applesaucedream | Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

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Tender Lumplings Everywhere, Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare [Open to All]

The woods are dark and deep, but not particularly lovely. If anything, they feel dangerous, as if something terrible might come lurching out from behind any given tree and tear into the nearest warm body. What that terrible thing might be is anyone's guess. A cat with hands? Slenderman? Stegosaurus? Actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf? All of the above in a horrible mob? It's anyone's guess. But every dreamer will be absolutely convinced that there is something unspeakable out there, and that it's after them.

The dreamers have two things on their side. The first is that there is actually nothing dangerous lurking in these woods (with the possible exception of other dreamers). The pervasive terror the dreamers are feeling is just that: a rift-given feeling, nothing more and nothing less. That snapping twig or rustle in the undergrowth is almost certainly just a squirrel or something else equally harmless.

The second is that no dreamer is alone. They all will be reunited with - or introduced to - their dæmons, a source of comfort in this dark, intimidating wilderness. However frightened the dreamers might be, at least they have someone with them who definitely doesn't want them dead.

[OOC: as ever, any and all are welcome! You don't have to be in the game to join the fun. Dreamers can remember or forget the events of the dream at the players' discretion. And the party only stops when you want it to; feel free to backtag forever.]

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She does not like its tone with her. Like she is some lesser thing and he the greater, which is simply not an ideological state Illyria is in the habit of accepting. She is absolute, eternal. They razed her temples and buried her in anti-magic, and even that was not enough. She will not be intimidated by a Pit-thing in a shell.

Pancakes silently notes the hypocrisy. Illyria glowers her into submission.

The Lucifer is merely an unfamiliarity, not an obstacle. Not yet.

"Why," she demands, like iron. "Why do you waste your time with them."

"I waste my time as I please."

Lucifer is an obstacle to whatever he pleases to be; he has humored her questions so far, but his cooperation stretches only as far as his mood and patience allows. He is not beholden to monster-kings of distant universes, and if she continues to make demands of him, she'll see how short his patience really is.

"Why are you here, false god-king? Go back to your fallen kingdom and your forgotten tomb. Go wait out the rest of eternity in darkness and silence, wallowing in the filth of your own moldering bones."

He tilts his head to look at her, and he can match her icy stare for icy stare. The dragon's wings flutter restlessly behind him, agitated but not wanting to show it.

"Unless, of course, you can't."

"You would speak to me in such a way."

Pancakes' warning squeaks and pips drop into silence. The entire wooded area around them is equally silent - whatever creatures or beings that reside here, all must know that none are dangerous or powerful as the two that exist in this same temporal space, here and now. Or as wrathful.

"You are a Pit-thing," Illyria growls, low and dangerous and in escalating fury. In all other circumstances she would not bother. She would not deign to look at any thing that speaks to her as if she is its equal or even, to her enraged incomprehensibility, its lesser. But this is something Old and new, and Illyria would know what foe she faces.

"You are a dark and tiresome creature, something so ordinary that vermin soil your name each day without sanction. I am Illyria. I am something so old that gods themselves cannot comprehend me, nor recall the days in which I ruled. I was old when they were young. I commanded armies. I slew legions. And you would find yourself comparable."

Your power is contained, mistress, Pancakes whispers in a small and terrified voice, and you are god-king no longer. Your shell is damageable.

She commands her be silent. She will not be spoken to by this - this thing in such a manner. All creatures are beneath her and she will take them beneath her heel, as is her right.

Lucifer brings up his hands, slowly, and... claps. Claps, like he has just watched a scene from Shakespeare in the Park and finds it amusing in ways that the production crew did not at all intend. Every pause between the sound is a long, measured beat of sarcastic silence. He slow claps it right out.

"Good for you," he says, like he's a distant father who's just had his kid wave her latest finger painting at him. He clasps his hands together at the end, folding them in front of him.

"Really, good for you. You should be proud of your accomplishments, even if they ultimately are meaningless because you lost your kingdom to a pile of cockroaches and lie forgotten and irrelevant in a squalid pit in the ground."

"My kingdom was lost," she spits, "in the passage of time. Vermin are resilient. You would know; you sheathed yourself in one of their skins."

She is hesitant to attack.

She is not hesitant to attack.

Illyria does not become hesitant. Such things are for humans, and she remains unaffected by the shell she is in. Unhampered. Unweakened. In every respect.

Even emotionally.

She is considering her attack.

She is considering the strength and magnitude of such a strike, and how she will implement it. She is measuring the pressure of vermin skin on vermin skin, and the impact of knuckle-flesh-blood, and blaze of discordant energies as they meet in glorious collision. She is anticipating the violence.

Illyria enjoys violence.

Enjoyment is human. She does not mind admitting it in this case. Not in the case of violence.

"As did you-- mine, at least, is flesh given freely. Do we have to play the hypocrisy game?"

Lucifer waits while she contemplates her violence; he is patient. He does not fear monster-kings in stolen girl bodies.

"I am the Morningstar. I witnessed the genesis of the universe. I was old before there was an Earth for you to desecrate with your presence, so maybe you should reconsider who you're calling vermin."

He steps forward, walking until they are separated by only a small margin, getting in her personal space like it's his. Rahab curls itself away from the creature before them, keeping itself behind Lucifer's neck and looking a little like it was considering climbing down the back of his shirt.

"You are a child playacting at godhood on a lone ball of dirt, not knowing what you imitate. Remember that children should be seen and not heard."

Pancakes skitters away from the approaching thing with a cringe of terror, burbling her intent to Get out of here, mistress! as faintly as she dares.

Illyria holds her ground.

"I chose not my vessel. It was selected. My Qwa Ha Zahn chose poorly." The shell is fragile, emotional. Illyria devoured her soul upon entry, but there are...remnants. Unnecessary. And irrelevant. She will not be barred from her destruction. Even if this shell less intimidating than her foe's. It is also shorter. An intolerance.

"You witnessed but one universe," she retorts, the flare of her anger evident in eyes and stance and speech. "I traveled all."

You traveled many, corrects Pancakes, even the world without shrimp. "All" is a stretch.

"I am reborn," the God-King hisses. "You are tattered and weary. And I will not hesitate to cast you aside."

The vessel that Lucifer inhabits still has its soul, still has its consciousness; Nick sleeps peacefully, unaware, his reward for the offering of his flesh. Lucifer does not have to destroy the soul to take the body like an animal, like a ravenous, mindless beast.

"And do you think that you're the only one who can move between universes, orphaned god-king?"

Contrary to her increasing anger, Lucifer stands glacially calm and immovable, like he is made of marble instead of flesh and blood. If he is bothered by her outbursts and increasing aggression, he makes no outward appearance of it; let her have her snits. Let her make her threats. Words are nothing more than words.

He cocks his head at her, acknowledgement of what she claims she can do.

"Try it, and I will unmake you."

"I will enjoy watching you try, creature."

Okay, says Pancakes, more than a little frenetic at this point, I am intervening, mistress. This is an intervention. That is the DEVIL.

"My shell cannot be unmade," she says it without inflection. It is a constant of the universe, immutable. Just as she is. Her being has been carved into the universe for longer than any vermin can remember. "And nor can I."

Your shell can still be HURT. And I can feel that TOO, Pancakes cries with ever-increasing desperation.

The dragon's claws bite into his shoulder, sharply enough that they may have drawn little pricks of blood from his vessel. Its breath is warm against the patch of skin behind his ear, where it whispers tersely this is not wise, and what point does this serve, and it may be able to injure you. Lucifer pays it about as much heed as he would a fly buzzing near his head.

"There are ways to deal with abominations like yourself," he says. "I'm willing to give it the old college try."

She wouldn't have one of his brother's angel blades, nor a weapon of Heaven; there is little she can do that he fears, that he cannot endure and recover from. Pain is nothing to the Devil.

Illyria bears no weapons but she requires none. Her power is immeasurable. Her shell is hardened, its skin like armor. It is enough.

NO IT'S NOT, yelps Pancakes.

"And there are ways to wipe out stains such as you," she retorts. "I am finding this stain to be tiresome."

MISTRESS.

He spreads his hands in a wide, encompassing gesture.

"Consider this an invitation," he says, and the words are barely out of his mouth before Rahab's weight is gone from his shoulders in a rush of wing beats. Because this apparently is a thing that's happening, this right here, and even dragons don't want to get caught in the crossfire between two old, powerful things.

"All your old god talk is boring me. If I wanted to hear flowery prose about abominations with big egos, I'd have picked up a little Lovecraft. Let's see your teeth, crawling horror."

Pancakes is gone from her side, possibly following the example set by the dragon and making herself scarce. Traitor.

The Pit-thing has tested her. The God-King will have her way with it. She will have her violence.

The first blow is confident and fierce with no anticipation for resistance. Blue and red intermingle in searing burst as she swings her shell's knuckles to collide with the Lucifer's jaw, a conflict of contrasting auras, and she is shocked to find it - strong. Stronger than she? No. Not possible. Not for her. Its shell is penetrable but the thing that writhes underneath, that dark and powerful and ancient thing, it is like nothing she has seen before, it is the furthest thing from the amoebas that crawl the planet even if it drapes itself in one of their skins.

Illyria does not feel fear. She does not. She does not. But this thing, this abomination, it does not yield to her as easily as anything she has confronted before. What is this.

The blow rings across Lucifer's face and he is slightly surprised that it's strong enough to turn his head. There is blood on the vessel's lip where it's been split, a smear of bright red across his chin rough with a perpetual day's worth of stubble; the injury seals itself up smoothly, like pulling a zipper, and he doesn't bother to get rid of the blood.

"Interesting," he says, the taste of copper on his tongue. "Allow me to retort."

His Grace surges up and lashes out in a telekinetic blow; in the close quarters of the woods, trees surround them on almost all sides. There is little room to be had that doesn't involve heading towards a thick trunk.

It slams into her, the intangible force of projection that drives her backwards, rams her shell into a tree with the brutal, sickening crack of velocity striking against mass. The thickness of the tree splinters, its trunk groaning with the weight of the impact, and, broken, it crashes to the ground.

Illyria does not crash to the ground. She twists to land on her feet when the trunk halts her trajectory. Now that is a foreign sensation - pain, echoing and persistent. An ache. Unique, and different.

Beneath the stoicism she is swarming fury but she is also satisfaction. Excitement, were that a thing a God-King could feel. Here, now, is an unstoppable force to make battle with her immovable object. A challenge, truly.

Her shell smiles. Illyria does so enjoy her violence.

She flies at the thing, flinging one hand outward to project her own force, an indefinable surge of motion aimed at its shell's chest.

She is quick, quicker than he anticipated, and the blow catches him right in the center of his chest; he is knocked backwards, striking the trunk of a tree with his shoulder and tearing out a chunk of it with a terrible crack. He never hits the ground, however, but beats his wings once and is gone, tugging space around himself.

The fact that this abomination can touch him is both abhorrent and exhilarating. Abhorrent because it is a disgusting, vile creature the likes of which his Father would have found hateful in His sight. But it has been a long, long time since he has had a challenge in a fight, and longer still since that challenge has been someone other than a beloved brother. Fighting Michael or Gabriel had always been tainted by the fact that they are family and he loves them, loves them fierce and sick, but this?

This is practically righteous smiting.

The next instant, he unbends space around himself and is before her again, using the momentum of flight as he lashes out with his fist towards her midsection.

The thing can bend and meld space-time indiscriminately; Illyria's enthusiasm for the fight dims in part as she fully conceptualizes this. In her age the streams of time and space were hers to command and displace. No other being was to hold that right, and yet this Pit-creatures wields its hold over its own translocation with ease. The injustice of it grates at her.

She has no further time to contemplate injustice, nor do anything but to brace herself for the blow whose thrust propels her shell in a stunted parabolic arc through the woods, skidding over leaves and scum and dirt until she can plant feet on the ground and reestablish her inertia. The whole of her shell aches, distantly. She will pay that no further attention than is necessary.

The Lucifer has this advantage. Spacial matter is its plaything here, and she will have to compensate.

She is still fast. Illyria closes the distance between her and her enemy, unfurling to strike at it. She will target her foe's shell, as it has shown that it can bleed like any other. Physicality. Substance. A violent fist that punches at its abdomen with enough force that would tear through an ordinary body, but meets thick and crackling resistance here.

There is a certain satisfaction to be found in watching a body go ragdolling through the air, propelled by the strength of his arm. There has always been a particular kind of pleasure to be found in the physical act of deconstruction that cannot be found through other means, like coercing a body's molecules to all go off in different directions. Maybe it's from the effort that goes into it, or maybe it's just pure visceral enjoyment of feeling someone else's viscera on his hands.

Either way: Lucifer enjoys the specific, practical application of violence. He very much enjoys it here.

He does not as much enjoy some eldritch abomination's fist sinking into his vessel's stomach.

This blow, however, he anticipated; not fast enough to block it, but enough to brace for it and avoid being moved backward more than a step or two. Were he human, the strike would've liquified his organs and sent him flying, but poor old Nick here is capable of withstanding so much more abuse with Lucifer's Grace healing and bolstering him. The main thing, though, is that he doesn't have to waste time in getting back up, but can grab a large, splintered chunk of tree and hurl it telekinetically at her; she's quick and slippery, so the best option is to try to pin her down, possibly against one of the sturdier trunks. Possibly pin her literally, if her vessel isn't quite as armored as she thinks.

Pleasure, victory, fluid and blazing, wells within her for a glorious instant to see her enemy fold beneath her fist, as is rightful.

To Illyria's indignation, this triumph is soon crumpled by the abrupt presence of a tree, launched at her shell with momentum enough to smash her into a secondary vertical target - another tree, she soon knows with outrage - and hold her in psychical vice. The disgrace of the act repulses her. She would not be pinned by something so mundane and mortal, she will not be crushed by mere dead bark, she will not allow herself to be driven like some bug into dust when it is she, chaos and conquest incarnate, that has always been the heel that performs the crushing.

The intangible kinetic force squeezes at her, but she forms a mental spearhead of her own, hardens it like her shell, drives it at the substance pinioning her, and with a high, tearing scream of her wrath made aural, she

shatters it, fragments of bark and dead things pinwheeling away, dropping her to land in bipedal configuration, square to her opponent.

"Do not threaten me with sticks, creature," she growls.

Fragments of wood fly off in every direction except the one that Lucifer stands in, a little slice of the destruction pie that is the area around her left clear. His meatsuit can be damaged, but he likes to keep it intact, thank you kindly. Nick looks so much better when he doesn't have splinters.

The air is barely clear of debris before he moves again, pressing the attack; giving her space gives her time to regroup, to strategize, and he wants her on the defensive as much as possible. She may be quick, but he is strong and persistent and tireless. His fists are what sledgehammers hope to be when they grow up.

"I thought it an appropriate way to answer your love taps."

Fierce and unrelenting fists strike at her and they would crack bone if her shell still had a skeletal structure to speak of; the organic material has long since been hollowed out to make way for the writhing mass of darkened eldritch being within.

The writhing mass of darkened eldritch being is losing.

Unacceptable.

Her shell requires immense kinetic force before it will reflect physical damage but she can feel the strength of the blows weakening her shell's hardened skin, tempting the leak of blood, her blood, the only substance that still remains within this battered shell that was simply not constructed to contain the entirety of the God-King Illyria.

The leaf-strewn ground will be her traction, she just needs to escape the rain of fists from this Pit-creature, Illyria will not allow its triumph over her, this victory will be hers. She braces her shell, steels herself against the percussive repetition, retreats, retreats, retreats, until finally -

She can evade the oncoming creature, if only for a second, but that is what she needs. She ducks and slips behind it to deal a vicious strike to its back.

She is a slippery and clever thing, and all it takes is one imperfectly timed blow for her to get away, to evade the hammer-fall battery of his fists and slip away. He snarls, slightly off-balance from a blow he expected to connect hitting only empty air, and by the time he registers that she has moved directly behind him, it's too late for him to react.

The strike would have been agony to his vessel if he bothered to allow pain signals through Nick's nerves; it would have been lethal to a human, strong enough to snap the spine like brittle wood and rupture the delicate organs underneath. Lucifer stumbles forward and nearly loses his footing entirely, catching himself with one hand against the rough bark of a tree.

He will not be brought to his knees by some Lovecraft reject.

"You realize," he says as the bark around his hand goes white with frost, "that we can't actually do any actual damage to each other here, don't you? It's a dream. As amusing as it is, it's ultimately just vanity."

He pushes himsellf upright, and the only sign that he even took a devastating blow to the spine is that his back cracks.

She retreats further, watching the ice curl from its hands, shell tensed in preparation for a secondary onslaught. Yet it is the Pit-thing's words that disconcert her (emotion, not hers, belonging solely to the shell) the most.

"Impossible," says she, but the words lack their ordinary conviction. Dreaming is - is mortal, and Illyria does not sleep, not in the human definition of the term. The thought of it repulses her.

And yet - here, this Pit-creature, the Morningstar, so clearly not of her world nor of any world she recognizes, and if it is to be believed than it has surely been drawn into this dream when it should not be, not with all its power and Hellfire.

"This shell does not require sleep. How is it that I dream?" The shell is radiating confusion. It is highly distracting.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

He turns, standing at a profile to the former God-King, and brushes a few imaginary specks of dust off of the sleeves of his jacket. Nick's clothes have gone through a lot in the time since Lucifer took him, but through the Apocalypse and what came after, they've remained exactly the same. Not a stitch out of place.

"There's something very powerful in the universe I'm in that has influence even over beings like us. Every once in a while, it pulls us into this... shared consciousness." He makes a wide gesture, encompassing everything around them. "You've simply gotten caught in the area of effect, it seems."

It did the same to him, once-- pulled him into a dream with Gabriel before he'd even been heading down into the Cage.

Powerful forces in the universe that disregard other powerful forces in the universe are immensely grating. Illyria cannot decide which powerful force she is angrier with. Ordinarily she would settle for the one most within striking distance, but if the Morningstar is to be believed then such actions would be pointless.

"Loathsome," murmurs Illyria, her shell's lip curling, "to think we would walk in minds with mortals."

The Morningstar has made no further move to attack her, she notes with a faint tremor of disappointment. The battle would have been glorious and could have raged on for many days and nights. They could tear a hole in the dreamstuff-consciousness and rip themselves back into waking. She will not act as though the thought does not tempt her but with the understanding that battles fought on this plane will be useless and without consequence, she finds that her interest in resuming their engagement has waned.

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