Duel:Derry vs Jolie

Background

Jolie becomes sufficiently irritated with Derry to wish him particular harm. .

The Hanging Corpse Tavern, Vailkrin

Valentin looks at Derry "Figured y'knew I wasn't the friendly type, guv. I don' exactly hide th'fact"

Kirien can't help but grin. "I definitely need to see these…things, one time." Though his curiosity regarding the box and what might be contained within it is not exactly sated, he's wise enough to know when to stop bothering and instead sips at his drink a bit.

Derry said to Kirien, "Use your diddly powers to find out where Kasyr is."

Kirien blinks at Derry in bewilderment. "My...-what- powers?"

Derry said to Kirien, "Your diddly powers, I have no idea what they are, so they are diddly powers until I know otherwise. The ones you can pick up where others heartbeats are. Yah know? Diddly powers.”

Jolie appeared from the upper floor. Basically, appeared, landing with a loud clack off heels, mid-tavern, having catlike managed not fall on her arse after the newly polished banister proved more of a slippery dip than she'd bargained for and causing her to flip off the rail somewhere near the landing. "Shyte." she said, blowing strands of hair off her face, grinning. "I could use a drink." Her grin died a rapid death on sighting Derry, however, and her cheer took on a morbid cast, "Scleratus. Look who's here. The hand-y man."

Kirien 's expression changes from utter confusion to sudden recognition in an instant; and then his lips quirk up in a slight grin, partially sly and particularly foxish and sneaky. "Ah. Those powers~. Erm, tiny problem though es that they have a limited range, else I'd be deafened by heartbeats from miles away." Jolie's abrupt entrance from above has him blinking up and peering over the top of Derry's head. His smile only broadens and he waves despite it all. "Jolie, hi~." Attentions quickly shift back to his coven mate though and Kirien wiggles his ears a bit in contemplation. "I could probably find his general area if I tried.. Maybe."

Derry said to Kirien, "You should try summoning him, he said he wanted to be here for this bit of business."

Valentin tips his bowler hat to his insane guildmistress in respectful greeting. "That he is. Tryin' t'recruit me t'join some toff called Kasyr. What d'ya think? Should I speak t'the revenant? Vampire toffs tend t'get annoyingly pompous in my experience"

Kirien said to Derry, "I don't summon my sire! But I can try to ask.."

Derry said to Kirien, "Just do it damnit."

Jolie strode over to Derry, and with coven-mates covering his treacherous ass or not, grabbed for the shell of his ear with a pinch that'd make a minotaur cry, and unless he ducked that hold, he would proceed to be dragged by this erstwhile handle toward to door.

Derry had his ear grabbed, and was drug tot he door, squirming ever so slightly,"Just hold on a damned minute woman. If we are going to do business I have someone coming who wishes to have a word with you."

Valentin watches the spectacle with a sense of deja vu.

Jolie was done with his ear by then. With a shove of hand, aided by a bootsole planted to his rear, she helped him out of her establishment.

Derry was shoved out of the tavern, and kicked too, a scream of "What in the blazing hell."

Jolie wasn't far behind. In fact, Derry would hardly have a moment to stand or stumble in under the twin undying moons of Vailkrin before the necromancer, moving like the fleet shade of some batwinged predator sprang, bootheels hardly touching upon that blighted ground before she was upon the pyromancer, a handful of hair grabbed at from the back, to be twisted hard in her tensile fist and tugged backward while she groped for his throat with her opposite hand. She knew where all the veins were. All the necessary organs. And undead or not, she intended him to bleed while the snarls of lengthening claws tore into flesh, before they burrowed through his neck and groped for his tongue. Before Jolie dragged that muscle back out through the hole she'd made.. This was her hope, her ambition, swift and painful, prominent in the message it would drive home - a horrible piece of retributive justice known among the darker denizens of the Dark Lands as 'the Vailkrin neck-tie'.

Derry felt the swiftness of the lady of Vailkrin on him, and tried to react in time. She had grabbed some of his hair, yes, but Derry managed to rip forward hard enough to cause his own hair to sort of, rip, and a decent sized piece of flesh with it, Jolie had a grip apparently. Dodging the hoped for attack of claws, they sliced Derry's back open, causing him to grit his teeth. As Jolie's claws drew forth sanguine fluid from the vampires back, his presence would be known. Stepping forward a few paces, Derry turned on his booted heel, eyes locked on Jolie. As blood dripped from both head wound and back, Derry smirked, and and soon it all started to come together. The blood that had landed on the ground steamed slightly, and dried quickly, and the ground under the vampire's feet became dry, arid, and cracked as if it were in a desert. Right arm straightening itself outward, the red brand along it would fade from its dull red to a bright crimson as the flesh along the arm, and the mantle along his shoulders bursted into a display of bright radiant flames. The flames from the mantle fell down the vampire's back, forming a cloak composed of such. Smirking towards Jolie, Derry clenched his right hand into a fist and then acted as if he were throwing a baseball towards Jolie, pivoting on his heel and everything. When he swung forward and released the 'ball', his attack was evident, a ball of flames flew at Jolie. Smirking, Derry re-clenched his fist as the orb split into a multitude of such, all aiming to singe Jolie's flesh.

While Derry tore away and turned, summoned heat and smirked, smoked and flamed and raised his hand to bring forth the fiery sphere spat from his palm to spray into a shrapnel-conflagration, Jolie was preparing herself for the inevitable flames, whatever form they'd wound up taking. She knew him, she knew the nature of his spells, of that damned book of his, and so it was she was already braced with outflung arms - perhaps invoking the universal gesture for 'bring it!' though her intention was more nefarious and while he did all those things she had been incanting the litany of the third Dark Tide, the black ice, tangible shades tugged from sepulchres and alleyways, cracks in the road and the bowers of trees, from her own cinder-black heart - they came pouring in at the summons of the Death-mage, swarming like a slew of unwholesome, ragged animals to do her bidding. Thus bound, they were transformed by the canta that roared over her lips just as the fireball left Derry's hand to explode into its own burning children. The blackness coalesced quickly, the temperature plummeting, the necromancer struck - once! Twice! The fire glancing off her arm to leave a charred trail through pale flesh, another searing the leather of her boot. But that was all, for she had driven the darkness into chill subservience to form a shield of tenebrous cold before her upon which the miniature comets hissed and died, and that now clotted around the fire-starter as blood does around a foreign object in the body, but cold, cold as the frost of the mountains he'd come from. And swift, they were, to clot further, crackling as they hardened, even as they sought to clump about the man, suspending him in a sphere of solid, black ice.

Derry smirked as he had actually landed the blows a bit it seemed, but he was at the disadvantage here, he'd never seen Jolie fight. The shades, they move fast. As the shades had started to clump together to form their block of ice around Derry, his cloak of flames reacted faster. The cloak had split itself and shaped itself outstretching, mimicking the form of a pair of wings that may have belonged to a phoenix, and doubly, it mimic’s their effect. Derry was lofted into the air, legs breaking free of the prison of the shade's, as they had already been trapped by Jolie's magic. Flying higher into the air, Derry shifted his position, so that he was facing downward, legs now in the air. Drawing legs up into his chest, and wrapping his arms about his head as he tucked it into his chest, the cloak once more shifted, and covered his entire form as he fell. The elemental clad vampire fell fast, normally than he would, and with the added appearance of being covered in flames, Derry almost looked like a damned meteor heading to collide with Jolie.

Jolie snarled as her shadows were out-raced by Derry's astounding cape - astounded she was, at his sudden lofting to a flame-drenched, man-shaped meteor that defied gravity's greedy hug to sweep upward, upward, pausing at the zenith of his flight before plummeting like some sort of flame-clad, cast-off angel down upon the necromancer. Her shadows were quick. She was, as well, and while he was in flight, while he paused to make that fiery swoop, she'd drawn her poisoned daggers, both flung upward with a lycan's musculature and rage behind them, aimed at Derry's oncoming frame, and her steel heels scraped flinty sparks off the blackstone road as Jolie scrambled to dive out of his path. The dagger's poison was blowfish. It played havoc with the nervous system in seconds. The third and fourth such blades were slid free from their vambrace, aimed and thrown, silvery slivers of slow paralysis, made slower for their potential sheathing in flesh that no longer knew a pulse.

Derry would have been struck by Jolie's two oncoming daggers, but they were blasted away by the sheer force of Derry's fall to the ground. Before he landed however, the second pair lodged themselves into his arms. Slamming into the ground with a large explosion, a snap of bone could be heard as a large dust cloud was kicked up, debris falling everywhere. Slowly rising out of the small crater he had made, Derry's flames were no longer brilliant as they had been. Most of them dieing off after the last attack as various wounds made themsleves apparent by the sanguine colored fluid dripping from his face, and the crushed left arm, that pour arm always took a beating, this time it had a snapped dagger blade stuck in it, the other blade having been knocked out in the collision, its piercing marked by a rather large wound in Derry's right arm. Normally poison shouldn't work on a vampire, but Derry was still young, and while it didn't have its full effect, it did bother him. Feeling himself being hampered by the daggers, he knew this was it. Drawing his right arm back, the flames that were along Derry's arm shifted to his fist, namely his finger tips. Standing along the black cobble stone, Derry jumped forward, the flames of his cloaking propelling him once more, this time towards Jolie as he drove his right arm forward, flaming finger tips aiming to dig themselves in the woman's chest where her heart should have been.

Jolie had a heart. Of gold as it happened - small, cold and hard to find. Even harder for the flaring fingers of the fire-mage, for the sharp jags of bone that jutted abruptly from the very ground he trod, an osseous upsurge of shards and incomplete dead things, badly articulated limbs that grasped and gripped at ankles, stabbed up to pierce through heat-shimmering soles to slow his path, to halt him in his tracks - had he forgotten where he was? The ancient dead of Vailkrin, disturbed from their loamy resting-places underneath the road that had cracked and sundered under Derry's explosive landing now swelled from their battle-fields of old, driving through dirt and stone to come to the aid of their dark Mistress, a clattering army of half-formed remnants scraping with reanimated fervor toward the pyromancer, their charge being to lock together about him like a boney cage. They were ancient, they were rotten old bones and not as fast as any recent corpse. The flesh of Jolie's face and shirt were seared, her hair crisping and smoking about her shoulders, her eyes scrunched against the well of flame Derry held in his fist that was inches from her now. Then the necromantic wall of bone snapped, crunched, locked, walled him in, if all went well - and better, shut him out of her shuttered sight altogether.

Derry was blocked from Jolie's sight as the wall of bone had wrapped around him, various pieces of calcium pressing against his form. Attempting to break free, Derry was blocked from Jolie as he scratched towards the black cobblestone of the road. His upper torso, and right arm breaking free on the opposite side of Jolie, the poison taking slight effect along his body, a muffled,”Damn you Jolie... I just came here for the coins and then I was gone...” He spat a bit of blood on the ground,”I knew I should have waited for Kasyr...”

Jolie opened her eyes, which stung from the heat of their lids, and did not waste her breath on reply to that. Not the kind used in common speech, anyway – what fell out of her mouth was a darkness of sound, a treacherous, poisonous string of syllables that shivered the very space about them. The bone cage shivered, buckling inwards – perhaps those ensconced behind the tavern’s oaken door would hear a loud splintering, a cacophony of cracks as the spell-bound remains of the long-dead warriors were ordered to sacrifice their integrity to the necromancer’s revenge. Shoving inward, the calcified cage become a welter of sharp spears as each tibia, femur and rib pressed hard against the vampire’s body, shards piercing where Jolie directed – through muscle, skin, stomach, cheek, avoiding the spine, the eyes, the joints of limbs. As her foul canta ceased the remaining bones dropped with a unified jangle to the broken road, leaving Derry resembling a tall, thin and sorry hedgehog – spines of bone sticking out him every which-way, even his slowly numbing arms. The poison would take time to work through his undead flesh – his legs should last him a long and slow, agonising walk home. “Pass my regards to the tiefling,” she said, plopping the shred of scalp that dangled still form her bloody fingers atop his partially-flayed head, and then said: “Be gone.” Hacking a smirch of dust from her throat, licking her fingers to extinguish a persistently smouldering tendril of hair, the Lady of Vailkrin turned on her heel and ticked her way back to her tavern, satisfied that vengeance was hers.