DRAIN YOU OF YOUR SANITY

[fakethulhu.livejournal.com]

WHO: The Emissary and co. versus everybody
WHERE: Off the coast of Battery Park and throughout the City
WHEN: Just before midnight October 31st (technically November 1st)
WARNINGS: Violence and frightening imagery
SUMMARY: Drawn by Illidan’s magic, a demon from beyond reality has come forth to help the Betrayer doom the world. The battle that saves or destroys everything has begun. Happy Halloween, Cityverse!
FORMAT: Paragraph to start, whatever works after.

It came.

The Moon of midnight on All Hallow’s Eve shone wetly on the waters of the City’s Harbour. From beneath the surface a rumbling could be heard, as though emanating far, far below, within abyssal depths and ancient fathoms that could not possibly be there. First there was a ripple, then a wave, then the creature began to arise from the waters. It slid upwards and upwards, rising smoothly and continuously out of the ocean like a living edifice, a vast Thing ancient and immovable, a walking island sunken no longer. The head then the shoulders then the wings then the misshapen body came forth, yet still more of Its bulk remained beneath the waters, with slow thighs beginning to move It towards the City. All around it the sky and the ocean seemed to darken with an almost positive quality, as though jet-black ink was spilling into the universe itself. The Emissary had come.

Water flowed off Its body in torrents, mixing with drool and ichor. An unending series of sickly slopping and slobbering noises came from the twitching forest of tentacles around Its mouth, the product of a ravening hunger. The ocean heaved immensely around the Titan form, waves thrashing from the power of Its body. How to describe such a thing? How to even conceive of such horror, outside of madness or nightmare? That immense octopus head crowning the terrible body, those dragon-bat wings sprouting from Its back, those rubbery, sea-green scales, the mingled and loathsome aspects of the reptile, the mollusc- and the human! For it was on two feet that It moved, and with two arms did the Emissary reach out toward the morsels It slavered for.

An aura of panic and despair announced It, greater than any herald’s trumpet. Merely to look upon that incomprehensible shape and its alien geometry was to gamble with one’s sanity. Its very presence emanated a sense of immeasurable insignificance and absence of meaning, as though all the Earth was plankton in the presence of a whale. It moved with a shambling, unwholesome motion that had nothing to do with clumsiness, gathering speed. A mountain walked or stumbled! Toward the City, toward the Well. Toward the end of the world.

[ooc: goddamndoomchat is open on AIM if anyone's interested! There are some people fighting the Emissary who have not been slotted into threads yet; we will work those out as we go along! The raid against Illidan in Central Park will be posted by Jill later. Have fun everybody!]

Comments

[out_of_time]

Jack brought the car to a halt so they could talk outside of the radio. His response was summarized by him stepping out of the car and pumping the shotgun in his hands. "We need to bring these things down before they bring the City down. It's that simple. Can you give me a location on the nearest group of targets?"

Because it wasn't as though Jack had just been chased by his 'targets' a few seconds ago or anything. Nope, he had to get right back into going after them.

[scarabsuited]

Jaime hovered down to earshot, blinking at that blatant display of manly badassitude. But only for a moment; he got right down to doing as asked, tilting his head and following the chatter Scarab was giving him while scanning out the area. Three miles wasn't very much in a city of that scale, but when the threat was so massive...

"Definitely," he replied, nodding before looking back. "Would you rather drive or fly?"

[out_of_time]

Jack had gotten a lot of close calls in his car tonight, and the demons kept going places the SUV couldn't follow. Flying it was. "If you can give me a lift, I'd-"

A velociraptor ran past them. Jack raised his shotgun in reflex, saw that it wasn't trying to kill them but was rather running towards the nearest set of monsterlike sounds, then blinked.

"Blue Beetle," he said. "Did you just see a dinosaur?"

If this was the first sign of that Thing driving him insane, he wanted to head it off before it could get any worse.

[scarabsuited]

Scarab hadn't said anything about the raptor until after-the-fact. Damn magic. Jaime's gape followed the thing as it ran off, as though he were simply watching someone mildly unusual hop on by.

He slowly looked back at Jack.

"Um. Yeah. Yeah, I did. Are...dinosaurs part of the apocalypse?"

[out_of_time]

"We haven't had any intel on anything like that." Jack was linefacing slightly more than usual. The last thing they needed was yet another set of monsters trying to kill the universe tonight. "Can you take us in for a closer look?" Judging from the strange and unsettling noises echoing off the buildings around them, there was a fight of some kind up ahead, and getting nearer.

[scarabsuited]

"Sure can. Here–"

One of Jaime's fingers lengthened, the blue tip spouting a beam which quickly shaped itself into a flattened construct at the end, big enough to stand or crouch on.

"Hop on, and we can go see."

[out_of_time]

Jack crouched on the... light-thing... without any hesitation. The City was under attack and there was no time to process how damn weird this was. He fought back vertigo as Jaime flew them into the air, tried not to look down, forced himself to treat it as another flight in a plane or a helicopter. The night wind pulled at his jacket, and he kept a tight grip on his shotgun.

They didn't have far to go. If Jaime flew them towards where the raptor had run, they would see something extraordinary, impossible. An apartment courtyard had been transformed into a battle scene taken from dream or delirium, a pack of fanged beasts straight out of a fantasy world's museum pouncing and slashing on a crowd of slavering tentacled fiends. Jack stared as a demon threw a raptor into a window, then was pulled down by another jumping onto its back and slicing with sickle claws. Even after everything he'd been through in this universe, it was really something.

"Are you seeing this?" He asked.

[scarabsuited]

Jack's chauffeur was rather slow in responding, staring slack-jawed down at the Jurassic...Narnian nightmare at play. Sure, weird things have happened before. But scale and scope counted for a lot, especially in the heat of things.

There was a giant...giant bashing two Spawn together by the head. It made a very unpleasant, squishy sound.

"Sorry, what-?" Back to reality, Jaime did a double-take back to Jack. Seeing this? "Dude, how can I not? I've never dropped acid in my life."

He shook his head, still marveling at the scene. But then it dawned on him, and his gaze slowly drew back to his passenger.

"...Which ones do we shoot?"

[out_of_time]

Jack thought fast. "We know the things with tentacles are attacking the City, and the others are fighting them," he said, speaking loudly above the fight din below them. "Take me lower, and be ready to take evasive action. I'm going to take a shot at the tentacles. If any of the others decide to attack us, we'll know that they're hostile too." In which case, him and Jaime would just wipe out everything in that courtyard.

Jack raised the shotgun to his shoulder, braced his feet against the ephemeral platform, and took aim at a Spawn that had its tendrils around a raptors neck in a strangling grip. "Ready?"

[scarabsuited]

In response to the proposed action, the construct holding Jack aloft grew to hip-height; not quite a safety belt or a railing, but it would at least keep him from toppling over and to a broken neck when Jaime accelerated. Along with that adjustment, Scarab was targeting every moving shape, prehistoric or not, and rattling off the usual list of kabooms with a few subtle suggestions for bigger kabooms it knew would be rejected, but there was a kind of solace gained by its host knowing how overpowered they were together. It gave Jaime a chance to take a resolved breath, nodding shortly.

"Kind of," Jaime uttered after swallowing. The arm not occupied with holding up the construct began melting and reforming to the weapon of choice. "But let's do this thing anyway...!"

He bent forward, head first to steer them down, leveling out to keep his speed from becoming too reckless. Omitting the dinosaurs and giants (for now), Jaime launched electrified shots out at the oceanesque beasts, trying not to hurl at the stink that came from their insides on the outside, charred.

[out_of_time]

Jack's shotgun boomed through the swoop. He kept his aim steady as the fight rolled by beneath them, aiming and firing at whichever Spawn weren't too close to a potential ally. The creature that had been choking the raptor flopped onto its side. Another took half a dozen pellets in the leg, bounded to the side bellowing, and was stomped underfoot by a stone behemoth. Jack watched the other side of the fight as he and Jaime zoomed by. Not one of them took any hostile action towards the heroes.

He looked up at Blue Beetle. "They're friendlies!"

[scarabsuited]

"I'm okay with it!" Jaime shouted back, a bit strained. If he unclenched his teeth for too long, he was liable to spew his guts. The crosshairs marking the dinos and giants flickered and vanished from his view, and Scarab redoubled efforts to target and take out the unfriendlies with greater vigor.

Surprisingly, it didn't take too long. He even did half a sweep back around to be sure.

"This block's clear! Where to, sir?"

[out_of_time]

Jack had never really appreciated it before, but seeing those blue bolts scour every hostile in sight out of existence drove it home: Blue Beetle was a flying artillery platform. He was amazed, but didn't let it show. Instead, he fed new shells into his shotgun. The friendly creatures below them were beginning to disperse and move on in search of new targets. Jack took a breath, then was ready to do the same.

"Scan for the next closest concentration of hostiles," he ordered. He looked up and around at the City under attack, the impossible, mind-hurting bulk of the Emissary looming in the distance, the darkened streets from which inhuman howls sounded. Happy Halloween. "This night's not over yet."