{Round One} An Icy Grave {Chozo, MrRandom, musical zombie.}

[P.]

It was dark as the rain came, like swelling and folding curtains of wetness. They wrapped the land in their sinews, those curtains, and drenched it to the bone. No crevice or cave or nook was left untouched, the damp clinging to everything within its long reach. The fingers of cold worked their way through existence chilling all in their path; soon all would be freezing, dripping with melted ice and clung to by the sinews of this winter.

Amongst the cold there were small orbs of white light that hovered about, humming and glowing. Every few seconds one of the lights would fizz and speed around, crashing into things and blowing up in a small nova that sent tiny sparks flying in all directions. Slowly, the all began to be drawn to a common point.

They hummed around a man that stood upon a rock, and they slowed down over time. This man was a dark figure, and his eyes were calmly shut against the quiet about him. His wings hung loosely around him, shielding his body from the cold. His mind reeled, and water dripped down his brow. He shivered, unfurling his wings and letting them settle behind his back. The Demon slipped his hands into the leather loop at the back of the shield he had concealed with his wings, and lifted it up, inspecting the edge of the blade that trimmed the disk. It shone in the moonlight that was all but extinguished, gleaming in the dark.

He jumped from the rock and landed on a soft floor of frozen ice, trapped in the chill. It crunched beneath his bare feet, ripping into his toes like cords of metal that tore his flesh. The ice was stained red when he dragged his feet onwards.

His eyes shimmered in the ethereal light that emanated from the little stars, and he pushed them away when they ventured within his reach. They cast a glow that made all things look like metal, burnished and polished smooth and reflective. They were the lights of the night, and they would shine on what was ordinarily left untouched by light or seeing.

The thaws would not come for an age, and Timaeus knew this. This was a place that would be touched by the winter and left in a vice of cold for aeons. But there were certain happenings that would be shed upon this ice world, happenings that one would only have to glimpse into the sky and the ice to envisage.

And Timaeus could see such things, things that were meant for unwary eyes, not people who were aware of the danger.

“Knowledge is wasted on the knowing,” the quiet and strong voice spoke unto the world, and his steaming breath dispersed as quickly as it had existed, and it was only a brief moment of contemplation as Timaeus watched his breath freeze upon the wind. And he trudged onwards.

His promenade was long and fraught with chill and bloody feet. His soul was not permeated by the pain. Nor was it interrupted by the iniquity of the ice and the malice of the sky shrouded by the breath of the land, the clouds that strolled across the heavens, untroubled by anger or love or any earthly emotion that blinds the thoughts of mortals.

And all this Timaeus knew. All this Timaeus could see in the frozen land that was slowly losing its life, bit by bit, until it was a barren wasteland of grey and white, untouched by thought or sentience of beings that would soon cease to walk the domains that were once of plenty and bounty.

And all was quiet as the Half-blood trod across the icy ground. He looked about him, inspecting the icy walls on either side of him. It was a valley of ice, and he was stuck in it. A chill ran through his veins, and he shuddered grimly, as if such an act would fight off the cold. He raised Jeika above his chest, and prepared himself for what would come.

[MrRandom]

OoC : I got a bit carried away with this...not too long, I hope?

There was little light streaming into the large warehouse on the outskirts of a small town. The walls were packed with shelves, which were themselves cluttered with pieces of strange-looking machinery and components. The floor was littered with tables covered in blueprints and larger machines. A pair of newly designed LED lights hanging overhead lit the massive space.

In amidst all the clutter, there was a thin path that led through the machinery and workbenches to a large desk opposite the warehouse's door. This desk had a large contraption resembling a telescope, a control pad with levers and a neat arrangement of square, black buttons, and a stack of blueprints on it. On a small chair in front of the telescope machine sat a tall human wearing a blue hooded cloak.

He muttered to himself continuously as he fiddled around with the telescope machine, stopping occasionally to grab a smaller machine or component from a nearby shelf or check the blueprints on the desk next to him. After an hour or two of constant work, he finally put down his tools and punched a few buttons on the control panel. The machine whirred into life and pointed out a nearby window as he examined the readings on a nearby screen.

Apparently satisfied with it's performance, the blue-cloaked man put his eye to the eyepiece of his machine and scanned nearby areas with it to test it. When he looked through it, he saw a magnified view of the area it was pointing at, with a small display at the top of the image with a pile of
statistics : temperature, activity level, air pressure, life count, and many more besides. He was quite happy with the way it was performing so far; so as he kept looking around, he thought about how lucky he was to have acquired this warehouse to store all of his stuff in. The previous owner had been very grateful when he'd fixed his house.

Falenor continued probing the surrounding area. He was about to pack up and test the device's portability functions when something caught his eye. He put up the magnification considerably and saw what looked like a massive frozen valley. Nothing unusual there, he thought. But there was something odd about the readings. He was getting a life count of only one. Not surprising in itself, probably just some lost traveler. Then he set the machine to find the traveler, to see if he could aid whoever it was. When he looked through the eyepiece, though, the man he saw seemed to have wings.

"Wings?" he thought, "How could he have wings?? I should probably see to this." But as he tried to zoom the machine in, it turned off, along with the lights in the warehouse, and a couple of other machines that he had running in the background. Falenor grabbed the machine in frustration and started fumbling through it, vaguely aware of a nasty, smoky smell. He used a bit of his body's energy to cast some light on the machine and immediately saw the problem : a short circuit caused several of the components to overheat.

Unfortunately for the machine, Falenor had no time to spend repairing it. He'd copied down the coordinates of the mysterious traveler, and his curiosity wouldn't rest until he'd found out who and what he was; he'd only gotten a distant look before the machine short circuited. He ran out of the warehouse as fast as he could and took to the air, aiming for the strange frozen place.

He arrived after an hour or two of supersonic flight above the clouds, exhausted from maintaining the barrier that stopped him from being damaged by travel at those speeds. He touched down just before the ice started and looked ahead. He could see no sign of anything living...just a barren, icy wasteland that stretched on for as far as he could see. He stepped onto the ice and immediately wished he hadn't; his feet had momentarily melted the ice, which re-froze around them within a second.

He melted the ice with a low energy firestream and surrounded his feet in a force barrier to prevent it from happening again. He drew his cloak about him and set off into the valley. It gradually grew colder, until he was forced to use his abilities to keep himself warm. He used his staff as a walking stick, and also to store what little energy there was to be found in the area.

After a while, he started noticing strange orbs of what appeared to be light floating around the freezing environment. He didn't know what they were, but he did know that he could use them as an energy source. He immediately set about gathering a few of the orbs and storing them under his cloak. Now I am assured a constant energy source at least, he thought. The concept of energy held in an orb intrigued him, and he resolved to think on the matter once he was done here.

He walked for a while in silence, drawing light energy from the orbs as needed to keep himself from freezing. After a while, he found what looked to be blood on the ice. There was a clear trail heading off into the distance. Thinking that this must be the traveler he'd seen through the machine, and that he might be in danger given the blood, he followed the trail almost at a run, but still conserving his energy should he need it later. Being filled with an odd feeling of unease, he kept his staff ready and plodded along the trail, suddenly a little afraid of what he might find at the end of it.

OoC : Okay, this is my first proper BA post, so I could use feedback etc. on it. *Crosses fingers*