to get a handle on the situation, even as Vista and I fought a losing battle against this thing that had replaced Clockblocker (that had maybe possessed Clockblocker?), part of me remained calm and collected. Multiple parts, even. I wasn't just one me; my mind was split into eight compartments, and each was equally myself, each running in parallel. Eight datastreams and I could devote my complete attention to all of them simultaneously: six sensor spheres, one from my actual body, one from Raising Heart's visual training mode. I devoted the six shards of my awareness in the sensor spheres solely to analyzing the sensory data coming through them. The me in charge of my body was trying not to panic; the me in the Visual Training simulator had repurposed the simulation and devoted it to providing my own realtime tactical analysis of the battle. Every second that passed gave me more information, a more complete model of what was happening.
There were two kinds of flickers. One happened when the creature touched me. When that kind of flicker happened, I got a sudden burst of compressed information from my sensor spheres showing me frozen in whatever position I'd been in at the time I was touched and for far longer than the no-time that I'd experienced. When the ClockMonster wasn't near me and things flickered, I got no such burst of information. Okay. I think I knew what was happening here. Now how best to counter it…
I willed one of my sensor spheres higher into the air, positioning it a good hundred meters above the battle. Meanwhile, I shot towards Vista with my actual body; I needed to get her out of the thing's reach as soon as I could.
The world flickered.
All at once, Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster were on the scene, the two former charging straight into melee combat with the creature as Armsmaster watched from a nearby rooftop. ClockMonster spun smoothly, moving with utterly inhuman grace, and caught Assault's fist in its open palm; he froze in place. The distance between ClockMonster's claws and Battery expanded ever so slightly: just enough to make the creature miss. Then Battery rammed her own fist into ClockMonster's face.
ClockMonster went flying backwards right into Vista's spacial warp; it blinked across the street, losing no momentum in the process, and slammed heavily into a frozen street light with a horrifying crack. Then it spat out a handful of silver teeth and glared at Battery.
My shield finally unfroze, and I was finally able to reclaim the mana I had been feeding into it. "DIVINE SHOOTER!" I called, forcing the relevant math into place, channeling mana through it. Twelve pink spheres materialized in formation around me. "SHOOT!"
The world flickered.
When it came back, ClockMonster was standing on the roof directly in front of Armsmaster, a hand extended to touch the man's chest. Armsmaster frozen instantly; ClockMonster took his halberd in hand and turned to point it at me.
Then the burst of data came in from the sensor sphere I'd moved upwards; unlike everything else, it hadn't frozen. While we had all been frozen in place, exactly 30 seconds had passed for the sphere outside the radius.
Meanwhile, my Divine Spheres pivoted upwards to follow ClockMonster, and it dove off the roof to avoid them; Vista compressed the space between my spheres and the target. One hit it in the shoulder and sent it into a spin, but the others missed -- mostly because I hadn't been expecting the distance to close so rapidly -- and it hit the ground hard. ClockMonster didn't let that slow it down, though: it was rolling and scrambling out of the way the second it landed, and three more Divine Spheres blew holes in the street. The remaining spheres closed in on their target; ClockMonster threw something into the air directly in front of it.
Dirt. A handful of dirt, which froze solid in midair; the absurdly inviolable barrier of dirt formed an impenetrable barrier that my Divine Spheres exploded ineffectually against.
More information put together. Inside the visual training mode, I told Raising Heart, [Tell me how many seconds there are between the time everything flickers without him touching us and the next time he does it.]
[Of course, my Master.]
I was almost to Vista, now. Another second. Just one more second. My hands were already extended, and she'd seen me. Her eyes widened.
The world flickered.
Assault and Battery were frozen in different positions, now. Armsmaster was frozen in mid-leap and had an ugly gash in his armor that blood seemed to be leaking through. All but a pair of bystanders with cameras who were still stubbornly filming the battle had fled.
ClockMonster intercepted my charge for Vista with a halberd strike to the face.
The world flickered, and Clockmonster brought the halberd's haft cracking down on the back of my head. The world flickered again. My barrier jacket took both blows, but I hit the ground, my body disoriented.
The rest of me was not.
I sprang to my feet and kicked off into the air and…
The world flickered. FUCK that was annoying. But it gave me the data I needed.
Vista had finally gotten away on her own; she stood on the roof of Arcadia High, and I joined her there, though I was caught in one more flicker before I made it.
Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster weren't doing so well. The three were frozen again, and Assault was bleeding from a head wound, the blood frozen just like the rest of him; I couldn't see how bad it was.
"That's Clock, isn't it," Vista said. There was no note of questioning in her voice.
I nodded. "Yeah."
"No," Raising Heart disagreed, "I believe it is malfunctioning. He is within, but it is not a living being; it is an entity from Lost Logia."
That made sense to me. It was probably running some kind of basic defense program. If it had been guided by a more advanced intelligence, there was probably no way what I was about to try would work.
Vista looked a little frustrated. "It's close enough to a living being," she said.
Inside the Visual Training mode, I finally had all the data I needed. Whenever it did an area pulse, ClockMonster froze everything except itself inside its radius for 30 seconds. After it had pulsed, it never used its pulse again before five seconds had elapsed. Its movement speed was fast, too -- it was sprinting at 32 miles an hour and showing no signs of getting tired. 30 seconds of potential movement when it fired off its pulse. 5 seconds between pulses. I could do this.
I multiplied its speed by the relevant movement time. Raising Heart made it easy, and projected a visual shadow over the area in question that she updated in real time over my HUD. And then I grinned. "I've got an idea."
"Okay," Vista said, "What's your idea?"
"The ClockMonster can stop time in a localized area for thirty seconds, and then it has a recharge cycle, right? And we've been losing mostly because every time it stops time, the creature is left free to act while we're all frozen, so it seems to just teleport to wherever it wants, and then it can touch us to refreeze us without using its area effect attack."
Vista saw where I was going, and she held up her hand. "You want to hit every possible spot it can occupy during its movement window."
"So all we need to do to guarantee that we can hit it..." I blinked. "Um. Yes."
Vista got a wide grin to match my own, though I'm pretty sure hers was way more manic and more worrying. "Not my first rodeo," she said. "Show me the movement window if you can."
I made an effort of will and sent a tiny bit of mana into the relevant math; a holo-screen appeared in front of her, highlighting the relevant area and updated in real time. Vista nodded. "If you can provide the firepower," she said, "I'll handle the rest."
"Can do," I said.
I'd been thinking a lot about the attacks I had available. They were pretty amazing, no question. Divine Buster was absurdly powerful, and Divine Shooter was just really good. But both were attacks intended to be used against Mages: people with barrier jackets, and with force fields to protect them. Those attacks were great against targets like that, but against normal people, even with Raising Heart set to stun, they were spectacularly inefficient. They wasted way too much power on their shield piercing properties, and that bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
So Raising Heart and I had been working on a variation of Divine Shooter. It completely removed the barrier-piercing aspect of the attack; it scaled down the attack guidance from 'active mode' to automatic and set to focus on gaps in armor and exposed flesh; and it scaled down the damage inflicted to something about as painful as a bee sting with about an equivalent amount of lingering pain.
All the energy savings went into a bigger salvo.
"Divine Stinger!" I called, accompanied by the now familiar Midchildan spell circle.
The most I could get out if a Divine Shooter was twelve bullets. Divine Stinger fired… more; as the spell finished, a full 1,200 firefly-sized balls of pink light appeared in the air around me.
"Now!" I told Vista, and then I spoke the trigger to fire off my spell: "Shoot!"
Twelve hundred tiny pink energy bullets shot out at the creature that had been Clockblocker at slightly more than the speed of sound, and space twisted with Vista's power, and everything became non-euclidian pink explosions.
The creature vanished, reappeared halfway down the block, and collapsed with the grinding crunch of carapace hitting pavement.
"Nice shot!" Raising Heart said, and there was a note of smug satisfaction in her voice.
My own reaction was less restrained. I started laughing. Maybe I cackled a little, but it definitely wasn't maniacal, no matter what kind of concerned look Vista gave me for it.
"All right, my Master." Raising Heart said after I'd had a moment, "Sealing Mode."
Raising Heart reconfigured; the staff-head extended away from her main body, and two pink energy wings snapped into being, spreading out from that gap. I took a deep breath. Inside the Visual Training simulation, she told me what to do, and in the real world, I did it.
"Jewel Seed Serial XI…" I called, feeling the rush of power through me as I blazed through the air towards the downed creature. "SEAL!" I brought Raising Heart down; ribbons of pink light sprang up around Clockmonster's body, and it writhed in agony, letting out a high pitched, keening wail as the Jewel Seed emerged from its forehead. The black carapace melted away, leaving an unconscious ClockBlocker in its place. There was a flash of light, and ClockBlocker collapsed to the ground.
Assault, Battery, and Armsmaster unfroze just in time to see Raising Heart absorb the Jewel Seed into herself.
"Receipt number eleven," Raising Heart said.
-------------------
Next: Interludes, then the next arc starts.
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Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Clockblocker: "I don't know, I think it worked out pretty well. Sure, it was the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced and there was some body Horror, and I could have died or worse, but I got a powerup out of the deal, so that's a plus, right?"
Piggot: *completely unamused* "You're also spending Christmas and New Years in Master Stranger Isolation."
Clockblocker: "... So, how about that not touching unknown Tinker-tech? That sounds pretty smart. I'm not sure who said it, but they are wise and merciful beyond their years, and I will never ever do it again."
Piggot: *glaring intensifies*
Eh, Armsy, MM, and possibly Aegis would also be good candidates for the talk, but yeah, that's pretty much how I would expect it to go down.
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
This is because 1.8 and 1.9 were originally combined into one chapter. Then, just as I was about to post it, my computer crashed. I hadn't saved. All of it was lost. So I retyped it, and wound up expanding what became 1.8 a bit and then figured I may as well separate it into two chapters as it would give me more time to work on the fight and work out the details of what exactly Clockblocker wanted (as opposed to what his Shard wanted, which was also granted).
EldritchPangolin
Hexapodia is the key insight.
Unless you have a touch-activated timestop power that has never failed before and that could prevent the dangerous tinkertech from going off. Seriously, Clockblocker made a judgement call in an emergency situation. It made sense, given available information. Bashing him would be very silly.
--
Couple of months later:
Vista: Oh no! Bakuda's bomb is about to detonate and turn the city into a glass sculpture. Armsmaster is two minutes away. Clockblocker, save us!
Clockblocker: Nope.
V: What?!
C: Director Piggot was very clear that I am to never, ever touch unknown tinkertech. Is this tinkertech known? Has it been vetted?
V: But...
C: Did it go through the committee? If it did, there should be paperwork. Where is the paperwork, Vista? Show me the paperwork!
Sakuya's Butler
A refined Butler to a knife wielding Mistress.
- Location
- ↓, ↘, → + Punch
Ayup.
This.
Never EVER do black & white rulings on things/abilities that might or might not result in casualties if use, or worse, NOT used, immediately, without waiting for authorization.
It tends to result in large numbers of body bags.
Just make sure that whomever has those things and/or abilities has the TRAINING needed to know the difference between needing to wait and the need to use it immediately, and has the authorization to do either of those (delayed action, or immediate action) already in place.
There's a good rule of thumb for military officers, and it's usually the first piece of advice they're ever given: Never give an order that you know won't be followed.
Piggott and Armsmaster seriously dropped the ball (or picked it up, in case we're referring to the idiot ball) when deciding on how to deal with Clockblocker's antics. Because in general, unless he flat out KNOWS PRIOR that something is going to burn his hand, he'll try it on a lark anyways. All the damn time.
So, upon considering Clockblocker's overall, unrepentant, general attitude? Ship him off to a boot camp for a month, while handing a note over to Arcadia that his civvie side was in a major accident (be a smartass and mention a cape was involved that did it), and that he's in isolation/quarantine for the near future. Meanwhile, somewhere, likely Paris Island, whilst learning to truly -hate- mosquitoes, he gets his ass in gear and learns responsibility, and even more importantly, how to take orders.
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- Pronouns
- Yes
I suggest you change "aoe" to "area of effect, or whatever the acronym was supposed to be. While the meaning was clear I can't see Taylor thinking "Ai Oh ee" or however you were going to have it pronounced.
The battle scene was well done, but this part is ridiculous. Taylor just spouted the most ridiculous bit of "Captain Obvious" I can think of, and instead of Vista waiting for her to get to the point, or deciding she's that stupid and concentrating on stopping the monster (which if it's inhuman enough not to count to her Manton limit should be relatively easy for her) she treats it as a brilliant idea. Not that "attack everywhere it might move to" is a bad idea, it's just obvious and the trick is how to do it. Additionally:
1)There really doesn't seem to be any need for Taylor to tell Vista all of that, she's just wasting time in the middle of a battle.
2)This seems to make the bit about timing the attack rather pointless.
3)It seems odd that Vista didn't try and do anything to the monster.
4)Taylor not mentioning the size of the area of effect to anyone, or getting asked what the size is, when that is much more useful information than the timing of the attacks.
Vista: Oh no, those monsters!! They have sucked out his humor and turned him into a bureaucracy minion!!
Marsyas
Surprisingly Jellicle
- Location
- Undimensioned and Unseen
Thanks, TheUnicorn. I will keep this in mind as I do my revisions of the chapter.
edit: Revised. Also gave Vista a role throughout the fight. I'd initially figured that I could get away with not mentioning anything just because of Taylor being constantly frozen, but in retrospect, that was a bit lazy.
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