Mountain, meet Endbringer

[sturdycoldsteel]

The Fate who calls herself Mountain tried to convince some of her neighbors to allow the occasional mountain in their lands, for stability purposes.

"I meant no insult!" Dodge ball of lava. "I don't intend to interfere, you said no!" Dodge house-sized spear of ice. "I'm leaving peacefully, okay, so stop tearing up the tile!"

"You'll respawn at home. No permanent damage. You interrupted an important meeting, you need to learn a lesson about territory, mountain bitch." Dodge- no, fail to dodge a thrown tree, and then another ice ball. The next sphere of magma is what destroyed that form.




She wakes up, stripped of all her tools and enchantments and even clothes, and groans in pain.

Comments

[peterxy]

She finds herself in a- well, it's probably a temple, though not one she recognises.

There are humans around her, wearing similar garb. They do not look like they were expecting her to appear. One of them asks something in a language she doesn't know.

[sturdycoldsteel]

"I don't know this place."

...She calls up stone. Granite clothes that somehow flow with her movements. She raises her hands in what she hopes is a gesture of calm confusion. "I mean no harm."

[peterxy]

They don't look reassured.

...they don't look much of anything other than confused and terrified, really, they don't seem to have understood a word.

Also, the "terrified" part might not have been caused by her, if the sudden tremor and their reactions to it are any indication. The same person who attempted communicating before tries another language, looking somewhat desperate.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Oh dear. She presses her hands to the ground and feels the structure of this part of the world. Where did that tremor originate from?

[peterxy]

A-ways south, caused by the sea misbehaving in strange ways. Nothing as bad as a tsunami, but when the sea everywhere is behaving as weirdly as that, well. That affects things.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Well, this temple can be raised forty feet on a bed of stone as solid as she can make it. With a stairway, for people to evacuate to.

Then she flies south towards the angry ocean Fate. She's not as strong as a Fate who can screw with whole oceans, but she won't be the only one trying to stop them.

[peterxy]

There aren't any Fates obviously visible, but it's severely overcast and if she flies up really high she'll see stormclouds in pretty much all directions.

And there's a lot of land. Much larger than a regular Tile.

[sturdycoldsteel]

...The terrain here is not following the pattern. It's curving and bending everywhere, and there are weird zones where it's not obviously Plains or Hills or Mountain or Forest. That's... Vaguely worrying.

You know what, she doesn't have an ocean subtype for nothing. She's not nearly as good with water as stone, but the rain can just go on and clear out for about a quarter of a tile around her. And she armors up as she flies, repeatedly calling up random chunks of stone, separating them, and pushing the unneeded parts back into the terrain, until she gets enough heavy metals and gemstones to protect herself.

She fortifies a few other buildings as she passes, lands to suppress another tremor, and keeps flying to the coast nearest the disturbances.

[peterxy]

The clouds around her obligingly clear up, though given how much more clouds there are they will probably not remain clear for very long.

And the coast is quite far. She's hit by heavy (and heavily unnatural) storms long before she reaches it.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She plows straight through the storms. The great thing about wearing seamless stone and metal and gemstones and a clear diamond visor at the front of her helmet is that it's pretty waterproof.

It does take her something like half an hour to suitably armor up and get to the site of that thing's rampage, but she makes a beeline for the epicenter of the destruction once she's close enough to feel it.

There's a lot of destruction, much of it underground. She would have thought that this tile would have crumbled already, but they don't use tiles, do they?

[peterxy]

Nope! Not by a long shot. In fact this seems pretty massive, and to go on and on...

Anyway. There's a creature, yes, though even the armor and the diamond visor don't make the torrential rains between her and it be any less blinding. The silhouette of a- something, thirty-feet tall, can be seen. And it's fast. It moves this way and that with blinding speed, even as tiny specks - flying people? Other Fates, perhaps? - fight against it with the strangest magic.

At no visible command from the giant creature, the water that's invaded the land starts receding.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She throws herself into the fray. Her primary strategy is to hammer the beast with fallen pillars of concrete, boulders she created, to mess up its footing or drive it into the air by shifting the ground around it. If she can keep it busy and/or still it will give everyone else more chances to strike or flee.

She takes some solid hits, obviously. But that's what armor's for. Raw physical force alone isn't enough to break her. Yet.

The water that left is going to come back in a big wave. She keeps half a mind's eye on it, and dashes coastward to raise a tall and thick wall - directly through some former buildings - when it starts to come back. Breaking up the wave's momentum won't stop the area from flooding, but it will help.

[peterxy]

The beast shows no signs of surprise - or of any emotion, really - at her sudden appearance, but the other people do. Not for very long, though, they start incorporating her into unspoken strategy as is.

The wave does come and hit the wall, and as expected its momentum is broken up - though not nearly as much as it by rights ought to have been. The beast looks at it for a second and then- vanishes.

A ridiculously fast trail of destruction along the coast might serve as a clue, but even the fastest amongst the other fighters isn't as fast as the beast. Some of them vanish into thin air, some vanish other people, but most have to move very fast.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She chases after it, but her flight is not that fast.

...It's not just messing with the ocean on the surface. It's messing with the entire giant not-tile, digging through and causing steadily worsening earthquakes. She stops chasing it, lands, turns porous water-filled rock (why does it go on so deep and then melt) into solid-packed stone of the most durable kind she knows. She holds a section of the landmass several tiles' radius around as steady as she can.

[peterxy]

Other than the sea still being controlled by the beast, there's no sign of it within that radius. The harder rock suffers much less from the attack, but it's still not nothing, and the rains persist.

[sturdycoldsteel]

After a while she chases after the beast then lands to reverse its damage again.

[peterxy]

The beast is focusing on damaging (killing) people and interrupting various evacuation efforts. The evidence suggests a tidal wave has recently made an appearance as well.

[sturdycoldsteel]

She can evacuate a few hundred people (she does try to move people to safety when it's convenient), or she can keep an area the size of dozens or hundreds of tiles from collapsing completely, bringing plural cities with it. She keeps up the fly-after-it-strengthen-and-reverse-damage routine.

[peterxy]

The beast is relentless. It seems to be simulating something like guerrilla tactics, causing a lot of damage and then springing elsewhere, sometimes even further inland.

And there's so much land, and so much water, and it's soon clear that not even the tidal waves are limited to where the beast is, but rather just periodically wreck more of the landmass. Her help is greatly appreciated, however, and the damage would be clearly far worse if she weren't around.

[sturdycoldsteel]

Why are people trying to talk to her when there's a monster rampaging around? Evacuate already! Not that anyone understands her screaming at them, but hopefully they'll get the tone.

She's getting tired. Manipulating whole islands is not trivial even for a Fate of the Mountain. She switches to evacuation, which is more attention-intensive than power-intensive. She doesn't ask people whether they'd like to be evacuated, she just grabs them dozens at a time and carries them to hastily made plateaus.

[peterxy]

There aren't really any people who wouldn't like to be evacuated. As for why they're talking to her, well, just one of those things, isn't it, weird otherworldy culture, who knows.

The beast suddenly zaps farther inland and north, not paying much mind to being stealthy for now, and is soon out of view again. The water doesn't seem to have noticed its master has left, though.

[sturdycoldsteel]

There's really not much else she can do. Alternate between evacuating people and hitting the monster, then reverse or limit some of its damage to the island after five minutes of, not rest, but somewhat lower activity.

[peterxy]

The monster dodges most hits and tanks the rest, and it's really resistant. While it does, it cuts off as many evacuation efforts as it can.

...at one point it climbs to the top of one of the Fate's plateaus.

[sturdycoldsteel]

When it's halfway up, she grows a flash-fast spar of stone around all its limbs except the tail. And then starts emptying the top of that particular plateau, because it's going to get free.

[peterxy]

It's barely even slowed down by the stone, quickly smashing its freedom in a few seconds, and reaches the top before she has completely emptied it.