milliways_bar | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

The clock is really whizzing forward today. After the large sacrifice last night, it's got a lot of ground to make up if it's going to reach the 10 by the time the quake is happening.

The note asking for sacrifices is still up, as is the note asking for signups for the ground assault.

And beside the clock, Urza himself still sits. Planeswalkers do not actually require sleep, or food, or any of those mortal trappings, so he hasn't moved, and has no plans to until the final possible moment.

[ooc: multi"pup" post! You can interact with the clock, talk to Urza, or just sign up on the note. All in one convienient, easy-to-use entrance post.]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Khayman has been lurking, on and off, all this time.

"That thing yours?" he asked.

"It is not," Urza replies. "It is a weapon of my enemies."

"They can't have many friend," Khayman agreed.

"Considering their ultimate aim is to destroy all life that is not Phyrexian across the multiverse, I would think this does not garner them much affection, no."

"What do they do with a small thing like the immortality of one vampire, then?" Khayman asked.

These people sounded more as if they preferred wholesale destruction.

"The sacrifices, you mean?" he asks, taking a wild guess. "They will return after the place is decimated, retrieve the Clock, and siphon off the power and memories offered to it. Then, using magic, they will be converted into mana and used to power the factories and breeding pits."

"So it doesn't matter at all what it was that people lost?" Khayman asked, aggrieved. Claudia's sacrifice had been very personal, as far as he was concerned.

He shakes his head, sadly.

"Not to the Phyrexians. The dearness of the sacrifice only adds to the strength of the emotion extracted, which just means more power to be used. Emotion is a weakness to the Phyrexians, and they delight in using it as a weapon against those they consider inferior -- which is everyone."

"I am sure they would taste very bad," Khayman said, intending it as an expression of disapproval.

...

"I'm fairly sure I don't know anyone who has tried to eat one," he says carefully. "Many of them are designed as plague carriers, so that even if the detachment is defeated, they leave behind the disease and let it finish the work for them."

Billy approaches slowly, with Cassie.

At about four feet out, he stops, then closes his eyes.

Cassie pulls him in and they hug and kiss, and conduct a whispered conversation, and then he nods again.

He steps forward, alone and walks to the clock.

"I will... I give my magic, all of it, powers to spells, all that is magic within me. Take it, and be done with it."

"I am a vampire," Khayman laughed. "Their disease doesn't concern me. I would like to drink the blood of one."

With his messy feeding habits, that would mean tearing the Pyrexian apart at the same time, but who'd mind? Nobody would expect a neat corpse for a burial.

The clock stops, almost before the words are done. After the previous night's sacrifice, the offering of magic is a fix to a junkie.

The hum builds, and the shock discharges, dancing along the boy's skin briefly.

As offerings go, it is not the most selfless, judging by the emotion behind the request. However, there is enough pain in the giving that the hand pushes back a fair distance before the ticking resumes.

Beside the clock, Urza nods, closing his eyes briefly. "Thank you, young man. It may be that your offering gives us the time we need to see this thing destroyed."

Billy looks up at him, shuddering.

"I hope so. For better or worse... I just gave everything that made me who I was."

He turns for a minute and looks at the Door, which, before his eyes, ripples and vanishes. He closes his eyes and then nods.

"For better or worse."

He nods to the man again and walks back toward Cassie, bnot sure how he feels or what he will do now.

Urza laughs, loudly.

"Oh, my friend. I do not think that even Baron Sengir himself, in his darkest moments, would ever consider the vile blood of a Phyrexian over the prospect of slow starvation!"

"Do they taste worse than rats?" Khayman asked. "I will really have to try now - in the worst case, I can still spit the blood out again."

"It is hardly blood at all! The Phyrexians are constructs of flesh and metal, sometimes more machine than animal. Their blood is filled with oil and lubricants and other such things to prevent damage to those machine parts. Having cut open my share on the battlefield, I can safely say you can never predict the color of what will flow out of any of them."

"That," Khayman admitted, "does not sound appetising at all."

He stares a the thing. For the second time now he's staring at the clock.

This is the agent of our destruction, the fox says, sensing only evil behind it.

"You say this device is intended to slay us all?"

The shakings get steadily stronger with each passing day, and they only started around the time this object appeared. I certainly do not remember any shakings before this device appeared.

"We were not always in the bar, lir. Who is to say there were no tremors during the time we were absent?"

That is true, but surely I would have sensed something amiss upon our returns. As for the present, if the tremors increase as they intend to, there will be nothing left to stop them from tearing this place apart and killing everyone in it.

Sobering thought.

He shakes his head.

"Indeed not. Better to leave such vileness to spill upon the ground."

"What are the plants like that grown in such a ground, afterwards?" Khayman asked, curious. "Humans have a word on the world where I live - pollution."

"Without magic to cleanse and purify the land, where a Phyrexian falls, nothing will ever grow again."

Urza watches the half-silent conversation, knowing that the questions asked were not to him.

"There is very little time left," is all he offers to them.

"That is a very serious sort of pollution, then," Khayman nodded. "Far from being digestible, their blood is noxious. These people are good for exactly nothing."

Snowball approaches the clock cautiously, not having seen Billy earlier.

"You, Mr Clock, are a pain in the backside. I offer you my ability to talk to humans, and beg of you to spare the only place I have left to call home."

He waits to see if his offering will be accepted.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 5