28 - The Hungry Forest (Final Battle)

[godsoffortune]

Who: Everyone!
What: At the heart of the mysterious forest lies a magical trap.
When: Nov 14, evening
Where: Within the forest
Summary: Working together, and with the (reluctant) help of some menaced cultists, the rescuers have pierced the wooden wall into the heart of the forest.






The sky is clearly visible here, but it’s an evening one – it’s taken the day to work their way through this far. Those with some astronomy knowledge will also be able to tell it’s a sky on Earth, and anyone who can climb up above the treeline will see a vast, mountainous and wooded area, with the lights of roads, train tracks and small towns glittering here and there. They're clearly not in the Heavens anymore. Somehow, in their journey through the forest, the rescuers have emerged onto the Near Shore.

An icy breeze is blowing, and although the vegetation is unseasonably green and lush in this clearing, there are patches of snow visible at the foot of some of the trees, hinting that they're fairly far up the mountain.

Rescues

The clearing here at the heart of the forest is vast, and five colossal sigils are etched into the earth, each one holding an incredible amount of power. It’s on these sigils, North, South, East, West, and Center, that the trapped gods and shinki can be found. Those unlucky enough to be at the Center sigil are bound by hypnosis, each staring at a firefly spirit that hovers before their unblinking eyes. These victims are still and unresponsive, and the spirits will need to be destroyed to free them. The firefly spirits can be harmed by both physical and magical attack, though they likely won’t stay still to let themselves be easily extinguished.

The captives trapped on each of the other sigils are around the edges of the clearing, entangled in vines, brambles or whatever other limbs the trees could provide to bind them to this place. Some may also be under the effects of the hypnotic fireflies if they’ve been particularly troublesome, while others who have fought less might have only those bindings needed to prevent them fleeing. Regardless of how tightly they're restrained, all of the kidnapped gods and shinki on all of the sigils look drained, the severity depending on how long they’ve been there. Some are merely tired-looking, whereas others are barely clinging to consciousness. Whether their power is being used to feed the spell or being stored for something else to come, one thing is clear – those trapped need to be freed before anything more can be done.

Sigils

Those sigils beneath each group of trapped gods and shinki are powerful constructs, brimming with energy and meticulously maintained by the cultists up to now. It’s the same power as what blankets the entire forest, but it's focused on each of those five points. They must be the source of the spell that's caused all of this.

If the spell is to be broken, the sigils need to be broken as well, but it’s going to take more than just scuffing out the etched lines to break the magic. Attacking with shinki in their vessel forms or using blessed water to wash away the magic will be most effective, but for those who didn't bring blessed water or don't have the energy left to transform, there's one other option. The clearing is lit by traditional paper lanterns hanging from the trees all around, and any object set aflame with these lanterns can be used to burn the spell out of the ground bit by bit.

The trees and any remaining soulless shinki are still furiously opposing the rescue efforts, the surviving cultists are continuing to work on maintaining the spell, and it will take time to fully destroy the sigils. However, as the sigils deteriorate, the effects of the spell will begin to fade, and characters will find it easier to access their supernatural powers to speed the process along. Gods' and shinki's powers (that is to say, the special power they gained as a god or shinki, rather than canon powers) will be as effective as a shinki or blessed water against the sigils.

But be careful. As each sigil breaks, some of the magic escapes, but some is captured by the remaining sigils. For the spell to fully disappear, all five must be destroyed – and quickly, because there’s only a matter of time before this power becomes unstable.

Comments

[priforprince]

[ At the words "just keep talking", Hibiki goes blue in the face and makes her exit without further ado. She needs to put as much distance pritween herself and Mirei as prissible, before her celebripri self priquires detoxpring....

....


....Setting her jaw, she hurries. ]

[nopixiedust]

[No, it's fine, don't worry about what looks like a small child with a large knife sawing through vines close to your body, Mirei. what could be concerning about this at all?]

[Wendy, for what it's worth, is taking care for where she's pointing the thing. All that's really a problem is her size and corresponding lack of strength... but she's not going to let that stop her as she works through the vines.]

[Talking. Right!]

Not really, but it's fine! It's obvious that this whole weird magic thing is to blame, so we just have to get rid of it! Right?

[disciprined]

Is that how it works, pri?

[No sarcasm here. None at all. Mirei genuinely doesn't know, and she definitely doesn't have the understanding or the experience to make so much as an educated guess herself. Has to work harder. Has to speak to people, read everything she can get her hands upon. It's not right to be this ignorant, this long after arrival: or to be this unable to so much as protect herself. She has to try harder.

[Mirei is still, scarcely daring to breathe when she doesn't have to: she's very still. But she notices when the vines wound about her right arm fall slack, and suddenly all she can think about is freeing herself, now--

[Just like that she's struggling again, twisting against the vines and the briars, and it hardly seems to matter that she's seen where that gets you. No consequences now, though, no point of light darting toward her to dance before her eyes. All that happens is her arm slips free, a bracelet of brambles still wound about her wrist, and for a moment Mirei simply stares at her own hand as if she's never seen anything like it in her life before she's pulling Wendy into a clumsy, one-armed hug.]

Wendy... thank you, pri.

[They're not home yet, she knows.

[She's just finally started believing they all might get there.]

[nopixiedust]

Whoa-!

[She's not surprised that Mirei suddenly starts freaking out the moment she has a free limb with which to do so, but that doesn't stop it from being a problem considering, you know. Wendy still has a knife near her body. She hastily moves it out of the way, one hand raised while she figures out what to do. Maybe she'll just wear herself out...?]

[Or, rather, suddenly drag her into a hug, there's that, too. Wendy jolts a little before immediately easing up. Oh. With her knife hand hidden, she stabs her weapon into the foliage so that she can reach up to gently wrap her arms around the other girl as gently as she can.]

Don't worry about it. Of course someone would come to help you. Look at all the people running around here. We'll get out in no time.

So just let us handle stuff for a little while until you're back on your feet, okay?

[disciprined]

[Mirei nods. She lets her arm slip from about Wendy's shoulders.

[Of all the ridiculous things that she's done since arriving here, stopping the girl who's come to rescue her from rescuing her until she's finished hugging has to be in the top three. Mirei knows it: she doesn't feel it. What she needs more than anything right now is not more delicate work with a knife. It's knowing that Wendy is here, that she hasn't just made it all up in some kind of weird bout of Wishful Thinking Starring Hibiki Shikyoin.

[She'll hold still now. She can wait. She just... needed to know Wendy was here.]

Okay, pri.

[Mirei is probably too tired to do much more. She closes her eyes, so she can't see what Wendy's doing with the knife: so much easier to stay calm if she can convince herself she's actually holding shears or safety scissors or something else reassuringly round-ended. She holds very, very still.]

Wendy? What happened to Shikyoin-san, pri? Is she all right?

[nopixiedust]

[Scissors have their time and place, and that's not in a cursed forest. The knife in her hand is easier to grip, the blade able to saw through vines more efficiently. Almost through with the other side of her arm, now...]

She's fine. But she was just scared about you using sentence-enders, so she ran off to do something else.

[If a shinki shouldn't spill their god's weak points in casual conversation, Wendy is doing it wrong, but that's alright.]

[disciprined]

Sentence enders, pri...

[There is definitely a story there. Mirei wonders if Wendy knows it.

[It's a distraction for the few moments it takes for Wendy to methodically work her way through the rest of the vines about her wrist - Mirei is tugging at it before she's quite done, desperately impatient, desperate not to spend a single moment longer than she has to restrained--

[There.

[There. Her left arm falls free of the briars, and Mirei reaches to rub at her wrist with her right hand. Her arms feel stiff, too used to immobility, and to move at all is to ache: she welcomes it, every moment of it, and she gives Wendy a wobbly, genuine smile. How do you repay someone for something like this? What she really wants to do is hug her again but this time, she tells herself, it can wait. Instead Mirei crouches, working breathlessly with nails and numbed fingers at the vines about her legs, and thanks her stars that her outfit includes boots.]

Hey... Wendy, pri? Do you have another knife?

[Ow. Brambles hurt.]

[nopixiedust]

[Wendy figures there's a story there, but has no idea about any of it. It's fine.]

[Or, at the very least, it's the least of her worries right now, and she uses one hand to lightly smack at Mirei's desperately scrabbling hands. Already she can see various fresh nicks and scratches as she tries to work at them.]

Hey! Quit that! You're just going to hurt yourself more. Is that any way to treat yourself when we've gone through this whole mess for you?

[Will guilt tripping work? She hopes so.]

If you want to help, tell me what everyone else is doing, okay? I didn't think I'd need two knives before coming in here.

[disciprined]

Sorry, pri...

[Yes, that worked, appropriately rebuked, Mirei smiles awkwardly up at Wendy - yes, she gets it, she will keep her hands strictly to herself and try and discreetly work a bramble or two from her fingers instead. Ow. No, you couldn't run very far feeling like this anyway. Put a lid on that desire, stow it back where it belongs, and let the people who are trying to help you get on with it.

[She straightens. Tears her gaze away from Wendy (stow it, I said) and focuses on - okay, that's very different - the clearing again, except this time Mirei might never have seen it before in her life. It's chaos: people shouting, people struggling, people she recognizes and strangers she could have sworn she'd never seen before either dragging their friends from the vines that entrapped them. People tearing at brambles and searing the sigils from the earth, fireflies darting everywhere. It's fortunate Hibkiki is... Hibiki, really, or she doubts she'd ever have stood a chance of picking her out of the throng, but there she is: still perched atop an ailing drone, brandishing water pistols. This time Mirei really does laugh.]

Well, Shikyoin-san seems all right, pri... there's a lot of people working on breaking the sigils. I guess she's helping with that, pri?

[She really could do with more water pressure. According to Mirei's calculations, that flow is not optimal at all.]

[nopixiedust]

[It looks like she's back to being fine again.... It's reassuring, and Wendy lets loose a sigh of relief before she continues right back to work. There's a lot of nonsense for her to get through, but she's determined.]

Yeah, you can probably see her from a mile away! [Because that's just how Hibiki is.] I guess it makes sense that everyone is working on those... I got a bad feeling about them from the start.

[There's nothing good about strange giant symbols in the middle of the words. Grimacing a little bit as she scratches herself on a thorn, Wendy screws up her mouth and keeps sawing through.]

If there's a lot of people, we'll definitely stop whatever is going on here... Do you remember anything about how it all happened?

[disciprined]

[Mirei laughs; Mirei nods. This whole place is just creepy. The sooner every sign of what went on here is washed or burned or blown away, the better it will be. Heaven only knows what the intent behind it was. She can only hope that the others have arrived in time to foil it. Wendy's words are a reassurance, even if the part of Mirei that always knows the odds wonders how exactly she can be sure of it. But how can this continue, if everything is gone?

[She wants to go home, but not if this can happen again.]

How it happened, pri...

[It's hard to think back on it. The memories are fuzzy, disjointed, they just don't seem to make a lot of sense. Because there were firefly lights in the trees, and their glow had just looked so pretty, so inviting... but that hardly seemed enough now, did it? It was a ridiculous reason to go wandering off alone, especially in a place as strange as this: it simply wasn't good enough. She isn't a child, to be allured by bright lights and non-specific wonder.]

I think... it must have been some kind of compulsion, pri. All I can remember are the fireflies. They're not that fascinating, pri!

[Ah. There's the anger.

[It's one thing to act like an idiot. It's quite another to have no choice to be anything but.]

[nopixiedust]

[Talking keeps people occupied, and thinking keeps people distracted. Wendy knows this for a fact, although she can't really say how she knows. It just feels like a truth, in the same way she knows it's a truth that she can fling herself through the air and latch onto something without taking a tumble.]

[And just as much... She knows that giving anything but hope can usually make people tumble themselves, in the mind and heart if not physically. But for lack of 'hope', well, 'anger' will do as well. She grins.]

Right? It's cheap, that's what it is. Ah- [And there they go! Vines: sliced.] Can you keep yourself steady?

[disciprined]

Exactly, pri!

[Yes, she's mad.

[Look at them all. Look at them! There are grown-ups here, there are fighters, there are people she knows for absolute certain are far too clever and cautious to go chasing off into the woods after insects, like dizzy children. It's a short-cut, it's a cheat, it's forcing people to play stupid because it would be too difficult to let them be smart. It deserves to be treated like the cheap shot it is. Mirei may know nothing else about whoever they're up against, but she now knows for certain they fight dirty.

[That's more than enough reason to want to bring them down.

[She feels it when the last of the vines give: she stumbles forward, thinking of nothing but putting as much distance between herself and the place she's been trapped as she can. Yes, Mirei stumbles; yes, she reaches out a hand to rest on Wendy's shoulder.]

Mm. I'll be all right, pri. Thank you.

[nopixiedust]

[It's been a learning experience to find that she's pretty sturdy for being a child. Honestly, it's all in the right footing and locking one's knees in place, and other things like that. Then again, Mirei also isn't exactly a big burly man or something. There's no need to worry. Wendy only makes sure that she won't go toppling over before she takes the other girl by the hand and smiles up at her.]

Make sure to rest for a few minutes, okay? Hibiki and me will help everyone else take care of this big mess! And then we'll find the guys responsible and show them what a mistake they've made.