The Interface: =================================================== 50/50 [ATTACK] USING...
The Imperative: ================================================== 4/50 [ATTACK]
The Interrobang: ================================================== 5/50
The Island: ================================================== 5/50
I +3 Cobalt.
The below charge attacks in this order: the Bone Cage/Caster, and if they're dead, Magress, and if they're dead, Eze.
The Scribe calmly strides across the field, holding yet another globule of undefinable energy in his hand. Another charged attack has coalesced into the coding of his palm. "My previous attack was swallowed whole by the Mysteryman, a terrible being. It worked out in the end, I suppose - he was more than happy to attack my intended target for me. But," the Scribe paused, taking out his Journal and flipping through its pages. "I would prefer to do the dirty work myself this time around. The only cosmic forces interfering with this travesty will be the ones I summon by my own hand." The Scribe traces across the Journal's pages with an errant twitch. "Now, let's see... My research on this topic is scattered at best, and what little of it I have, I'd prefer not to divulge to other realms. This is a secret best kept guarded."
"Besides," the Scribe waves his fingertips in a wind beginning to congregate, "Why should I bore you with words when I can rip through you via action." The Scribe shuts his hand into a fist, murmuring words to himself, muffled through the fabric concealing his face to all. "Venite ad haec harenas." Immediately, Sandfall Ampersand's crystalline body begins to spasm and shudder, flickering across a bevy of possible dimensions and altering through various shades of red in the process. Its voice keens and splinters its way over to the Scribe. "What are you doing," it flatly states. The Scribe keeps its gaze steady on his Journal as the winds intensify. "For this attack to work, I will require a cacophany of sand. Could you provide some for me?" Sandfall Ampersand scoffs despite having no mouth. "I have done you a great enough service by coming here at all. Don't push your luck." The Scribe shrugs. "I don't need a Curse to change minds."
The Scribe's power intensifies into a single point as he takes out an unseen blade and carves it through the air. A gash forms in space, and a rumbling is felt across reality as a sea of crystalline shards pours forth, shimmering and tinkling through the sands of the desert. Sandfall Ampersand slows its rotation in shock. "Are those... crystals of the Timewheel?" The Scribe nods, gingerly holding some of them. "You said it was impossible. If plot didn't want me to find them, you would have said they were nearly impossible instead. The fighters of this war revel in spitting at impossibilities." Sandfall Ampersand merely hovered in the air. "I... honestly have no words." "Good," the Scribe cheerfully quipped. "Because I do." His goggles pierced through the air with a blank white stare. "ЦОНГЕАЛ, РЕВЕАЛ, ЦРЫСТАЛЛИЗЕ, ТРАНQУИЛИЗЕ, УПСТАГЕ, ЕНРАГЕ, УНЦРЕАТЕ, ПУНЦТУАТЕ." Sandfall Ampersand's ankh form suddenly glitches across five dimensions, warping into fractals and back again. The sea of crystals behind the Scribe reacts in a similar manner, rising up and shuffling themselves into the shape of shapes.
"I've done extensive research on the Timewheel since our meeting, Ampersand. It turns out that they're little more than MacGuffins. They operated with time on a level that could only be achieved within reality's formative moments - when reality was a spinning, undulating tesseract of infinity, and not a solid cube that could be traveled across or penetrated through in segmented pieces. They've lost their magic, you could say." In almost complete contrast to the Scribe's words, the crystals behind him - they were arranged in a sickly lime color - were spinning and frothing in the formations of geometry, as if they were alive. "Yet some crystals of the Timewheel adopted powers separate from the arms of a bygone era. Take you, for instance. You became a glorified tape recorder, slayer of paradoxes. The Hyper Crystal became a hyperdimensional war machine, mutating all it touched. Rumor has it there's even a piece of the Timewheel within the Dark Carnival. But the most interesting thing I found," the Scribe says, gesturing behind him, "Was this. A literal mountain of shattered crystals, lost in the annals of a darkened temple."
The crystals swirl in columns and rows, forming the peculiar shape of a slightly misshaped sphere, a smaller version of itself hollowed out in the middle, sideways. It resembles some alien eye. The crystals' colors fluctuate intensely, forming a shimmering kaleidoscope. "If it has a true name, it's been lost to the... sands of time. Some call it the Mother Horse Eye. An artifact of enlightenment. But it is wracked with a perverse sentimentality, if you will. It believes enlightenment to consist of trips into higher dimensions that strip away the essence of a being, replacing it with sickly and dehumanizing wretches. It is... better shown than described. So, without further ado, I require a sandstorm. A very large sandstorm." Sandfall Ampersand spins wildly out of control, seemingly of the Scribe's will. The wind whips around to such an intense degree that the sands plaguing the Battlefield spin ever upwards. Towering dunes form, steadily losing cohesion and toppling over, only to build themselves again. The entire field is submerged, and the Mother Horse Eye towers over it all. The Scribe propels himself under a cushion of air, keeping his left hand pointed towards the Caster, who is locked in place, and is similarly spiraling up.
Once a shimmering sphere of yellow sand is formed above the Battlefield, floating in the air as a crucible of wrong, with the Scribe, the Mother Horse Eye, and the Caster as sentries at its apex, the Scribe knows it is time. With a flick of the wrist, the Caster's bones snap and crack, shuddering into a locked position that throws itself into the hollow cavity of the Mother Horse Eye. If the eye analogy is taken to its extreme, the Caster now sits inside of the pupil. The Mother Horse Eye shudders in an eldritch motion, blinking. Its entire form shimmers with a gelatinous yet completely crystalline substance for half a second, and when it retracts, the Caster is covered in the same gelatinous substance. Its entire body shudders and spasms, its eye cavities turning into orbs of kaleidoscopes that seem to leak away bodily fluids. The Caster's body rolls from Mother Horse Eye's womb, floating in the air. "The Caster," the Scribe explains from afar, "is now composed entirely of a hallucinogenic. Lysergic acid diethylamide. LSD. Normally, it just makes the afflicted, quote, 'trip balls,' end quote. But when consumed continually over a long period, or in absurd quantities... Then we stray from the realm of solely mental hallucination and into those of actual changes." The Caster's body cracks and splinters in some kind of reversed animation. Usually, it is said that flesh peels from bones - but now, bone is peeling from flesh. The Caster is wrapping flesh around itself, its jaw twisted into a silent scream.
The yellow sands below the Caster seethe and froth with an unholy ferocity. Grains and dust fuse together as bits and pieces of flesh pop out from thin air, striding in on the wind. Arms, legs, and organs snap together, roaming around the sphere of sand. Flashes of light illuminate the sphere from within, and veins are clearly visible snapping themselves together in a patchwork phenomenon. The Caster's body undulates and mutates, limbs coursing every which way. The Caster suddenly gains legitimate vocal chords and begins to let out a stream of laughter, which starts off small and then bubbles over itself to a peak, before changing course entirely, intensifying into a bout of screaming. This cyclical action drives the motion of the sand underneath, going ever faster. A churning tornado bellows and whips from below until, suddenly, the Caster's skull shatters. A breathing brain dripping with kaleidoscopic ooze pulses within the cavity, the Caster's eyes darting in every direction as it speaks in every language at once, uttering an unmistakable announcement of scientific advancement. Its brain has been mutated, enlightened; days of exposure to LSD condensed into the timeframe of mere minutes. The Caster salutes, tumbles through the air, and falls head-first into the churning sphere of sand.
The entire Battlefield has been watching this spectacle from reverse polarity, below the sphere of flesh. It has seen similar effects - skin and organs dancing across, screams and laughter bellowing from above. When the Caster sinks into the sphere, rays of kaleidoscope shine from within, casting unearthly reflections. Every entity and player sees themselves rendered in fractured skin. Then, the sphere shudders, sand and bits of life falling off. The sphere slowly sinks towards the earth. Not wanting to be caught in the maelstrom, every entity vacates the area, forming a ring around the sphere as it collides with the desert. It bends and twists the earth until it retreats underground, the gilded expanse swallowing it whole and leaving no indication of its existence. The Scribe looks on from above. The Mother Horse Eye hovers in the air. With another flick of his wrist, the crystalline entity shudders, falling into the dunes of sand, leaving a tumbling series of waves. A seemingly internal conflict wracks the desert sands, bubbles popping up and dissipating, revealing a powerful odor - the smell of rotting flesh. Everyone on the field gets a keen sense that something is going horribly wrong - that life itself is being drained away and transmutated into a far cry. This sense comes to a head when a circle of light shines from under the sand, ripping it apart and spraying glass in all directions. The Caster slowly rises from the cavity, its body twitching and spasming with apparent delight. All the entities on the field try to move, but abruptly, the Scribe's hand slashes across the field. A red network of tubes winds its way across the sky and through the earth, illuminated by the Scribe's goggles like a sea of Red Miles. They are incident zones. Sections where, if anything living goes near, the afflicted will be cut, perfectly. Segmented.
The Caster, whose brain is composed entirely of a hallucination, has no care in the world for such unearthly divisions, and promptly leaps through the air, straight through about twenty incident zones. It's as if they make it a point to fly through as many as they can. There is no snapping sound, no flash of light as it happens. It's barely regarded. And when the Caster settles back in the air, floating, it takes several seconds before anyone realizes something's wrong. But something is wrong. The Caster's body has been cut into pieces. Slowly, they drift apart from each other, dangling in the air as if held by an unsteady palm. The Caster smiles, laughing and screaming as if nothing is wrong, as if they're able to function completely fine. Even as their skull bisects and drifts away from the body, and their brain is cut into five pieces, all leaking ectoplasmic goo, their head turns to view everyone. And their sounds of parallel emotional expression are echoed from the hole they left. It's a burrowing sound that peals through the air, clear as day. Triumphant laughter elicited from the notion that it's all just a joke, followed by the stark screams of pure existential horror. They repeat endlessly, and some of the entities find themselves engaging in the activity as well before they catch themselves.
The Caster seems to be in no pain as its limbs stray further from each other, and each of its ribs goes their separate ways. But then, something rises from the pit. Something drags itself out. Mounds and heaps of flesh, stitched from limbs and bits and pieces, into crazed animosities of living death. They tear at the Caster, pulling its bones and its flesh and its drugs out of what was once its body, piece by piece. Each and every time, the Caster's face, split into pieces, scrunches up with pain. It howls with laughter, tears of universes dripping into the sand, staining it with pleasure. Inch by agonizing inch, the Caster is discarded on the grounds of birth, and it is swallowed whole into the pit it helped create. The only thing left is its brain of dark enlightenment. And then, bursting from the yellow sands, as if to create it, is a monstrosity unparalleled.
It is a gigantic creature that seemingly died moments after its birth. It is stitched together, sewn from the flesh of rotting corpses, all from various animals in various universes. If its code was examined via electroscope, it would consist solely of viruses and runtime errors. Its hair is shaggy and unkempt, and the largest of insects buzz around it. Its limbs are multiple and wrong, and its body folds in on itself too many times to count, and in all the wrong ways. When it breathes, it shudders, sounding on the verge of laughter or a screaming fit. Sometimes, its head shakes, as if it is experiencing a seizure. It has two eye sockets, one of which is empty and continually drips some kaleidoscopic fire. The other contains a sickly lime crystal. Its mouth is poorly stitched together, and the powers of the Four Horsemen pour forth like liquid from within.
It is Mother. Hear her roar.
In a single fluid motion, the gentle and caring arms of Mother scoop up the brain of the Caster, cradling it like an infant. The living beings on Mother, in various states of decay, take care of the Brain like one of their own. They whisper tending and caressing words, babbling in Siberian tongues, in the language of superiors. Mother closes her good eye and sheds a single tear of white cleansing fire. It drips down her body, leaving a trail of luminous smoke that sheds into the sky, leaving a column of fire. When it touches the brain of the Caster, it obliterates it into grey ash, the kaleidoscopic fire snuffing itself out and shattering the Caster's existence into but a memory. All the havoc it wrought is snuffed out, leaving Mother to turn into dust itself, fading quickly, like an afterimage. But the visions it leaves on the field burn as brightly as ever. The sun is blotted out by a sea of ash.
The hole from which the Caster came forth fills with darkness, now. Whispers and murmurs, the faint sounds of laughter and screams, congregate from within. A Flesh Hole has appeared on the battlefield. Does anyone dare drop down?
Mother is calling.
