RP:Of Muffins and Madness, part III

From HollowWiki

The further adventures on the muffin homeworld.


The RP

Taikahn : The muffin attacking Angelo smelled quite heavily of cinnamon. I don't know if Taik had warned anybody of the cinnamon ones, but they're the cruelest (though physically weakest) kind of muffin. As the knife whipped around, the cinnamon muffin dislodged itself from Angelo and leaped away to some distance, where it held still and blended in with its surroundings, waiting on another opportunity to strike, tiny hooks unsheathing themselves from its tentacles. Meanwhile, with the apple minions swiftly falling beneath the swung blades, the muffins decided to ramp it up a notch. Suddenly, up from the back swarmed the scones--and down they came, but not onto Angelo or the cake or Taikahn or Corny. No, instead they descended on their fellows and exploded, coating them in a goopy concoction that swiftly adhered to their bodies and hardened, giving them temporary makeshift armor. It wouldn't last long, but it might be enough to change the momentum of things. Taikahn's ice blade fragmented and the preklek was forced to a crawl, forward-movement wise, as he tried to figure out what to do next. Red still sliced them up fairly easily, but it was on fire and almost seemed to move itself when it got going. Taik still didn't understand why, but it did.

Angelo nodded with satisfaction at the apparent disappearance of the muffin, turning back and grabbing the cannon, aiming for the (now armored) group of muffins. Cackling with delirium he began the firing process, laughing all the while. This was insane, he thought. He was covered in various types of muffins, the smell of sugar was -intoxicating-, and he was beginning to go mad. Delightfully mad. And by the gods, he wanted -more- destruction. "Fire in the hole!"

Cornelius doesn't mind the chocolate coating at first, as the muffins seem to have to detach themselves from the ground where the icing had sprayed. The first chocolate and apple muffin he attacks, its coat not yet hardened fully, is cleft like its doughy brethren, Cornelius shouting out "Death by chocolate!". The man then trails off into a cackle of laughter, his momentum stopped as he dances around another muffin, severing bits and hacking into it. Then Angelo's call comes, and the man curses "Oh, bloody 'ells bells" and runs with lengthy, ground-splooshing steps, in the general zig-zagging direction of 'away'.

The muffin behind Angelo watched and waited as the device thrummed dangerously and hurled its dark projectile into the battlefield, narrowly missing the retreating Taikahn and Cornelius and smashing into the nearest ranks of muffins, exploding with a blast of gravity and temporal energy that ripped apart most muffins immediately surrounding it and throwing up a shockwave that smashed a good portion of the army attacking Taikahn and Cornelius into creme-leaking piles of dough and pretty much de-armored the rest. The cake, having seen and sensed the effect produced by the insane gravitic explosion, decided to try and replicate it, letting out its own shockwave and getting rid of more muffins. However, in the moment of the explosion, the cinnamon muffin struck. Leaping silently up behind Angelo, it would attempt to lash itself to him in a way that would hopefully bind his arms to his sides, hooks trying to embed themselves in flesh, venom pumping that would cause the pain of being burned alive. A modified tentacle would attempt to jam itself into his back and start to suck out the moisture from his body--if nothing was done and the terrible cruel assassin muffin had its way, Angelo might begin to wither on the spot from dehydration.

Angelo threw his right fist up and let out a roar of victory at the destruction wreaked by both him and the cake, laughing wildly...until he was grabbed. From behind. And then hooks, and then...oh gods. It was like being turned all over again. He dropped the cannon and used his thankfully free right hand to try and grab at the thing, flailing wildly whilst he let out a steady stream of curses; one such word was simple. "Cornelius! Assistance!" Damn it, that burned. His hand gripped an offending tentacle aimed for his back, holding onto it he began to try and remove the muffin, but to no avail. "Ack! Damn it! Accursed MUFFINS!"

Hearing Angelo's plea, Cornelius turns as he runs, cursing once again "I swear, I am never eating a cinnamon muffin ever again". Taking a course uphill, he winces as the exertion starts to cause stress on his mostly-healed injuries. There would be only one way to do this... and there it was! Cornelius runs to where he dropped his frying pan, hacking into a muffin which tried to intercept him, then transfers his sword into a left handed grip to pick up the frying pan. "They Who Watch, guide my frying pan to glory!" With a running launch, he hurls the pan end-over-end towards Angelo, his hope to hit the damn thing and either dislodge it or stun it. Either way, he continues running towards the Lycan, finding his breath more difficult to come by - it will only be once he has ascertained the outcome of the throw and the Lycan's fate that the dandy may reconsider his destination.

Taikahn suddenly found himself the sole person on the front-lines team with a short allowance for weapon-swapping. He sheathed Red and pulled out the weapon in the holster at his side, a two-handed heavy crossbow that unfolded and rested steadily in his hands. He toggled a few settings and took aim, and then began firing. The dart, when fired, was propelled along a series of electrically-charged wires, both filling the projectile with static energy and bringing the energy held inside the crossbow to a brimming point. As the dart was hurled from the device and into its target, the energy could ground itself now--taking a path through the target food product, and spreading to those immediately nearby. All of this is long words for: "Taikahn fired and a bolt of chain lightning struck the muffin he targeted and those immediately around it, frying whatever alien systems they had and leaving them quite handily dead. The weapon reloaded itself fairly quickly, but Taikahn still couldn't hit everywhere with it and was beginning to get pushed back. Meanwhile, the frying pan smacked the cinnamon muffin quite handily and it disengaged from Angelo, although if those hooks had gotten under his skin then Angelo would likely find himself the proud owner of a lot of tiny new gashes. The cinnamon, wounded, hissed and threw those hooks back at Angelo and Cornelius as it retreated, hoping to cause more pain and irritation as a distraction while it fled.

Angelo stepped forward as he felt the vicious cinnamon muffin dislodge, shaking his head in irritation. Now irate, angry, and -entirely- too cinnamon-y, Angelo took the crossbow from his left hip and fired a bolt at the muffin with the intent of piercing it. After the bolt was fired he quickly placed the crossbow back in its holster and picked up the cannon, turning again to assist Taikahn in his assault with a shot aimed to Taikahn's right to destroy oncoming muffins.

Cornelius slows his run to a jog, and lifts his sword and gauntlets up to cover his face as the muffin's projectiles impact on, then bounce off, the sturdy material of his armour. He calls out with a merry laugh "Frying pans! Who knew, right?" The armoured dandy takes a moment to catch his breath once he reaches Angelo - running in full-plate, no matter one's fitness level - was bloody hard work. It also gave the dandy a chance to evaluate the current situation from a decent vantage point and be on hand in case Angelo needed more defending from rogue baked goods.

Taikahn : Simply piercing a muffin doesn't usually help much, and this was no real exception--the muffin merely made a sound and continued slinking away. Most likely never to return, at least not this battle. The explosion again cleared out a good deal of the muffins, and the cake was holding its own quite well at this point--that is, until one of the blackberry ones suddenly decided to act--while most blackberries flee when threatened, some stand up and fight, and when they do... The extra-large muffin smashed its way through the cake's temporal defenses and hit it with a burst of kinetic energy, followed by a wave of pure cosmic force that not only hammered the cake further into the ground but splashed over and incinerated some of the muffins. It let out a loud roar and lunged for the cake, fully intent on showing it what happens to those who eat its children. The other "queens" backed down and wormhole'd away--the universe was being played with enough between this and the cake and they instinctively knew to leave the area. Taikahn appreciated the help, moving further to his left and trying to increase the voltage as he fired--it wasn't going so well, and eventually he gave up on that, but kept firing.

Angelo focused his sights onto the large, incredibly angry rampaging muffin. He began the charging sequence, deciding instead to let it charge for a bit longer than usual; couldn't hurt, right? As soon as he pulled the trigger, he regretted it. He could only hope his aim would be true as he groaned in pain; he tried to drop the cannon, but his hands were moving ever so slowly...and -blinking-. That was nigh impossible. Oh gods, it hurt; it felt like different parts of his body were reacting at different speeds, and the burning sensation left by the cinnamon muffin was -not- helping.

Cornelius looks at the huge Blackberry muffin and the cake. Fighting. He was fortunate, the dandy mused, to have such an elaborate imagination for the absurd. No doubt once he'd pulled himself together he'd find himself sprawled out in Mrs Mallard's shop, having ransacked the shop, or somesuch. In the meanwhile, though, he had muffins to massacre. He picks up the punctured and battered frying pan with all the dignity one would afford an ancient relic, and calls out to Taikahn "Well, old bean, what do we do now?" even as he starts jogging down to assist with any left-over apple muffins. Except, in the timewarp caused by Angelo's use of the device, the last two words are drawn out, and the dandy appears to be moving in slow motion. The strange sensation of multi-layered time forced upon the dandy's awareness simply reinforces the belief in his own derangement. Reverbed, bass-lined, drawn-out and contracted, the word 'Fascinating' can be made out.

Taikahn made the mistake of looking back. His eyes widened at the slow-motion caused by what could only have been misuse of the singularity cannon. Speaking of singularity cannon, the projectile was also moving slower than normal and it seemed--as it arced towards its target--to negate the force of gravity against the things it passed over--which is probably the only thing that saved Taikahn from getting dog-piled, the muffins suddenly inexplicably finding themselves leaping high into the air cast a shadow that allowed Taikahn to realize the position in which he'd put himself. He raised his crossbow and fired once, and then: ching. Ching. Ching. The sound of no ammunition left. And the muffins were beginning to come down. Taikahn had no superweapon hidden, no sudden ray of mass destruction to save him--and all he could do was light his sleeves on fire again and empty both his tanks of fire and ice on the badguys. He still went down pretty hard, though, despite the damage he'd started to do. And then he was gone, buried in a mass of messed-up muffin. The blackberry noticed the sudden development, too, and since the singularity was traveling slower than normal the queen had the time to do something with it--that something being to lash out with a tendril of power and smack it harmlessly into the sky, where it burst and did almost nothing--nothing except give the cake a sudden rush of power. It rose up on its spiderlike legs and sent its own vortex of rippling darkness at the larger muffin, but again the blast was smacked away pretty much harmlessly. This... does not bode well for the heroes.

Angelo shook off the last of the time-altering shenanigans, eyeing the situation; well. This was turning bad. "Cornelius. Get Taikahn." And with that he slid down the hill a bit, regaining his footing before quickly charging and firing another shot towards the giant muffin; hopefully, this would divert its attention -away- from the dogpiled Taikahn and towards the quite vulnerable Angelo. In hindsight, he didn't think this through. So long as Taikahn was safe.

Cornelius continues his ultra-slow jogging until the muffin's intervention re-introduces the dandy back into a more rational timestream. Which was jolly helpful of it, Cornelius thought. In any case, the armoured man continued his downhill jog, barely taking note of Angelo's words, electing to run over the top of the muffin pile, footwork and balance precise as a goat's as he bounded from muffin to muffin, heading towards his target: the blackberry muffin. Sure, it was the size of a house. Sure, it was fighting a cake. Sure, none of it made sense. But really, at the end of the day it was a blackberry muffin, and there was no way in hell Cornelius wasn't going to cut that bastard up and serve it as afternoon tea. The dandy did stop briefly on top of an already-dying muffin, however, to let loose with a whirling flurry of cleaving cuts, opening large wounds on the surface of the muffins nearest to the last perceived location of Taikahn. But after that, it was onwards-ho! for blackberry muffin territory. It would take Cornelius a while though, as there was a lot of ground to cover, and no doubt some muffins would try to get in his way.

Taikahn was inside his suit of armor and the fact that the muffins immediately on top of him were dead from the flames had kept him from getting killed rather swiftly. He hadn't much room to work in this pile, though, so for the moment he just sat th--hey, it felt like things were moving! That'd be because Corny had just swiped away some of the muffins on top of him. Taik rotated, adjusted one arm and opened his mask... and then took a bite. Hey, if you get buried in food might as well eat your way out, right? While he does that, let's check up on the cake versus Muffinzilla, shall we? The cake had taken up the genius strategy of trying to keep its larger, more powerful foe on the defensive, hurling objects at it with concentrated energy bursts, eating muffins for fuel to keep it running. The giant muffin suddenly, upon noticing the shot fired by Angelo, leaped backward and smacked the black hole towards the cake, attempting to take care of both problems at once. The flitting, giggling little nearly-invisible things began to hum and snicker around Cornelius as he approached--one materialized and began to snowball towards him, two others attempted to leap on him at once and tackle him, materializing immediately on his sides. The cake saw the incoming projectile--and reached out for it with a beam of dark energy, accepting the ball of delicious gravity and adding to it, separating it and pulling it into its own aura. It began to levitate, the light from the area flowing into it like water down a bathtub drain, and it grew larger--swelling in size until it was almost par with the other cement-truck sized muffin. Then it released all that power in the form of a concentrated swirling pillar of darkness that smashed through the defense hastily put up by the queen and smashed the muffin the length of three large school buses. Intense? Yes. Very.

Angelo looked absolutely terrified by the result of his shot, seeing the cake was about to be hit he cringed...before it absorbed it. And used it against the muffin. Well! That wokred out just fine, he thought to himself as the muffin slid to a halt. He waited until it stopped moving before charging up another shot and letting loose, cackling; he felt he should say something witty. Anything witty. "Damn muffins."

Cornelius recognised the cooking-egg sound of muffin giggles, and instinctively rolls forward then to the side, managing to keep grip in both langenschwert and the sacred frying pan - that symbol of everything savoury and unbaked. Temporarily evading the pincer-ambush, the dandy swings around to see the other muffin adjusting its course downhill to meet him. While the two muffins disentangle themselves from each other's tentacled embrace, the dandy charges towards it, calculating the vector which will let him dance to the side at the last minute. With the insight of a madman, Cornelius realises he has solved the dilemma of transport. Raking his sword through the tentacles with whip out to attempt entangling him in transit, he spins and charges the muffin's rear, hooking the frying pan to his belt, and thrusts his sword into it. The muffin's momentum drags the dandy swiftly up as it rolls, and as he approaches the summit of the doughy spheroid, he reverses his position, and starts running counter to the muffin's snowballing direction, like a lumberjack on a log. It takes every ounce of concentration, and he holds his sword like a staff, occasionally using it to bat away at the occasional tentacle the muffin forces through the doughy earth it has collected around it during its movement. A slightly unhinged cackle forces itself out of the man's lips as he calls out "I'm a muffinjack, and I'm okay!"

Taikahn poked a head with a mouthful of muffin out of his little dogpile, looked around at the situation and shoved his way out, staggering a bit to regain his balance and taking deep breaths, pausing once to swallow. Meanwhile, the queen got un-stunned and took stock of its surroundings--realizing that a black hole was coming at it again, and also that someone was riding a growing snowball muffin towards it, the queen let out an omni-directional burst of power that was intended to--oops, the cake countered it somehow, carry on. The blast from Angelo punched a deep gash into it but for some reason didn't explode. The snowball found its own mass becoming less than beneficial for its speed and began to slow down, although this would likely give Cornelius the chance he needed to leap onto the giant blackberry delicacy and do some carving.

Angelo knelt down to steady his aim, once again charging the cannon and allowing another blast to move towards the muffin queen; damn it, this thing just -refused- to die. It was getting aggravating. "I don't know -what- they baked with this, but by the gods it better be deliciously worth it!"

Cornelius had impacted against enough walls and cliff-faces in his time to recognise the change in air-pressure caused by large objects. At the moment though, the dandy called it pure luck that something caused him to flick his head for a quick look back to see the out-of-control snowball muffin's impending crash with the blackberry muffin. Timing his next action... that would be the hard part. The interplay of cosmic physics had done hell to the ground around the cake and muffin, ripples of power causing dune-like ruts in the ground, and by pure chance the snowballing muffin hits one of these, launching briefly into the air. This was the moment, Cornelius knew, and he turns, bunches his legs beneath him, and leaps at the height of the muffin's trajectory. Aided by the muffin's forward momentum, Cornelius sailed through the air, and for one moment knew again the beauty of flight as the snowballing muffin slammed into the blackberry muffin. Then Cornelius was on the Blackberry muffin, jamming his sword into it and holding on with his left hand to provide stability as the muffin righted itself. Kneeling down, and retrieving the sacred frying pan with his right hand, he started to dig his way in to gain some cover from the other attacks, using the pan like a muffin-spoon. "I say, this smells divine!"

Taikahn : And that's how Taikahn, being the one who got caught in a dogpile, did not help much with the actual takedown of the boss monster and was primarily mook bait. Which is, I suppose, okay. The black hole smashed into the blackberry muffin dead-on this time--though it still didn't explode, it punched a clean hole straight through. Black goop poured out, and as Cornelius dug his way in the stuff would inevitably begin to inundate him--oh no wait, the snowball collapsed upon impact and seemed to "wash" away most of the poisonous innards. The cake suddenly spasmed and its legs gave out, and then it began to leak steam and shrink again. And then... there was quiet. The battlefield was soaked in creme filling and littered with baked body parts, and cookie dough had been thrown this way and that from the massive forces at play. But there was silence. It would seem that everything was over.

Angelo raised the cannon with both hands and let out one final triumphant roar, a constant stream of words in an unknown language bursting from him; he felt this was the most important victory he had ever accomplished. Against muffins. Who would've thought.

Cornelius was almost thrown clear of the muffin, and was forced to hold onto his sword for dear life even as his weight dragged the sword through the muffin about a metre as the thing canted sideways. Eventually, when everything stops moving he stands up "So. Has anyone seen a quiche?"

RP:Of Muffins and Madness, part II; RP:Aftermath of Muffins and Madness