Arcana Tournament, Ikos Event (Lohrtar & Carly)

[Odyleon]

Fifth brightening of the Versian Arcana Tournament

"Only four people signed up?" Madame Roslinda was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "But but but I wished for lots of participants! Life is so unfair..." She took a longer peek, parting the pretty curtains that shielded her window from view with one hand. "Deirdre would have a heart attack if she knew it." The Hobb chewed on her plump lower lip in frustration, the shadow of a tear welling up in the corner of her eye. The Esh'lahier Druid by her side was no romantic. "Just go there and start the Aeternia-damned thing, Roslinda, or they, too, will leave. You were wishing for a miracle."

She pouted. "Meanie! There may be only four of them but I bet they could beat your tree huggers with their hands tied behind their backs!" She straightened her simple dress and made her way downstairs. "And pray tell me" said the Master Druid "how are they going to draw their doodles without hands?" Roslinda looked daggers at him but said nothing. Instead, she merely opened the door and stepped into the Versian central square. This place had been chosen as the setting for the Ikos main event instead of the open fields surrounding the town. The audience wasn't nearly as large as in the other contests, and it fit comfortably in the streets all around the square - but not the square itself, which was for the four participants and Roslinda only.

They sat at the four corners of the square, each one provided with a desk and drawing supplies; parchment, three bottles of ink (black, red, and blue respectively) and two quills. The Northern spot was occupied by a Dwarf, who had introduced himself as Vurd Gnollbane. The sturdy red-bearded youth was apparently missing one eye, which he had replaced with an eyepatch carrying the rune of Telos.

Across from Vurd, in the South corner, was a rather plain-looking human no-one really knew anything about. His name was Lohrtar Silvermoon.

The East corner was the domain of an Elven woman, Lady Armilla Pressivil Valim'drina Ordhundul, III (she had insisted on the 'III' part). She had a Deirdre Lorelei obsession, in all likelyhood, for she had her action figure on display on her desk, and boasted about the lock of Deirdre's hair she held tied around her finger.

And in the West corner, another newcomer. A Telera, a Sea Elf by the name of Carly Jr'ana. All in all, Roslinda was a little disappointed, but hopefully the four would prove themselves to be better than they appeared.

"Um... serale and welcome to the Ikos event, ladies and gentlemen. These brave individuals here will try to bend the rules of destiny in their favor to achieve victory, and I suggest the audience to stay clear of the square since it might become... unstable during the course of the contest. To put it simply, if you leave this square or surrender, you are out. Last man or woman standing wins. I'll be watching you from above, my dears. Do make me proud!"

And with those words, she scurried back into the building. It was much better to observe this kind of things from a distance. A safe, safe distance.

[Carly Jr'ana]

Sitting comfortably at her desk in one of her black and red lace dresses, Carly watched with a calm mind the actions of those around her. A hand moved a small bottle of some indescript liquor to her mouth, enough to make meditation that much easier. She recognised the human Lohtar from a brief encounter in Ieffreon, not knowing he had been an Ikonomancer she threw him a smile. But her attention was not focussed upon the other contestents, for whatever they did now was none of her concern, but rather the audience. Fate would bend to her will and the audience would comply, she studied their faces allowing the possibilities to mull in her subconcious before she turned her face to Roslinda.

Watching the little cether depart the square for a safer location it struck Carly that this battle would be dangerous, and maybe she should move a little closer to the centre of the arena. Choosing her supplies carefully, infact taking all the supplies she moved them to the centre of the arena as best she could and sat cross legged infront of the piece of parchment. This was how Carly started all her castings, and now would be no differant.

To begin with, she would build a defence against removal from the square, better to stop someone from casting against her than to counter every intent they formed. Such was the only way to counter Ikos, only now could she directly aim her spells at certain individuals and thus make her runes more direct.

Her lips murmurred a silent intent, for she did not want the others to hear
"I want the three other contestants to ignore me."
Scrawling this along the top of the parchment in neat Thelyri script, so that no one watching could read it, and so she would remember it until the casting she held the intent firmly in her mind and set about creating her rune.

She would use Salucha for their antagonism, and Bhun to silence it, with Evo used to provide reasoning in their minds for the twists of fate. Always best to make someone think it was their idea in the first place rather than blindly forcing them to accept it. Faint threads of chuckling echoed in her mind that perhaps she should have been a Mystic, even as he mind emptied itself of wordly distractions to focus on her intent and begin scrawling the Sigil.

Her sigil would be a simple sequence. Next she considered the strokes of her quill, she had been studying the basics of the concepts recently. She could draw Salucha to bring out it's material meaning of antagonist, for the other two runes she did not yet know of a stroke to bring out their meanings in the way required.

Picking up the quill with a delicate touch she drew smooth strokes for all the runes, ranging across a full piece of parchment from left to right. Beginning with Evo, followed by Bhun, and finishing with Salucha with the practised downwards strokes.

She knew Evo and Bhun like intimate friends, they were the first two runes she had ever choosen and this was reflected in the way she drew them as if they were outlining the familiar face of a relative. Finishing the sigil after a time she began to clear her mind, taking a swig from the bottle a second time she looked down upon the Sigil and hummed. The sylables drew out like a song, a song of whcih consisted only of a constant rhymic pattern, the s rattled off like some angry snake drawing her mind even closer to the intent of her sigil.

Carly sought clara with all her being, and her soul, only a recently discovered commodity, hummed with her intentions. Her command, for that is how she always truely considered her intent thumped at fate in her imagination.

[Odyleon]

OOC: Roslinda is a Cether. The Fae teacher was Teresa Yi, now exiled. Also, I'll be NPC'ing Lohrtar, but of course he can step in any time!

IC: Many among the audience still failed to understand the workings of Ikos, dismissing it as some sort of cosmic oddity that just existed for no apparent reason. Very few had taken Roslinda's warnings seriously, refusing to retreat from their positions on the very edge of the square. Others had decided to watch the event from a vantage point, namely windows and balconies – a few, belonging to the smaller races, had even occupied the roofs of the houses looking on to the open square. Among them was Filgrim the gadgeteer, carrying a bag full of his strange contraptions, a pair of Gnome-sized binoculars in his hands. It was likely that some Masters from the Imaden, too, were watching the event, though they had probably mixed with the common crowd, as well as some Magi who had entered different sections of the tournament.

Lohrtar returned Carly's smile with the slightest nod – but then the Priest of Rak was never one to make a public show of his emotions. The other two contestants seemed to mind their own business, merely looking around to analyze the place that would soon become their battlefield, scanning the brightly colored and oddly-shaped Versian buildings.

None of Carly's opponents left their desks to draw their sigils elsewhere. Of course, moving closer to the center of the square took the Telera some time, and this gave Lohrtar enough time to finish his sigil first – it became apparent when the Human tore apart his sheet of parchment. However, Carly had mastered her runes remarkably well, and her casting followed by mere seconds. The Dwarf finished next, and he sliced his parchment with a dagger, eating the pieces with gusto and beating his chest afterwards. Unfortunately, Carly was still too far and too focused to make out the runes they had used. The lightborn elf finished last, folding (with practiced ease) her parchment into a little hat that she then placed on her head.

Apparently, Carly's wish had been granted in that what happened next did not specifically affect her. However, something definitely happened which affected everyone. It started to rain. The Deirdre-obsessed Elf smiled quietly, pulling out a stylish paper umbrella of exotic shape from her bag as the rain gradually picked up. Whatever Lohrtar and the Dwarf had wished for, it wasn't showing, at least for the time being.

[Carly Jr'ana]

Carly looked up at the rain, letting it cascade down her face and soak into her skin. A laugh escaped from her lips as she drank some of it down. Ink would be no good, but thankfully Carly always carried chalk and charcoal with her, substances which would be less inclined to wash off parchment with the rain. Laying all her sheets of parchment in front of her Carly looked around the square as her mind flicked through possibilities.

A flash of light off those binoculars caught her eye, triggering the though within her mind for her next sigil. She grinned devilishly as she took her chalk and began to trace the runes upon the sodden material at her feet. Carly wasn't the nicest little girl in the world, she was often quite far from it. She began with Lopeter, for destruction, the centre of a star pattern. She drew with downwards strokes to emphasize the physical nature of the destruction, her target was the elf. The arms consisted of Chanu and Aga, describing the storm and the lightning that was to come. Genas and Salucha combined their own arm of the pattern, describing the pain and destruction that would consume her worldly body.

Her strokes emphasized the utter physical obliteration of the elf, lightning would surge through her body and burn her out soul. Her own storm would be her undoing. Carly placed the chalk within her dress pocket and focussed in on her sigil, imagining the results in her mind as all other distractions were pushed away in favour of clara. The world became a ghost as she willed her wish into existence, letting clara slip away once she was done. A swipe of her hand would wipe the chalk away from the parchment, the rain aiding her in her endevour.

[Odyleon]

Throughout the creation of the sigil, the rain kept picking up in intensity, heavy drops falling from thick, dark grey clouds. The uncanny thing about it was that the sky outside of the colorful town of Vers appeared to be mostly clear, as though every single cloud within miles had gathered upon the contestants. It caused some among the audience to go 'ooh' and 'aah', though others had seen Elementalists and Druids do the same before and were not as impressed.

Then there were brief flashes in the clouds, the prelude to something far more powerful to follow. Carly's three opponents were not standing idly, of course, drawing their own sigils while she did hers. The Dwarf etching his with a dagger on a strip of leather; the Elf with a pencil on a piece of paper, protected by the umbrella; and Lohrtar with a piece of chalk, like Carly.

The first lightning struck a balcony near the edge of the town square, dangerously close to its occupants, who retreated into the house screaming. The second lightning followed soon, discharging its power upon Miss Armilla, III. It was a terrifying lightning, the likes of which were not usually seen around Vers - not those of natural origin, at least. There was a flash and a loud, crackling sound as the beast from the heavens fell upon its target...

... only to leave the Elf completely unscathed. It turned out that the lightning had not struck her, but the Deirdre doll resting on the desk; it had acted as a proxy of sorts, and was now a charred, blackened action figure - though still retaining the Arch-Ikomancer's enigmatic smile - with the desk having nearly fallen apart in the process. The Elf looked at it in disbelief, but appeared mostly annoyed at the damage the doll had taken.

Lucky. If one could call it so in Ikos.

Meanwhile, Carly was facing another problem. The flash. The horrible flash. Her eyes, they hurt more than they were supposed to. By a whim of fate, she had been looking at the wrong point at the wrong time, and now an annoying whirlwind of colors was superimposed upon her vision.

[Carly Jr'ana]

A smile spread across the elves face as she watched the lightning bolt trace it's way across the square, scattering innocent bystanders and obliterating her opponent. Only it didn't. She watched as instead a little doll was charred, cooked, set alight. The bolt from the heavens likely gluing it to the spot as it melted, the table, destroyed. And yet through that haze of flashing lights and spinning colours Carly saw quite clearly her opponent was untouched. Her silly little umbrella quite alright.

Blinking at the colours, hoping they would fade, Carly grimaced. And yet, not to worry! Her vision was her worst sense of all, she barely used it when she created her sigils anyway. Instead she relied on her superb sense of space and place, and her echolocation to map the impressions made on the parchment. Still, there colours would distract her from the chalk. And so she took a sheet of parchment in her hands and prepared to rip it, Ikos could be made in many forms, one of which was sculpture. The water had weakened the parchment and made it easier to tear, and tear she did.

She pondered on how best to take her opponents out of this race, her thoughts flicking through her runes, looking in the deepest darkest corners of their meanings. Something no one would expect, and her lips curled into a smile once more as she found it. She ripped the parchment into scraps, and with those scraps she laid one rune within another, within another. Genas within Dharv within Salucha. Need, sexual potency, and lust. And off to the side of these she laid Lopeter and Bhun to signify her enemy Ikomancers, their traquility destroyed by their natural urges. Being so young, she knew she wouldn't be affected by such a sigil.

And now, she shut her eyes and ignored the dazzling lights before her as best she could. Pressing wet clammy fingers over them and pressing down, all she could see would be black. Darkness. And then she hummed her tune, the sound of her sigil, a mix of their characteristic sounds. And she focussed on what she wanted from her spell, the intent. Looking for that meditative trance of clara, where she would unleash her will upon her quite suspecting foes.

[Odyleon]

It sounded like a change of strategy for Carly, moving away from showy displays of weather control towards the subtler manipulations of instinct. Meanwhile, the town square was quickly turning into a clash of probabilities, as was the norm with several Ikomancers casting simultaneously and competitively. Situations may occur that were next to impossible to observe under normal conditions as the contestants disturbed each other's wishes with their own.

So, they were in the middle of a thunderstorm getting stronger and darker by the moment, a storm limited to perhaps less than half of the area occupied by Vers. People were seeking shelter from the rain, some kind souls opening their doors to welcome them into their homes, others leaving the area, and those who were lucky enough to be Magi conjuring all manners of umbrellas and shields to stave off the rain and still enjoy the show.

It took some time for Carly's next sigil to produce a visible effect. Meanwhile, the Dwarf and the Elf had time to draw one more sigil each, whereas the Human known as Lohrtar did the unexpected and raised his hand, quitting the contest altogether as he was unable to cast anymore with his supplies completely ruined. Someone among the crowd disapproved of this and waved their bent arms at him while doing their best chicken impression, but that was it. The man simply slipped out of the square and disappeared in the crowd.

This, of course, left three contestants that could hardly feel desire of the flesh for one another, so obviously the wish did not come true in the way Carly had imagined it would. The Elven maiden was planning her next move, when someone, paying no heed to the horrible weather, jumped over the barriers that isolated the town square and invaded the place of the contest, heading straight for the charming Ikomancer. He was young, with a scary-looking mohawk, quite possibly under the influence of some Mage-specific drug, and had a lusty light about his eyes.

He ran towards Armilla, who saw him coming and shrieked in fear. She had met this maniac soon after entering Vers, and had turned down his advances more than once. At some point she'd even used Ikos to get him lost in the woods. And now, he was after her at the worst possible time. There was no time to cast, and she had to run, the intoxicated human going after her. The guards gathered at the edges of the square seemed unsure whether they should intervene just yet, but Carly could see that, given the randomness of it all, the young Telera may be trampled at some point. Which would probably make some previous wish come true.

[Carly Jr'ana]

Carly smiled for only as long as it took her to work out how much chaos was filling up the square. Her sigil had worked, perhaps, or the man was simply insane. Naturally the elf was out of the running, so long as she could escape the square, leaving Carly and the dwarf. But if things continued to esculate Carly would find herself in the middle of a raging storm of unbridled chaos. Scampering across the cobblestones to her desk, the one originally assigned to her Carly took up a sheet of soggy parchment and quickly formed the singular rune of Bhun. Running finger nails along the parchment so the stroke ran to the first meaning of the word. Her first ever rune and the one she always had a strong sense for. Concentrating on it as hard as she could, holding tight to the legs of her desk, Carly willed calm into the square.

Utter, unabashed calm in the purest sense of the word. Here, now. Calm calm calm she repeated in her head, willing it to happen as quickly as she could. Like a little child hiding from the boogey man she cowered under her table wishing for calm, pushing the vain thought that maybe the other elf had ran away from her mind whenever it popped in there. Carly had just hit the big metaphorical reset button on the entire tournament, she only had to see if it had worked.