Sypha Belnades (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
verunandesu) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
maskormenacelogs2020-08-24 05:15 pm
verunandesu) wrote in maskormenacelogs2020-08-24 05:15 pm
Entry tags:
Mind the gap
WHO: Sypha & Edwon
WHERE: Jeopardy
WHEN: Mid-August
WHAT: Sypha meets her nefarious power-countering villain. Edwon helps her out!
WARNINGS: Probably none, but will be updated as needed.
Sypha had closing shift at the library again; given that it only was open until eight pm during the summertime, it wasn't exactly late when she started walking home. The darkness was soft as the day's heat radiated upwards from the concrete beneath her feet, which was still a sensation that was weird and wrong to Sypha. She was so used to being chilly, except in the very middle of summer, and the artificial lights of the buildings and streetlamps bothered her. She yearned for true darkness to coexist with human society, the way that it did in Wallachia, where she only had to step out her door to view the stars. Here, the light pollution made that an impossibility so long as she was within city limits.
That in mind, Sypha walked down alleyways on her route home, avoiding the lighted streets and main thoroughfares. She is coming up on a crossroads of sorts (cross-alleys?) when she begins to feel jumpy. Her thoughts had begun to stray, as they inevitably do, to Dracula and his army of vampires. She and Trevor and Alucard surely had not taken them all down in their mad rush to encounter the architect of Wallachian genocide, but what had become of them? There had been many other vampire soldiers, in a different sort of livery, but Sypha had only been dimly aware of them at the time, she had been so focused on her mission. So what had happened to them? Where had they gone?
She remembers how the female vampire in eastern robes had dissolved to dust then reappeared in an instant to slash with deadly force. She remembers how the castle had responded to her control of the mirror, the crawling of her flesh as the spell took hold with hooks under her skin, up her arm, how she had only been able to stop its creeping spread with her own force of will, how it had whispered in words she had almost understood...
She looks up suddenly at a noise to her left, whirling to catch sight of whatever caused it. Dread is creeping, icy cold, up her spine despite the oppressive heat of her robes. She tries to marshal her thoughts: she is in Jeopardy, where strange things happen all the time and are normal and do not scare her at all. She is not in Wallachia, where a Night Creature can come hulking around the corner of the garage up there at the crossroads, where it can dart out of the underbrush beside the buildings behind her and be on her before she noticed, where a vampire can materialize right beside her and she would not feel its fangs until too late because she is alone and vulnerable and so very scared...
Sypha did not realize that she was breathing erratically until her lungs began protesting from lack of air, and she sucks in a breath. In the same moment, fear bubbles up from somewhere below her brainstem and overtakes her mind in a wave; she drops to one knee, paralyzed. Her gut is screaming at her to fight fight but there is nothing - there is nothing in front of her, and try as she might she cannot remember...
"Well well." The voice is deep, resonant. Sypha quakes, her mind blank. "Not so dangerous after all, are you?"
WHERE: Jeopardy
WHEN: Mid-August
WHAT: Sypha meets her nefarious power-countering villain. Edwon helps her out!
WARNINGS: Probably none, but will be updated as needed.
Sypha had closing shift at the library again; given that it only was open until eight pm during the summertime, it wasn't exactly late when she started walking home. The darkness was soft as the day's heat radiated upwards from the concrete beneath her feet, which was still a sensation that was weird and wrong to Sypha. She was so used to being chilly, except in the very middle of summer, and the artificial lights of the buildings and streetlamps bothered her. She yearned for true darkness to coexist with human society, the way that it did in Wallachia, where she only had to step out her door to view the stars. Here, the light pollution made that an impossibility so long as she was within city limits.
That in mind, Sypha walked down alleyways on her route home, avoiding the lighted streets and main thoroughfares. She is coming up on a crossroads of sorts (cross-alleys?) when she begins to feel jumpy. Her thoughts had begun to stray, as they inevitably do, to Dracula and his army of vampires. She and Trevor and Alucard surely had not taken them all down in their mad rush to encounter the architect of Wallachian genocide, but what had become of them? There had been many other vampire soldiers, in a different sort of livery, but Sypha had only been dimly aware of them at the time, she had been so focused on her mission. So what had happened to them? Where had they gone?
She remembers how the female vampire in eastern robes had dissolved to dust then reappeared in an instant to slash with deadly force. She remembers how the castle had responded to her control of the mirror, the crawling of her flesh as the spell took hold with hooks under her skin, up her arm, how she had only been able to stop its creeping spread with her own force of will, how it had whispered in words she had almost understood...
She looks up suddenly at a noise to her left, whirling to catch sight of whatever caused it. Dread is creeping, icy cold, up her spine despite the oppressive heat of her robes. She tries to marshal her thoughts: she is in Jeopardy, where strange things happen all the time and are normal and do not scare her at all. She is not in Wallachia, where a Night Creature can come hulking around the corner of the garage up there at the crossroads, where it can dart out of the underbrush beside the buildings behind her and be on her before she noticed, where a vampire can materialize right beside her and she would not feel its fangs until too late because she is alone and vulnerable and so very scared...
Sypha did not realize that she was breathing erratically until her lungs began protesting from lack of air, and she sucks in a breath. In the same moment, fear bubbles up from somewhere below her brainstem and overtakes her mind in a wave; she drops to one knee, paralyzed. Her gut is screaming at her to fight fight but there is nothing - there is nothing in front of her, and try as she might she cannot remember...
"Well well." The voice is deep, resonant. Sypha quakes, her mind blank. "Not so dangerous after all, are you?"
no subject
He hadn't expected to run into anyone he knows. He recognizes her presence even from a distance, and he can't resist following after to see where she's going. He keeps to the shadows, out of sight, confident in his own ability to go unnoticed.
He also hadn't expected an attack. It's turning out to be an interesting night.
Edwon waits for a little while to see what happens. Sypha had striked him as someone competent, someone not to be underestimated - so he's more than a little surprised when she drops to a knee. And well. He likes her. He's not about to allow her to get herself killed.
Edwon turns himself invisible and runs closer. It doesn't take long before that terrifying pressure hits him as well, and he understands what had overwhelmed her. Edwon only smiles. He's always thrived under pressure, gets a rush from his own fear... And he's spent so much time training with Jadus lately. This aura is nothing compared to his.
"She's just the distraction."
Edwon's voice comes out of nowhere, and so does his dagger a moment later, flying towards the villain. Edwon turns himself visible again, several more daggers already in his hands.
no subject
"You planned this." His voice is accusatory. He unsheathes a rapier, holds it ready. "No matter. I'll kill you as well as the witch."
--
There is a voice, a buzz of movement. Everything is as if seen from behind frosted glass, or from a river bottom. Sypha is drowning in emotion; the terror swamps her mind and covers it so completely that she cannot move in abject fear of shattering. She cannot see, she cannot hear, she cannot breathe - suddenly, the pressure lifts, and Sypha gulps great lungfuls of air. The world snaps very briefly and suddenly into focus around her; she is on the pavement, the rocks and dirt are sharp pricks on her palms, her knees hurt... is that Edwon?
She sits up, unsteady, a chorus of anguish and terror baying at the back of her mind, and tries to think. A man she does not know unsheathes a sword. He is bleeding from the shoulder; Edwon is holding knives. There must be fight, she thinks, dimly, and then, more strongly, I should help out.
Sypha fights to concentrate through the yammering din of fearfearfearfearfear and the whispers that really, she can't do this, this is too difficult, she will fail, she will get Edwon killed, she will get herself killed, she will trip and fall, this is so hard.
no subject
He tosses a dagger up in the air, catches it again, and then throws it hard at the villain's opposite shoulder.
"I should kill you, but the clean-up is a lot of trouble. I'll give you ten seconds to run instead."
no subject
No, that is not something she would ever think. Sypha knows her own mind, knows that self-recrimination is something she does not do, has never thought. There is something - there is someone else saying these things.
There is something over her mind, some sort of blanket (though blanket is not the right word; English cannot express this, and her mind flickers to synonyms in Enochian, similar expressions in Adamic). A weighted blanket, a grey piece of cloth wraps her senses as a voice from without, a voice that sounds like her own, whispers words of fear and confusion and doubt.
--
"Impossible," the man in the cape glowers at Edwon. "You could not have know- ack!"
He makes a swift movement and barely manages to dodge the knife through a combination of what seems like a telekinetic batting of the knife out of the air and a backwards stumble that leaves him sprawled on his back, Edwon advancing. The knife skitters away into the darkness. The man has dismay written all over his face: this clearly is not turning out how he had envisioned.
Instead of running, he screws up his face and punches his fist towards Edwon, putting telekinetic force behind it.
--
Suddenly, pressure lifts: Sypha can feel her mind begin to work once again, counterbalancing odds with confidence in her own skills. The blanketing fear is still there, dulling her senses, but anger has begun to pierce holes in it, to let clarity come pouring through the fog. She shakes her head, holds on to that bright piercing outrage, and calls up ice.
"I would prefer he not get away," she says coldly. She does not want the man dead, but made to answer for his attack. She also wants to know why, and corpses are not forthcoming, as a rule.