Scene #6042: Seas of Red and of Green-2

Owner	Pose
Bloody Revelations	With a captured Lintha fleet captain, who also isn't some coral-infested demon-touched abomination, to interrogate without getting mindfucked in return, the directions to Bluehaven are necessarily very obvious at this point. Given the extreme northwesternly direction, it'd have to be so far out in the middle of the ocean that it seems dubious there would even be some small, undiscovered island there, but then the fact that one would need to essentially trip over it in the middle of the massive ocean that runs to the western end of the world would certainly help keep it secret. It'd still take the Silver Prince's sole loaned ship, the Mist-Veiled Siaka, some time to reach it. The crew of the dead and undead under a single Solar Exalted doesn't exactly require much in the way of supplies, which is an obvious point for having been chosen, but the advantages of speed and solo sailing are somewhat lost when a battleship and two cruisers of the Realm have been recruited to follow along. It easily multiplies their naval firepower by an order of magnitude, and certainly involves a great number more troops, but it also unfortunately forces Captain Darktide to keep his Solar powers in his pantaloons and fake being a highly skilled mortal ship captain. Given an unfortunate lack of Warpgates in the middle of nowhere ocean, sailing is, in fact, required. Given that nobody knows exactly what might actually be there at the end, getting there really really fast by some other mode of transportation entails getting there alone and completely unprepared. Finally, given that practically every single sailor, marine, and captain vociferously protests to the presence of women aboard the ships for any significant length of time, for all manner of ostensibly superstitious reasons, it probably just makes the most sense to let the journey take a few days and check in regularly. Now would be one of those good times for it, at least. Sailing through the northwest, the fleet has done its best efforts to avoid going straight through the region's known yet inexplicable oceanic shadowlands, which has cost some amount of time. Having been slowed to a crawl for the entire evening by the presence of intense and unseasonal storms however, they've wound up uncomfortably close to the border of one they've navigated around when night falls. As is often easy to forget for those used to city living, darkness out in the wilds is only a partial affair, lit by a strong moon and thousands of stars all but carpeting the floor of the heavens, meaning that true blackness only comes when banks of heavy clouds pass overhead and cast the deck in deep shadow for differing periods of time. The wind is quiet and the waves are shallow, meaning that tireless zombies and alternating Realm crews take to the oars, making the gentle creak of wood and the splashing of gleaming black water below the predominant sounds to be heard. There have been no signs of dolphins or frigate birds all day, and the night doesn't get any livelier.
Bloody Revelations	One would assume the situation to be the usual for the Siaka at least, given its crew being both native to an island covered in shadowlands and also one of them being a Solar Exalted, but they're far away from the Skullstone Archipelago, in hostile and unsettled waters, and, as the captain of the Siaka would testify, the Underworld isn't known to be any more unified, or any less contentious, than Creation, outside the domains of the Deathlords. Even this close to Bluehaven, and so far away from any other land, near a shadowland at night like this, the likely threat isn't being ambushed by Lintha ships in the dark. It is encountering the Lintha that are already dead. It doesn't take long either. Perhaps only an hour after the sun has completely disappeared, while the moon is still rising, crewmen call from the crow's nests at the sight of vague, white suggestions on the nearly invisible horizon. Growing closer at an alarming rate, the dim, ephemeral shapes begin to resolve as another fleet, out in the middle of nowhere at this time. Six in number, the ships are undoubtedly of Lintha make, but so worn and splintered and cracked and rusted that there is no way they are seaworthy, riddled with holes and caked in pale coral as they are. They fly no sails and extend no oars, and glide through the water even more unnaturally than the ships of the flesh and blood demon pirates. Splitting three to a side, they begin to circle around the cluster of allied warships, eerily quiet, almost glowing under direct moonlight, but becoming utterly invisible in the shadow of rolling clouds. It can't be anything friendly. They weren't while they were alive.
Tomoe	They need the way to Bluehaven, to get the information still carries a risk given what they have picked up some unexpected allies from the Realm too in this event as well. She'd packed some extra personal supplies in her inventory just to be certain in the event something did keep her here longer. She'd been riding on one of the boats and keeping somewhat to herself, training with her weapons of choice, watching the ocean or making use of her smart phone's stash of movies and reading material. When night falls it really is quite the thing given she is used to cities even as much of a wandering adventurer as she has become. When things start to get odd? Tomoe is on deck and ready for trouble with the moonlight she will be able to fly if it comes to it, the ghost ships or the thing she thinks are ghost ships are moving in and leaving her quite on edge she's going to have to be ready as there's likely a fight coming and she's not sure just what they will be fighting now. Creation has long ago made her throw out any ideas of what she might face here. Other than it seems to live by and these new things are worse.
All-Seeing Eye	All-Seeing Eye has remained on board the Siaka with an eager kind of glee entirely at odds with the grim nature of the vessel's mission, to say nothing of the undead crew frequently in his presence. His footfalls seem lighter than those of his fellows. His attention seems ever on the horizon. Even his misgivings about sailing with undead are seemingly put to bed, for now. With the way he hangs upon the railing of the ship, one would almost think he was anxious to arrive there. So, when night falls, and they appear to be bordering a shadowland, things will seem even stranger when Eye's apparent joy only increases. When the ship, and consequently the fleet, are awash in cries of ships on the horizon, he can no longer contain it. Clapping his hands, he holds them together and raises them in an excited, elated gesture. "Oh, wonderful," he exclaims, as if long-expected guests have finally arrived at his doorstep. His vision allows him to see the ghostly ships as one might through a looking glass. He strides eagerly up to the Siaka's port side when the ghostly fleet splits up. This Exalt has killed many Lintha in his short time wandering Creation. Many of those, he has whispered to, in their dying breaths. 'When you go to meet your ancestors, tell them what's coming.' He makes no effort to hide himself, and in fact, goes out of his way to draw attention. Wearing a striped sailor's shirt and a pair of rough-hewn work slacks, his clean clothes and shock-white skin stand out whenever the moonlight washes over the Siaka's deck. He waves magnanimously to the ships nearest his side of the vessel, and calls out. "Yoo-hoo!"
Gawain	Gawain's already in his armor aboard the Mist-Veiled Siaka, preparing for some sort of conflict against the Lintha. He knows that their goal isn't diplomacy, even if he's the type to allow surrender. Excalibur Galatine is kept to his side in a specially-made sheath, as he waits through the Shadowland. As it is night-time, he doesn't have his boon from the sun. He's okay with that. But backup's still nice. So as the ships start to approach, the Knight of the Sun takes to All-Seeing Eye's side. "Come, Lintha undead! Show us what you seek! If it is conflict, we will accept. If it is parley, make your terms clear now..." Just in case it is. But when they inevitably try to attack, if they move to leap onto the ship or get into Gawain's range, he'll draw his blade and move to slice through whatever opposition there is. He's going to wait for them - though if they don't come into melee range if they become hostile, and instead decide to use ranged combat, he'll try and leap over to their ship to strike them down. And if they don't attack at all, well, Gawain will certainly be confused!
Empty Tidings	Empty Tidings does not truck with the superstitions of the sailor-folk. Despite being quite clearly the wrong gender to assuage their concerns, she has been doing a magnificent job of it. She's confronted complaints and backed griping crew into a corner until they had it out; she's debated the religious and superstitious and argued with the old and set in their ways. Every time, she seemed to come out ahead, counting another case of begrudging acceptance or blooming friendship. It no doubt helps that they're quite aware she's Tengese by now, making her familiar with and comfortable on the water, as well as possessed of a matriarchal attitude in the presence of combatative men that has been so carefully cultivated by her homeland. She, frankly, refuses to take their shit sitting down. (It also helps that she's something to look at that isn't endless tracts of sea when they're off-duty, too, but that is neither here nor there. Nobody is brave or stupid enough to make a move, especially when she's been making eyes at the Siaka's Solar captain.) The monotony of searching endless seas is broken up by Lintha vessels, albeit ones that should be at the bottom of the ocean. Tidings, dressed as finely as ever, regards them from the side of the ship. The darkness doesn't seem to be impeding her inspection. "I wonder if they still have beasts beneath the sea dragging them along," she muses aloud, outwardly unperturbed by the ghastly appearance. What she's really thinking is frankly nobody else's business.
Bloody Revelations	Day or night, living or dead, Lintha are Lintha, so are they now and so have they been since the earliest days of Creation. Their modern culture might be more excessive and savage than their ancient ancestors -as is most of Creation in the second age- with so much emphasis necessarily placed on the survival of their bloodline, but they weren't any less misanthropic and cruel a hundred years ago, a thousand, or ten thousand. The ships, and their crews, that draw closer are certainly much older than the pirate fleet they'd wandered in on earlier, respectively in style and make, and dress and mannerism. Despite their state of decrepitude, like wrecks taken off the sea floor and set to drift upon the surface once again, they appear to be better armed too, with weird weapons of ancient brass and newer instalments of soulsteel, rather than normal ballistae and harpoons. Their even taller, even gaunter, even paler, and semi-translucent crew are fully dressed in tattered and aged naval coats and vests with armoured chestplates and links of metal sewn in, with hefty stocks of soulsteel blades and alchemical weapons between them, instead of just bows and hookswords. They appear to be /better off/ than their living cousins. Richer, more organized, and more experienced, as though they've only become more successful as pirates after dying, and certainly they aren't anything else; having died at least a millennium ago as seaborne murderers, they've kept it up all the way until the present day. Certainly this explains why a Deathlord would bother to hate them, for they must be even worse scourges on the Sea of Shadows, where the Silver Prince plies the quite likely more important half of his trade. They begin with salvos of wickedly spiked soulsteel harpoons launched from below deck, fired as a series of broadsides to puncture the hulls, claw at the decks, and snag the railings and masts of the Realm and Skullstone ships. They're even connected with chains of the same dire black substance, rather than ropes or links of iron, apparently having no shortage of the stuff on the other side. Securing their prey immediately, the six ships form two incomplete semicircles to the port and starboard of the fleet, and begin pulling them out of formation (though it takes three of their frigates to move the Realm's battleship), instead of charging and firing away. They intend to split them up, board the ships individually, and slaughter their crews personally, before dragging the captured vessels into the shadowland by daybreak.
Bloody Revelations	The length of the grappling chains is well within reach of both arrows and words, though only the latter are fired, since they quite probably expect a high possibility of a surrender. Despite his frankly ludicrous choice of heavy plate armour for sailing, they seem to identify Gawain as the leader of the Siaka, especially with Captain Darktide concealing his nature while the ships of the Realm are still close enough to notice for the time being. A Lintha captain, or rather the ghost of one, eight feet tall and with pointed features like a shark's, swaggers to the fore, stepping brazenly out to the railing. "Parley? The human wants to parley! Isn't that entertaining! How's this then? You give up everything in the hold, you tell us where you're going, and who sent you, and we'll leave you in your lifeboat on /this/ side of the shadowland border. Maybe you'll even find an island to paddle to before you drown! Of course you're going to answer me either way, but this way's considerably quicker than torturing it out of you, and I'll leave which of the crew get left behind to you, instead of having to do all the chopping myself." No doubt the Dragon Blooded fellowship aboard the Realm's flagship vessel aren't taking this kind of attitude well, increasingly far away to the eastern side of the fleet. Of course, nobody likes the Lintha, but the Terrestrial Exalted especially have the power to typically do something about it, and consider themselves above mere humans already. There's a whole lot of ego floating around here, as evidenced by how when All-Seeing Eye decides to show off, the captain speaking with Gawain gestures to one of his men, who then braces a heavy, mechanical-looking crossbow over the deck railing and manages to place a shot like an actual sniper, rather than a rowdy piratical hooligan, for the gall of saying 'yoo-hoo' and detracting from the atmosphere.
All-Seeing Eye	Briefly, the moonlight crosses over Eye's pale face. The benefit of ultraperipheral vision is that one can see the would-be surreptitious attacks of one's enemies, often before said enemies are aware they're being watched. When that crossbow is leveled at him, the moonlight reveals his expression. It's an elated smile. But as the clouds conceal him, it darkens into a bloodthirsty grin. A steel cable glimmers briefly in the dark, illuminated by a crackling arc of purple lightning. It winds around the bolt mid-flight. Eye steps out of the flight path, then swings his arm wide and hurls the bolt through the air. But rather than send it towards the marksman, he redirects the projectile and sends it sailing towards the nearest set of chains, attempting to break the Lintha's hold on the Realm warship. "Oh, no, no, darling," calls the Exalt back to the captain. "He was giving /you/ the opportunity to surrender." The whip retreats back into his wrist, and he stands upon the railing. His arms extend in a gesture of mocking welcome. "Frankly, you should have taken it," he says, as his targeting charms begin to mark hostiles on the deck of the Lintha captain's vessel. "But I'm ever so glad you didn't!" The Exalt returns fire, a hail of dark metal bolts flying from crossbows that mechanically pop out of his wrists. They swarm the deck like a cloud of angry insects, bouncing off of ghostly masts, artifact weapons and armor plating to harass the crew.
Tomoe	Lintha will always be Lintha it seems, she does not know their past, or what they were like back then. Tomoe only knows the now. She knows they are bad news alive, she can only guess they are bad news if not worse news when they are dead. She also takes note they seem far better off than the living ones she fought before. Then comes the salvo of Harpoons, she draws her blade and takes flight right away, her red wings looking somewhat eerie in the light as she takes flight, she casts a spell which causes her blade to burst into flames and she'll dive at the black goo cables? She's not sure how to put it into words and honestly, she does not want to know what it is. She'll keep trying to hack at them and cut which ones she can, at the worst she may draw fire away from her allies, right? Also, the idea of being tortured to death and killed in creation is terrifying. More so than death the fear that she'll be caught up in the local reincarnation cycle and wiped from existing period. Well in her worldview at the very least.
Gawain	Even if he's a fool for wearing plate out at sea, Gawain doesn't care. He wears his armor for a few reasons. As the pirates shout back their only demands, Gawain waits patiently for them to finish, despite immediately knowing they're not acceptable. It's not until they start to ready their crossbow that he speaks. "My name is Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun. I don't believe this will be an acceptable agreement, and as you're preparing to fire, we can only reach conflict. Let us hope it is swift." He doesn't actually react to the crossbow bolt, because Eye can handle that. Instead, Gawain starts to dash forward, and leap off the ship. He's faster and more mobile than someone in full plate has a right to be. The reason he wears the plate is three-fold: One, because it's durable and helps him with blows. Two, because being a magical spirit, it's not too heavy to hinder him as it might a mortal. And three, because he's a freaking Knight of the Round Table. When Gawain leaps, he's moving to land on the ship with the Lintha captain who responded to him. Gawain flicks his sword wrist, moving to light the blade on fire, and moving to strike at the captain. This has an even more clear reason: the Lintha are weak to his fire, the undead are weak to his fire, and this guy's a Lintha undead, so the math is pretty clear. "I don't expect you to want to have a fair duel, but I will treat you with honor all the same. Let us battle!"
Empty Tidings	Oh. They've mistaken the loud, handsome, brightly-lit one for the captain. That's... perhaps ideal. It means that the actual captain is less likely to get instantly murdered or, more likely, outed as a Solar Exalted, which then means they won't have to kill a bunch of Dynasts to keep their alliance working smoothly. Thanks, Gawain! Your madness in choice of dress is working out better than they could have hoped. Tidings watches the chains land, standing at the rail with her hands folded and her eyes scanning the Lintha vessel. She looks it up and down, then peers towards the surface of the water instead. Stepping across the deck, she moves behind one of her favorite people, asiding, "Eye, would you be a dear and tell me if the ships are being towed whenever you have a moment? I don't want to get soaked if I can avoid it. You understand." She moves down to midship, nimbly moving past the sailors. Empty Tidings finds one of the soulsteel harpoons hooked into the ship and leans over the rail to grab hold of it with her right hand, twisting and pulling to tug it free and haul it onto the deck with her. She bounces it in her palm, watching Gawain leap over and brandish his holy sword like a blazing beacon in the night. That will surely get the captain's attention. Without further ado, Empty tidings raises the harpoon over her shoulder, hauls back, and hurls it like an oversized javelin across the gap and back at the loudmouthed captain with all of her absurd strength. Her eyes flash green, a look of fury writ across her pretty face the moment she lets loose. Honor can suck seaweed; she's got revenge on the mind.
Bloody Revelations	"Suit yourself." the captain laughs. "I like it better when they put up a fight. You didn't think we went into this not expecting one, did you?" He then immediately proves that he means it. While the pirate fleet they had defeated before had been caught in the Realm's initiative to hunt down what Lintha it can, and they had simply happened to make a bad day for the Lintha even worse, these ones had come to them, full well expecting there to be Terrestrial Exalted and possibly a First Age weapon or two. The difference when he signals to the ghost ships to open fire is pretty staggering. Waves of black arrows and massive bolts of solid metal are enough to be threatening to crew and hull alike, but they're joined by pots of ghastly green fire which water only makes worse, flashes and cracks of Underworld 'grave copies' of ancient Essence weaponry, and shots from alchemical and artifact personal weapons from especially old and powerful ghosts on board. The Lintha ghosts don't have to swim or swing ropes, but simply fly over the water to board, with many of them simply phasing through the hulls of ships to instantly move belowdecks, where the sounds of both panic and bloody battle erupt immediately. Even the Realm's twin cruisers are infested immediately, with the larger battleship only protected by the wards of their Sorcerer. Without need for rations or supplies, there are three times as many ghosts aboard each of these ships than there had been living Lintha on similarly sized frigates, and each of them is vastly more skilled, due to having hundreds of years of experience, and dying several times over in Underworld skirmishes. They don't even hold back their sea beasts; once the full wave of boarders is away, and the ships are left with gunner and sailing crews, huge, pale, maggot-like serpents rise from the water without parting it, bearing empty eye sockets and flesh that is as much coral and seaweed as it is scale. They too are able to ghost through hulls, and where they make physical contact with those aboard, they leech tremendous amounts of blood solely from touch, even if they escape their hungry jaws.
Bloody Revelations	In other words, it's a much worse fight than last time. Attempts to cut the chains quickly turn out to be extremely slow going, as the links are soulsteel enough that it'd be more practical to break the parts of the ship they're attached to, or at least their source, rather than the cut the chains themselves, and so each of the ships in the fleet is slowly dragged into their own skirmish. Sorcerous fire and elemental blasts light up the Realm's flagship, but the cruisers seem to be struggling from the get-go. Captain Darktide drops his facade immediately, sensing the immediately dire situation. He runs along the boarding chain much as he had when the Silver Prince's ship had been using one and leaps to Gawain's defense, just as the knight's jaded prediction has come true and a ghost has risen from the floor beneath him to stab him in the back, cutting it down with a blow of his daiklave, glowing with its own sunlight. The Realm's Water Fleet will have to fend for themselves. All-Seeing Eye has his hands full with the sheer number of targets to deal with. The deck only remains crowded enough to score huge chains of hits for a short time before the crew just takes flight rather than hoping for cover, and bombards him from above with arrows and grenades. Those that he fails to re-kill immediately quickly slink below decks via intangibility, rather than be finished off. Tomoe is under fire from two ships at once as such an obvious target, and on one dive for the chains, a plasmic sea demon lunges up from under the water and attempts to snap her up and swallow her whole. It's only fortunate that it happens to be the one pulling the ship that owns the harpoon Empty Tidings wrenches free, causing it to tip violently, almost capsizing, from the monster's sudden motions. When she hurls it at the captain facing down Gawain and his Solar buddy, she is less lucky, in that the Lintha captain here doesn't rise to the bait like his young, living relative had. He's old enough to /remember/ the Solar Exalted, and knows better than to get into a direct brawl with them. He grabs a marine next to him, throws him in front of the way, and flies backwards, such that the unfortunate soul is splattered in his place, and the two are hemmed in by swordsmen with enough soulsteel on their bodies to stand a chance of not being obliterated by a sweep of Galatine or a Daiklave. Seeing where the harpoon had come from, a squad of Lintha marines zero in on Tidings immediately, and /both/ other undead sea monsters attack her, rising from opposite sides of the ship.
Bloody Revelations	Darktide tells Gawain "Don't turn back! Pursue the captain and don't let him out of your sight!" and then sticks like glue to his back, turning where Gawain turns and fighting off the other 180 degrees of his arc, so that at least the two have no blind slots. The Lintha ghosts are armoured, but not heavily so, and have plenty of places to strike that annihilate their corpus instantly, where they then flee rather than face a re-death from something ostensibly holy enough to purify them. Still, having soulsteel blades means that they can actually parry the two, as well as deal real damage in return, and they can attack from both the air and through the floor. The captain moves back constantly, picking up and using one-shot pistols and grenades as he reaches them, maneuvering towards the bow of the ship, for some reason that is not immediately obvious. It can't be good though. The atmosphere is already completely saturated with the dins of clashing blades and cries of agony, the stench of spilling blood and burning wood, the sights of flashing cannons and crackling sorcery, and the uncanny and unnatural prickle of Death Essence on the wind, but the gratuitously intense violence of the bloody pitched battle exploding all around them doesn't fully mask a deeply entrenched sense of dark, mounting dread. No matter how deafening the sounds of dying sailors and firing cannons become, or how overpowering the breeze of sea salt and coppery gore becomes, the sense that something much worse is about to happen continues to grow by the minute, as one's sixth sense refuses to focus on the immediate danger to every side, and distractingly blares louder and louder about something that isn't here.
All-Seeing Eye	When the sea monsters rise from the water, Eye calls out a response to Tidings. "There you have it," he says simply, with a light shrug of his shoulders. His initial barrage was largely just a show of force, toying with the enemy to show his utter lack of concern. As such, the number of Lintha he kills is probably pretty low, and consequently, the number of them able to retreat belowdecks before he kills them is prooobably pretty high. If the Exalt is concerned by this, he doesn't show it. If he is concerned by the surprising resilience of the chains, he doesn't show it. If he is concerned by the volley of mixed First Age and necrotic siege weaponry, he doesn't show it. The only thing which sours his mood is the counterattack from the ghostly Lintha. Their cloud of projectiles harasses him, halts his movement. "Insects," mutters the Alchemical beneath his breath as shrapnel from a thrown grenade grazes his chest. His arms snap out to either side and steel cables violently snake free of ports attached to each. His arms twirl overhead, working each whip into a rapid spin. At first a few projectiles slip through the net, scraping and cutting at his unarmored form, leaving black bleeding wounds in their wake. But a scant few moments after, they spin so rapidly in the night air as to appear two discs of moonlight. Electricity courses through each one, and the attacks are blown back towards their respective sources. Some attacks may still slip through this net--but he anticipates this, for once, upon seeing what effect the aforementioned siege weapons actually have. Eye breaks into a run across the deck of the Siaka, moving to get a better firing position on the attached chains. Fully counting on the above attackers to follow, he angles his makeshift target shields towards the Lintha vessel. Specifically, he attempts to find whatever affixes the chains to the pirate ship, and destroy it with the pirates' own weapons. If necessary, he'll even give those projectiles ghostly qualities of their own, sending them through 'solid' (relatively, what with ghost physics) matter to strike at whatever holds the grapples fast.
Tomoe	The enemy was ready for the Dragon Blood and worse they also had a lot more experience than their living kin had. She's unable to cut through the chain fast enough to try honestly it would be better to take out the launcher that each chain is connected too. Soul Steel, that stuff scares her. She also is drawing fire, a whole lot of fire, two form the fire and then there is a sea demon trying to eat her. Another huge horrible thing is trying to eat her for the second time in a month, she does not desire to have this fate befall her once more. She's nod railing so well as she ends up taking hits which already are eating into her HP bar and causing her form to warp a bit she'll react without thinking as the demon comes up. She counters dives at it hiving trying to drop down. She does all this while attempting to avoid its the jaws and trying to drive the sword into the thing's head, maybe she can get something vital if she's quick. Though she could just as easily end up a snack cake and have to try and escape if she's not bit in two in the process. "I AM NOT FOOD DAMN IT!"
Gawain	Gawain moves with confidence...but this fleet is far-more skilled and armed than the ones they had slain before. Gawain didn't expect an ambush from below, and without the sunlight boon, he's weaker, so if Moray Darktide hadn't had immediately lept to his side, he might have been slain. "Thank you!" Gawain shouts to Darktide over parrying a soulsteel blade. However, instead of his duel with the capain, a marine is thrown in the way - and splattered by the harpoon. Gawain's not going to scold Empty Tidings, for a very important reason. They're outnumbered, and their enemies are armored with high-quality stuff. Gawain is struck several times as they approach forward, bloodied and injured, but manages to parry quite a bit, showing his masterwork skill with a sword - which, instead of his durability, is primarily what's keeping him alive here. Any bulles hat hit his armor pierce through it, and for that, his spiritual healing has to fill in the gaps, reknitting flesh together slowly and mending his armor. As Darktide tells him to keep chasing the captain, Gawain does so, not turning his back, though that feeling of dread and danger does make him slow down ever so slightly, eyes darting around the battlefield. But Gawain keeps moving. He has to have faith in himself and his allies. And so, Gawain pushes on. His sword strikes for those soft-spots that burn the corpus on anyone who gets in his way, where possible, and otherwise clashes against armor. "Don't run away! Show me what honor you have, if any! Face my blade straight!" A bomb is thrown forward, Gawain quickly trying to deflect it away so the blast doesn't hit him full-on, but it burns into his skin. This is not a clean fight. Faith and skill are what he must cling to.
Empty Tidings	"Damn," Tidings grates through clenched teeth as a Marine explodes, "he brought a shield!" Everything goes to absolute hell after that. The massive volleys of arrows, Essence weaponry and worse erupts, filling the air with death both feathered and shrieking. Empty Tidings copies a good idea had by the enemy, seizing an undead sailor from behind and hauling his corporeal form between herself and the worst of it. He comes apart under the first wave, then begins to fade to incorporeality as the second comes, intending to escape -- Tidings' hands tighten on his ghostly form, and he's forcibly returned to solidity. "You'll live," she growls. He's turned into a pin-cushion then torn to pieces after that, forcing her to step quickly across the deck. Far too quickly for a mere mortal; she weaves between quarrels and sidesteps discharges from Essence cannons, the deck around her turned to matchsticks pinned to the skeleton of the ship. By the time that volley is done with, the real threat comes in. Her obvious super-strength makes her an equally-obvious target, and the Lintha aren't holding back on trying to take her out before she can leverage whatever other tricks she's got. Marines rush in to surround her, and for a moment, she smiles. Is this all they plan to send to face her? She can enjoy this, and move on to the other ships before -- The sea monsters rise up out of the water. Two of them, in fact. They focus their rotted eyes on her out of everyone on the deck. "Thank you, Eye," Tidings calls up the ship to him, flatly. "You're truly a treasure." The Marines jump her like something out of a wuxia film. They come at her from all sides, and she fights them bare-handed, moving into blocks and open-palmed slaps against the sides of swords with literally blurring speed. It's above and beyond anything she's ever wielded before. That spearman, that Lancer... moving as fast as he did is disorienting, and she seems to overstep and overcompensate, apparently having trouble dealing with her own power. Did she take something she can't properly use?
Empty Tidings	THREE DAYS AGO MALFEAS Bodies are strewn about the sandy arena. Nearly identical combatants, forged of equal parts brass and flesh and armed with a dizzying array of weapons, circle their quarry. A woman in all black stands in the midst of it, hair pinned and fists raised. Her left hand is scratched and bloodied; her right looks like it's made of an elegant fusion of stone and metal. She takes a deep breath, breathing hard with exertion. "Again!" Tidings barks. They charge. NOW No, she absolutely didn't. The stumbling is a feint. One Marine thinks he's going to get a lucky shot, and Tidings' shadow abruptly turns to something like writhing tar at his feet. The world spins for the lot of them, baleful darkness seeping into their ghastly forms as spiteful curses of misfortune and debilitation flow upwards. Tidings' left hand chops into the side of the genuinely stumbling combatant with a sharp 'crack.' She pivots in the other direction, slamming her right hand through the side of his head with an impact like she'd hidden a cinder block in one of her fitted red leather gloves. One foot leaves the ground, a snap-kick shattering the ribs of the next and knocking him into the mast of the ship. The others seem to hesitate -- and Tidings feels a line of hot pain cut across her back, a Soulsteel blade slashing a rent in her silks and leaving an angry red line across pale skin beneath that simply refuses to bleed. She twists to look at him, baring her teeth. Her eyes seem to flash with red-hot anger and then darken considerably. She pounds a hand into his sword-arm at the elbow, then his shoulder, then his chest, pulverizing limbs that should by all rights be turning insubstantial rather than sticking around to deal with someone causing suffering instead of efficiently killing them. Her presence seems to grow and intensify as she lifts her foot again, kicking his leg out from under him and planting her foot on his chest. She takes his arm and twists. Empty Tidings faces the rest of them, wielding the severed arm of the Marine, still clutching the Soulsteel weapon. She swings it like a grotesque sort of bladed flail, beating them back with her more than doubled reach. A shadow rises up over them while she does it -- the sea monsters. They come down, moving through the hull and crashing atop her and them, caring only about the very living, very corporeal thing they can bleed dry and tear apart at their master's call. One of them is faster than the other, but gets nothing but a mouthful of shifting shadow. It flows out of a hole in its rotted hide, up to the top of the next. Tidings reforms on its head, a disk of utter darkness resting on her brow. She starts driving her right hand straight down again and again, delivering increasingly monstrous blows with a jackhammer's speed and focus. She started screaming at some point. She doesn't remember when. She just knows she needs to hurt these things. All of them. As much as she can.
Bloody Revelations	It almost does without saying that the crew of the smaller Siaka are better suited to fighting the dead than the three larger ships in the fleet. A substantial portion of its crew are ghosts and are able to repulse and fight the Lintha ghosts on their own, intangible terms. The remainder are zombies, and thus not vulnerable to much other than being chopped to pieces with fully materialized swords, and are of course armed themselves. The ship uses a soulsteel skeleton that is unthreatened by the pyre flame being lobbed as Greek fire, which is quickly smothered with emergency barrels of grey /dirt/ kept aboard for just such an occasion. When All-Seeing Eye takes to the railing and aims for the enemy ships' harpoons, he quickly sets the Silver Prince's destroyer almost completely free of the conflict. Loaded into launchers powered by hand-cranked, spring-powered wheels, so as to fit in cramped belowdecks quarters, most of their protection comes from the hull itself, only being exposed via a narrow firing slit, and intangible bolts fired straight through it can easily hit their pins and braces, either causing mechanical failure, or the launchers to be ripped out of the floor entirely by the Siaka's maneuvering, where it quickly starts to gain space from the sea monsters, experienced as the intelligent parts of the crew are in battling Lintha. It also causes a lot of the ghosts aboard to phase back out into the open as the ship escapes them, since they'd chosen to hover in space instead of obey gravity and inertia, where they can then be shot down. Tomoe narrowly dodges the plasmic horror, more difficult than before due to its eerily quiet movements and the lack of the water responding to it at all, giving her no telltale churning or heaving to warn her. Unlike last time however, this one doesn't deluge her in acid for a narrow miss, and she comes away able to plunge her sword into it. As far as anatomy goes, a 'head' isn't all that clearly distinguished from its body, and the ancient sea growths apparently fused into its flesh make for hard armour, but the point of her sword scrapes through the coral and plunges into some sort of buried gill slit, ripping a wide slash through the thing's flesh as she flies past it, to the point she almost partially decapitates the monster, now swaying limply in place and drooling a fountain of plasmic blood into the ocean. Its kin don't do any better. When Empty Tidings slips into her berserk fury and becomes something that these ancient, murderous ghosts have never seen before, their fate is sealed from the start. While they might be heavily outclassed by the Solar Exalted, they at least know what they are, and when and how to avoid being destroyed by them, but that isn't case for the incongruous Tengese woman aboard, and they have no idea what to make of it when she begins physically tearing the troops apart like bloody sack-cloth puppets. The bravest try to fight her, and at best exchange a flesh wound for being pulled to pieces, and after the first dozen or so fall, the rest begin to flee, turning around and flying back to their ship. The plasmic 'serpents' are too bestial and stupid to do the same, and while the first is underwater from missing its lunge, the second violently bounces and jolts with every blow, its skull rattling like a bag of marbles in a rock polisher, cracking and squelching under her knuckles until one last punch blows its head off completely, flooding the dark waters with yet more ghostly 'blood'.
Bloody Revelations	The Lintha Gawain crosses blades with are a far cry from those he did before, both centuries more experienced, and also freed from the limitations of living flesh, where their empowered corpus can move with greater strength and speed and fluidity than bone and blood. Still, they aren't embodied knights of the round table, and no match for him individually. Their crippling weakness to his weapon also tempers their aggression, making them hesitant, overcautious, and easier to push back. Where he and Moray fight towards the bow of the ship, the marines left to hold them back grow fewer and fewer, either cut down in exchanges of black and gold steel, or unable to keep up with the dynamically moving melee. Soon, the captain has run out of environmental prompts to throw at them, after employing the grenade, a following mounted weapon, using a black harpoon as a javelin, and cutting rigging to hammer them with the weighted rope. He is trapped at the very prow, one foot on the forward railing, as if considering whether or not to jump. When he leans over though, it is with a triumphant snarl, as he grips the ship's bone figurehead ornament, and then twists and wrenches it free, revealing an almost football-sized shard of pallidly glowing crystal held inside a bone cage, with a piece that looks alarmingly like either a trigger or a detonator. He holds the thing up as if he expects it to take out the both of them, if not all three of them, outright. The feeling of sick, smothering, cold and oppressive dread is at its apex now, seemingly centered around the captain and his device, emanating from beneath him like a leak of toxic fumes into a sealed room. He exudes such a ridiculous aura of Death Essence that it becomes difficult to approach him, stabbing the skin all over with thousands of icy needles. It's like he is the center of a building hurricane of smothering terror, rapidly becoming a vortex that threatens to bring very real and very physical death.
Bloody Revelations	Or rather, it's like he's /at/ the center of one. The cold waters beneath him burst before he pulls the trigger, erupting in a frigid geyser of brine, as a massive pseudopod of unknown origin breaks from the waves, rising over the rail of the ship. It's transparent enough to look like a tendril of bright, liquid glass, but filled with impenetrable shadow. Along its sides, rows of translucent cilia flicker and beat in a way that splits the moonlight into throbbing strobes of prismatic colours fit to cause a seizure. Its blunt tip swells, bulges, and then bursts into a facsimile of a huge, five-fingered human hand, and abruptly snatches the Lintha ghost and drags him screaming into the depths. More tendrils -more hands- rip free of the water, grabbing hold of the Siaka and the three Lintha ships it trades fire with, snatching and crushing rails, masts, oars, and ballistae, until all four vessels are entangled. The entire crew of all three Lintha ghost ships begins to flee, abandoning their posts completely, and scores of them are plucked out of the air, dragged down into the whirling maelstrom of gut-dropping, physically palpable horror that is nearing the surface of the water. The maimed sea monster Tomoe had struck abruptly disappears as if snapped up and dragged under by a crocodile. Clouds of plasmic blood billow up from below, staining the waves dark, dull red. By the time the water surges around the bulk of a main body dragging itself from the abyssal depths, the sea is saturated with plasmic gore to the extent that there are scarcely a handful of Lintha left between them. The beast that had attacked and missed Empty Tidings never came back up. The moon is fully blocked out by the most leaden ceiling of clouds of the night, casting the fleet into deep, blinding shadow, but the glistening, flickering, many-limbed thing that has dragged itself out of the water is visible nonetheless, as if it had imprisoned the moonlight that struck it and now glows from within. Dozens of tendrils all lead back to a central mass similar to what one would see from an abyssal jelly creature, translucent and bizarre and moving in too many ways in too many places at once, with no way to tell back from front or top from bottom. Deep in its core, the shadow of a woman is frozen as if trapped in amber, occluded by the shifting, alien light within as if a pair of arms were embracing it, no matter from what angle. The humanoid outline 'pulses' like a heartbeat, letting off waves of power like chilling adrenaline broadcast over the air. The creature lifts one of its many still-hanging tendrils from the water, revealing the ghost captain dangling from the end like a puppet, the pseudo-hand buried in his corpus and a blank, deadened expression on his face. He opens his mouth, and from it, the creature says: "All the Family is our prey. All thoughts and fears upon the Sea of Shadows belongs to us. Your flesh is ugly, but your souls are ours, now. Let us in, else we will tear them from you and into our bosom where they belong. We will make them beautiful. We will make them ours."
All-Seeing Eye	It's obvious to anyone that Empty Tidings is being sarcastic when she calls Eye a treasure. His response, however, is anything but. "I know," he says sincerely, if somewhat distracted. His efforts free the Siaka, and as the battle rages around him, he at first entertains freeing the other ships of their grapples in a similar fashion. This is before a gigantic ghostly seizure jellyfish bursts from the water to snap pieces free of sailing ships like so much brittle glass. In the few moments of pitch darkness before the being's transparent form simply drinks in the light, he hears it. Hears the quivering, undulating plasm, the screams of sailors bouncing off of its gelatinous flesh. Hears the slapping of waves against that same flesh. "You are what's ugly in this world, as you have ever been," shouts Eye into the darkness just as the creature's body is illuminated with stolen light. "You are a cancer." Targeting charms begin to load up once more. New ammunition is loaded into his wrist-mounted crossbows. His eyes give way to miniaturized Soulsteel nodules--Essence Pulse Cannons. Energy surges from his body, with a crack of lightning that illuminates his immediate surroundings in brief, near-blinding purple light. Stormclouds swirl around his body fast enough to appear a dark, roiling funnel, lit with occasional flashes of lightning. "I am the scalpel."
Tomoe	Tomoe gets lucky she scores a hit on the strange serpent horror and nearly cuts its' head full on off, it was a near thing too she's now pulling away from it knowing there are many more things to still worry about. As she might put it there's a huge pile of ADDs here. She turns though as something else happens to the monster is just dragged under the water by something. She has no idea what's down there and part of her does not want to know. Tomoe stares in horror she freezes up for a moment at the horrors of all of this. Something snaps. "I will not be enslaved by you nor will you get anyone with me." She starts chanting in badly accented Norse, golden runes dance about her body which is followed up but a barrage of light rays focusing on whatever this horror is. She has no idea what it is, other than it wants to swallow her soul and the souls of everyone else here. She was saying she was not food once already now something wants her soul now too?
Empty Tidings	No. This is not the might of the Solar Exalted. This is something altogether worse. Empty Tidings hammers the spectral sea-monster until its skull cracks like an egg and spills discorporating innards all over the surface of the sea. She lands on the deck, breathing hard. She seems a colossal presence on the Siaka, and the space around her opens up as the Lintha realize that to face her is to choose to meet their utter end. She seeks the second worm-creature -- The moon disappears, and the seas become pitch-dark. Empty Tidings' eyes seem almost luminescent for a moment, and the blackness on her brow deeper than even the moonless night. She wavers but does not fall, the ship coming apart as something truly titanic begins to savage both fleets, seemingly unconcerned with matters of allegiance. Did a third party just enter the fray? She turns to face it. It's... "Hnnnh," exhales the Tengese woman. Her stance widens. She steadies herself, staring up at the looming monstrosity. "The Family is /my/ prey," she calls up to it. "The sea will stain when I spill their blood upon the waves and break their bodies upon the rocks. Name yourself, creature! What claim do you think you or your master have on one such as I, if you must lie in ambush and they hide beyond the veil of death?!"
Gawain	Gawain is battered, bloodied, and bruised, but he's confident about his assault. Up until the strange bone ornament is drawn, the aura of dread spilling over Gawain. It causes him, briefly, to stop, to want to run, to want to panic...but his spirit keeps him pushing forward. He takes a breath, clearing his mind, preparing to charge and stab the man before he can pull the trigger, possibly stabbing the trigger itself to try and overwhelm whatever power it has. However, instead, a horrible undead monster rises from underneath, snatches the Lintha ghost, stopping whatever he was going to detonate. Pitch blackness fills the sky, with Gawain primarily using the fire of his sword to guide him, but the creature's light helps. As it speaks, Gawain quickly realizes it isn't an ally, especially since the rest of the group is preparing to fight. But either way...he must try and negotiate with it anyways. "Creature! I am Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun. If you seek to take the Lintha, we may be able to negotiate such, though I can make no promises." He glances towards Empty Tidings, though he prepares his sword. At some point, he might need to launch at the monster, and he's not going to be unprepared to do so.
Bloody Revelations	With a form so incomprehensibly bizarre, it is impossible to project any kind of anthropocentric reaction onto the creature. The words chosen are as if hurled into a deep, dark well, hoping to hear an echo as they clatter off something, but all too likely to disappear into the blackness. The most that can be ascertained is that it doesn't view all of them as an immediate, critical threat. The effect that it seems to be facing toward the viewer no matter what angle they look from, due to its alateral structure and the sole identifying feature within it being a trick of light and shadow, certainly aids the impression, when Tomoe leaps to attack it. 'Behind' it by her perspective, a swarm of tendrils flex and move through its own substance, ripping half of the ghost ship they lay claim to and swinging it into her ray barrage, smashing into the attack with a ton of plasmic hull. The center of it explodes as a trio of ghastly hands punches through it, thrashing out to slam Tomoe, spike down into the water, and then catch her at the last possible second, only for the seizure cilia to spark and crackle and then brutally electrocute with crawling arcs of pale and opalescent lighting, and lastly whip her back at the side of the Siaka, probably through the hull and into the bowels of its third deck. Essentially, it's as if each phasic arm is its own thinking combat entity, and the bulk of the creature doesn't pay attention. "When all the body of Gaia is a tumour, a cancer calls the old cells abberrant." A voice says through the captain's doubly lifeless face, soon joined by an additional choir of pirates lifted from out of the water and plucked intangibly from their ships, handled like finger puppets. "She deserves her wasting illness. The Family deserves its fall. Both have made their own, sick perversion. We will heal them. We may cleanse their disease in the pure waters of the Maw." Gawain, of all people, with his misguided diplomacy, seems to garner the most attention. A twitch of fluid tendrils. A pulse of scattered and split light through its cilia. "Knight of the Sun. Killer of Vodak. Champion of Ondar Shambal. Doom of Lookshy. We know you have saved yourself with words once before, but we cannot imagine what you could say to excuse your presence here and now. You are straying. You have left our embrace." Yet the fact they haven't come to sea-splitting blows already is already extremely improbable. To Empty Tidings, the voices of the Lintha dead die out, extinguished as their mouths cease to move, and replaced with a heaving choir of voices that are all nebulously female, but speak a hundred different languages in a hundred different tones, almost unintelligible over one another. "We are N I L I H" "S O V E R E I G N * I N S T I N C T" "We do not hide. We are already within you. We have been here always."
Gawain	As Tomoe attacks and is attacked, Gawain feels a little bad about diplomacy...but he has to try. It's who he is. The creature actually responds to him instead of attacking immediately though, so that's a start! Except it says some pretty weird things, and gives Gawain a title that makes him sad, tilting his head downwards. "Yes, I contributed to the fall of Lookshy. You know my actions here, it would seem, and I will make no excuses...but what do you mean by 'left your embrace'? I was never one with the Underworld! Explain what you mean...!" Gawain's a little off-guard, but not too off-guard. If the hekatonkhire proceeds to move to attack Gawain or his other allies again, before Gawain can get his response, he moves to try and strike at it with his flaming holy sword, trying to run up the nearest tendril and slice it across the center-mass, since that's where the 'core' is.
Empty Tidings	They're multiplying, Tidings thinks. It's really taking the dead for itself. This is troublesome. A decanthrope writ large is already a problem for them; one that has an enormous central body to smash warships with on top of it is another level of 'terrible' that she cannot easily deal with. Can she kill enough of them to prevent it from getting the majority of the fleet? Maybe. Would it help? Maybe not. Tidings blinks her eyes. They water and run, tears flowing freely. It makes her fury-tinged expression look more petulant than really angry. Droplets hit the deck beneath her. In the scattered lights left about the ships, they occasionally look tinged a little... yellow. It's strange, but it is so minor in the face of this thing that almost nobody will have the attention to pick up on it. "The world is diseased, I agree," she calls. "But wholly unmaking it is a waste. It can be cured, and its torturers and butchers expunged. It can be made beautiful again. It can be made whole again." Her voice reverberates out over the seas for a moment, and her eyes fix on the thing, hunting for a connection. An oath. A promise. A binding. Something she can grasp. Something she can use. Something she can /twist/. She smiles a terrible smile, ugly and sad. "I have within me the marks of many," she sighs, "and I hear the voices that call me to beautiful, wondrous places to do awful, terrible things. It is a weight I must bear --" Her gaze, momentarily distant, focuses suddenly. The terrible darkness that rests on her brow suddenly seems to intensify, drinking in the lesser night that surrounds them. "But it is not yours." Empty Tidings flicks a ghostly hand off the deck and into the water, almost casually. "Return to whence you've come. It is not your time. Follow and find the Family, of whom you may make a feast. Continue your ill-advised assault against this vessel, and you will be reduced from many to one, and then trapped in a tumorous hell carved out of this dying place just for you."
All-Seeing Eye	Eye's charms remain loaded. His HUD still displays targeting paths, reticules, and readouts. But he doesn't fire. Gawain and Empty Tidings want to try diplomacy and investigation, respectively. The things introduction doesn't have much of an effect on him. Native though he might be to this world, he's spent his whole life tucked away in one specific corner of it, removed from anyone or anything which might have all but the faintest glimpse of what actually happened in Creation's days of yore. Anything, except one very biased account by very biased priests of a now-slumbering Primordial. "The old cells!" Eye calls back with a laugh, going so far as to clap his hands. The crossbows remain unconcealed, rigidly staying in place. "Cleansing disease," he manages between fits of melodious laughter. "Oh," he continues, pretending to wipe a tear from his eye. "You really are a humorous... mmm..." He waves his hand dismissively after a moment's thought. "Whatever you are." He says this, whether the voices speaking to Empty Tidings are audible to him, or not--the intent is to show his mocking contempt. "It really doesn't matter who or what you are," he says. "As soon as you said that, you revealed your nature." With both arms falling to his side, it might appear as though he's let down his guard, were the cannons in his eyes not still revealed. He shakes his head and even tsk-tsks at the giant amorphous sea monster. "You are either one tyrant, or another," explains the Exalt in a patronizingly sweet tone. "Either a plaything of the Breakers, a lackey of the Sun's Chosen, or of their defective counterparts, these 'Deathknights.'" With a chuckle, he shrugs his shoulders. "Your motives are equally easy to discern, based on these three possibilities." One index finger raises in the darkness of night. "Mortals are not your playthings anymore, and your feelings are hurt over it! Whichever one of those groups befits you, however you rail against each other and scream at the injustice of one anothers' actions, you are all the same in that regard. If you can't grind mortals under your boots, you kick your little limbs around and scream like spoiled children denied sugar rations." "And," he says, raising a second finger, "Whatever else your motives may be--restoring 'rightful' Solar rule, bending this world to your own whim, making it yours again, or outright destroying it, they can all be traced back to that tyrannical mindset all of you 'old cells' share." Lightning flashes within the roiling stormclouds that surround him, and he laughs, his mirthful face momentarily illuminated in the darkness as he throws his head back indulgently. The noise caused by Tomoe being slammed into the side of the ship doesn't escape him. In fact, the change of his amusement to annoyance is easily seen, thanks to his anima, and the sparks flying from the champagne gem set in his forehead. He sighs through his nose, lowering his fingers to run that hand through his hair. "In fact," he says, allowing that annoyance to sour his up-til-now sweet tone, "The very sickness you believe you can cure is your own doing--all of you." With a gesture towards the Realm vessels, he gets to the point.
All-Seeing Eye	"The only reason Creation suffers as it does is because all of you--the Realm, Solar apologists, Deathknights, the Breakers both dead and imprisoned--are incapable of accounting for mortals. You consider them beneath you. Toys, subjects, worship generators. Even the great and noble Realm places no interest in them until one shows the potential to become a Dragon Blooded, at which point they are whisked away before they can realize just how much of their labor is being stolen by leeches such as you. It's tragic!" He flips his hair over his shoulder, raising his weapons to threaten the monster again--he has no control over Tomoe, and she's not spoken up on the radio. If she fights back he might get what he wants. The option to destroy. To remove what he deems evil in the simplest way he knows. He is hopeful for that--but just to stoke the fires of hope a little more, he throws his weight around, just as he was criticizing literally everyone else for doing. "But this story /can/ have a happy ending, because now, the hero is here. So here's what we'll do, since you're unaware." Like a significant other patiently and endearingly listing groceries, he makes what he hopes will be considered outrageous demands. Hopefully, an insult of such weight as to provoke. "You /will/ cease any and all attacks against this fleet, and my duly authorized deputies. You /will/ listen to what the Sun Knight has to say. You /will/ tell our comrade what she wants to know about your masters. Then, you /will/ allow us safe passage to our destination or /I will/ slowly take you apart and send you back to where you came in quivering pieces." His arms snap to either side, and there are two whips on each side, all four cracking to punctuate the sentence--two steel cables, and two materialized lengths of lightning. To add insult to insult, he makes a 'move-along' gesture with one hand, slightly jiggling the whips held and attached to it. "Go on.~"
Tomoe	Things are just going very poorly for everyone with whatever this thing is. She's not sure she wants to know just what it really is. In addition, her bravado likely was an error if she survives will be something she will come to deeply regret later. If she lives through it or she might regret it more if she does not survive this given this is creation they are upon. There are far many worse things than death on this world. She will soon, find part of the ghost ship is used to intercept her attack, and she's done little more than pissing it off. She will attempt to evade but this does not work well for her. The hands slap into her doing a fair bit of damage one of them even does catch her in the face causing it too distort as she hits the water and ends up getting electrocuted, her screams echo across the waters, she convulses there are even more injuries from that. She's is only due to her superhuman endurance be able to force her way free back into the air, smouldering as she goes and she's not looking very good at all. Her avatar is disported from all the rapid damage and its form is trying to reassert itself and she's unable to make further attacks now due to just how badly she's been smacked and she seems to be giving up the idea of attacking it after a savage beating like that. If she's going to make for another she's looking like she's trying to recover first... This is not Tomoe's day at all.
Bloody Revelations	When Tomoe is put through the side of a ship and out of the immediate combat area, the thing that'd grabbed her seems to lose interest in pressing the assault, basically slapping her down for making the first move and then weirdly entertaining Gawain's attempt at dialogue for reasons unknown, for a certain and weird definition of "entertain". "You were 'one' with us when you were born screaming into this world. You deny you nature and refuse to let us in. Once, you did, but you have turned then and shed wrong blood. You can still be saved. We can save you." It doesn't go back to using the voices of the dead Lintha; the more confusing speech continues to be a babble of unknowns. "Few of you are completely beyond our salvation. When something is so broken and twisted, it must be taken apart to its most base components before it can be rebuilt, but we see it within you. That thing you pretend not to have, but which may save you from the coming dark. You are misguided, but you will let us in. Soon." This time it sounds less specific, perhaps including Empty Tidings. Which is where things get fucked, at least for her specifically, because when she searches for the binding -the contract of a summoner- necessary to bring something this massive, this old, and certainly this horrifically powerful into Creation, what she finds is anathema. There is only the barest hint of a summoning years long ago, by the highest circle of necromancy, worn away as if by acid, like this thing's very being is somehow fundamentally acerbic to the idea of orders and agreements and restrictions on a deeply intrinsic level. She can search further back than that, but she'd be staring into thousands of years of this thing being completely forgotten, called upon only once in the diminishing clarity of its ancient history. It's enough to know who it was summoned by. It's also enough to know that it was four years ago. Even if the principles are different, Empty Tidings already knows that there's no such thing as a one-shot summoning that lasts for any more than a year and a day. That's how it is. This thing's oaths burned away a long time ago. And yet, just like that, she knows that the cthonic fractal horror above and before her does the bidding of someone else . . . willingly. Does a puppeteer of souls even have a concept of alliance? It makes even less sense, considering the Deathlords themselves must bind and enslave their most powerful servants and creations. Three more of its limbs of rippling shadow and glassy liquid rise from the water, almost clasping their hands together. The rows of glittering nemocsysts along their length stand straight, glowing and popping with disorienting and chaotic refracted light. Shifting hues strobe and pulse down their length, as crackling iridescence gathers between the triangulated tendrils, arcing from limb to limb and running down from base to tip, where its fingers twist and merge together into a mesh of translucent flesh, grasping a sphere of throbbing, nauseating, vertigo-inducing light that fades and brightens like the beating of a heart, growing larger and larger with each pulse, where coruscating Death Essence constantly feeds into it down the aligned pseudopods. It's a lot of Essence. A /lot/ lot. It doesn't take magical senses or Essence vision to feel it. It's like a long, drawn out, shriek of reality, drawn from the air and turned into a light, coalescing into a blinding point of the likes of which wouldn't be seen outside of a First Age battleship, yet rather than being drawn from a reactor, the icy, sterile Essence of death /oozes/ from the thing's surface, as if it sweats tangible, terrible magic. "We must simply erase the built things. The trash things that walk as men; toys which do not belong here.Back to your hole beyond time with you, would-be traitor, for you lack even the sentience to truly betray. You are worthless to us." It turns the attack on 'Eye.
Bloody Revelations	Apparently just within the timing that the Captain that'd taken them this far has been waiting for. Since the Siaka was freed from the boarding harpoons, it has been drifting eastward at a steady pace, pushed in the water by its ghost crew and then left to move of its own accord. The discussion with the utterly alien and utterly inhuman ghost has taken a long time already. The Solar jumps decks just in time to get in front of the Alchemical, reaches into his coat, and tears out a Hearthstone pendant from under his naval cravat. Holding it up high, he calls out "A moment too late, I'm afraid!" and the golden, egg-sized stone blazes with bright, blue-sky sunlight that washes away the night, racing across the water and piercing the clouds such that it casts the light of day around for miles. It doesn't actually do anything to the primordial ghost, but it does something to where they are, that being the edge of a Shadowland -its precise boundary. A Shadowland at night connects directly to the Underworld, which is why their course had plotted around it, and how the Lintha ghosts had attacked them when waylaid by the storm. At day, however, its borders enforce different rules on ghosts. As the Siaka drifts just outside the range that Darktide had apparently been hoping for, the daylight is sufficient to cause the hekatonkhire, the ghost corpses it wears, and even the Lintha ships, to fade out of sight, going intangibly into the halfway between the western ocean and the sea of shadows. The Siaka lurches over starboard as all the weight on it suddenly disappears, regaining full control of its direction. Sadly, Gawain is going to get dropped into the drink, but he seems to think it a small price to pay. "There are tricks to sailing these seas other than picking fights wherever you go my friend." he says with some relief, clapping All-Seeing Eye on the shoulder. "We're about to reach Bluehaven soon. Save your strength, and save that bile, for the cannibal scum we're about to put to the sword, eh?"
Gawain	Well, it looks like there's going to be a fight...but Darktide has a plan. Using the light of day to protect them is super clever, and Gawain would go and cheer Darktide on for the brilliant plan. However... Gawain is busy falling into the ocean. Platemail is heavy, so he's sort of at a drowning risk. Luckily, he's superhuman enough to keep himself afloat for a few seconds, long enough to dismiss the armor and reveal a suit underneath, which is uncomfortable to swim in but way easier. He keeps himself afloat, starting to swim towards the boat, but instead of make their already injured crews pull him up... He ignites the thruster once he's as high up as he can, holding the sword high above the water, and using it to boost himself. Gawain's going to try to land back onto the deck, desummon his sword, help out where he can with the aid, and then rest for as long as he can before they reach Bluehaven. Hopefully, it'll help him make up for being a diplomatic dumbass if he pitches in.
Tomoe	Tomoe is afraid, feels a whole lot of fear about this thing she tries to not lose it, she does not want to let it in. God, above she does snot want to let it in. She's going to make for the ship now as swiftly as her wings can carry her. She needs some time to recover. She will too help out where she can and try to rest when she can. Still, she finds herself having trouble sleeping the next night.
All-Seeing Eye	"Hah." The sound is as throaty as it is indulgent. It is as disrespectful as it is incredulous. It could be leveled at the monster which now fades back into the underworld, or at Captain Darktide. Such is the ambiguity of a gesture like that, coming from someone who can see in every direction. "If they couldn't get rid of /you/," says Eye to Darktide after a moment's pause, "I /highly/ doubt they'll even scratch my flawless skin." This, he says, with his flawless skin sporting several scratches and cuts. He flips his hair over his shoulder, the various weapons sliding back into his body with a chorus of whirs and clicks. Even the lightning whips dissipate into thin air. "I mean no offense, of course," he gently clarifies with a raised hand. "But my design /is/ the template from which... lesser Exalted spring. You understand." He rolls his neck and gives a long stretch of his arms. "You're right, mind you--at least, where saving my strength is concerned. To spend even the drop necessary to rid us of that nuisance was unfortunate!" He smiles brightly at the captain. "I'll be belowdecks when you need me. Ta!"