Duel:Cintra v Pyde, Chartsend Fighting Championship

Duelists: Cintra vs. Pyde.
Duel: Traditional 3 posts each, with final defense. 15 minute posting limit.
Stakes: Autohit post. Advancement in the Chartsend Fighting Championship.
Judges: Alphonz, Linken and Mythayus

Cliff Caves

Pyde informs the guards that he is a member of the Tournament that is going on in the town. Asking permission to use the cave ahead as the battle ground so that no one could be harmed that needn't be so. He bows politely, and when the guards give permission he enters. Quickly hiding away the same size bundle as he in a place not so easily found by folks or creatures larger than he. The fermin stands about 1ft tall, the runt of his litter. Well groomed fur and a well dressed individual he deposits some pouches and tightens a larger one on his belt. He awaits his opponent in the cave.

Cintra makes her way up the steep cliff path, a chubby human with a frizz of red hair on her small head and a merry gleam in her green eyes. She looks unsuited to hard travel but unfazed by it on this evening. Receiving a curt nod from the Chartsend guard who makes to apprehend her once she states her purpose and her particulars, the woman walks calmly past him into the cave. At first, her opponent is hard to see in the dimness, but at last she spots him...a diminutive fermin, by the look of him. Wasting no time on ceremony, Cintra spreads out both plump hands and casts them in the fermin's direction. The spell she releases is almost instantaneous; an outline of pink faerie fire now clearly highlights the small ratlike form, a mystic halo that will do no damage on its own but which is apt to be of use later. This is a cantrip so oft-practised that the effort necessary to loose it is minimal, and Cintra finds herself free to visit more malevolence upon her foe. This she does by devious means, sending twin jets of fire from her fingertips to ignite the halo into an inferno of hellish heat. Illusory though the conflagration itself may be, Cintra knows that her victim may be fooled into believing himself trapped in a fiery cocoon, and should this delusion prove true, then the magic of Cintra's spells will turn the fermin into a veritable hell of very real flame, fueled by the rat-man's own belief in his impending doom.

Pyde searches out with his magic like a sonar, to feel any possible bones or fossils in the cave. Being so close to the ocean in this cave his magic tells him that there were thousands of tiny sea creatures' remains, a good based for calcium for his magics. All this is done in a split second, right before the consuming fire engulfed his body. The fermin screams out in pain but fights on as his fur scorches, and his body begins to bubble. The scent of burning flesh permeates the air, and Pyde pushes past that, what gives it away are the tattoos around his eyes, they glow a certain color of green showing the type a magic it was. He drops to the grounds writhing as if on fire the gasps as his minds breaks the reality of it. "That was a naughty trick you pulled my dear," he says to the human. Pyde shakily stands and opens his coat to reveal a nice set of puppets, and he sets them upon the woman, carrying knives and shears. They start walking jerkily but quickly at her going for her tendons on her ankles.

Cintra begins to laugh. She cannot help herself. The sound is merry and full, the mirth of a soul experiencing great pleasure and joy. She rocks to and fro on her short legs, clutching both hands before her breasts, loosing peal after peal of glee into the echoing confines of the cave. So enthralled is she that she almost does not see the puppets. She stumbles back a pace, but not quickly enough to avoid a glancing slash across one hip from a pair of wicked-looking shears held by the foremost marionette. Hissing with pain, she spares the burnt fermin and their controller a baleful glance, then falls backward to avoid the onrushing constructs. Her body never strikes the floor. Instead, a thick blanket of blackness begins to expand like the petals of a flower from the place where Cintra fell, a cloak of darkness meant to hide from prying eyes the things which transpire within it. Cintra now assumes her true form - that of a four-inch-tall pixie - and, still within the shroud of deepest night she summoned, flies up and out of reach of her adversaries below. By now, the unnatural lack of light has spread to all corners of the cave and shows no sign of relenting. More laughter echoes from within that velvety emptiness, now seeming to come from the very rock on all sides of the natural cavern. Favouring her bad leg as she flies silently upward, Cintra uses her race's natural gift for sensing life to pinpoint the approximate location of her singed prey below. Deciding to use no true illusions at this stage of combat, the pixie instead simply removes the necklace which she had been wearing till now, then casts it downward, spitting a single word after it in the Drowish tongue. "Chath!" The word explodes like a cannonade of thunder in that enclosed space, and the underdark word for fire causes her necklace to attempt its deadly mission. Tiny though it is, the missile attempts to hone in on Pyde's form by way of the heat signature he creates. If any of its outer edges, razor-sharp now, should sufficiently penetrate his flesh, the necklace will simply burrow into him and, in the space of painful minutes, rip him apart from the inside out. Worst of all for Pyde, however, is the fact that this abominable creation, now triggered, will not simply skitter away if dodged and be spent and useless; instead, it will attempt, however clumsily, to flip and lash through the air in pursuit of its target until it is somehow forcibly stopped.

Pyde merely smiles in the dark, as his charred form is struck down by the heats seeking missile, the item getting lodged between a couple ribs, and the calium in the rest of the bones closes in to make this device much harder to get loose from his body. The stink of an over rotted corpse fills the air, Pyde's own illusion breaks as it was no longer useful. The body that was Pype drops to the floor of the cave as you hear the sound of a flute being played from somewhere in the cave. The song makes you feel wrong somehow, as if the music was corrupted. Rumblings in the cave are evidence that something much bigger was buried here. The real pyde comes from his hiding place playing his flute. A dark glow is coming from the flute and a large skeletal dinosaur. Long necked, and having triangular flippers, which break off andc turn to dust as the shells of much smaller creatures crumbled as well and the calcium in those let Pyde reshape into bones so it could walk as a land creature. Sharp teeth gnashing at anything it could hear, the dinosaur shambles around with Pyde safely out of the way.

Cintra :: At the first fell note of that flute, Cintra knows that dark magic is at work. The rumbling and stench, not to mention the significant air disturbance created by the skeletal monstrosity below, unnerve the pixie as she continues to fly higher, toward the chamber's domed ceiling. She believes herself out of harm's reach, until she is nearly swatted to the ground by a half-seen arm of prodigious size. Increasing her speed and attempting to gain more altitude, Cintra voices that single Drow word again, done more in desperation this time. She has so far avoided a run-in with the dinosaur below, but her wings cannot hold out forever, and to fight on the ground in her current form - or any form of which she is capable, for that matter - would be suicide. The necklace below erupts into a disc of white-hot flame that quickly spreads along the cave floor like a skillet of boiling oil. The heat bakes up toward her almost at once, filling the cave with a reeking haze. With as much precision as she can muster, Cintra now fashions the last of her devilish trap. Illusions of stalactites and stalagmites begin to erupt from both floor and ceiling, creating complicated columns and cagelike structures which appear to somewhat impede the progress of her spreading lake of flames. The threat from the flames is very real, and Cintra has woven her spell such that the thrusting teeth of illusory stone, from above and below, will hopefully herd the hapless flautist toward the only open space within the lower part of the cave...the heart of the blaze, where incineration is quickest. For her own part, Cintra finds a tiny rock shelf and settles down upon it, winded and trembling with exertion but with both eyes trained over the lip of her hiding-place, all senses alert for the deliverance of the puppeteer's fate.

Pyde 's hidden pouches are revealed as the hiding places were compromised. As the bones inside scatter about, Pyde squeaks out the command word to animate them. The rock formations do herd Pyde towards his doom, but as a rat, he quickly grabs hold of one of them protruding from the ground and is carried upward, trying to dodge being impaled, and doing his best to stay away from the extreme heat. The rats he animated, proceed to march toward their target, climbing wall and the rock formations to get there. Pyde throws off his coat and puts away his flute to make digging his claws into the rock much easier. But despite his efforts, his weariness was catching up to him, so he starts digging and chewing into the rock so he could attempt escaping the flames. Meanwhile his rats were closing in on Cintra's position.

Cintra is well-placed to gauge the approaching horde of rats, though her point of vantage offers poor chances for a skirmish. Diving from the edge of the shelf as the rats set upon her, Cintra is gashed twice as she tumbles away, once across her back below the wings and once across her legs, just above the knees. A tiny scarlet fan of blood marks the site of the barely-avoided battle, and the pixie's flight has taken on a wobbly aspect. The aperture through which both combattants gained entry to the cavern is relatively nearby, and Cintra arrows for it with all of her remaining strength, giving the conjured columns and the tiny fermin one baleful look as she goes. All of her illusions collapse at once, turning the cave into a well-lit spectacle of fire and scattered bones without the slightest remnant of her spikes and knuckles of stone, and then she is out, hovering in place, rotating in midair and sticking her tiny tongue out at the rat who dared to challenge her. Once more, that gleeful laughter erupts within the cave, a final taunting display for her quarry. Even at the darkest times, here is a pixie who cannot help but see the humour to be found in life.

Winner: Cintra (split)

Cintra catches sight of her downed opponent and simply cannot resist the opportunity it presents. She zips back into the cave, temporarily buoyed by a surge of sadistic pleasure and forgetting her own wounds for a gleeful moment. She maintains her diminutive pixie form, swoops down close to Pyde's upturned ear, sucks in a double lungfull of smoky air and then shrieks as loud as she can. She amplifies this with a thread of magic, channelling a faint filament of ice to vibrate in time with the vibration of the ear-splitting sound she has created. This razor-thin shard of ice effectively shreds part of Pyde's ear simply from sonic force, before melting and dribbling down his face along with a sufficient quantity of blood. "That'll do, I think," she murmurs, flying up and out of reach. She turns away, then calls back over her shoulder, "Wouldn't follow if I were you, darlin'. I'm not happy with you right now. No, you stay right where you are. Be a good rat and burn a little. You'll live longer." And with that, she is gone into the greater dark of the Chartsend seaside.