Duel:Cintra v Kovl, Chartsend Fighting Championship

Duelists: Cintra vs. Kovl.
Duel: Traditional 3 posts each, with final defense. 15 minute posting limit.
Stakes: Autohit post. Advancement in the Chartsend Fighting Championship.
Judges: Alareik, Celinia and Hildegarde.

Setting

Private Gardens

You find yourself in a walled garden, its walls climbing with honeysuckle and jasmine. Large leafy plants overtake the place, many of them exotic, from lands far beyond Hollow. An area close to the manor house is carefully cultivated with vegetables and herbs. In one corner that catches the afternoon sun is a bower with a wide marble bench and a table where a book and wine glass have been casually left.

Duel Start

Kovl floats into the gardens, the agreed-upon meeting place between Kovl and a Chartsend contestant named Cintra. His emerald eyes land on Cintra's human guise. She looks human and smells human, but Kovl is not ready to see if she tastes human because that would be weird. The illusionist nods to his partner. "Annnnd go!" The announcement is short, sweet, and could be considered a cheap move, but this doesn't stop Kovl from whispering a few words under his breath for his first attack. The table and its contents (a wine glass and a book), a bit of scenery the pixie picked out as he entered, immediately lurch forward by some unseen hand. The flying table and its accoutrements are aimed at Cintra and moving at an alarming rate. The illusion is completely silent. The pixie can't be bothered by adding sound to such a sight during such a quick attack. And Kovl hopes his fake table's image completely blocks its real counterpart, which sits steady and untouched, from view of his opponent. If Cintra believes what she is seeing is reality, her body will react as if it is hit, suffering whatever damages her mind would perceive to occur.

Cintra is never at ease, even when she appears to be. Nevertheless, the speed of her foe's onslaught startles her enough that she almost misses the flicker of magic apparent in his conjuring. She thus cannot entirely banish the thought of the illusion before it strikes, but its impact is perhaps less than ideal if damage were intended. With a breathy "Oof" made more of surprise than pain, Cintra trains her glare on the fluttering pixie. "You're a devil, you are. Trying to trick me that way. What's a woman to do?" She even affects a petulant tone and accompanying pout, all the while her own counterattack is going to work. During her brief stay in the garden, Cintra has noticed many bees sampling the honeysuckle and jasmine growing wild on the stone walls, and these insects have given her an idea. Focusing her considerable talents upon the two or three specimens she can currently see, the illusionist bends forward, as if still winded by the phantom impact to her middle, picks up a stone from the ground and hurls it, not toward the pixie but toward a particularly lush bunch of flowers. Her spell flies with the rock, and suddenly the trio of honeybees is a small but angry swarm, a mirage which descends with all its insectile fury upon the target of its aggression. A five-inch pixie menaced by several dozen angry bees might be too distracted to notice the illusory quality of all but three of his attackers, so Cintra flicks out both well-shaped hands just after the casting of the enchanted stone. Small skeins of fire lick outward above and below the swarm and the pixie hopefully caught up within it, a safety precaution to sear Kovl significantly should he simply bolt for escape.

Kovl's eyes trail the rock's trajectory to see bees: an army... NO, a legion! The tiny pixie begins to panic at the sight of many animals, the proportionate size of dogs, cascading toward his being with their incessant annoying buzzing and nasty stingers. Did Kovl's buzzing sound that annoying? Oh. That's why people try to swat him away. These thoughts are drown by terror. More words are spoken: an incantation conjuring an illusory box of stone around him. Because the bees have minds like his opponent, they cannot possibly conceive of a way in. With the swarm around him, Kovl darts at full speed toward where he thinks his opponent waits, evading what he believes to be real flames below him. Ow. OW! The heat of his opponent's attack only fuels him to fly faster. A window in his shield appears to guide his trajectory to Cintra. His window is replaced by stone every time a bee comes into view to keep her out. Oh, that woman will pay! Kovl brings the bees to Cintra's side, hoping they will strike her flesh. He reaches into a pouch at his side to retreive pixie dust, mixed with the most evil of intentions. Allowing his illusion to create another window in his box for less than a second, Kovl tosses the evil dust toward Cintra, a dust which if meets Cintra, will manifest pain so severe that it will feel she is burning alive within her skin.

Cintra cannot help but be impressed by the stunning display her adversary performs; the midair stone box, which somehow seems to repel the real and ephemeral bees alike, is a trick she files away for future analysis. The moment she sees that blocky missile arrowing in her direction, however, she relies on her keen instincts for defense. Cintra casts both arms wide and falls backward over a low stone bench, bringing her splayed hands together as Kovl's tiny fortress approaches. A fan of intense reddish light bursts upward and forward, an innate shielding mechanism meant to do nothing more than keep her transformation from her impish assailant's vision. Now a pixie herself, and afforded protection from both bees and dust by the bulky bench behind which she hides, Cintra is nevertheless dusted lightly by an errant draft containing minute particles of Kovl's insidious powder. Her tiny body twitches in agony, but Cintra bites back the scream that wants to tear from her throat and grimly sets herself to paying her mischievous kinsman back tenfold for his attack. The thick bench behind which Cintra crouches is only a foot or two from the garden's exterior wall, a barricade draped with many flowers and vines. Trusting that her foe's frightened flight has taken him over top of her crouching form, if only for a moment, Cintra weaves tendrils of magic into the creepers on the wall, which suddenly appear to lash out at the hovering enemy, stone fortress or not, in an effort to grab him and squeeze the life from his minuscule bones. Never one to trust an illusion by itself, Cintra presses one hand into the muddy ground, finds a little water there, and compresses it into a tiny spike of coldest ice, which she sends shooting straight upward, meaning to either skewer or freeze her flying target. Hesitation, or the very real belief that he has been snared, may each be enough for that lethal spike to find its mark.

Kovl allows another window to form briefly on his box shield of tricks to see that his opponent is now gone. Is that woman invisible? He let a cry escape from his mouth as the tendrils of magic approach his being. That ferocious fiend's fixated unfriendly fury lashes out at him, and though his stone fortress flies farther up to the furls of leaves above him, one such tendril latches onto the pixie's foot. Kovl's realization that he cannot get away hasn't dawned quite yet. A needle, pulled from his pixiekin satchel of lessening grows proportionate to human size, forming a tiny piercing sword in the illusionist's hand. He stabs at the tendrils in futile effort and wretches his body in a twisted form from the incoming ice spike below him. His efforts to escape only awarded him with a pierced thigh as the ice steals a chunk of his muscle. The pixie screams in agony. No. This is not happening. Kovl's dark green eyes scan the ground below him, and not seeing his opponent frightens him to no end. The pixie glows blue after a new incantation and his box blinks from existance. An outward blast of azure illusionary flame erupts in all directions as he hopes his foe is within range. He hopes this flame will force the attached tendril to furl in his attack's wake and incinerate the opponent who thinks she could challenge him.

Cintra feels her lips curl into a grimace of pleasure as she takes note of Kovl's plight above. Not one to be arrogant, she does not necessarily believe that one so wily will fall entirely prey to her trap; so thinking, the pixie starts running as fast as her aching body will carry her along the little trench behind the bench, before taking flight some nine feet to the right. She is just lifting airborne when the illusionary flame announces itself, a telltale blue radiance seen from the tail of her left eye. She feels heat, looses a thin scream nearly too high-pitched to hear and beats her small wings all the more furiously in order to escape the blast. Soon she is flying twenty feet or so above the garden, singed and shaken but still very much alive. There is one large difference between the pixie formerly on the ground and the one now bobbing and weaving in the air: this flying fey is furious. Weaving about herself a cloak of shade from nearby plant life - the better to confuse the eye, if only for a moment - Cintra takes in a deep breath and bellows it out in a terrific, thundering shout loud enough to shake stone. Such a titanic voice cannot possibly be anything but magic, and it speaks a single, power-laced word. A second later, it is answered by two calls, one quiet and the other much louder, as if some great beast approaches. The wind appears to stir, the flowers to bend, as something enormous swoops in low over the private gardens...a white dragon, mouth agape. Cintra is near where the dragon's tail might swing, and thus afforded a good vantage, when the mighty saurian belches forth a cone of intense cold. Both the beast and its breath are unreal, a terrible illusion which has taxed nearly all of Cintra's remaining reserves, but one of her kin's greatest racial weaknesses is now raining down on the far side of the clearing. Aware of and thus immune to her own illusion, Cintra almost shivers anyway, so intense is the blast of frigid breath from her conjured ice dragon. Flagging with fatigue now, nearly spent, Cintra allows herself to drop groundward as she takes from her hip two needles, enchanted and properly sized for her tiny hands. These she flings toward the endpoint of the dragon's icy blast, hoping to peg Kovl with one or both missiles, using her kin's ability to sense magic as a rudimentary form of target acquisition. Each needle possesses a potent sedative which will quickly render Kovl unconscious with even a light scratch, whereafter his helpless body will be easy to dispose of. If the spectacular nature of the illusion does not quite literally frighten the pixie to death, and even if the needles miss their mark, it will take a strong mind to ward off the potent psychological attack unleashed; Kovl may very well believe himself frozen and, by so doing, stop his own heart dead in his chest.

Kovl's head turns to his opponent's cry. A pixie like himself? Ah ha. His own kin. Kovl can hardly fault her for her methods. The pixie winces in pain as he lifts the knife from the boot on his injured right leg and cuts the illusonary tendril from his foot. Keeping his affected appendage steady, the illusionist rushes toward Cintra, only to see a magnificent beast of cold approach. Holy Sven's mother-in-law! A frost drake??! Out of instinct and terror, Kovl lets his wings go limp just before a blistering blast of frost heads his direction. The pixie drops quickly, allowing gravity to be his source of escape. Nearing the ground, Kovl barely dodges the drake's wave of death spewing from its jaws, but frigid cold numbs Kovl's wings, hindering his attempted flawless descent. You see, when the pixie nears the ground, he attempts to flare his wings to slow his fall, but no. Someone always has to ruin everything. What a party pooper. The pixie's wings only barely open, stunned from the cold, causing his plummet to be like that of a skydiver whose parachute opens at the last second. Sharp pain shoots up his leg as he lands. Kovl, falling flat on his face, misses one of Cintra's needles, but the last of her thrown sharp missles pierces the top of his prone left shoulder. The illusionist groans and uses one arm to scramble to his feet, nearly collapsing again from his shredded thigh's

Winner: Cintra