Veloci-Rapture

@Acies ab Vesania Can you handle text with italics in it? Or do I have to do some kind of formatting thing for it to come across that way?

I've got at least one more editing run to do on mine; still a little too wordy and a little too poorly paced.

"I had about 75% confidence," Al panted, as he scrambled to catch up. "Are there a lot of those things, where you come from?" Al reached into his pocket again and hesitated. If there was another Anular lurking around... The way the Render was assaulting the barrier told Al that this creature was not immune to magic; Al could probably deal with it on his own terms. He decided to save Plan B, just in case. "I've got this!" he yelled, as much to his followers as to Luz. "Get out of here! Go! Follow the beautiful young woman!" Taking a deep breath, Al stepped outside the barrier. He wished he'd spent more time learning Summoning, or even Illusion, but a young hot-headed Al was only happy at the thought of coming out of the Gnomish Academy as a right proper destruction-slinging badass gnombre. Evocation solved problems, but only in the same sense that a sledgehammer solves problems*. "Excuse me!" he called to the Render. "I see you're having some difficulty with that barrier! I'm quite confident that, in this specific instance, the error has something to do with an insufficient user IQ!" The thing appeared to be earless as well as eyeless, but it turned towards Al anyway with a low, threatening growl. Al didn't wait to collect any further data on the spikey-looking beast; his hands flew as he began to cast the most powerful, versatile spell he knew**. The Render darted forwards at an astounding speed. A brilliant cone of multicolored light erupted from Al's fingertips. The beast's attempt to interrupt its charge in favor of a sidestep was not quite successful, and it caught a bright yellow beam directly in its midsection. Electricity raced through the Render as Al backpedaled to try and keep a distance. Good news: the Render was successfully distracted from the group of refugees. Bad news: the Render was successfully distracted from the group of refugees. *Gnomes with sledgehammers, however, tend to solve gno problems. **Well, to be fair, calling down a swarm of meteors would probably be more powerful, but Al figured the city currently had enough problems.

There's no d8? Well hell. Ok, d10 -2 with wraparound. That'll do the trick.

Rolling to see what prismatic ray hits the Orisian Render! 1d8 please!

Make another big announcement about it! ...or maybe the stated participation of two previous winners is scaring people off. Hmm. Shit.

Al had never seen a creature quite like the Anular before, and his mind went in two directions at once. His logical half began making observations; size, speed, effect on the environment, relative intelligence level, and other details that a trained magus could make use of. His emotional half was working very hard on controlling his bowels*. The flickering of the barrier, as well as the way the orbiters left a wide berth around the creature, was cause for speculation. Was that an anti-magic effect? Or something else? Al moved with Luz, and the rest of the survivors followed like sheep, many with exclamations of fear or disgust. The gnome wove a mystical pattern in the air and produced a weeny fireball, which he regarded with a look of distaste before launching it at the hulking creature. It sped towards its target, then flickered and vanished. Data point. His hands moved again, adrenaline giving them enough speed that they looked like faintly-glowing blurs. A purple ball of pure mystic energy leapt from his fingertips and made a wooshing noise as it pierced the air, before also flickering and dying well before reaching the beast. Al's mind worked**. His eyes narrowed. He calculated. He scampered alongside his compatriot. The gnome's hands moved again, but this time, to his pockets. From those voluminous compartments emerged a pair of compact, rubbery-looking devices, definitively shaped to maximize their aerodynamics. The Anular drew closer, causing the green barrier to flicker more severely. On the devices, panels popped open. Al stumbled over some rubble as he frantically made a series of adjustments; he recovered his footing but lost valuable space. As the beast lumbered forwards, Al made one final set of calculations. The panels closed. He second-guessed himself; maybe plan B was better? No, too late to switch now. The barrier was nearly down. If he'd had a free hand, he would have crossed his fingers. He threw both devices, one after the other, at the approaching horror. They flew through the air, two tiny little dart-shaped things, each hardly bigger than a can of Magi-Cola. They passed the anti-magic threshhold, and began to grow. And grow. And grow. The magic of the Expanding Buoyancy Adjusters was in how they were compressed, and in adjusting how much that compressed mass needed to expand for a given emergency. Once inside the anti-magic field, there was nothing keeping them from enlarging to the fullest possible limit of their pre-compressed size. And since Al hadn't known exactly how big any given drowning Orisian would be, he'd built in a rather significant amount of extra tolerance***. As they expanded, they lost their magically-granted dart shape and took on the form of multiple (still expanding) cylinders connected by tough guidelines. By the time they reached the Anular, they were each roughly the size of a decently-well-off gnome's front yard, and the ballooning cylinders were as big as tree stumps. And they were just the tiniest smidge heavier than air. The Anular was now faced with a pair of enormous floating nets drifting happily towards it, ready to save its life from any possible kind of aquatic emergency. *This was not included in the "effects on the environment" observation, but might should have been. **Any later reports of smoke coming out of his ears are purely apocryphal. ***He never specifically found any references to giants living in the islands, but he'd have felt like a real heel if he let one drown due to a failure of imagination.

Oops. Ok, next time I decide to work 30 days straight, I'm going to start logging in and posting on my lunch break or something. I once again lost track of the days. I'm going to have to put notifications on my phone calendar or something. Geeze.

I must have missed the notification for your last post. Man, I suck at this.

Al hustled to get under the green dome, not caring for even a moment that such eagerness for safety, should it come to light, might hurt his membership standing in the Man Club.* "Speaking of data, let me tell you what I've collected on my journey so far. Ah, if only I had my voice-activated mental note recorder handy." Most of the refugees, seeing their ersatz leader walking away, scrambled to their feet and hastened to follow. A few remained behind, either too overwhelmed with terror or too exhausted to continue. "When caught in one of the black orbs, objects that cross the plane from this direction disappear. There is no sucking effect; whatever specific part of an object or person enters the orb is simply removed. My Sun Screening Field Generator, supercharged, protected me from this effect, which leads me to believe that this is not an intrinsic property of the orbs themselves, rather that they are preceded minutely by a force-based exclusion zone, possibly a thin field of annihilation. I further speculate that the strange creatures rampaging around the city, as well as your medical center, were deposited here by the same black orbs. I have not yet seen direct evidence of this, but until more data can be collected, I prefer to surmise that there is a single cause producing multiple effects, rather than that there are multiple catastrophes happening simultaneously. Question: is it nighttime, where you come from? If these orbs are in fact portals -- either one-way, or, as I suspect due to the exclusion field, two-way -- a night sky on the other side would explain their apparent color." Al's short stride was making it difficult to both keep up with the long-legged doctor and talk at the same time, but he muscled through. He wryly noted that perhaps he should have spent more time at the gym.** "Also, concurrent with the appearance of the black orbs, the force that typically prevents magitech devices from functioning -- the locals call it 'La'Ruta', and for brevity's sake I will do so as well -- has weakened or vanished. I do not know if this phenomenon is uniformly or unevenly distributed, and if unevenly distributed, if the areas of weakened effect are dynamic or static. I've been designing an experiment to find out; we'd have to leave multiple self-referential magitech devices at various locations around the city. We'd observe whether or not they functioned immediately upon deployment, and leave observers behind for some period of time to see whether or not that functionality fluctuates. But, well, let's just say that idea is a touch impractical at the moment. I don't think we'd get many volunteers. Plus, I don't have anything suitable on hand. A Parti-Magick Illusionary Confetti Generator, or even an empty Magi-Cluck Rapid Hatch Incubator*** would work just fine for this purpose... but, again, I ain't got none." As the group approached the bridge across the bay that would take them to the orchards, another of those terrifying roars echoed in the air. Al shuddered. "I also might have a plan for dealing with that thing, pending a visual analysis. I'm not sure I have a plan to deal with my inevitable evacuation into my pants, but that's a minor detail." *It was already under review, after the last septiannual report showed that he was 535% more likely to mutter gruffly under his breath than to haul off and punch someone. **As per one of the recommendations from the Man Committee reviewing his membership status. ***Or many more wonderful Gryffyn Enterprises products, available wherever fine magitech products are sold!

Ana opened her mouth to explain her lack of injury -- fuck these people, getting hurt so easy -- but was interrupted by the eruption of green light from the walls. "Aww, c'mon, really?" And then the floor was gone. Son of a bitch. Ana had never been awesome at flying; wings weren't a problem, and she could even use them, but it wasn't graceful. She could never get the center of balance right, and unless she'd had a really bad week, she always had much more mass than was strictly aerodynamic. She could always use jet engines, she mused as the ground go closer. Jet engines should make mass totally irrelevant. She could never possibly retain enough water to make her as bloated as a 747. Even if she did sometimes feel that way. So yes, jet engines; that's a great way to overcome this flying prob-- *CRUNCH* Annnnnnd, there's the ground. If not looking injured had been a problem before, it wouldn't be now. She'd seen plenty of vertebrates that had been dropped off of high places onto hard surfaces -- most of them she'd been responsible for -- and was quite proud of the way her current form mimicked the effect. Ana always liked confirmation that she'd done something properly. Her legs jutted out at odd angles, her arms looked like they'd been telescoped in on themselves, and her torso was torn open right about where her guts should be. She created some, and let them dangle out of the wound. As an afterthought, she let some blood leak out of all the appropriate holes too. "Son... of... a.... bitch," she groaned. Ana painfully and carefully rolled over onto her back, and made an agonized expression. With a horrible grinding sound, her arms slowly pushed back out to their proper lengths. With a show of much effort, the desert warrior sat up. She carefully gathered up her exposed intestine and stuffed it back into her stomach, then leaned over and grabbed ahold of her leg, twisting it sharply back into the proper alignment with a shout of intense pain. She repeated the process on the other leg, then -- because she was out of ideas, primarily -- allowed the flesh on either side of the gash across her midsection slowly knit back together. The comedic value of having her innards fall out at random times during the rest of the trip was overshadowed by the logistical pain-in-the-ass-ness, Ana decided. "A moment... if you please," she panted. "That was...unpleasant."

See, I would have suggested this:

AHh! I'm still not ready! My entry is still at 2146 words! So much more editing to do! Too much exposition in the climax! too much redundancy in the setup! Things I set up for in the beginning, but end up not using at the end; keep them, toss them, or finish them and take the extra words from somewhere else? I don't knoooooow! Panic! Panic! *ahem* I mean, I shall certainly be entering once again, my good sir.

Metallic lavender with gold undertones. *nodnod*