Character #1: @Marisol Bonded: n/a Magic: n/a Armor: n/a Weapons: throwing spear Current Health: 18 Current Attack: 22 Current Experience: 37
Character #2: @tucson Bonded: n/a Magic: n/a Armor: n/a Weapons: n/a Current Health: 12 Current Attack: 8 Current Experience: 10
hallelujah i found jesus when i drowned;
It is a cloudless day, and summer-sultry; the sky is a blue so bright it nearly hurts to look at. Heat casts a wobbly film upon the wine-dark dirt. And silence is king here in the middle of the day, when all creatures with sense have gone back to the shade, but its rule is disrupted by the sound of feathers beating high overhead—louder and louder and louder, until it stops. Abruptly. Completely.
Marisol lands with a soft thud, and her hooves cast clouds of dust up from the earth. In the right light, the dirt that rings her legs seem red enough to be bloody. She looks plainer even than usual, no warpaint, no cuff; she’s always found it a little trite, to come to a battlefield wearing anything but scars. Gods willing there will never come a day where she must lead a fight while carrying a crown. A girl can only focus on so much at once.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a return to normalcy, so she must look the part. No queenly regalia, nor signias of importance. She is only clean and dark and plain, and it is obvious from the confidence in her stride that she has been here before. The steppe is an old friend by now. It has been a home to her for years and years, before she was Commander, before she was even a cadet: hadn’t that been ages ago? It is as familiar to her as the path into the fields or the hallways of the barracks.
So much more familiar than the idea of being a queen.
Her mouth still curls with a little distaste as she thinks of it. Or maybe it’s just fear of failure, coming after her once again with claws like needles and a keen sense of smell. Commander and Queen at once, that has never been done before. Why should she, she with the sharp teeth and the heart like steel, the antithesis of a traditional Terrastellan, be chosen for it?
Who can tell her truthfully—she with the bloodlust, she with the battered wings—that it will be okay?
With a shake of her shoulders, Marisol sloughs off a curtain of red dirt. Her coat is starting to heat up under the glare of the sun, warmth leaching into her muscles, limbs slowly waking up as she moves around the steppe.
The world is quiet but for the presence of birds, singing and chittering overhead.
Mari is not worried that she might have made the trip for nothing: battlefields rarely stay empty for long.
because regret drives you as crazy as the taste of swallowed words
T
ucson arrives at the Steppe like a one-man stampede.
.
He is anger and dust and fury. The tension of the air is held just beneath his wings so that, when he tucks them just so, he descends from the sky with swift violence. The earth nears him recklessly and Tucson hits the ground at a lope to keep his momentum from flinging him face-first into the ground. The shock of the impact goes up his knees into his shoulders and then, accordingly, his hips. It hurts and for a moment, brief and inconsequential, he feels his age.
Then the moment is gone and the stallion tosses his head, snorting. He does not know why he is angry. There is only a steady stream of the sentiment, and it comes from the night before when he had, perhaps, one too many drinks. The tavern he frequented had kicked him out, again, and he stumbled back to the soldier’s output sodden drunk. There was a sharp edge to his anger, and an even sharper one to his recklessness. The words of his commanding officer were resonant in his mind. You piece of shit… You’re the opposite of what a Terrastellan is supposed to be.
Tucson was finding out more and more he wasn’t cut out to be a soldier. How could he explain, babbling drunk, the only thing he’d ever learned how to do was kill? How could he say, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be if I’m not just a wandering vagabond? Those words were too much for him, too large, and his mind could not comprehend nor articulate the complicated sentiments that now plagued him. Tucson had never been taught the emotional intricacies of loneliness, or fear, or heartache. Everything he had ever felt could be answered with a bottle of bourbon or violence, and Daisy Mae came to him more and more often in him dreams, saying: You gotta stop suppressin’ Tucson, it ain’t right, y’gotta talk about it hon. Talk to me.
Tossing his head, breathing in the bright summer air—he thought of that. Talk to me. And all the words he wished he could say die in his chest before he can even think them, because it is unattractive to feel things so volatile, so brazen, so full. The only way to let the fullness out of his chest was to feel something else and so now he seeks it like an addict. Tucson looks around with his bright amber eyes and locks them on the only other figure at the Steppe—the bay with spotted wings. He recognises her as the new sovereign, a word as foreign to him as the land he lives in now.
“Ay’ there, lass.” he calls over the space between them. “Looks t’me like we could do each other a'favour.” And wasn’t that the truth? He bowed his head in a way that is almost mischievous, if not for how sharp the gesture is. As he bows he says, “Let’s dance, sweets.”
@Messalina | "speaks" | notes: this took soooo long i'm sorry!
He lands hard, hard as a ghost into a house it’s not meant to haunt. Marisol watches with cool-dark eyes, her wings settled against her spine. And though she watches intently, she does not say anything, except maybe a single word, as quiet as the tiny quirk of her lips.
Finally.
His accent is funny. Cute, even. Marisol is so used to the thin, rhotic song of Terrastellan voices that Tucson’s drawl sounds… alien. Unnerving, even. Mari’s ear flicks back and forth as she listens, as if it’s marking all the ways they might be different. She stretches—wiggles her hips back and forth like a wildcat about to pounce, rolls the kinks out of her stiff shoulders, pushes the joints of her wings forward and back as if testing the strength of their connection to her body. The warmth and the friction of the moving muscles feels good. Like starting to wake up from a long, dark sleep.
“Ha!” she calls across the steppe. With renewed playfulness, Mari lashes the long, black strands of her tail over her haunches, shifting in place as if preparing for a pirhouette. “‘Dance’ is far too nice a word.”That’s true enough. There is nothing particularly romantic about the thud of a breaking bone, or the copper-bright scent of blood on sweaty skin. Nothing romantic about realizing the horrible weakness inherent to a mortal form. Nothing romantic about feeling your legs give out, like a child’s in the face of danger.
But it is not made to be beautiful, only real, and satisfying. And what more does she need than real and satisfying?
The game begins. Mari’s dark ears pin back to the curve of her neck; her eyes narrow and her head snakes down to the level of her chest. Each beat of her heart strikes deeper than the last. Blood rises to fill her cheeks and pools into the corners of her head. The sun is still shining, shining, shining, an ever-watchful eye overhead, and as it bears down on her like so many lamp-lights Mari digs her heels into the dirt and takes off in a lunge.
Quick and sudden as an arrow she’s bolting over the dirt, a blur against the clear blue sky, running as fast as her hooves will take her. Dirt rises behind her like so many phoenix’s worth of smoke. Her pulse is pounding in her ears now, louder than eve, and as the space between them closes she does not stop, does not even slow. Instead the Commander twists her head out of the path of impact and throws a shoulder forward, hoping that when they collide, the momentum of her sprint and coiled muscles will be enough to throw him off his feet.
Summary: Mari stretches/warms up and says hi to Tucson. Then she takes off with a sprint and tries to use the shoulder closest to Tucson as a battering ram to throw him off-balance.
he disappeared without a word but the next night a coyote was heard
T
ucson cannot help himself.
A grin, broad and infectious, bursts across his face. “Aw, sweetheart, dancin’ is th’ only way to describe it.”
He loves her, if only because she doesn’t waste any time. If he could hear her thoughts, he might be a little less inclined to think so kindly of her—if only because he would reverently, aggressively disagree. Fighting was about the only romantic thing Tucson knew, besides love-making, and of the two one certainly had less dramatic outcomes. He finds himself watching, weighing her strengths and weaknesses, and all he can find is that she looks less like a horse and more like a weapon.
When she charges, Tucson is ready, and he laughs loud and long and joyously. His squared stance is replaced by a much lighter one but he does expect her to hit him squarely, just as she charges; at the last second she dips to the side and rams her shoulder against his own. Tucson finds himself reeling for a moment, and if not such an acrobatic in the air and on land, he would have tumbled. As it were, he stumbles heavily and is saved a full-on fall only by throwing out the wing farthest from her assault. One of his knees hits the ground and skids—but then Tucson is up, and lunging toward her.
His reaction is instantaneous and fierce; Tucson does not play pretty. He saves only a moment to think, damn, that hurts, before he is pivoting on a hind-leg toward her and rising, simultaneously, into a rear. The goal is to close whatever distance she has recreated and, if she is launching a second attack, to parry it through an offensive of his own. Tucson aims to land the majority of his weight on whatever body part is available, churning his hooves mid-air as sharp, hard weapons and hook them around whatever he can reach. Close, close, close. It is the way Tucson fights.
And still, he cannot help himself. ”Y’keep bein’ sweet t’me and I’m gonna have’ta ask’a for a second date."
@Marisol | "speaks" | notes: this took soooo long i'm sorry!
Summary: Tucson takes Marisol's hit squarely, stumbles, and then recovers. He pivots toward her and rears to attempt to bash her with his hooves and draw her into an "embrace".
He loves her. Ha! Love. Neither of them knows anything about that, she’s sure. Love. If she could read his thoughts, she’d laugh. Almost she does, when she sees his wide, wolfish grin and hears his breathless chuckle in the warm air.
But even in a dance, there has to be some element of seriousness; maybe it is Marisol’s duty to provide it.
She is disappointed but not surprised that he makes no effort to block her move. Either she was right or he is dull, and in a place like this the difference hardly matters.
Her heart pounds against her teeth, and her hoofsteps crack against the dirt, and then, sudden as dying, they are colliding, and the breath is smashed from Mari’s chest. Whoomp. Marisol’s teeth snap together on impact. The meeting of their bodies is less sacred than a prayer, but just as satisfying. Adrenaline spikes her racing blood with something cold like fear. And by the time Tucson stumbles, Marisol’s whole body is buzzing with sweet, sick satisfaction; she sees him hit the ground and her whole face splits into a ravenous smile.
As quick as they collided, they’re off again, or so she thinks.
Satisfaction rumbles in her bones. But it’s short-lived, ill-fated. Hardly a stride is taken before Marisol squeals in unexpected pain. There is a white-hot, stinging slash of hooves against skin, and she nearly crumples under the pressure of the landing blow. Fucker.
No time to waste, there’s blood to spill: riveted with panic, Marisol grinds her jaw against the ache in her spine, and with iron effort, she twists back toward him instead of away. How close they are now! She can see the whorls of his dark hair, the smell of salt shivering across his skin. For a moment she wants to say something in response to his quip.
But no, no, there are far more important things.
WIth a snarl, she digs her hooves deeper into the dirt and lunges forward. Her ears fall back against her coarse hair, her lips curl up, and then with her too-sharp teeth bared she is reaching, reaching, reaching for his throat like a predator with no other aims.
Summary: Mari catches Tucson's hooves on her shoulders/spine. Rather than try to slip away, she turns back toward him and lunges upward to reach for his throat while (hopefully) simultaneously dislodging his hooves from her side.
Due to @Tucson being deactivated, the fight is forfeited and @Marisol wins!
This thread will be locked and moved to the IC Thread Archives forum shortly.
All damage taken in the thread is still applicable and cannot be retconned.
Both character's EXP has been updated to reflect below changes; no need to post in the Experience Updates thread!
MARISOL
- Participate in a Battle or Challenge: +1 EXP
- Win a Battle: +1 additional EXP
-- Total: +2 EXP to Marisol
TUCSON
- Forfeits do not allow you to gain EXP for participating in a Battle.
-- Total: 0 EXP to Tucson
the novus crew
the someday crew
10-23-2019, 02:17 AM - This post was last modified: 08-23-2020, 01:31 AM by inkbone
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