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Envoke's story: Episode 2 & 3

Written by Grif :: [Monday, 07 August 2017 06:21] Last updated by :: [Tuesday, 22 August 2017 09:14]

Episode 2

She waits and waits atop the 5 story tall building. Hours pass by with no signs of life other than her own. In those hours, she examines the cityscape that she now resides in. All she knows about this city is that there is popular arena in it, and that its gladiators aren't that much of a challenge to her. Their champion was strong at least, but seemed too tame to give her a fruitful sparring. Maybe, the denizens of this city that even care about the loss of their Champion will seek her out and try to kill her, or something like that. She will need competition to refine her physical capabilities. If left untested, then she may become tame like that Champion. Envoke doesn't want to be tamed, she wants to be challenged. She wants to become as potent a fighter as is possible.

She doesn't know how she arrived in this city. She can't remember anything before her sudden, birth-like arrival. She just has to take on whatever she may find and live for as long as she possibly can.

Amidst her wonderment, she spies some of the challengers exiting the stadium in haste. It is difficult to see details, but their energy signatures tell Envoke that there are 9 pursuers in search of her. At least, that is what she thinks that they left the Stadium for. Since Envoke defeated their Champion, she assumes that the challengers will now want to defeat her instead. The nine walk down the weathered stairs of the Stadium while looking in different directions. Despite her hopes, the nine do not split up as they walk toward her general location. They slowly proceed along the sidewalk on the opposing side of the street. Envoke can eventually see that the 9 entities consist of 3 golems, 3 translucent warriors, and 3 human hybrids. As they get closer to her position, she debates whether to fight or flee from her elevated position. She is very interested in fighting all nine of them at once, but without knowing what they are capable of; she is unsure if the fight will be in her favor, or if it is even worth her effort at this time. Conversely, Chaos is serene. The attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible; that temporary stillness that exists, when the surrounding menagerie of signals becomes completely decipherable. How could she resist the temptation to find serenity amongst those 9 potential assailants down there? What is her safety even worth?

Episode 3

9 challengers from the arena walk along the sidewalk as they move closer and closer to Envoke’s position atop a 5-story building.

With the thrill of chaotic serenity beckoning, Envoke holds back her attack in favor of a decision to learn more. Envoke widens her eyes in an attempt to focus on the nine’s energy signatures. At first, she looks for patterns to determine how their bodies control themselves to navigate the world. Through their repetition, she sees that the source of all their energies come from their heads, and then flows out to their different extremities. So far, they appear to work the same way that the Champion works; so she assumes that if she can remove all their heads quickly enough, then the burden of defeat would not be hers to bear. “So far, the obvious solution is still the most likely one, but nine at once sounds very difficult.”, Envoke thinks to herself. Envoke keeps her desire at bay to listen to everything around her.

She closes her eyes to focus on the sounds around her. She can’t pick out each challenger by sound, but she can at least tell where they are and which way that they’re going. She doesn’t hear anything other than the challengers, as they arrive just below Envoke on the sidewalk. She listens and listens for a couple minutes without hearing anything other than the group of challengers; but then, an additional source is heard from about 20 feet behind her.

She immediately turns to face the sound to find the familiar energy signature of a translucent warrior sneaking toward her. The translucent has become transparent since Envoke cannot see its body in the darkness of night, but she can still see its flow of energy as it quickly converts the creeping movements into an aggressive lunge after realizing that it has been spotted. Using what little she remembers about the warriors from the arena; Envoke decides to leap up into the air to try to land on the incoming assailant. The warrior expectantly lands just below Envoke as she lets gravity pull her back toward the ground. The translucent warrior ends up landing thighs and belly first because it didn’t consider failure in its lunge. It went all in and missed its mark. Fortunately, as Envoke’s right foot lands with a forceful stomp, the warrior’s neck manages to slip away from her violent landing only to feel its neck get annihilated by Envoke’s left foot. A sharp cry of pain is emitted from the warrior’s mouth along with its last breath; at the same time a beam of energy grazes Envoke’s cheek. Envoke instinctively ducks back below the roof’s wall, while a tingling sensation circulates through Envoke’s right cheek.

She feels her cheek become numb and unresponsive. Concern builds as she carefully looks behind her to try to see where the beam came from. She also touches her cheek with her hand to prove that she has indeed lost the sense of touch on her cheek. Envoke can only see a new energy signature in the distance, but cannot make out any physical form from her current location on the other side of the road. Envoke estimates that this other entity is at least 100 feet away from her. In a quick decision to test the waters, Envoke throws the head of the disemboweled translucent warrior at this other entity to see how it will react. She tries to stay as low profile as possible to try to avoid another shot to the face, or other vital points. The head flies straight toward the entity and even gets close enough to make contact with it, but instead of seeing it recoil from the hit, it appears that the entity simply caught it without issue. Envoke smirks with pleasure as she decides that she must spar with that thing. To her surprise, the world becomes illuminated in front of her eyes.

She then turns her head to look behind her to try to see where the light is coming from, but she doesn’t see anything emitting light onto her. In that moment she realizes that the light is coming from her own eyes; allowing her to see things much clearer a couple feet in front of her. Envoke looks at the dead warrior’s body while fiddling internally with her eyes until she figures out how to control the amount of light being emitted from her eyes. She comes to the conclusion that she can only produce enough light to clearly see about 5 or 6 feet away from her. “Wow, this is amazing!”, Envoke proclaims with awe. While in awe, Envoke notices the damage she did to the roof when she stepped on the warrior’s neck. She sees that she easily made an about 3-inch deep footprint in the rooftop. Her plan of attack has been inspired with this new information. She tests her plans by punching the roof really hard to find that her fist does indeed go most the way through the roof without hurting her arm; it stung, but didn’t hurt. Envoke smiles with confidence as her plan of attack is formed. She visualizes herself sneaking up on the entity from below and striking it down with much ferocity. Not exactly a blow for blow sparring match, but kill or be killed doesn’t exactly merit pulling punches. Time to convert fantasy into reality.

To start, Envoke grabs the rest of the translucent corpse and prepares to do a low-profile hammer throw at the unknown entity. She steps away from the wall a bit to improve the trajectory. And with a quick lateral spin of her body, Envoke sends the corpse into the direction of the unknown entity while immediately and stealthily slipping over the roof wall so she can return to street level, and thus get underneath the entity. While she is still conscious of the challengers’ distant presence, she does not look in their direction. Envoke believes that checking up on their location is not important, and that the distraction may even alert them to her current location as she runs across the street to get inside the 5 story building ahead of her. She quickly leaps up to an open window on the fifth floor in several successive jumps, while also noticing that entity didn’t move during her advance. So either the corpse didn’t collide with the entity, or the entity didn’t bother with the flying corpse.

After landing inside the building she penetrates some of the darkness with her new head lights to see dust-coated furniture and decorations. It looked like a place where someone lived at some point, but unlike the stadium, it looks like no one has been here in a long, long time. None of the furnishing look familiar to Envoke, but then nothing in this world has felt familiar, well except fighting. She leaves the room through the door-less doorway into a hallway while keeping her eyes transfixed on entity’s energy signature. Envoke goes from dusty hallway to dusty hallway as she gets closer to the entity’s location. Doored and door-less rooms appear every 20 or so feet on each side of the hallways, until she finally arrives below the unknown entity. Her excitement builds as she bends down into a squat-like pounce-ready stance with the fires of unwavering aggression fueling her body with focused, destructive power. Seeing no change in the entity’s energy signature while her breath slows to just the right pace, she launches herself arm first into and the through the 12ft ceiling above her. Her arm plows through the building materials and deep into the entity’s flesh, blood, bone, and organs with meager resistance. Just before Envoke’s fist reaches the entity’s head her momentum stops completely; forcing Envoke’s body to crash into it, crumple up, and then hang from the entity’s powerful, clenching, shredded and torn torso muscles. Before she can recover from the painful and abrupt stop, the entity rolls backward to launch Envoke into the night sky. She flies across the remaining portion of the current building, then over the next street, and fall onto the next 5-story building’s roof.

Envoke is reeling on the roof in physical and mental pain as she desperately tries to compose herself. She can’t see any of the challengers, and can only see the unknown entity either just laying there or slowly crawling toward her as Envoke struggles to recover from the unexpected throw. After an internal and external examination of her own body, she finds that the arm she punched with is dislocated at the shoulder causing her intense pain, but otherwise just a lot of sore muscles. “Phew, no permanent damage.” ,says Envoke along with a sigh a relief and the renewing vigor to finish the fight. With a few intuition driven tweaks, Envoke relocates her shoulder into its proper position as she slowly returns to her feet. She decides to take a slower return route. Being ever vigilant of surprise guests, Envoke eventually returns to the unknown entity without encountering any challengers. She keeps her distance in order to avoid any more flying lessons from the entity.

She finally gets to look at the entity, and finds that it has a bipedal, human form with 2 arms and 2 legs, and has a… surprisingly basic, female-shaped physique that doesn’t look muscular or fat or even powerful. This female-looking entity has tan skin, red eyes, blue, shoulder-length hair, and this weird mask that covers her mouth, nose, and neck. In addition to the mask, it is wearing some damaged navy blue and brown colored leather armor on its’ torso and legs, but like Envoke, its feet are bare. Unlike Envoke it has very long toes. Its energy signature is much more faded than it was before, and a large pool of blood surrounds its body. Envoke can clearly see that punch she hit it with tore its’ torso asunder from the crotch to the chest. All of its organs are visible in the darkness of night, under the reflective light pouring out of Envoke’s eyes. When comparing her own muscular physique to the entity’s slim, and plain looking physique; Envoke cannot comprehend how it could have thrown her so far and with so much velocity. Envoke deduces that the entity has only about half as much mass as she does. That said, she has no doubt that it could have killed her just as easily as she has killed it. “That mask is quite weird.” thinks Envoke as she sees the entity’s energy signature fade to nothing. Seemingly dead, Envoke decides that it is okay to take a closer look at this unknown being.

She touches the metallic face mask to find it to be cool and smooth to the touch. Pushing harder, Envoke finds that she can dent the mask, but it strangely felt like she needed to apply a lot more force to the mask than she did to the roof to damage it. Putting her ear closer to the opening in the mask where she thinks the entity would speak and breathe out of; she couldn’t hear any breathing or even any sounds at all. Moving on to its’ face Envoke finds the skin to be very soft and squishy, much more malleable than her own. Envoke’s skin is very tough, hard, and has a rough texture to it. As Envoke is feeling her sturdy skin, she notices a reflection in the entity’s mask. “There’s words on my arm?”, Envoke questions her state of being. With some adjustment she reads the statement Chaos is Serene tattooed on her left deltoid; which connects her arm to the rest of her well built body. Confused she states, “That is weird, but I like it. It is so true! The serenity of chaos is the best feeling!”. Excitation spurns curiosity as Envoke looks into the entity’s eyes. Deeply she stares, looking for any insight into who or what this thing was.

Suddenly, Envoke registers heat coming from the entity. Before she can understand what is happening, the entity’s body becomes a flash of white light, and then disappears high into the sky like a firework of pure light. As Envoke recovers from the flash of light, she finds that the entity is gone. No body, just the structural damage she did to the roof when she killed it. “WHAT!?”, Envoke exclaims in total confusion as her eyes eventually readjust to the darkness of night. She looks all around her for any evidence of what just happened. Stirred and unsettled, she could not find any help in understanding why the entity’s corpse just vanished. She just watches and waits for about an hour, finding nothing but waning hope. She decides to retire for what remains of the night by sleeping on the roof; so that she will be awakened by any nearby threats. Envoke uses the uncomfortable cement roof as a bed to get whatever rest she can. “Good night crazy world. I welcome whatever tomorrow will bring.”, Envoke proclaims to herself before nodding off.

Severed Warrior Head

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