Scene #6528: MECC: Arthur Lowell vs Doctor Strange

Owner	Pose
Doctor Strange	The arena's piped-in sound system begins to play a meandering, somewhat mysterious melody, the first bars featuring a piano and guitar. A few of the spectators, seated behind protective wards, recognize the tune and let out excited cheers. Cracks spread in the air, as if reality itself were a mirror. (Theme: https://youtu.be/-Wtj59opWKg ) As the cracks spread, they split off and become a full-on break, creating a floating screen of glass-like shards of existence. As the lyrics reach the title of the song, the Sorcerer Supreme floats out from behind the curtain, passing untouched through the seemingly dangerous shards. The rift seals itself behind him, and the deep red Cloak of Levitation billows out like a pair of wings. It slowly carries him to ground level, where his wrapped cloth boots gently touch down just as his requested intro music fades. Strange offers his opponent an wordless, but affable point of the finger before he prepares himself, forming a floating, roughly palm-sized mandala of orange energy before each hand.
Arthur Lowell	As Strange's music fades, other music begins. It doesn't stop through the fight, and it's not even piped into the sound system. It's just part of how things go, right now, the weird logic of Arthur's existence: https://iodbc.bandcamp.com/track/new-broom-extended Arthur's entrance and approach are much like entrances of old. Thickly stacked rows of tiny fission magic constructs suddenly activate, carving a brilliant path of upward-facing lights. Like a vast, tall screen, the motes of light display Arthur's symbols, his green ampersat, his face, his spacey spirographic whorl, in their black-and-white patterns. Vivid green lines carve a half-circle pattern like a rising sun from the ground, and more fireworks gush from within as the GATE opens to reveal Arthur Lowell. With wide, swaggering strides, he approaches slowly, his hood trails dramatically, and he trails stars through the air behind him. He leaps into the arena with a stylish twisting flip, prompting tiny magic rockets to go off in spiraling patterns behind him and explode near him the moment he lands. A projection shows his name in lights: "ARTHUR" and "LOWELL", flashing repeatedly in the background. There's plenty of CARAPACIANS and IGUANAS from Afterus in the crowd today, and they're easily whipped into a screaming cheer as he makes a wide, arms-out gesture, raising his palms to encourage more and more screaming. And once the cheering reaches its peak, he points dramatically to strange. "ALRIGHT you MAGIC MOTHERFUCKER!" He shouts. "I wanna see that MYSTICISM MASTERY, 'cause I got some HARDCORE MAGECRAFT to TEACH YOU THE REAL OLDSCHOOL!" He spends a few seconds himself whipping the crowd into more of a furor. "COME ON! That the LOUDEST you got!? I wanna hear you SCREAM, not WHISPER! You want that BLOOD?! You want that POWER?! SHOUT IT, BABY!! YEEEEAAAAAAAHHHH!!" The crowd is going fucking insane. As the fireworks begin to fizzle out, Arthur's videogame logic begins to get into things. "THERE'S GONNA BE SOME STRANGE GEOMETRIES!" Declares an SNES-era sixteen-bit voice. Hanging above the field of battle are a pair of marked HEALTH VIALS and ASPECT GAUGES, though presumably Strange's are, at best, an estimate. "GET READY!" Arthur takes a dramatic pose with his metal battle-broom at the ready in both hands, light on both feet, shifting weight and ready to go. His spellcircles that pop around his body like bubbles are a vivid green. "STRIFE!!" And he's off. No waiting, no chill. He opens with a knockdown rush of flickering spellcircles that shift his body through a dozen angles around Strange as he builds up rocket-speed, and tries to surprise Strange with a very abrupt reversal of gravity, combined with Arthur suddenly striking him from above (below) by encasing his body in a bubble of intense gravity magic and trying to slam him into the floor (ceiling).
Doctor Strange	Strange frowns archly at Arthur's entrance, rubbing his chin and nodding. The name in lights and the simulated jumbotron are a nice touch, he has to admit. He bobs his head in time with the music, pantomiming shock when the mage points at him, pointing at himself as if to say, 'who, me?' When Arthur asks the spectators if they want power and blood, Strange shrugs. "I could go for an everything bagel," he says, not bothering to speak up above the din of the crowd. He looks up, spotting the HEALTH VIALS and what he presumes is a super meter of some sort, and offers a very rare reaction: a smile. He nods at Arthur, getting ready as he's bidden--the Sorcerer Supreme adopts a slightly crouched stance, one fist held before the other, rings of glyphs slowly rotating around the mandalas hovering before his hands. Arthur is off, and Strange opts to begin building up for an attack. As Arthur zips around him, he focuses only on the weaving of a spell. His hands move as if deflecting a multitude of invisible attackers, and the motions draw bright orange lines through the air, weaving them into a magic circle. Having gravity flipped upside down, suprisingly, doesn't bother him at all, and he in fact turns his body on a dime in midair to continue weaving the magic circle upside down. Being slammed into the ceiling, however, is not something he was expecting, and he is slammed flat on his back. The breath audibly escapes him, but he leaps back up to his feet, marshals his breathing, and finishes the spell with a thrust of his palms. The glowing circle spins rapidly, and begins spitting out bolts of white lightning that fly through the air at random. Pillars of tesselated arena begin to slowly grind their way into existence, filling Arthur's airspace with cumbersome obstacles, and orange portals of Strange's own make dot the pillars at random. Errant bolts of lightning fly through them, creating another hazard for Arthur!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur bounces off of the attack, flicking around to find things getting more aerially dense. "FUCK!" He shouts, swearing abruptly, when one of the bolts slams into him, knocking him out of his teleport spam and crashing him against one of the pillars, just in time for another random shot to slam into his chest painfully. His HEALTH VIAL loses a chunk, and he grunts in pain. "Oh no you fuckin' DON'T"! He shouts, raising a hand dramatically and gathering black fire around the palm, before slamming it into the pillar, losing a chunk of his /startlingly/ fast-regenerating ASPECT GAUGE. Gravity shifts again; suddenly, each pillar is like its own planet, swirling each randomly-fired shot into a more predictable orbit and starting to clear the air as some fail to orbit, at least when they don't land at Strange's own gates. "Best step the fuck off my REAL ESTATE!" With that reduced a bit -- and the battlefield made substantially more gravitationally confusing -- Arthur suddenly makes an abrupt open-handed gesture. He means to YANK Strange off the ground with gravity, and send him up into the freshly complex gravities of the many pillars. "'Cause I OWN this ARENA, MOTHERFUCKER!" He shouts, before launching on his rocket-broom into several swinging orbits. He tries to build up enough speed before Strange can get reoriented that he can swing around and give him a heavy smash with an overhead rocket-powered broom strike, to bounce him among the pillars like a pinball!
Doctor Strange	Strange is yanked off his feet in the midst of preparing a counterspell, pulled towards one of his pillars. The bolts orbiting around it are directly in his path, and he alters the gravity of the arena in defiance of Arthur to keep from getting struck directly. As he decides that 'down' is now '45 degrees THIS way,' the bolt merely grazes his arm on the way... down... up... sideways, whatever. A red chunk flies off of his HEALTH VIAL. He lands upside down, standing straight up and staring Arthur down--the man who'd have the nerve to say he owns the arena. Arthur's strike shatters him completely. That is to say, it strikes an illusory Strange who then shatters into a cloud of butterflies, while the real one steps out from behind a facade of empty air. "That's not what the divorce court said," retorts Strange, as he makes a gesutre similar to stirring a cauldron. The 'floor' of the pillar opens up, and out from an open portal sprays a plume of briny sea water, called forth in the mage's approach trajectory. Hot on the heels of that watery attack, Strange makes another gesture, pounding his fists together and then making a two-palmed thrust. The glyphs around his mandalas lock into place, and they spew a biting cone of cold at Arthur as he makes his pass!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur is slammed by the briney sea, impacted hard and then blasted with cold in quick succession. His own HEALTH VIAL now displays a dangerous-looking icicle icon, one that quickly proves to be his undoing. With his agility harshly reduce, Arthur can't avoid slamming into one of the pillars with an icy crack that depletes the remainder of his HEALTH VIAL! Arthur Lowell is defeated! "ROUND TWO!" Fuck's sakes, both HEALTH VIALS are refilling, though the ASPECT remains the same. Arthur clambers onto the side of one of those pillars, standing horizontally, working the stress out of one of his shoulders, panting. "Alright, homie. You feel that? That shit? That was, what, another SIX MILLION VIEWS, right there. You've earned a taste of that REAL HEAT." He says, rapping his knuckles against his own chest in a self-aggrandizing way. "It's time to bring out... FUSIOOOOOON!" He shouts it more to the crowd, raising a hand containing a small sun. They, of course, chant. "FUSION! FUSION! FUSION!" He whips them into more of a fury, pumping his hand dramatically. "YEAH! YEEEEAAAAH! You know it! WHO'S NUMBER ONE?! FUCK YES! ARTHUR GODDAMN LOWELL!" He finishes pacing about and hype-building around the pillar, and takes a battle-stance against Strange, grinning wide. "READY!" Shouts the sixteen-bit voice again. "STRIFE!!" And Arthur blasts that fusion projectile out into the arena. It splits into eight parts. Those eight parts begin to split in whirling arms. They split and split and split, fractally, until the lights are a massive eight-armed galaxy that's sweeping through the arena, a million tiny suns that begin to fire short bolts of starlight towards Strange, or emit quick spherical bursts of many bolts, or a dozen other strange things at a low but building fire-rate. A huge pattern, like a bullet-hell game. It's meant to prevent focus, disrupt construction, to bring Strange down to being unable to strategize and to make him focus on just the combat directly.
Doctor Strange	The Sorcerer Supreme's 'win animation' for the first round is as follows: looking over his shoulder at the refilling health gauge. "...wait, Aspect? What is that?" Strange holds out a scarred finger towards Arthur after he crashes into the pillar. "Hold off on the real heat a sec." While Arthur showboats for the crowd, Strange waves his hands. The ASPECT meter is replaced with a blue bar that reads V-ISM. It's full, segmented into two blinking halves with gold letters alternating between CHARGE and FULL. "Theeeere we go." Ah, memories... READY! STRIFE! Strange sees the field of projectiles coming, counting under his breath as they multiply. By the time they become a galaxy, he just gives up. Both hands work at weaving something together. It looks like an orb of broken glass, gradually increasing in size until he casts it out in the classic 'fighting game projectile' way. As it flies through the air to meet Fusion, it swells in size with the sound of broken glass scraping against itself or perhaps crunching under a boot. When it reaches the size of a beach ball, it unfolds, swirling in the air and becoming a wall. The great galaxy's spatial onslaught is swallowed up by this wall, which passes over it like the surface of water. All of its confusing projectiles are moved 'somewhere else,' the Sorcerer Supreme evidently not a fan of All That Shit. The wall turns back towards Strange and spits them all out in an orderly line... Significantly reduced in size, the projectiles are now shot out of a portal at Arthur, meant to be a distraction which serves Strange rather than... distracting him. The pillars break in half--actually, the whole arena does, as if someone were looking into a kaleidoscope and turning it around. The halves break into quarters, the quarters into eights. Eight tesselating copies of the sky and the sun, eight projectile-spewing galaxies, eight predictable but still dangerous patient trails of projectiles, eight fields of now jagged and sharp pillars, eight 'ceilings.' It's like someone broke an N64 game over their knee and fell under the map or something.
Arthur Lowell	Doctor Strange's question is answered; he briefly has the matter of ASPECT explained to him by HONEYBEE PROFESSOR, until someone clicks the little tickbox that says "MUTE PROTIPS". HONEYBEE PROFESSOR is angered by the insolence. The world is fracturing, and with it, Arthur's gravitational grip on the pillars is broken up and eventually entirely decoheres. Arthur keeps his arms crossed dramatically, his grin wide eagerly, his eyes aflame with bloodthirst. He presses his broom between himself and his returned assault, eyebrows swiftly pulling down and locking into battle position over that grin. "Come on, homie." He says. "That V-ism ain't gonna HOLD OUT FOREVER. You know I'mma bring that POWER." Arthur is perhaps the one person in, well, not the world, but in a pretty substantial chunk of worlds, who could comprehend and navigate the eight-way shatterscape as effectively as Doctor Strange can. His arms shift to his sides, and lock into place with the magical equivalent of the sound of a gun cocking. "I TOLD YOU." He says. "I OWN this ARENA." Geometry bends for Arthur. His steps forward result in dramatic "clunk" sorts of noises as he forces the TESSELATING SHATTERSCAPE through a few key rotations around its many assorted AXES OBFUSCATORY, giving him something to step on. More importantly, something to rush along towards Strange, with a rising shout. "HOOOOOOOOOYYYYYEEEEAAAAAAAAAAH!" His body flickers as he forces himself to push through Gates, his own particular divine domain, straight towards Strange, with the intent to broom-smash him out of the defense and back into the galactic shitshow, as well as try to strike him out of whatever input combo he has afoot in there.
Doctor Strange	Strange once again faces Arthur head-on as he charges in, diverting some of the projectiles from the FUSION attack to... himself? Two exit-portals open on either side of him, and rather than prepare to evade or block, he holds his arms out to either side, index and middle fingers pointed towards the projectiles. The glyph-rings around his mandalas begin to rotate, and the mystical energy from those attacks is absorbed into the constructs. Waiting until the last possible minute to defend himself, Strange banishes the portals as Arthur's broom is raised to strike, and attempts to rotate a cross-section of the pillar beneath him to simply slide himself away. It doesn't quite work the way he wants it to--the broom slams into his shoulder on the way down, before striking the pillar hard enough to crack the stone it's made from. A red chunk appears on his HEALTH bar, falling off after the fact. "I'm gonna show you juuuust what V-ISM's about." This is his 'SUPER ACTIVATED' quote. A blue starburst appears before him, and he lifts an arm up. The meter beneath his HEALTH now sports a helpful triangle, which begins counting down from one end to the other. Shadowy purple afterimages of Strange trail behind him with each motion he makes. A green beam of concussive energy flanked by crackling veins of yellow lighting shoots from his rising hand, aimed at Arthur's center of mass. It has the force of a punch, but what makes it really annoying is that the shadow-clones /also/ make the attack. It doesn't hurt and is really more of a shove, but it's enough to be irritating. Strange lifts his other arm casts the same spell again, followed by three more 'fake' copies of it, and again, and again, until the meter runs out--but that doesn't mean the combo's over! Strange rushes in and goes for a leaping back kick to try and push Arthur off of the pillar and into the galaxy projectile spam below!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur takes the beam dead-on, blasted back several feet, arms and broom crossed in front of him. Spellcircles are stacked up to make a barrier, and while several of the multitudinous beams are halted on them, several more shatter through and eventually barrage him. He's holding back the searing pain, but shortly he finds his hard defense in the screen-corner is more of a zoning issue, resulting in a harsh slam that takes Arthur off his feet and results in him having to hard-stop his fall after grazing the painful rush of solar fire below. His HEALTH VIAL is dangerously precarious. Little more of that and he'd have been done for. "You're not 'boutta TWO-ROUND ME with a COMBO LIKE THAT you WIZARDY FUCK." Arthur grunts, eyes suddenly blazing white. "You and those fuckin' SHADOW CLONES wanna really goddamn learn how to DO A FUCKIN' INFINITE?" He dashes up the side of the pillar, forcing chunks of the SHATTERSCAPE to rotate into place and conduct him up towards strange, and using them to provide him some cover. They shift into place like rounds into a loading revolver. "It goes..." He blasts off with one final rocket-swipe of his broom. "HEAVY UP!" He screams. "MEDIUM NEUTRAL! MEDIUM NEUTRAL!" He shouts, continuing to batter. "LIGHT DOWN! LIGHT DOWN! HEEEAAAAVY DOWN!" His broom begins to glow brilliantly, and his impacts are forceful enough that they're likely as anything to crash Strange into multiple layers of the same pillar. "GROUND SMASH! HEAVY SWEEP! DOWN! RIGHT! UP! SPEEECIAL!!!" And with this effort to mess up Strange in close-range, he blows a huge chunk of his ASPECT GAUGE in a close-range rapid-fire series of area-of-effect fusion waves meant to knock Strange in the relative direction of "up" again. During this huge gush of magic, Arthur presses both hands together in a pose that would almost seem enlightened if it wasn't coming with the voice of a screaming xbox live kid. And then if he can get Strange in the air again -- another loop of everything past the heavy upstrike!
Doctor Strange	Strange chuckles as his V-ISM meter depletes fully. "Oh," he says, shaking his head. "That wasn't an infinite. Come on and show me yours, though." He places one hand behind his back. Through the translucent mandala on the opposite hand, now outstretched towards him, Arthur can see Strange make the classic 'bring it' gesture known to many an archetypical martial artist. Boy, does Arthur bring it. From the moment Strange brings up a portal to try and block mid, the broom is on him. It cuts the portal in half and strikes his hands out of blocking range. He is forced back across the pillar, catching broom-swipes to his chest, the first heavy down knocking him on his back. He attempts to recover with a kip-up, but the broom smashes him all the way to the other side of the pillar. He flips gravity around so that he can land on his feet upon crossing through to the other side, but Arthur is ready for him, juggling him with a lattice of projectiles and starting the combo all the way over again, knocking him clean to the original side of the pillar. It snaps and breaks off, falling 'above' to the galaxy eight-way projectile chain, getting obliterated. The crowd goes wild--until Strange makes a parry. The second launcher-projectile is cast aside with a short-range explosion of bright blue energy, and Strange's hands glow a brilliant gold. "/This/ is an infinite." He darts towards Arthur, the Cloak of Levitation carrying him above the ground. Strange starts with some standing punches, each one a cross with a form similar to Wing Chun, alternating directions. Then, a kick that reaches so high, some of the male audience members wince at the sight of it. This is his launcher, trying to get Arthur into the air! If he's able to launch, the assault continues, juggling Arthur in a similar fashion, holding him in the air with superheated punches, then bouncing him back up with point-black explosions of green flame and one of those sweeping kicks. Just as Arthur did to him, Strange attempts another go-around, only this time, there's a finisher: A book bearing the same mark as his golden amulet appears before him, and as he assumes the lotus position, it opens in his lap. A beam of burning golden light erupts under Arthur!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's moment concludes, and that parry throws him off. He slams into the top of one of the nearest pillars, skidding to a stop. He's freshly reinvigorated, bouncing on both feet, eager to continue as Strange gets his matter sorted. "Gimmie an UP CLOSE DEMO, Doc." Arthur says. "These people came for a SHOW. You better turn this fuckin' ARENA into an OPERATING THEATER, else I'm 'boutta BREAK THOSE HANDS. The bitcrushed voice returns one final time. "ROUND THREE!" He shouts. Arthur grabs his broom in both hands, choking the grip and lowering his stance. "GET READY!" Arthur revs his broom, the motor of the twisting bristles roaring. "STRIFE!" He launches forward the moment Strange pushes forward. A couple of punches. Arthur has to take the brunt of them on his broom, but can't manage most of it. He gets a high launch because of the block, where Arthur tries to batter at the punches with heavy swings. The heavy explosive kicks get him bouncing, struggling to steady himself against the twisted shatterscape's sides using gravity manipulation. He holds his own through the infinite, his health chipping and chipping and chipping, until the final strike comes. Facing it dead-on is a mistake, but the only choice Arthur could make. "NO YOU FUCKIN' DON'T!" He shouts. "Not in front of my FANS you MYSTIC SHIT!" Concentric spellcircles array in front of him, a massibe barrier of vivid green spirographic lines that branch into fractal sub-spirographs that twist and rotate within the whole, like pieces of a great clock. But after several seconds, the barrier between him and the beam emits the worst possible noise it could make: CRACK! Arthur tries to firm up his stance, shut his eyes tight and pour more aspect into the defense. But he's swiftly -- not exactly running dry, but running out of inputs per second, so to speak, unable to keep the shield together as the fractures spread. And soon enough, the floodgates open. A beam leaks through, striking him, throwing off his focus, letting more beams breach a little more, and soon enough, he's taking the full weight of the beam dead-on. To his credit, he survives it for a /startlingly/ long time. But that HEALTH VIAL suffers more and more, until it is fully drained, and Arthur falls to one knee, too exhausted to continue. The bitcrushed voice returns one last moment. "K.O.!!" And Strange takes it! "Haaaahhhh... Haaaaaahhhh... Fuckin'... Hell, god damn..." He pants. "That last bit... What the hell was that...?" He seems genuinely curious. "Jesus, that was... gotta be some vancian shit..." He has to hold himself up with one arm. His body is conspicuously smoking, but he still laughs with a bloodthirsty kind of joy at that last exchange.
Doctor Strange	Stephen Strange lets out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, and reaches up with a trembling, still-glowing hand to wipe the sweat from his brow. Realizing this, he flicks both wrists. The glow disappears, as well as the mandalas before each hand. Now that it's gone, Arthur can see just how much damage his broom did: each hand spots dark, angry bruises from blocks and failed parries. His short hair is visibly damp with sweat, as well. He brushes off an errant bit of pillar-rubble as the Shrine begins to undo their thorough fucking-up of the landscape--and each other. Strange extends one of those bruised hands to Arthur, offering to help him up. When asked about the Book of the Vishanti, the sorcerer supreme offers the vaguest possible response. "Not Vancian, nope. It's a special book," he says. With a dry chuckle, he adds, "Lots of spells in it. Y'know--one of the authors would /really/ like you." Agamotto and Arthur would get along like two peas in a pod. "Good fight, Arthur. Come by the Sanctum sometime, you can check out my library--and I don't mean books."