1178/08 D-Point: Good Luck, Sailor Moon, Everyone

08 D-Point: Good Luck, Sailor Moon, Everyone
Date of Scene:	08 March 2016
Location:	The Dark Kingdom
Synopsis:	CONTENT WARNING: Grim. Horror. Character death. The Nameless Hero and Prism Keeper Yellow make their last stand, and take with them rather more than anyone might have imagined.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Ano Onna, Hoshi Kogane
Tinyplot:	D-Point

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Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Once out of the ice and snow, the tunnels aren't much fun either: a maze of twisty passages, all alike, and the 'alike' is incredibly disturbing in and of itself. The walls are ostensibly made of rock -- who told these caves they could exist in the Arctic? There's no landmass, it's just ice all the way down -- but they look organic, they look like they're melting. They move in the edges of peripheral vision, and they change configuration when unwatched, as though actively trying to get all the young heroes lost.

'As though.'

Now and then, something in the weird phosphorescent rock and not-light and shadows looks like a face, or a hand, or from a certain angle, some other part of a human body.

The air is cold and possessed of unpleasant odours, impossible to identify, and now and then, something like a laugh or a scream echoes through the darkness from far away.

Ano Onna has posed:
    It had not been an easy going of things. That Girl had nearly missed the call for aid to the north, and only got it, perhaps, second or third-hand at best. But she knew her particular skills would best be put to use fighting darkness in the cold, dark, wastes of the north. A journey she knew very well might perhaps be her last.
    'So her course is set.' The White Dragon that resides within her left fist murmurs.
    'Give her credit, the girl's got guts.' The Black Dragon within her right replies.
    She had told the two people in the world that she held most dear of her intent. Her friend Konoko was hesitant to accept the decision, knowing very well it could cost so dearly. Her grandfather had said nothing, the aged master of Ikken Hissatsu simply nodding his head in silent blessing of his grandchild's ultimate choice.
    Now here she is. Cold, but thankfully not alone. Worn over her henshin armor is a ragged cloak, tattered by wind and elements, pulled up to cover her face and neck. Her hands shiver. She clenches her fingers into fists to stop them.
    Scarlet eyes glance to her companion as they break free of the snow and enter the tunnels. The cavernous labyrinthine maze proving to be just as miserable an experience. The figures flickering in the corner of her eyes, and the scent and sounds lingering in the air make her pause.
    Her palms itch. She clenches her fists tighter to quell them.
    "Hoshi. I don't think we're alone."

Hoshi Kogane has posed:
Hoshi hasn't dropped henshin since coming here; still tired from the fight against Kunzite, she has no less soldiered on; dedicated, driven to do everything in her power. She's been trying to save power for later. She's stuck to others, Kukai before, but apparently she lost track of him.

Still, there's the nameless girl, or Fist-Chan, and Prism Keeper Yellow at least has some company. "Probably not." She agrees, nervously, sounding a little tired, though she tries to hide that. "I can't tell where evil is, beyond everywhere." She holds on to her wand firmly.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Everywhere... everywhere... everywhere...

At first it sounds like an echo, but the voice changes from Hoshi's to an older one, laughing in a bright mockery of joy, laced throughout with malice.

Where? Who?

There's a second voice, also female, a little huskier. It's from behind them. There's also a clicking sound behind them, like thousands of chittering beetles, or thousands of tiny clicking claws against the stone floor.

Ahead of them, a tall and unnervingly beautiful youma steps into the not-light, pale and dressed in a flowing gown. Her steps are like a dance, and as if to prove it, she spins on one tiptoed bare foot.

Her back is hollow, like the inside of an egg cleaved in half lengthwise; her hair is long and flowing and the deep blue of the bottom of a gasflame. Her fingernails-- no those are her fingers, long and sharp and pointed. She smiles at them, and it's almost kind until her lips part. Sharp, pointed teeth. When she opens her mouth to speak, there are rows and rows of them, like a shark's. "What pretty girls. Lead us to the Princess and her Crystal, and we shall let you live."

Behind them, the clicking and chittering resolves into hundreds of wet, clawed lizards, leaving trails of phosphorescent slime. About a hundred of them climb atop each other as they come into the 'light', eating each other viciously until they form another woman-shape, but this one is dripping and scaled, blackened lips, hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, bony joints and thin arms and hands. She's dressed in sodden rags, and her slimy black hair clings to her scalp, missing where scabrous patches show through. Her tongue is very long as she asks, "Will you tell us? Will you tell us? Or will you die here alone in these tunnels made from bodies and souls, from despair and hate?"

The rest of the lizards begin to advance, crawling up the walls and crossing the floor toward the girls.

Ano Onna has posed:
    A slow breath, and that girl closes her eyes. Listening, trusting none of her senses, trying to find the source of the whispers through simple awareness and controlled breathing, once the malicious voices make themselves none.
    From behind.
    And another from the front.
    Scarlet eyes slowly crack open, and the Nameless Hero shifts her stance. "Two of them." Confirmed as the youma pair and tightens her fists. Knuckles pop audibly, echoing in the deadly corridors as the two state their intent.
    She highly doubts their promises. But she cannot fight both.
    "Yellow. Your back to mine. I won't let this one pass me. I trust you for the other." Her voice is a whisper as she slowly shifts her stance.
    'Your words are empty, Youma, wench.' The Fist of Earth snaps.
    'You will be led nowhere.' The Fist of Heaven replies.
    "I will die on my feet, before I take to a knee and sell my allies to the likes of you." The girl with no name replies solmenly as she takes on her fighting stance, her fighting spirit glowing about her like a soft aura, facing the hollow-backed youma woman. A bead of cold sweat running down the side of her brow at the sight of all those teeth. But she does not back down. Instead, she reels one fist back. And thrusts herself in a step forward, with intent to deal as solid a blow as she can, intending to test the Youma's defenses.

Hoshi Kogane has posed:
"I'm lost and don't know what you're talking about, so even if I wanted to tell you, I couldn't." Yellow tells the youma that have come to extort her for knowledge. She sounds a little scared, but nonetheless doesn't seen to be paralyzed by indecision. The nameless hero's resolve fuels her own.

She points her wand at the approaching mess of lizards, and the being which fused into many at once, and fires a simple beam of Yellow colour energy. It doesn't have a lot of energy, so far Yellow still believes they can defeat them and make it to the big fight, so she has to preserve her energy.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Really," bubbles the uncanny valley youma in front of Nameless Hero. "I think you shall. Do you know that our Great Leader once commanded all of this Earth? And killed the Moon and all its sinister light, its spying eyes and its self-important immortals?"

"And," hiccups the lizard-crone youma in front of Prism Keeper Yellow, "its weak little princess killed herself at the loss of her prince, when our beautiful Queen Beryl could not stay the blade meant for that foolish child? Someone..."

"Someone," echoes the hollow-backed and blue-haired, the many-toothed and sharp-fingered, "the accursed queen of the Moon, sent their souls to be reborn to plague us again, to take from us what rightfully belongs to the darkness. And she sealed our--"

That's when Nameless Hero's punch swings forward, swift and sure, backed by magic and spirit and the purity of her determination. The hollow-backed youma reflexively lifts a hand to catch the punch, then hisses as her claw-fingered hand steams and crackles, skin boiling away from the impact. Still, it's like hitting a steel wall. Her other hand jabs upward, fingers outstretched, to attempt to stab five burning points the length of knitting needles through the girl's torso. "She SEALED our LEADER! And the foolish child now has the weapon we crave to awaken her from her prison, finally! You SHALL tell us, even if you will it not! We shall suck the knowledge from your mortal minds even as we--"

"--even as we consume the flesh that houses it!!" screeches the dripping lizard-crone as stars embed themselves in her flesh and burn, steam and smoke rising up, scales flaking off and blackening. That one, that one scrambles bony fingers against the floor, snapping up lizards and eating them, healing her wounds and breathing out black smoke that smells of sulfur, of rotten eggs. "Your tender little brains will tell us where she is, this wretched Moon Princess! You cannot tell me you do not know her! She is the one named Sailor Moon!"

A lizard drops from the ceiling on to the bright yellow little girl, and then they begin to swarm. They don't do a lot of damage on their own, but the slime stings a little, numbs where it touches after a couple of seconds. Not terribly numb, just enough to indicate that more of it will be more effective.

Ano Onna has posed:
    Though her strike may have been true, the situation seems no less grim. The nameless girl's reflexes are fast, and her strength and endurance have helped her come this far, but as she backpedals to put distance between herself and the hollow-back woman, it is a dark look that forms across the brawler hero's face.
    'G-girl you are blee...'
    'Be still Fist of Earth.' The dragons that make up her gauntlets bicker in hisses. Though she glances down upon her left fist, and learning the result of the divine blow from her white gauntlet and clenches her fingers, she remains silent for a long moment.
    With a word of quiet thanks in prayer to her patron deity of fists that her henshin garb is red.
    "I'm sorry. I'm sorry that it happened that way in the past." She whispers. "But this is now. People have been hurt. Girls have fought, and bled, and died up to this point. It must end."
    That girl re-takes her battle stance once more, but as the lizard begin to advance, she snaps her hand back. Her hand does not need feeling to use it. This is perhaps why she snaps her arm back, seeking to grasp the first of the slimy creatures to fall. If she can grab it, she will fling it for the hollo-backed woman. But it is a mere distraction as she flings something else. A portion of her fighting aura, launched as a projectile of pure concussive concept of 'left punch', in the act.
    The swing is... A bit more sluggish than the first, for reasons she does not choose to bring up.
    Like the blood quietly soaking into her clothes.

Hoshi Kogane has posed:
"The crimes of the past do not justify the crimes of the present." Yellow says in a tone filled with determination, even as creeply slimy critters start to fall on her head, she shudders, but doesn't hold back her clear statements, "I do not know if things transpired as you describe, but I will not let you continue crimes based upon ancient wrongs."

And then she points her wand at multiple load-bearing parts of of this section of the caves, each time sending a single yellow star carrying a drill flying, they dig into the walls, "And whatever knowledge is stuck in my mind is not yours to claim."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
The problem with having a hollow back-- with literally being a shell, no matter how strong your limbs or your magics-- is that by design, you are quite brittle in a very inconvenient place.

Blue gasflame hair whirls through the air as the shark-toothed and beautifully wrong youma spins again, dancing lightly to one side to avoid a couple of falling lizards; the lizard-crone cackles wildly and starts to glide toward Yellow again--

--and then a lot of things happen all at once. The lizard that Nameless Hero flings is accompanied by that concussive force punch through the air and explodes on contact with the sharkflame hollowback's face, and both youmas shriek, and then the force-punch shatters the hollow-back's midsection. The purity of the nameless girl's righteous fury begins to eat away at the two falling halves, and they both independently start scrabbling at attacking her, even as they burn slowly away and black smoke rises to fill the top of the tunnel.

The swarming lizards move faster now, sliming the girls with anaesthetic and starting to bite, and the lizard-crone's hands lengthen and reach to grab at their ankles to pull them down as her mouth opens slowly, bigger than her head, and her long tongue shifts into a mouth of its own and starts to reach to bite into Yellow's head--

--and the drill-stars hit home, their clean bright yellow sparkling burrowing into the walls at those perfect points of balance and burning away the dark energy that glues it all together. Immediately the walls start screaming and coming apart, the ceiling shrugs the rest of the lizards off and starts to crumble, and things move in the structure of the place.

Shark mouth and double mouth both begin to howl in terror, joining the din of the writhing walls, and glowing rock flakes angrily off of the building material it had swallowed. The building material... bodies, souls, despair, and hate. The hate is burned clean away, and as the bodies begin to fall and the souls waft clear-- shining stars and hope and relief-- the despair melts away, as well.

For just an instant before the parts of the ceiling actually made of rock tumble down and the bodies around them begin to disintegrate into so much dust, the air is filled with the rejoicing of freedom and memory.

It's too much for the youmas. Even before the ceiling crushes them, they burn and burn from the brightness, from the hope, from the loss of energy that this enormous battery of souls had been providing their Great Leader. Even Metalia's malevolence and unbearable power cannot wall the place off fast enough to keep it from destabilizing its nearest borders.

The price is heavy, but in this moment--

In this moment, it may not be too dear. The girls' minds and hearts and souls and memories are safe, and they've freed tortured souls they didn't even know were there... and begun the clock's ticking down to the ultimate destruction of this unthinkable hell.

Ano Onna has posed:
    That Girl has given her all. From the moment she set foot in the desolate northern lands, until now. Her strentgh could be called great, but it is certainly not limitless. Time, exposure, and injury have taken their toll. Though the hollow-back Youma is brought low- she still continues to come even while mangled...
    That isn't the reason that the nameless girl is smiling. Her lips are tugged in a thin, knowing, smile, as she glances over her shoulder at Hoshi's handiwork, the dutiful little stars setting to their final task of drilling the walls.
    She's fine with it.
    She's alright as the first pebbles fall and herald the oncoming fall. The youma are crushed. But the ceiling doesn't stop there. Gravity is perhaps the most merciless law of them all.
    In the last moments, That Girl sees the walls fall. Their contents- what they comprise of- what they are formed by- and even that cannot horrify her. Not now. She's too busy seeing something else, as the ceiling collapses.
    When the din ends and everything settles, there's silence and darkness.
    And a wet cough.
    That Girl is pinned. No she's crushed. Hunched on her hands and knees, her body trembles as she puts all of the last of her strength into the impossible task of holding the fallen ceiling on her shoulders, as she hunches over Hoshi in the darkness. A heavy price, indeed. It is a doomed hope, though.
    'Mm... Was that on purpose, child?' The Fist of Heaven asks. 'It was for the best either way.'
    'But if it was... Not bad thinking.' The Fist of Earth chuckles mirthlessly.
    That Girl whispers something quiet and simple though.

    "The last thing I see."
    "Shining Yellow Stars of hope."
    "... This is a fine end."

    All she can do now is wait until the last of that strentgh gives out.
    She is content, at least, in the presence of her first friend.

Hoshi Kogane has posed:
"A little too much." Yellow says as the rocks fall, and she gets trapped beneath them. She has no speaking companions to make pithy comments on her situation, and yet she smiles. "Better than too little." She smiles at Ano, and then says one last sentence, "Good luck, Sailor Moon, everyone."

Ano Onna has posed:
    "Mn." Her reply is short, affirmative, and simple. And nothing more.
    That Girl has stopped talking, as well. And so too have her gauntlets, as she quietly gives the rest of herself to the single, last, task of holding all that weight on her back.