if you're feeling dead i'll be your reanimator

[whichcraft]

WHO: Summer and YOU!
WHAT: All over Chroma!
WHERE: Various times in the month of October!
WHEN: Catch-all prompts for the month of October, some open, some closed! See below for links to open top-levels.
WARNINGS: Will be marked in their individual threads!


QUEST 29 (SKELETON WAR) — OTA! | QUEST 30 (TRICK OR TREATING) — OTA!

Comments

[whichcraft]

[Oh, oh, look at that, it's a clever boy up to something on the verge of battle, and it really shouldn't make her heart go flip-flop but boy, it sure does.]

See you on the flip side, gunboy.

[And off she goes to get up to her vantage point, perched like a raven and tracking Prompto carefully as she watches to try to see what he'll do.]

[photoshooter]

[For a while, he just waits and watches until he's sure she's far enough away to be safe. Then, he calls the Lion Heart to hand, blue streak bright along the muzzle, peers out along the edge of the field, and spies a likely rattle of movement at the treeline.]

Lights, camera--wait, skip the camera. Lights, action!

[He holds his gun sideways and shoots high, then brings his arm in to shield his eyes, letting the gun dematerialize as his Starshell bursts into being, glowing like a low, miniature sun above the trees. The light's bright enough to alert more than the couple idle skellies out here on their wandering patrol; they're the first to stumble onto the field, but there are more on the way, clattering eagerly through the woods.]

H--hey! Over here!

[Prompto spares one nerve-wracking second to jump up and down, waving his arms, before turning and starting to bolt for it. After a couple seconds, though, he stops and looks back. Glances at the hunting blind. Stares back at the poor creatures coming up the way.

Man, they're slow. This won't be any fun for poor Summer at all.]

That's right. Come on, guys...

[Now walking slowly backwards in their blind's direction, he beckons the bony troops on like slow, lumbering, trainable animals. When more appear further afield, he sidles that way to bring them closer together.]

Here, skelly, skelly, skelly, skelly...

[Oh. Okay, crap, that's enough. There's a bunch of them now, and Prompto breaks and runs for real until he's close enough. Then, he turns one last time. He summons the big gun. The heavy machine weapon Cid fixed up for them. He waits.

They're only feet from him when Prompto fires the gun--knocking himself back on his butt--and a big, black sphere pops out of it, sucking the skeletons together like a vacuum's opened in the field.]

[whichcraft]

[Fortunately, Summer's not precisely the kind of person who defines battle as "fun", categorically, so she's not too worried about having a good time at the moment; she's mostly just shuffling her weight back and forth from foot to foot on her perch, trying to find a rhythm while she watches Prompto enact his plans down below.

It takes her a minute to figure out what he's doing — and she's momentarily dazzled by the Starshell, herself — but from up high it's always easier to see the patterns that armies make when they move, and how they converge and disperse on the two-dimensional plane of a battlefield.

She sees what Prompto's attempting, sort of, and it becomes clearer and clearer the more he darts around. But then all of a sudden they're close to him, and the timing of this plan goes from leisurely to critical when whatever he does knocks him down to the ground, impeding his ability to flee —

But then the gravisphere starts to draw in the skeletons, sucking them toward it like a black hole, and abruptly, she gets it.]

Okay.

[This, then, is familiar. Standing in a hunter's blind, standing on one of the peaks of Sorceror's Isle — it's all the same, whether there are waves of water or of grass down below her, whether the targets are hapless sailors or undead abominations. She remembers this rhythm: breathe out, dig deep, let her magic flow up and out of her body, into her hands, ready to be forged.

Battle magic always feels a little different than parlor tricks. There's something raw to it, something sharp. It acknowledges its nature, that it exists to destroy. It comes with the realization that she's calling upon this magic with the intention that her enemies will die.

Good. Fuck 'em.

She brings down her hands, and the battlefield erupts as a firebomb drops in a rough circle with Prompto's gravity sphere as its centerpoint, scorching bone and evaporating ligament as it hits.]

[photoshooter]

Whoa!

[Were Prompto not already flat on his ass, the explosive force would blast him off his feet for sure. As it is, he shields himself again from the searing heat and light--(ten years from now, maybe it'll feel familiar, crouched all together in a bunch to protect their King from the flames)--rolls, and scrambles to his feet, dropping his machine gun back into the Armiger so he can run like the dickens.]

Whoa!

[He whoops it again, louder, directing it up to her.]

Girl, you're on fire! Not literally. But everything else is! Literally!

[Prompto spares one look back over his shoulder before he reaches the hunting blind and clambers up, panting and a little sooty and grinning.]

Maybe we didn't even need this. Though I guess the fire could bring more, maybe, and we can just chill. [He pauses and tilts his head.] Unless you're tired? That was a pretty big boom.

[whichcraft]

I know, right?!

[She flexes her fingers a little bit as Prompto comes climbing up next to her, like the movement is helping with keeping the magic at the ready in her fingers. It's not, of course, and it would be silly to assume otherwise, but it's not like she really knows how her magic works on a fundamental level, and sometimes it's just about doing the little things that will make her feel better, in the end.]

I'm okay. I can usually drop a couple of those before I get too worn out. They're big and flashy, but not really all that complicated.

[Even so, she's opening up the front of her cloak and throwing one of the folds around his shoulders, which is either the equivalent of being cute and sharing a scarf, or just her paranoia talking as she tries to help keep him a little bit more hidden from enemy view.]

[photoshooter]

[He smiles, ducks his head and lets some fire-unrelated warmth rise to his face, and then scoots obligingly closer. It's big, but it wasn't meant for two people to wear at once--or maybe it was, but only like this. Close. Nestled together for sharing secrets; or being, themselves, the secrets shared.]

Okay. I can pick 'em off from here on. Unless a bunch suddenly come, and then Hot Stuff Kabooms can be our last getaway move.

[Nothing's coming yet, though, so what he pulls from the Armiger isn't his sniper rifle. They smell warm and buttery, in fact, and he hands one to Summer.]

Corn on the cob? Too bad no one's found any corn that'll pop yet. That'd be perfect right now.

[whichcraft]

...You literally just keep hot buttered corn in your magic closet.

[You butter believe she's going to take that and tuck into it, though, because hot damn.]

You're sure we couldn't just explode one of these and get popcorn? ...I don't know how popcorn works when you're not buying it from the store.

[photoshooter]

[Hnomf nomf nomf. Bless Iggy Scientia, the Armiger's infinite storage, and whatever ancient genius invented butter.]

I'm pretty sure that's not how it works? Though I mean, we only tried it with fire once and not with exploding. Only got really bad burnt corn for it, and Iggy wouldn't let us eat it.