Scenes from U-K8P
"You didn't tell me you PLAYED!" Hannah shrieked.
"Well... You didn't ask? I wasn't sure if either you or Darna were really all that into the Bowl, you know? I'm kinda the only jock in the nest." Lissile shrugged ruefully. She was clad in grey and silver armor, the dwarf made sport-plate articulating easily, her dark hair in a tight spiral braid. There was a chibi spider logo plastered across her chest, the Wee Webber. (Somewhere between an inside joke amongst the University founders and a bribe to the We to give it personal stake in the endeavor, it was rumored.) Her helmet was under her arm.
"Well duh, I'm the only wizard and Darna's the only dwarf, but we try and open up and share! We're all lonely and a bit out of our element but we all should try, right?" Hannah, on the other hand, was in a vest and skirt of the same colors (the skirt grey with slashes that opened silver as she twisted), and with a similar crest. The bright mage distained the traditional semaphore-poms, preferring her own magics, but she did have her hair up in two high blonde pigtails.
"Well, also because... I wanted to surprise you with it. Once you got on the squad and kept coming back so excited about everything you were picking up hearing stories about old games, I just... I wanted to see your face! Like this, like, all dolled up and me in my armor and... And I'm totally shutting up now." Lissile was blushing.
"Oh! Oh. ..." Hannah stepped forward towards the taller girl, clasping her hands together above her thighs. "I suppose, then..."
She darted forward, going to her toes and planting a soft kiss on Lissile's cheek, before quickly continuing behind her out of the locker room.
"Good luck out there!" Hannah's voice drifted back.
Lissile blushed.
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It was a local game, a scrum against the orcs. Full-field, which was unusual these days, as the professional game had moved on from acreage. Really the origin of the game to begin with though, but its popularity had grown in leaps and bounds with the introduction of quarter-field rules that allowed closer spectating.
Full-field originally referred to the caldera itself, the eponymous bowl in Blood-Bowl, and ran teams of fourty-four to a side. If you ask the Undumgi, they'll tell you blood bowl originated when a squad of orcs, apparently newly spawned after the ninth purge of Karag Dhraz, somehow happened upon a group of Undumgi drilling barehanded against each other.
"Oi!" An orc is said to have shouted after a long pause staring between the two groups. "Dat looks fun!"
Lieutenant Prifter is known to have been the one who shouted back, "Sure! Rules are someone gets beat, you leave em alone after, equal numbers, and try not to kill anyone!"
And thus was born Blood-Bowl. The orcs of that time were sparse and seared by defeat after consecutive defeat at the hands of the dwarves until it just wasn't fun to have those kinda scraps no more, so surprisingly, they kept to the rules. And Lieutenant Prifter, having just survived an ambush of half-again as many orcs as he had new recruits armed only with training swords, realized the utility of the experience they had just gotten.
So when the orcs came back hoping for another scrap, the Undumgi had shinies for prizes and an offer for them. The game had evolved since then, introducing a ball and goals to require some semblance of tactics, but the core remained.
Blood-Bowl was as close to a declaration of peace as the orcs had ever gotten, the culmination of years of smaller trust-building scraps outside the walls of the Karak. Blood-Bowl, the orc name for the game that washed away Ash-Bowl, the place of death, with proppa blood and struggle. The dwarf name for the first time orcs had ever come into a dwarven Karak and obeyed the law from start to finish, an entire team of fourty-four plus two dozen spectators who didn't even get to fight, across the whole of the caldera.
The current game was of course not in the caldera, but rather in the stadium of equivalent size set up near the underway exit and Death's crossing, the one the orcs considered 'home field'. It suited the dwarves to hold the games there- bloodbowl truce was real, but there had been two purges of Karak Dhraz since the games started- sometimes a waaaagh happens despite the pressure valve.
And sometimes an orc got onto Karag Dhraz's traveling team, and became rich and famous across the old world.
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"WAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!"
Lissile spun, the ball under one arm and the other in a waterfall block. The orc had lept over the wall she had been using to cover her advance and OH MY LADY SHE KNEW HIM!
The half-second freeze didn't spell her end, as the two-fisted hammer blow was already deflecting off her guard, but it did prevent her from reacting fast enough to avoid the kick to her knee that his landing immediately turned into. She got a pass off, tossing the ball back and sideways even as she started to fall, but a follow-up punch from the orc slammed into her head and she knew no more.
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"I was so worried when I saw you go down! It was really hard not to jump in and try to help, that orc took you so fast and after you had taken those first two without loosing!" Hannah dabbed at Lissile's face where the edge of her faceplate had deformed into it. The two sat on the bleachers above the stadium, just after the match.
"Hannah. Hannah that was GROK THRASHASMASH! Like, Grok the one who came back from 6-1 solo against the Monefort Lancers! Lady, I didn't think he'd show up for a college scrum!" Lissile gesticulated, perhaps a touch too grandly for someone who so recently had been knocked unconscious. "Like, The Grok!"
There was a grunt, as if a laugh had been clubbed on its way out, from the field below.
"Oi! You girl! Dat play near da end- good cunnin. Lookin forwardz to seein' y'again."
Grok, apparently 'The' Grok, was standing there, looking up at them.
He waited just long enough for them to both make eye contact, then grinned and exited under them back to his crew in the lockers. It paid to encourage fans, after all, and, well, the girl did get the pass off as he was crumpin her.
"Oh Lady did he just talk to me? Did he just COMPLIMENT me!?! Oh Lady, Hannaaaaaah!"
Hannah grabbed her by the hands as she bounced and turned Lissile to face her. She had a huge smile on her face, bright eyes to Lissile's wide ones, and she enthused back.
"Oh my God I'm so happy for you! That's great, right?"
Lissile stared at her for a moment.
"Hannah, I really want to kiss you right now."
She clapped a hand over her mouth.
"I'm sorry, I just got hit in the head, I have no filter at all right now, I'm so-"
Hannah laid a finger on her lips to shush her.
"Ok."
And so she did.
A/N: Bloodbowl! And romance because yes.
"Hey Belegar. Time to start building a wizard battle tower on each peak for each wind. Chop chop! Also I'll need you to spend all the favours to get each tower tied conceptually to a different piece of an ancestor god ala the Eye."
