Thumper glides the last stretch into the shelter.
The TW spins and “fans the hammer”
Elaine blasts the last creature in her vicinity, stunning it, and binding it with ice. At that, she takes off running, hoping she can outdistance the monster. In short order, she sprints her way to the Apothecary Shoppe. When she gets there, she is somewhat stunned to see that there are other people running towards the store instead of away. Who else would be running towards the source of all this mayhem?
Jace dashes toward the embattled figure on his right, slicing with wicked blades at the monsters attacking him. The first he decapitates cleanly, but the second seems to catch a glimpse of him before the attack and ducks out of the way.
K842 dashes into the storefront, brandishing his two handed chainsword in two arms, and his stake-bow in the others. Taking in the scene, he moves to the left, seeing Arsenio front and center, and Jace on the right.
His sword strike bisects a creature with minimal resistance, and his crossbow stake nails another creature to a wall, right through the heart. The thing dissolves away to ash, right before his eyes.
Thumper bolts into the store, casting a gaze about for a target. He sees the roiling mass emerging from behind the counter and fires into it blindly. Casting off four rapid shots from the hip feels awesome, but unfortunately hits little. He wings one of the monsters, spinning it out of the writhing mass that is surging up and trying to get enough space to take wing, but probably did little damage to it.
Micheaux lets out a primal scream, and the psychically sensitive among you feel a wave of energy flow through the room as she does her best to exert the maximum amount of force she can pull together.
First, you see the sales counter shudder, and then it splinters, compressing itself to be smaller and smaller. Micheaux forces it backwards a few inches at a time, holding it in place against the surge of writhing hairy bodies. While the constant flow of them hits against the mass and tried to push it upwards, Micheaux holds it in place, and even manages to force it down a bit against the flow.
Another shelf near the sales desk starts to collapse under her telekinetic power, and then another behind it. She adds the peices of these to the mass of debris she is forcing into the stream. Gradually, as she manages to force the mass lower against the floor, you start to see something like a pit in the floor behind where the counter initially sat. The creatures were surging upwards out of the pit as though a portal of some sort opened down there, beneath the store.
Slowly, the stream of new creatures begins to stem and slow, until only a few creatures here and there seem to be able to manage to make their way around of through the wad of debris, instead of the dozens that were emerging every second only a few moments before.
While the stream seems mostly blocked for the moment, the strain of holding the debris in place is plain on Micheaux face. It is taking everything she has to hold the imperfect cork she has made in this particular bottle. Should she give into the strain, the stream would likely resume as it was, scattering the plug to the bits of detritus it is made from.
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As Elaina gets nearer to the shop, she sees an armor-clad figure running just as quickly toward it.
"Stand aside, citizen," he booms out. He clenches glowing swords in each fist and their ephemeral light casts ghostly shadows on his yellow armor. A crude clenched fist is stylized on one shoulder.
"This place seems to be the origin of the Xeno tide. I can not guarantee your safety this close to it."
His words come in a rumble, stoic yet steady, as if he walks a path, and does not care if he dies in the process, so long as the path is walked.
"I can handle m'self, thanks," Elaina says, a bit irked by the strange man's dismissive tone. "Besides I wouldn't be here if there wasn't something to seal away," she adds as she trots beside him.
= 7 Spade
= 5 Diamond
= Queen Clubs
= 7 Clubs
= 10 Hearts
= Queen Spades
= 7 Spades
= Jack Diamonds
= 8 Diamonds
= Joker
The Apothacary Shoppe
Seeing the center of power, Jace knows what he needs to do. Blade whirling in every direction, he cuts a path through the creatures and heads right for the source.
Thumper turns from the creature facing him with a flinch. He reaches into his pack for an odd hourglass where the seems to be falling up. "Time to release all that stored up time little ones"
Techno-Wizardry: -2 Multi action
Once he gets to Jace he stops short the juicers blade an inch from his neck. "I have a present for you friend" he holds out the hourglass and the grains of sand suddenly begin to fall again and the Juicer begins to move even faster.
@Jace
The gizmo has 7 PPE so it will run for 5 rounds
Jace slashes at two of the monsters, stunning one and killing another. Just then Thumper hands him a magic device, and time seemingly slows to half it's normal pace.
Ace continues to run towards the problem :
= 11"
Arsenio take a rough strike from the monster, though manages to narrowly avoid being disemboweled. Grunting through the searing pain mere movement brings, he grabs the man lying on the ground and begins to pull him out of the shop. Hopefully once he's out of danger Micheaux will know to fall back and regroup.
Jace has to concentrate to understand what Thumper is saying as his voice slowly comes out of his mouth. Understanding hit him quickly as suddenly time itself seemed to stop and he was the only one moving in the store. The slow flapping of the wings of the creatures beat in unseen nanoseconds as Jace made his way to the next group of creatures. As the flock thinned, he recognized the young man in the center of the circle. He had raced him not long ago as they entered the city. The kid was fast. This didn't seem like him though, something wasn't right. He didn't want to kill him, and Jace's understanding of magic was slim, but if he could get Hyper out of there, maybe that would help. All of this thought occurred as he hacked into two more creatures on his way to the circle. One neatly severed into two halves and the other seemingly unfazed as he barely nicks it. Unconcerned, he rushes towards Hyper, in an attempt to knock him out of the circle.
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Brother Aterro takes in the scene of chaos and carnage before him. To his keen eyes, it takes no great time to see the source of the Xeno plague. Obviously the unfortunate psyker caught in the Ritual of Chaos at the crux of the room is being wrought for power like a white dwarf at the heart of a forge engine.
Realizing the minor beasts about them are but distractions, he forsakes offense and sprints toward the spectacle in the center.
"If a job's worth doing it's worth dying for."
Arsenio manages to hang on to consciousness by a fingernail as the small monster tears into him. He grunts in pain as he goes down under the flailing little beast, but he is not out yet...
Jace leaps in and around the monsters, making his way towards the mystic circle and Hyperkinetic's floating form. He splits one in half, from head to groin, not even pausing to watch it die. While the second blade connects as well, the wound is shallow, and will likely only stun the beast.
Continuing to barrel past, he leaps towards the magic circle, aiming to carry both himself and his companion clear of its influence.
As soon as he enters the circle, Jace's athletic form is tossed backwards like a rag doll. He smashes through a few of the shelves, stopping only when he hits the sturdy exterior wall of the building. The breath knocked from him, it will likely take him a few moments to figure out where he is.
You sense several powerful workings here, some unrelated to the strange power; there is a burster before you - a purely psychic emanation of power, but powerful in its own right. Second, a dark skinned woman standing near him with her gaze focused on what looks to have been a cashier's desk. Powerful telekinesis is holding a mishmash of flotsam together within the mouth of a yawning portal located in the floor. It is from there that the flying creatures were emanating, though their flow is presently arrested. The woman holding the barrier in place is no doubt a master of the psionic arts, though you doubt even a Mind Melter could keep that kind of power expenditure up for long.
The foreign power is present in two chief workings; one is the portal. The power for that spell is located beneath it, not through the portal, but in a chamber beneath the floor that just so happens to lay on the other side of that portal. The second emanates from a man floating within a circle of arcane symbols near the two psychics. You can feel the power flowing out of him, and being taken directly into some other working you cannot immediately see. Perhaps if you examined the symbols of the circle, you might be able to get a better idea of what is being worked here, and whether there is anything you can even do to disrupt it.
Arsenio manages to hang on to consciousness by a fingernail as the small monster tears into him. He grunts in pain as he goes down under the flailing little beast, but he is not out yet...
Arsenio is indeed Stirred, not Shaken.
Elaina scooches over to the man being drained for some dark purpose and examines the runes around him.
Elaina dashes to the side of the mystic circle, trying to stay within Jace's wake. As soon as she arrives, she opens her senses to examine the circle.
Like the magic you feel around you, these symbols don't seem to fit with the version of reality you are used to; they are just off somehow. However, you can see the flow of magical energies around them, and that gives you a basic impression of what they are meant to do. The circle is warded; anyone attempting to cross it will be similarly affected as Jace just was. The circle proper isn't imprisoning the young man within; more like draining him. It is a well known fact to practitioners of magic, that the amount of magical energy a creature can produce doubles at the moment of death (which is why so many mythologies include the concept of sacrifice). This young man seems to have been somehow trapped at the moment of death - not actually dead yet, but not alive either. Even with that revelation, his body is producing far more magical energy that any mundane being should be able to produce; it is almost as if as each moment strips away his power, it is regenerated almost instantly.
If you could find a way to disrupt the spell, whatever is causing the boy to regenerate might be enough to save his life. If you were to kill him, there would be a burst of power into the spell he was meant to power, but within minutes the spell would collapse, as it would run out of power to fuel it.
= Queen Hearts
= 9 Diamond
= 8 Diamond
= 2 Diamonds
= 8 Clubs
= Queen Diamonds
= 9 Hearts
= Ace Clubs
= 5 Diamonds
Ace continues to run toward the source of the problem :
3" from door of shop.
= 11"
Jace shakes his head clear and it dawns on him what he should have remembered from his training and the few bounties he had against mages. You don't just go charging into a magic circle. Standing back up, he sees Elaina dealing with the circle, probably safer that way and his leader having difficulty with one of the creatures. He decides that killing is what he does best and bound towards the thing that has Doloso pinned and cuts its tiny little wings off. Or at least, he tries to. They are almost as fast as he is.
Party may act except for Elaina...
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"Blessed is the mind too small for doubt. Prayer cleanses the soul, but pain cleanses the body." Aterro chants, almost automatically, as he comes within a few steps of the central figure.
There was someone caught in a warp-bubble, and there was a gate lettings in all manner of Xenos. Such things were known by those who fought not only the throne-cursed spawn of dark elves and the whole of the foul Eldar races, but their former brothers too now trucked with powers that were not above using an innocent as fuel for infernal rites.
He knew what he had to do.
Because, were it him, he would want the same.
Holding his force-blades high, he CHARGES into the field, trying to lance though the being caught in the web, to end that man's life and too, this threat to his holy Terra.
= 5!
= 4!
Pressing on through strength of will, he presses through the force-field. It might hold at bay an army.
But it would not hold against the Emperor's finest.
"Thumper" ducks low and moves across the room and to take a closer look at the spell trying to determine how they are linked to the boy. 'A straight power drain may work but there is a lot of power here, if I take the boy out of phase with this reality, can I remove him from the proximity?'
"I'd be careful of that Aterro, brute force didn't work for me either." Jace says as he spars with the flying creatures around his squad leader.
Though he didn't understand Aterro's fanaticism to some machine-god, Jace couldn't disagree with the sentiment. "Fair enough, brother." He grunts again as he takes slash after slash, trading blows with the airborne nuisances.
Arsenio continues dragging the unconscious officer out of the building.