Re: New Blood (multi-series fusion)
Posted: 2014-01-03 04:34am
Sparring with a vampiric abomination capable of casually ripping mecha apart with her bare hands was quite intense exercise. If Ellie had not already spent her formative years as an urban spelunker and pack mule she was fairly certain the experience would have caused her to collapse into a spluttering heap after the first minute rather than after the first two. Despite the fact that Seras was pulling every single punch to avoid killing her, she did not actually go easy on her. She was always just a little bit faster than Ellie, and hit just hard enough to make sure Ellie remembered the experience. She also let her monstrosity hang out as much as they dared so that Ellie got the full effect of the creeping shadows and multitude of eyes staring at her and judging her.
It would have been completely demoralizing after the first session if not for the fact that Ellie had personally seen Seras move faster than the trigger pull on a plasma cannon held against her head so that she could absorb the shot with her face, then proceed to peel the armour like an orange and crucify the pilot with the structural members. That sort of experience meant that simply not breaking down into a blubbering wreck within five seconds was a major accomplishment, and every time she managed to tag Seras anyway was like a shot of adrenaline to her ego. The fact that her magic spear actually let her tag Seras with a greater frequency than pure, blind luck was a fairly significant part in helping build up her self-esteem with regards to her fighting.
Although then again the spear was really weird to fight and train with because it seemed to have a mind of its own at times, attracted by invisible forces toward incoming attacks and targets. Both Seras and Mercer had reported the effect when they tried it out, but neither was capable of replicating the teleportation effect and Ellie could teleport the weapon out of their hands simply by willing it so. Also, she was fairly certain the guided effect was more pronounced for her than for either of them, even when factoring in their great strength, speed, and skill. She supposed the weapon was somehow bonded to her, which did fit with what the Shadow of Night had said about it.
Of course, she was also trying hard to not think about the name it had called the spear, and the vast array of terrifying implications involved. On the one hand, there was a part of her screaming that she was playing around with forces she did not understand and she should stop using the spear. On the other hand, there was a part of her that acknowledged the danger but since she was clearly already stuck with the spear and just getting rid of it held its own dangers, she should at least learn how to best utilize its mundane aspects, and possibly some its more esoteric ones in the process.
As it was, Ellie was getting just good enough that Seras was starting to really cheat, in that she could do things like launch an attack, get Ellie to start responding, and then cancel it and come in from a completely different angle, leaving Ellie off balance and desperately trying to correct against the massively faster woman. It was totally and utterly unfair, but in an odd way Ellie appreciated the respect inherent in stepping up to such methods. What Ellie wished she could do was be able to transfer between stances and positioning as fast as Seras.
Ellie felt that she was on the edge of an epiphany when Seras stopped and said, "Okay, that is enough of a session for today. You need to go cool off and stretch your muscles for a bit. Once you are done with that, practice your stances and forms for a while."
Ellie nodded when she found her throat too busy trying to get air into her lungs to have time for speech, dismissed her spear back to the ether, and went into the cool down routine that Alex and Seras had devised for her. As far as personal trainers went, having two extraordinarily veteran combat instructors working on her might not have been great for her ego, but it was certainly great for her physique.
Taking a light run in the miserable Scottish weather, Ellie rolled her own thoughts about in her head. She could practically feel the seams of her psyche starting to separate from each other, but she could also feel those same seams struggling to regenerate, like broken bone coming back denser and tougher than before. The books she read and the tutelage she received could hurt, but she also knew that they were arming her, making her stronger, making her better able to spit in the face of the things that considered her prey and get away with it.
As she jogged, Ellie closed her right eye while leaving her left open. She could see through the blind eye now, but not the physical world of the now. No, she could now see through the lens of memory, the memories of things not human that Nyarlathotep liked to show her in her dreams. The Outer God was taunting her, taunting her with wisdom beyond her years, showing her the patterns of life across the cosmos, showing her the ancient histories of those that walked the stars.
It was... depressing, to say the least. Suffering begat suffering, hatred begat hatred, and war begat war. Humanity was treading a well walked path followed by far too many before them, each iteration of life acting out a different version of a play that Nyarlathotep had first written shortly after the beginning of the current iteration of the universe some fourteen billion years ago. To know this was to psychologically dance with nihilism.
And yet despite hatred being just another of his tools, Ellie found her spirits buoyed by her own detestation of the taunting Outer God. Nihilism was his ultimate tool, the point of social entropy that he pushed all intelligence towards, and as such she rebelled against that. She had too few ties with humanity, her strongest ones now being post-human monsters, but she still had hope and compassion and all the ephemeral things that ultimately meant nothing in an uncaring universe, and when pushed she could still hope and care if only out of spite for the Crawling Chaos.
It had yet to show her the other individuals who had taken up this philosophy, but undoubtedly they had existed in a cosmos impossibly vast beyond human reckoning, and undoubtedly some of them had given up in the end and embraced the nihilism that Nyarlathotep had pushed them towards. She had yet to live the lives of any of those creatures, but she had no illusions that such an event was coming.
A faint smile passed over her lips as she considered that she could take comfort in knowing that she would never see the life of any who might have succeeded unto death in not giving in to the Herald of the Outer Gods. Even if their paths were impossible for her to follow, just knowing they existed was to allow that hope within her, and thus she could also take hope from knowing that Nyarlathotep could never conclusively prove her hope false. On a purely rational basis it was rather poor logic, but poor logic had never stood in her way before.
Opening her good eye once more while she felt the knots in her muscles from trying to keep up with Seras or from where she took the equivalent of a love tap fade into the jog, Ellie considered that her dead eye was token enough of where poor logic could get her. From her growing knowledge of the occult and how that tied in with myth, she was also starting to understand what she was becoming as a result of her actions.
Taking some shelter in one of the burnt out ruins in the village while rain began to fall, Ellie started to go through a series of stretches to pass the time and keep her body from locking up later. As she did so she mused to herself, "After stabbing Gnarly in the face with a rusty fork, I guess I should track down Shubby and kill her, just so she can't intrude on my title space."
Ellie paused in her stretches for a moment and then asked the silence around her, "You're going to give me her sob story, aren't you? How she was the last of her kind, driven to near extinction by the rapacious natures of some other alien species and she cut a deal with one of you for ultimate fertility so that she could remake her people, but then she got carried away with revenge and Darwinian impulses or something like that and joined in one of those grand crusades across the stars that seems to wipe out most life every billion years or so."
The silence remained silent, so Ellie just flipped it off knowing that it would get the message one way or another. Knowing without a doubt that everything you did was observed by alien entities that existed outside time and space did not make for a 'healthy' human mind. The slightest brush of amusement against her mind let her know that the gesture was noted and appreciated for what it was, although by what exactly was not something she really wanted to know.
Once the brief but miserable spatter of rain finished off for the moment, Ellie exited the ruins and summoned her spear once more, going into the slow, smooth motions of the practice katas that Alex and Seras had given her to practice with. Between the two of them and those they had eaten, they knew essentially every martial art on the planet and how to best synthesize them. Her spear was a holistic weapon, and while the thrust was by far the most effective and efficient tool in her arsenal, there were other ways to use her spear that could compensate for the times when the straight path was insufficient.
"Tighten up your swing. If you have to move your spear in a circle, make it as small as possible so that you can get back to the business of stabbing as quickly as possible," Alex commented clinically from the shadows he had been lurking in.
"Logically what you are saying makes sense... but this spear seems to like a different style," Ellie noted.
"Then it will open you up to attack," Mercer pointed out.
"Yes, I know that, but..." Ellie trailed off with a frustrated sigh before she asked, "So are you just going to comment on my inability to master something as quickly as you, or do you have news?"
"If by news you mean progress on getting us into London, then yes," Alex noted while he detached himself from the shadows and started to walk with intent towards the run down house they had been sheltering in for the past few weeks. Glancing over his shoulder he said, "I have obtained low profile transport for the three of us."
Dismissing her spear once again, Ellie asked, "A car?"
A slight smirk cross Alex's lips in a way that was creepily almost human in how it lacked his usual predatory intent, and he said, "I considered it, but our needs are slightly different this time."
Allie ran this over in her mind before she burst out into a huge grin and asked excitedly, "Bikes? Did you get bikes?"
Jerking his head in the direction around back to indicate where she should look, Alex then leaned up against the old house in a self-satisfactory manner as Ellie rushed past in excitement. Finding a trio of freshly manufactured off-brand Hayabusa clones waiting there caused Ellie to break out into a distinctly fangirlish squee as she examined them all and found them up to Alex's standards of engineering and design.
"These will let us travel with you outside the arcology without rousing much suspicion while also giving you freedom of movement when you go in alone... plus I've heard you muttering about missing your bike," Alex explained.
"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" Ellie cheered with the sort of giddy glee that had been shoved into the back of her for far too long. She even hugged the presenter of this gift, although the viral abomination was his usual prickly self.
Materializing out of shadow, Seras asked, "So... do you think you are ready?"
Taking a deep breath, Ellie closed her eyes for a moment before she opened them and responded, "I'm ready to leave this place, at the very least."
"Good," Alex noted as he went to one of the bikes, he and Seras needing them only for the purposes of blending in with Ellie when around people. "Any music to mark this occasion?"
Ellie grinned as she picked up her own helmet and replied, "I think Ride of the Valkyries would be most fitting, for a start."
It would have been completely demoralizing after the first session if not for the fact that Ellie had personally seen Seras move faster than the trigger pull on a plasma cannon held against her head so that she could absorb the shot with her face, then proceed to peel the armour like an orange and crucify the pilot with the structural members. That sort of experience meant that simply not breaking down into a blubbering wreck within five seconds was a major accomplishment, and every time she managed to tag Seras anyway was like a shot of adrenaline to her ego. The fact that her magic spear actually let her tag Seras with a greater frequency than pure, blind luck was a fairly significant part in helping build up her self-esteem with regards to her fighting.
Although then again the spear was really weird to fight and train with because it seemed to have a mind of its own at times, attracted by invisible forces toward incoming attacks and targets. Both Seras and Mercer had reported the effect when they tried it out, but neither was capable of replicating the teleportation effect and Ellie could teleport the weapon out of their hands simply by willing it so. Also, she was fairly certain the guided effect was more pronounced for her than for either of them, even when factoring in their great strength, speed, and skill. She supposed the weapon was somehow bonded to her, which did fit with what the Shadow of Night had said about it.
Of course, she was also trying hard to not think about the name it had called the spear, and the vast array of terrifying implications involved. On the one hand, there was a part of her screaming that she was playing around with forces she did not understand and she should stop using the spear. On the other hand, there was a part of her that acknowledged the danger but since she was clearly already stuck with the spear and just getting rid of it held its own dangers, she should at least learn how to best utilize its mundane aspects, and possibly some its more esoteric ones in the process.
As it was, Ellie was getting just good enough that Seras was starting to really cheat, in that she could do things like launch an attack, get Ellie to start responding, and then cancel it and come in from a completely different angle, leaving Ellie off balance and desperately trying to correct against the massively faster woman. It was totally and utterly unfair, but in an odd way Ellie appreciated the respect inherent in stepping up to such methods. What Ellie wished she could do was be able to transfer between stances and positioning as fast as Seras.
Ellie felt that she was on the edge of an epiphany when Seras stopped and said, "Okay, that is enough of a session for today. You need to go cool off and stretch your muscles for a bit. Once you are done with that, practice your stances and forms for a while."
Ellie nodded when she found her throat too busy trying to get air into her lungs to have time for speech, dismissed her spear back to the ether, and went into the cool down routine that Alex and Seras had devised for her. As far as personal trainers went, having two extraordinarily veteran combat instructors working on her might not have been great for her ego, but it was certainly great for her physique.
Taking a light run in the miserable Scottish weather, Ellie rolled her own thoughts about in her head. She could practically feel the seams of her psyche starting to separate from each other, but she could also feel those same seams struggling to regenerate, like broken bone coming back denser and tougher than before. The books she read and the tutelage she received could hurt, but she also knew that they were arming her, making her stronger, making her better able to spit in the face of the things that considered her prey and get away with it.
As she jogged, Ellie closed her right eye while leaving her left open. She could see through the blind eye now, but not the physical world of the now. No, she could now see through the lens of memory, the memories of things not human that Nyarlathotep liked to show her in her dreams. The Outer God was taunting her, taunting her with wisdom beyond her years, showing her the patterns of life across the cosmos, showing her the ancient histories of those that walked the stars.
It was... depressing, to say the least. Suffering begat suffering, hatred begat hatred, and war begat war. Humanity was treading a well walked path followed by far too many before them, each iteration of life acting out a different version of a play that Nyarlathotep had first written shortly after the beginning of the current iteration of the universe some fourteen billion years ago. To know this was to psychologically dance with nihilism.
And yet despite hatred being just another of his tools, Ellie found her spirits buoyed by her own detestation of the taunting Outer God. Nihilism was his ultimate tool, the point of social entropy that he pushed all intelligence towards, and as such she rebelled against that. She had too few ties with humanity, her strongest ones now being post-human monsters, but she still had hope and compassion and all the ephemeral things that ultimately meant nothing in an uncaring universe, and when pushed she could still hope and care if only out of spite for the Crawling Chaos.
It had yet to show her the other individuals who had taken up this philosophy, but undoubtedly they had existed in a cosmos impossibly vast beyond human reckoning, and undoubtedly some of them had given up in the end and embraced the nihilism that Nyarlathotep had pushed them towards. She had yet to live the lives of any of those creatures, but she had no illusions that such an event was coming.
A faint smile passed over her lips as she considered that she could take comfort in knowing that she would never see the life of any who might have succeeded unto death in not giving in to the Herald of the Outer Gods. Even if their paths were impossible for her to follow, just knowing they existed was to allow that hope within her, and thus she could also take hope from knowing that Nyarlathotep could never conclusively prove her hope false. On a purely rational basis it was rather poor logic, but poor logic had never stood in her way before.
Opening her good eye once more while she felt the knots in her muscles from trying to keep up with Seras or from where she took the equivalent of a love tap fade into the jog, Ellie considered that her dead eye was token enough of where poor logic could get her. From her growing knowledge of the occult and how that tied in with myth, she was also starting to understand what she was becoming as a result of her actions.
Taking some shelter in one of the burnt out ruins in the village while rain began to fall, Ellie started to go through a series of stretches to pass the time and keep her body from locking up later. As she did so she mused to herself, "After stabbing Gnarly in the face with a rusty fork, I guess I should track down Shubby and kill her, just so she can't intrude on my title space."
Ellie paused in her stretches for a moment and then asked the silence around her, "You're going to give me her sob story, aren't you? How she was the last of her kind, driven to near extinction by the rapacious natures of some other alien species and she cut a deal with one of you for ultimate fertility so that she could remake her people, but then she got carried away with revenge and Darwinian impulses or something like that and joined in one of those grand crusades across the stars that seems to wipe out most life every billion years or so."
The silence remained silent, so Ellie just flipped it off knowing that it would get the message one way or another. Knowing without a doubt that everything you did was observed by alien entities that existed outside time and space did not make for a 'healthy' human mind. The slightest brush of amusement against her mind let her know that the gesture was noted and appreciated for what it was, although by what exactly was not something she really wanted to know.
Once the brief but miserable spatter of rain finished off for the moment, Ellie exited the ruins and summoned her spear once more, going into the slow, smooth motions of the practice katas that Alex and Seras had given her to practice with. Between the two of them and those they had eaten, they knew essentially every martial art on the planet and how to best synthesize them. Her spear was a holistic weapon, and while the thrust was by far the most effective and efficient tool in her arsenal, there were other ways to use her spear that could compensate for the times when the straight path was insufficient.
"Tighten up your swing. If you have to move your spear in a circle, make it as small as possible so that you can get back to the business of stabbing as quickly as possible," Alex commented clinically from the shadows he had been lurking in.
"Logically what you are saying makes sense... but this spear seems to like a different style," Ellie noted.
"Then it will open you up to attack," Mercer pointed out.
"Yes, I know that, but..." Ellie trailed off with a frustrated sigh before she asked, "So are you just going to comment on my inability to master something as quickly as you, or do you have news?"
"If by news you mean progress on getting us into London, then yes," Alex noted while he detached himself from the shadows and started to walk with intent towards the run down house they had been sheltering in for the past few weeks. Glancing over his shoulder he said, "I have obtained low profile transport for the three of us."
Dismissing her spear once again, Ellie asked, "A car?"
A slight smirk cross Alex's lips in a way that was creepily almost human in how it lacked his usual predatory intent, and he said, "I considered it, but our needs are slightly different this time."
Allie ran this over in her mind before she burst out into a huge grin and asked excitedly, "Bikes? Did you get bikes?"
Jerking his head in the direction around back to indicate where she should look, Alex then leaned up against the old house in a self-satisfactory manner as Ellie rushed past in excitement. Finding a trio of freshly manufactured off-brand Hayabusa clones waiting there caused Ellie to break out into a distinctly fangirlish squee as she examined them all and found them up to Alex's standards of engineering and design.
"These will let us travel with you outside the arcology without rousing much suspicion while also giving you freedom of movement when you go in alone... plus I've heard you muttering about missing your bike," Alex explained.
"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" Ellie cheered with the sort of giddy glee that had been shoved into the back of her for far too long. She even hugged the presenter of this gift, although the viral abomination was his usual prickly self.
Materializing out of shadow, Seras asked, "So... do you think you are ready?"
Taking a deep breath, Ellie closed her eyes for a moment before she opened them and responded, "I'm ready to leave this place, at the very least."
"Good," Alex noted as he went to one of the bikes, he and Seras needing them only for the purposes of blending in with Ellie when around people. "Any music to mark this occasion?"
Ellie grinned as she picked up her own helmet and replied, "I think Ride of the Valkyries would be most fitting, for a start."