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It should have been done already.Schnee One said:Hey
Enlil (I/O)? At some point
I mean it is just feeding Enlil another win kekFirephoenixearl said:Done.
Inb4 Iap unfriends me. xD
from The Bride Wore Black Leather |
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These Outsiders were attempting to break into 3-D space by forcing their entire reality onto the 3-D plane through a man they made into a doorway. (It makes sense in context, sort of...) The act of them doing that caused...this. Walking into the Ward was like pushing against a fierce wind, an almost solid intervention of some Outside will. I could feel Space itself stretched taut by some unimaginable influence. I stopped, despite myself, struggling to get my bearings. There were too many directions, too many dimensions inside Ward 12A now, too many ways to look, too many options to deal with. Another reality had been added to ours, superimposed on it, making the world heavier and more complex than it was ever supposed to be. The red wall was full of something like maggots, writhing and twisting. There were dark holes in the floor, dropping away forever. And rising over everything, a horrible feeling, a terrible conviction, that something was coming. Far-away, from Outside or beyond our universe, I could hear something screaming, an endless howl of rage and hate. Drawing steadily, remorselessly closer. And right there before me, hanging in mid air, was patient John Doe X 47, or what was left of him. His Humanity had been ripped away. His body was gone. He had been subtracted from the world and made into something else, and now he was a living tear in reality. A human gap, a human shape full of something that hurt my eyes to look at. A way in for whatever wanted in. I forced myself to look away, to check on what had happened to the other patients trapped in Ward 12A. I knew Julien would want to know. I could see all the beds, and the patients in them; but they all seemed far-away, distant, on the other side of the world. Looking across the Ward, across all its hideously stretched Space, was like looking across the universe. Trying to concentrate on the patients was like trying to look in a new direction, one I could sense but not make sense of. They'd been pushed aside by what was happening, forced out of the way to make room for what was pushing in. I was pretty sure the patients were still alive. But I couldn't tell if they were still human any more. John was originally going to use his gift to break the link between the Outsiders and the guy who'd been made into a doorway halfway between the Outsiders' plane and the normal one, but then he realized that the guy/doorway was the link. So instead, he used his gift to seize onto the guy/doorway and make both him and the Outsiders attached to him "more real" to 3-D space and his own perception. I concentrated, focusing my gift on the human-shaped gap in our world. I tried to reach into the gap, to find the link between the patients and the beings from Outside, so I could break it . . . but it only took me a moment to realise that the patient was the link. I couldn't break the link without killing the patient. And I wasn't ready to that. Not until I'd tried everything else I could think of first. I couldn't sacrifice one life to save many. Julien wouldn't approve. He always was a good influence on me, the bastard. So, since I couldn't touch the alien influence, I found the man and grabbed on to him. I could feel him, held half-way between this world and the other. And the more I held on to him with my gift, the more real I found him, until finally it was the easiest thing in this world to haul him all the way back into reality. And suddenly there he was, hanging in mid air, where the gap used to be. One hundred per cent real and solid and human. I let go, and he fell to the floor. And so did the beings from Outside that had been attached to him, that I'd found and dragged into this world with him. This caused the Outsiders attached to him to be restructured by the laws of reality, which basically depowered and killed them: All of Ward 12A snapped back to normal. The light was soft and even, the awful howling was gone, and the room was room-shaped again, with only the three usual dimensions. Patient John Doe X 47 lay curled up in a ball on the floor, breathing harshly, eyes wide and staring. I'd rescued his body, but someone more experienced in these matters would have to bring his mind back after everything the poor bastard had been put through. I looked at the aliens I'd dragged through into our world, and my lip curled. Rewritten and restructured by the laws of our reality, there were floppy bits of meat, each the size of a man's head, with protrusions that made no sense, squirming and oozing across the floor. They whined and squealed with every movement, as if being in our world hurt them. I only had to look at them to know they were suffering and dying, unable to withstand human conditions. One by one, they fell silent and lay still, and within moments they were rotting and falling apart. |
from A Hard Day's Knight |
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I raised my gift, and it only took me a moment to find the dimensional rift that had let the messenger manifest in our reality. It took a complicated lattice of strange energies to hold the rift open, and it only took me a moment to find a fatal flaw in their arrangement. And then it was the easiest thing in the world to hit those energies in exactly the right place, and the whole thing collapsed. The messenger shrieked once, in shock and horror and surprise, and the collapsing rift sucked it back through and out of our reality. There was nothing left in the mall corridor but bright lights everywhere and the last vestiges of a really nasty smell. I smiled confidently at Oliver and let myself relax a little, reaching for my psychic second wind. I really hadn't thought it would be that easy. |
Multiple quotes here |
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The two of them slammed together, tearing at each other with unnatural strength, while everyone around them cried out in shock and horror at the awful things they were doing to each other. And while all this was going on I concentrated on slowly and cautiously raising my gift, opening my inner eye, my third eye, a fraction at a time. Previously, when I'd tried to use my gift in this house, Someone had shut me down, hard. But nothing happened this time, and I was able to use my gift to find the old and very nasty magic that held the various parts of the Charnel Chimera together, in defiance of all natural laws. And it was the easiest thing in the world for me to rip that magic away. The creature just fell apart. It screamed like a soul newly damned to Hell as all the separate pieces of meat dropped to the floor, already rotting, the last dying remnants of people the creature had been before. The Charnel Chimera collapsed, its scream choking off as it sagged to the floor, losing all shape and running like filthy liquids, until nothing was left but a quietly steaming stain on the floor and the last, lingering traces of its charnel house stench. Walker nodded pleasantly to me. "Thank you, John. I could have handled it myself. In fact, I would have liked to take it back in one piece for questioning and study…but then, you can't have everything." "Indeed," I said. "Where would you put it all?" -Hell to Pay I fired up my gift, and straightaway found the very basic magic that was reanimating the dead nuns. We'd triggered the spell by entering the chapel, and it was the easiest thing in the world to push the switch back into the off position. The spell shut itself down, and the dead bits and pieces were still again, their dignity restored. Sister Josephine put her machine pistols away. She was breathing hard, but otherwise seemed unmoved. -Hell to Pay He spoke a Word of Power, and the two feral children suddenly changed. Thick fur sprouted out of their bare skins, and their bones creaked loudly as they lengthened. Muzzles full of sharp teeth thrust out of their dirty faces, and in moments the two children were two wolves. The Beadle laughed and urged his pets forward. The faeries cried out hopelessly, cringing away from the slavering wolves, tugging piteously at the steel chains that held them in place. The wolves stalked slowly forward, and Dead Boy went to meet them, drawing two long silver daggers from the tops of his calfskin boots. "No," I said sharply. "Don't kill them. I think they're as much victims here as the faeries." Dead Boy glanced back at Julien, then shrugged and stepped back again. He didn't put the silver knives away. I confronted the two wolves, hoping I was right in my assumption. The Beadle had brought about their change with a Word of Power, which suggested the boy and girl weren't natural werewolves, that the change had been enforced upon them. So I fired up my gift and found the spell that controlled the change. Then it was the easiest thing in the world for me to rip the spell away, and just like that two wolves shrank back into two dazed children. Only a boy and a girl again, at last. They could feel they were free, and their feral instincts told them who was responsible. They charged towards me, and I made myself stand my ground. The boy and the girl pressed affectionately against my legs, nuzzling me with their heads and faces, pathetically grateful. The Beadle shouted orders at them, trying his Word again, and they turned and snarled defiantly back at him. I patted them comfortingly on their matted heads, and they settled down again. -Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth Also, if those spells can only be undone by reciting an incantation, John can use his gift to find that incantation. I lurched over to the glass display cases, forcing myself against the terrible pull of the gravity well, until finally I stood before the case holding the chaos butterfly. It hung there in its stasis field, such a small thing to hold such potential power. I reached out for the case, and Wilde cried out, afraid I was going to kill the butterfly, even after all its presence had brought about. I used my gift to find things, opening the third eye deep in my mind, my private eye, to locate the necessary Word of Power that would collapse the stasis field. I said the Word, the field collapsed, and the butterfly disappeared, free at last to return to the moment in Space and Time from which it had been snatched. And as it moved on, it became just a butterfly again, no longer significant, no longer the first domino in any line of destiny. And so became ordinary again, of no importance to anyone at all. -Hex and the City |
from The Bride Wore Black Leather |
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I concentrated, raising my gift again, using it to study the reality of the thing before me, opening up my inner eye, my private eye, to See the world as it really is. And then I almost dropped the shard as I realised what it was I was holding. "What?" Bettie said excitedly. "What did you See?" "Temporal energies," I said. "This mirror shard is soaked in Time, in Time magic. I can actually see inverted tachyons, shooting up and down the broken edges." Bettie gave me a hard look, only slightly spoiled by her pouting mouth. "Yes, very nice, darling, very dramatic. But what does that mean?" "It means, I know what mirror this came from," I said, pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and carefully wrapping up the vicious-edged shard before tucking it very carefully into my coat pocket. |
from Hex and the City |
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The Presence settled heavily into our world, spreading out in directions we couldn't even name; something Huge and Vast downloaded from a higher dimension. Its thoughts smashed into everyone's minds, as harsh and merciless as a spotlight, searching for the single significant thing that had brought it to this petty, limited place. It didn't take a genius to realise it must be looking for the chaos butterfly. The only truly unique thing at the auction. The psychenaut couldn't seem to locate it exactly for the moment, presumably because of the stasis field holding the butterfly temporarily outside of Time and Space. And so the Presence sank deeper into people's minds, forcing their very selves away in its search for knowledge. All around me people were crying out in pain and shock and horror, shrieking Get it out of me! Even the major players were on their knees, sobbing and shaking. The only one left mostly unaffected in the Hall was me, and I didn't want to think why. |
from Nightingale's Lament |
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It hit us both at the same time, a psychic assault so powerful and so vile we both staggered and almost fell. Something was watching us, from behind the blind, windowless walls of the Necropolis. A presence permeated the atmosphere, hanging on the air like an almost palpable fog, something dark and awful and utterly alien to human ways of thinking. It felt like crying and vomiting and the smell of your own blood, and it throbbed with hate. Approaching the Necropolis was like wading through an ocean of shit while someone you loved thrust knives into your face. Dead Boy just straightened his shoulders and took it in his stride, heading directly for the front door. I suppose there's nothing like having already died to put everything else in perspective. I gritted my teeth, hugged myself tightly to keep from falling apart, and stumbled forward into the teeth of the psychic assault. For the record, this is what was attacking them. We were almost half-way across the hall before we got our first glimpse of what was waiting for us. At the far end, in the darkest of the shadows, barely illuminated by the light of the swirling mists, were five huge figures. The corpsicles. Thawed from unimaginable cold, revived from the dead, reanimated by abhuman spirits from Outside, they didn't look human any more. The forces that possessed the vacant bodies were too strong, too furious, too other for merely human frames to contain. They had all grown and expanded, forced into unnatural shapes and configurations by the pressures within, and now they were changed and mutated in hideous ways. It hurt to look at them. Their outlines seethed and fluctuated, trying to contain more than three dimensions at once. Mere flesh and blood and bone should have broken down and fallen apart, but the five abominations were held together by the implacable will of the creatures possessing them. They needed these bodies, these vacant hosts. The corpsicles were their only means of access to the material world. I kept wanting to look away. The shapes the bodies were trying to take were just too complex, too intricate for simple human minds to deal with. We were getting too close. I grabbed Dead Boy by the arm and made him stop. He glared at me. "We need information," I murmured. "Talk to them." "You talk to them. Find me something useful I can hit." One of the shapes leaned forward. It was twice as tall as a man, and almost as wide, its pale, sweating skin stretched painfully tight. A head craned forward on the end of a long, extended neck. Bloody tears fell constantly, to hiss and steam on the hall floor. Bone horns and antlers thrust out of the distorted face, and, when it spoke, its voice was like a choir of children whispering obscenities. "We are The Primal. Purely conceptual beings, products of the earliest days of creation, before the glory of ideas was trapped and diminished in the narrow confines of matter. Kept out of the material worlds, to protect its fragile creatures of meat and mortality. Ever since Time was, we were. Waiting and watching at the Edge of things, searching eternally for a way in, to finally show our contempt and hatred for all the lesser creations, that dare to dream of being more than they are. We are The Primal. We were here first. And we will be here when all the meat that dares to think has been stamped back into the mud it came from." |
from Something from the Nightside |
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I've always been able to find anything with my gift. That was how I'd made my reputation. To be back in the Nightside, and blind in my private eye, was almost too much to bear. I ought to be able to pick up at least a glimpse of her, if she really was so close, on Blaiston Street. I lashed out with my mind, hitting the night like a hammer-blow, forcing my gift out across the secret terrains of the hidden world. It beat on the air, wild and angry, pushing open locked doors with grim abandon, and people around me clutched their heads, cried out and shrank away. My hands closed into fists at my sides, and I could feel myself smiling that old vicious smile, that wolf on a trail smile, from a time when nothing mattered but getting to the truth. There was a sick, vicious pain throbbing in my left temple. I could do myself some serious damage by forcing my gift beyond its natural limits, after so long asleep, but right then I was so angry and frustrated I didn't care. I could feel her out there, Cathy, not long gone, her traces still vibrating on the membrane of the hidden world, but it was like reaching out for something you can sense in the dark, but not see. Someone, some thing, didn't want me to see her. My smile widened nastily. Hell with that. I pushed harder, and it was like slamming my mind against a barbed-wire fence. Blood was dripping steadily from my left nostril now, and I couldn't feel my hands. Serious damage. And then some tension, some defence, broke under my determination, and Cathy's ghost sprang into being before me. It was a recent image, a manifestation only days old, shimmering right there on the street before me. I grabbed Joanna's hand so she could see it too. Cathy hurried down the street, really striding out, and we hurried after her. |
Johns eye will likely let him see that Merlin is faking it tbhMrKingOfNegativity said:He 100% opens with that no matter what?
If so, I guess. But I'd like some context as to how much he actually does this, because the "opens with X every single time" argument is something I find hard to believe most of the time. (The only reason I argue it with John is because his eye is quite literally where most of his powers come from)
You mean the thing that gives him his precog?Iapitus The Impaler said:Merlin's opening move is what his clairvoyance tells him is the best move, which in this case would be popping into his day dream. The only exception is if he is ******* around doing his hobby, but other than that and he is gonna go with what his clairvoyance says is best. Especially since he knows that John can really **** him here if he doesn't take it seriously
Multiple quotes here |
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Most oracles are a joke. The concept of alternate timetracks (as seen every day in the Nightside's spontaneously generating Timeslips) makes prophecy largely unprofitable and knocks the idea of Fate very firmly on the head. But this particular oracle had a really good track record in predicting the present; in knowing what was going on everywhere, right now. I suppose specialisation is everything, these days. -Hex and the City "I see you going on a long journey ..." "If you tell me I'm going to meet a tall dark stranger, I swear I will unzip right here and now and piss into you." "You would, too, wouldn't you? Bully ..." "Hold everything," I said. "You're predicting a journey in my future. How can I have a future if the soulbomb's going to go off in forty-one minutes?" "Actually, rather less than that now. But yes, I see your point." The oracle hummed tunelessly to itself for a moment. "Look, your whole existence is so unlikely it gives me a pain in the rear I haven't got just thinking about it. It's hard to be sure about anything where you're concerned." "Because my mother was a Biblical Myth?" "That doesn't help, certainly. But it's more that you're involved in so many vital, important, and earth-shaking things, that every decision you make changes not only your life but everyone else's as well." -A Hard Day's Knight |
Link it here. I have to leave for IRL business in a bit, but I'll read through it when I get back.Schnee One said:Johns eye will likely let him see that Merlin is faking it tbh
Theres a thread O debated this you can read, but its long
On a side note, are we in agreement that it is a stomp for Merlin's favour in that match or should I bump itSchnee One said:https://vsbattles.com/vsbattles/2708275
Careful, its long
And my point is that said clairvoyance doesn't work on John.Iapitus The Impaler said:Merlin's clairvoyance give him precog, yes, but that is not the part I was focusing on. It is Merlin's ability to completely be aware and see everything happening in the present, and since his higher form exists outside of time, that potentially applies to all points in time as well, but the latter part is less important. He knows everything John can do to **** him up, so he will take him seriously and step into his day dream
from Hex and the City |
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"Hello, oracle," I said. "What's happening?" "More than you can possibly imagine," said a deep, bubbling voice from a long way below. "Bless me with coin of silver, oh passing traveller, and I shall bless thee with three answers to any question. The first answer shall be explicit but unhelpful, the second allusive but accurate, and the third a wild stab in the dark. The more you spend, the more you learn." "Don't give me that crap," I said. "I'm not a tourist. This is John Taylor." "Oh bloody hell; you're back again, are you?" The oracle sounded distinctly sulky. "You know very well your whole existence makes my head ache." "You haven't got a head." "Exactly! It's people like you that give oracles a bad reputation. What do you want? I'm busy." |
Yeah, but he doesn't need to use magical energy to incapacitate, at least other than something like the dream cage he was using on Tiamat. He needs magical energy to influence them, but not to keep them down. He also does not need to use magical energy to simply make avatars.Ramesses the Sun King said:Merlin's projections/Avatars only seem to last while he's sleeping as seen in America. Merlin can use apparitions/shadows like in Babylonia but they won't have any magical energy to use if he's entering their dreams. As Merlin needs to use his magical energy to mess with your dream and mind. As seen in Babylonia when Merlin's shadow only used a few spells and stated that he couldn't really use his Clairvoyance due to using his magical energy to keep Tiamat asleep in a cage of dreams.
Merlin has a huge weakness when invading dreams as well, if the target is in REM sleep and notices him they can crush him like a bug.
Side Note: Merlin shouldn't have precog.