Echo squints into the riot of light and color, and struggles to keep up with the strange alien thoughts, to organize the wildly shifting perceptions into something orderly that she can make sense of...
(Spending 4 Intellect to reduce difficulty by 2 ranks.)
[roll0]
(...and Echo apparently merges with the Time Vortex and becomes the Bad Wolf)
Echo's vision goes dark, then bright again. For a moment it was as if she were high in the air above the city, looking down on streets and buildings that show a curious patchwork of gleaming newness and shattered, dusty, ancient stonework. A blue domed building pulses with power held barely in check, and a slow, oozing river of energy slides greasily in unsteady pulses under the surface of the street to another structure, tall and spindly and red, some many streets distant. The power in the blue building seems to be being held at bay by the point of the hovering inverted mountain. In places in the street, in the new parts, you can see the small moving forms of living beings, but when they reach the gray parts of the city, they seemingly vanish from view.
And abruptly Echo is back in her own body, her own eyes, her mind feeling decidedly bruised and the ribbon of energy withdrawing from her with unseemly haste. As if burned, one might say.
[sblock=OOC Echo]OOC: Echo takes 4 Int damage.[/sblock]
Duncan looks at the distance between himself and the chronal feeder, and tries to access his memory banks of the pattern beasts use to play with their prey: toss in the air, direction, range of chronal teleport... If his strategic mind could calculate where that thing would appear next with Xaion, and he could get there first, perhaps he could save his friend...
OOC: Could I spend Intellect to reduce whatever difficulty this would be for Duncan? I need to find my PDF of the rules, now that I've switched computers to a Mac.
[roll0]
Duncan tries to calculate when the chronal feeder will end up next, but its abilities are very strange, even for his experience with vicious beasts. He sees the feeder appear again, distantly to the east, and sees Xiaon strike out at it, catching it and rocking it slightly before the feeder charges and both of them vanish into a fold of the air again. It seems Xiaon, at least, will not make this easy on the creature.
On the other hand, Ohm Eleven and Father Seren are now some 60 feet up in the air on a bridge of floating, glowing cables, Echo may have just eaten a ribbon of mysterious energy, and Wisco... Wisco has vanished entirely since you last looked. There's nothing but a little tree where he was standing.
And the city still awaits, the mountain still hovers...
[sblock=Duncan]OOC: You may use Int points to calculate where the feeder might be sure.[/sblock]
[sblock=Wisco]Doghead, I know not where you have been, but if you see this, we can bring Wisco back when you return, never fear.[/sblock]
Seregal looks around the bridge, staring into the distance. "I wonder where this goes?" he asks Ohm. He carefully teeters back and forth, and is lucky that he's trained in balancing.
He squints down at the commotion below. "Echo? Duncan?" he calls out. "Is everything all right?" He wonders how to get down.
Seregal then considers the far more important matter of his own survival. At least up here, he's away from the monsters. "I thought that they were gone already," he mutters. He looks carefully around on the wires.
Would it be safer to continue on, or work his own way down to the ground below? "Ohm? What do you think?" he asks.
The wires stretch for about a hundred feet, then terminate in another floating tower, still not close enough to the city gates. But apparently walking on the area where they were was enough to trigger them, so it stands to reason more might be triggered if one were to tread on, or over, the right places. And it does seem to be heading in the direction of the city gates, for fair.
