Duty Session 165: Undead Defense Force

"I'm just saying," Att is just saying, "undead hordes would be easier to take care of if you could tell us where they were coming from and point it out in the morning."

The village elder looks at Att like he has three heads.

"Nevermind. Gather everyone within the village and we'll get to work." Att turns and returns to the party nearby. The elder hurries off.

He shakes his head when he gets there. "No dice on the necromancer's location," he reports. "I guess we can't sequence break this one quite so easily." Att folds his arms and looks around the village. "Daylight is pretty limited... I'm going to see if I can get the local merchants to turn over supplies for this defense. Thinking we'll get some chaff waves and then a big boss, so, you know... layer accordingly."

Whis, drooling on herself while sitting on the back of an untethered cart set up like a barricade in the middle of useful territory, doesn't even come back fully to Earth to respond to Att trying to sequence break.

Mostly it's because steam is rising from her brow.

"Why don't we just... buy some help? I'm sure if we just explain that we're performing a service they'll help. They understand rewards-up-front dialogue. Try that."

Her chin drops, lolling down as she slides off the cart and starts knocking on doors.

"Hiiiii, nice to meet you, defending your houses, please take care of me..."

"Hmm..." Yobi says, placing a hand to his chin in a thinking motion.  "It seems that they were programmed to be as unhelpful as possible," Yobi says with a nod.  "Well, I suppose we'll have to make due...somehow."  He says towards Att and then turns towards the village itself.

"Maybe we can talk to them to aid us in fortifications," he says, before walking out to talk to various connected villagers to try and get materials that might be helpful for the night.

"It might be easier to find the Necromancer, but I suppose we'll have to settle with fighting it on our terms and not it's...so that is one advantage," he says to the others.

"These aren't your standard undead Att. They cheat in how they get around with the creepy magic mist, I doubt any meer Lander would be able to even phantom a guess where they're coming from." God damn, just starting the venture and Kauchemar is already making terrible ghost jokes. "We're best off just building up our stance here best to our advantage."

Everyone is probably tired of undead by now. But this is good for the Guild's reputation so they can weave shadowy schemes later.
Or right now, just going to sweet talk the locals into helping them out in some way.

After some time...

"Oh I see they have programmed the Landers here to be /as unhelpful/ as possible! Amazing! Truly the person who wrote this up was someone who hated either players or fun...maybe both."

"We know that already." Whis deadpans, bonking her forhead on a closed-and-locked door.

"Which part of my statement, the unhelpful part, or the second part?" Yobi says towards Whis, looking for some clarification.

The Landers have in fact been programmed to be as unhelpful as possible. Maybe it's because they're foreigners? Or maybe they're just tired of being fleeced out of their hard-earned valuables in the name of not dying to undead?

Kauchemar's ghost jokes break enough ice for Att to make headway with the local merchants, at least. Even if Att sighs inwardly *and* outwardly every time one gets made.

"Creepy magic mist, huh? Alright, good to know. So I guess we can count out trying to funnel 'em through a kill box, then..." Att discards his prior plans. He crouches off the side of a path and draws in the dirt with a stick, sketching out the village from above and some places to put barricades. "...which means we should limit the ways they can reinforce or retreat once the mist is inactive. I assume they become solid enough to try to kill us at some point?"

None of the Landers have an answer, possibly because they're running around trying to block their doors.

This is why headbonking doors doesn't help. Sorry, Whis.

Yobi once more is making a thinking motion as people do anything and everything to save themselves.  "You would think they would realize that banding together and helping each other would actually give them their best chance at survival, instead of this everyone fight for themselves..." he says with a shrug.  "Honestly, the heavy-handed writing in this one is just silly."

Well, Yobi produces a hammer and some nails.  He also starts gathering the things gathered.  Boards, posts, various bits of firewood, a hot dog stand, and some barrels.  

As time seems to be against them, and the mist rolls in, Yobi looks to set up defenses, but also purposely make weak fortifications in places.  The idea is to cause distractions for low intelligence undead, to help better create kill boxes.

However, the construction sight instead turns into litteral purple goo. Yobi looks very confused by this... "I feel this is impossible, and I hate the programmers a bit more now."

It shows that Kauchemar has dealt with this matter a few times already. She seems to know precisely which Landers she can sweet talk and snake oil around the programmed unhelpfullness, and the Nightmare eventually returns with enough stock materials that she also got a few younger landers to help carry it.

"Yeah, once they come out of the mist they're no less attackable than any other monster. Their main strength is in numbers as they kamikazi rush the town. So if we place our defenses to force them into a kill zone, their numbers just stack them up for us to knock over as hard as possible."

She gets those youths to help build as quickly as possible, because even they will flee back into town once the darkn sets in.

"Yes." Whis groans to Yobi, as Kauchemar and Att solve the entire problem for both the heretical Druid and the punchy butler. Unhelped by her zombie-like donking on doors, nor her groaning, 'gimmie stuuuuuuuf' and 'please take care of meeeeeeeeeeee' Whis is decidedly useless the whole initial setup.

"If it's a mist, then for once: I can take care of it. As for defenses..."

Whis looks at the total state of abject disarray, NPC despair, and local destruction.

"It's fine, right?"

"I won't lie to you miss...yes. It is fine." Yobi says, absolutely lying as his construction is still goo and not the parts he started with.

Whis looks at the purple slime. She sees it, as if for the first time, blinking slowly.

"You are a powerful alchemist too?"

"No. No I am not." Yobi says, truthfully this time. "I just appear to be a very bad constructor..."

Kauchemar looks over from keeping the young Landers working for as long as there's sunlight. "Don't worry you two. There will be plenty of punching things back to death for you two to do later."

Whis oh's, dropping her fist into her palm in an anime eureka.

"Ah, sou. You haven't learned to shove this all off on Haseo yet."

Kauchemar's jab gets a 'hehehen...' bashful chortle from the Druid.

"I'm a support player. This sort of physical stuff isn't my specialty, okay?" She excuses, twirling her long bangs around her finger as she looks away.

Yeah okay, busted, she's basically sleepwalking around.

"Yeah. You know. It's, uh, it's fine," Att assures Whiskey and Yobi while Kauchemar runs around actually talking to the right people. She's speedrunning things while Att continues to find limitations to his cunning plans to make this as simple as possible. Limitations like Yobi's complete inability to do things involving nailing pieces of wood together. There's got to be a way to use that, somehow.

In short order, though, barricades are erected and Landers are removed from the potential battlefield. "Alright!" Att announces, dusting his hands after having put up a pointy-looking barrier, "now the enemy should be here any second!"

...

"...aaaany second now."

... ...

"...aaaany second now..."

... ... ...

A creepy fog begins to roll in. Att immediately hurls magical fire into the mist, at torches and wood piles. He is disappointed none of them are actually skeletons.

Yobi looks embarrassed by this situation, "Yes while fighting is within my skill set, it is not my ONLY skill.  Thank you very much.  I pride myself on being a lightning speed butler."  Perhaps the jab hurt a bit more than he let on.  

However, as the mist starts coming in full time, Yobi takes his gloves off.  His right hand ignites in flames, as he flicks his fingers towards the torches set up near the defenses and along the various paths to give them better light.  His hands are also now both lit up, ready for the battle that is to come.

Kauchemar aids the illumination efforts by summoning a swarm of will-o-wisps and spreading them about the area they need to defend like small floating spotlights. "There will be a rush of physical attackers, and a rank of archers will follow them up with cover fire. So be on your guard, it can take a moment to get into position to deal with those bow wielding bones."

'I'm A Support Player'
'Please Take Care of Me'
'Sorry, I'm just a support' 'Someone else should take care of that' 'It's fine, I'm just tired'.

There were a lot of excuses. Every once in a while you had to go, full bore, and make sure everyone remembered why they kept you around.

The mist rolls in, thick and dark, forboding and choking as it spills like dry ice smoke through the village.

And then it stops, breaking upon the air near where the party is.

The mist curls and shapes a perfect sphere, a thin glowing line in the street where the mist simply could not encroach.

"Alright. I said I'd blast away the mist: I'll show you how."

Whis' gnarled branch-like crook staff materializes in her hand with a scattering of glowing leaf effects. "Though far away, the light of the sun still shines. Blaze eternal, to the exclusion of all evils. I name thee harm, I name thee death, I name thee pestilence. Begone from this place of light: Sanctuary!"

The lightly shimmering line in the sand glows brilliant sunlight-gold as it pillars upwards, expanding outward in a ring of noonday sunshine at the border of twilight.

Flame alights in the distance, creating eerie pockets of illumination amidst the mist. It burns away streaks of it, but flame and the will-o'-the-wisps are just doing the job of giving them spots where they can more easily target enemy combatants. Yobi stands ready, one of the beacon-like Adventurers awaiting danger.

Whiskey Sour very definitively demonstrates why you should take care of your support players. The space inside the ring brightens to a mid-day shine, the warmth of goddess-given sunlight bathing the faces of the party. The ring of twilight very clearly shows the line where the mist hasn't been burned off, and it's much wider than they had any right to expect at a time like this. It's almost auroral from where they're standing, a brilliant aura surrounding their fighting ground.

Att gets out a surprised and impressed, "Woah," right before a ghoul leaps out of the remaining mist and tries to kill him.

To his credit, he's not caught flat-footed, almost entirely thanks to Whiskey's Sanctuary. Att deflects the leaping ghoul with a swipe of his staff, then follows it up with an pulling-upwards gesture that calls a swirling elemental from the ground, laying into the monster with bursts of flame as it flits to and fro. "/Finally!/ Let's clean up!"

With everything and everyone set in place, it's a waiting game until the mists thicken to the point that the enemy will start to appear. As a final precaution Kauchemar brings her Binder Sword and Shield into play, the possessed weapons hovering in the air. Until the horde finally makes itself known. Then they start to move, the sword lashing out a few times to smack ghouls away.

Until one of the ghouls slams into it with such force that the ghost sword is flung backwards, spinning in the air until it THUNK into the side of a house point first. It wiggles and jerks itself, but it's lodged in pretty tight.

The shield is still with Kauchemar, bumping away ghouls. "That is getting to be a running gag isn't it..." she murmurs as the sword is stuck out of the fight. But no time to worry about that. She's just using the binder shield to keep undead at bay while she gets into position for the second wave to come.

The terrors of the night finally start revealing themselves.  Standing out like a torch in the darkness, the older looking man stands with his eyes closed as the abominations start to wrap around the town like a noose.  Ghouls start their assault, in fact, one seems to jump at Yobi.  It was at that moment that Yobi opens his eyes.

That slanted old man look as he seems to move too fast for anyone to perceive.  All that anyone can actually notice is a fireball flying up into the sky, and the Ghoul itself is gone.  The fireball goes out a moment later, as pieces of charred bits fall to the ground across the forest.  

Yobi moves in like a flash, his body moving with grace and skill as he collides his punches and kicks with each ghoul that is unfortunate to get in his way.  Each strike sending fireball after fireball out of the village.  Each one lightning the area up before decayed and charred remains hit the ground.  

It doesn't stop either, finally hitting one point where he strikes the earth, a pillar of flame erupting under a mass of ghouls that had started to form to try and break down some of the defenses.  It leaves them smoking, and falling to the ground afterward.  All of them now goopy piles of ash, ready to mix with lye to make soap.

"If it's horde defense, then you can't clean up right at the start though..." Whis complains lightly, though with a Literal Butler in the party, Att may just be trying to offer Yobi a new cool catch-phrase.

This turns out to be the case, as Yobi Maid of the Fist Star's the first wave into goo alongside Att and Kauchemar's spirited charges or tactical battle-fumbling.

"The next wave may be coming--" Whis squints quarter-lidded eyes past her ring of light and into the mist.

"But I don't need to see them to impair them."

Drawing back her left hand, a cold blue-white light in her palm joins the sun-dappled green light cast from her staff.

"Like meteors of winter, crash and fall, and leave naught but frigid destruction - Ice Rain!"

Past the Sanctuary-cylinder, in the onrushing mist of undead, a winter blizzard hits with fist-sized hail stones leaving large patches of ice and cold debuffs on the mysterious approachers.

Catch-phrases are important. So is morale! It looks like Yobi could use both, given so far he's been-

Oh, no, okay, he's popping off, notes Att internally. He's fine. This is all fine.

The ghouls are far from fine. The first wave is on them, with Att and Kauchemar delaying them while Whis and Yobi get ready. The second wave hits the icy storm on the way in, slowed and staggered enough to make them extremely easy targets for the Lightning Butler, whose vengeance on this quest designer's monstrous minions is swift and extremely painful. Blasts of flame leave heaps of ash and ghoul-goo. The speed at which he is rendering them unto soap components is frankly frightening.

I mean, unless you're on his side, then it's just hyper efficient and fun to watch.

The waves intensify all of a sudden. Kauchemar is already at the right angle to handle the archers in the back, so Att focuses his efforts on the front line, flooding out of the fog through the edge of the ice storm and getting into the sunlit space in a hurry. He draws his sword, pointing his staff with his left hand and an announcement of, "THORN BIND HOSTAGE!" The layered magical defenses get another one, pinning incoming hostiles as they move into the area of effect -- but there sure is a lot of them...!

Her guildmates do a handy job of putting down the first wave, giving Kauchemar an ample oppritunity to position herself where she wants to be at the edge of the mists and just off to the side. Just as the end of the first swarm is made re-dead the second emerges from the mist, but she just lets those go for now.

She doesn't have to wait long for her real objective, the skeleton archers, to march out of the mist and onto the field. They line up into position, starting to aim and draw back their bows to rain pointy death down on the village and it's defenders...

Kauchemar grabs the Binder Shield and flings it hard and high into the air, sailing past the archers to little immeadiate effect. Rest assured it is all a part of the plan.

Then she plants a hoof into the ground to brace herself, arms half-flexed to keep her balance, and opens her mouth. Wide. Like, wider than should be possible. But being able to unhinge her jaw like the feral Nightmares do to devour their prey also makes her mouth a much more powerful projector. Like a giant natural megaphone.

The scream that comes out of her is deafening to say the least. Combined with the entropic dark energy it ripples through the air with volatile force to rattle the skeletal archers to their... well... bones.. and disrupt their ability to aim and draw their weapons.

That's when the reason for the shield toss becomes apparent, as it floats down to position itself on the opposite side of the line. The darkened sonic blast hits it, causing the shield to ring loud and darkly like a gong. And reflect the horrendeous blast back into the enemy a second time to finish the job!

Yobi does not stop, he is literally on fire right now as he continues to help fight the horde.  However, with the arrival of the old bones, he notices that the long-range attackers might cause some problems.  Whis thought ahead, and with Att used some things to keep them in places or debuff their movement speed.

Yobi kicks off the ground, off a ghoul which explodes into flame, and leaps into the air.  Then, he comes down towards the old bones like a meteor, aiming to smash the ground on top of the first bones he sees.  The crash causes shockwaves, as the earth itself explodes out in all directions.

This is followed by an eruption of flames to trail the earth, aiming to knock down and char the debuffed enemies.  Yobi stops for a moment, pausing.  Damn, he didn't have anything clever to say right now.  It seems he missed the moment!

"A clean sweep," Att helpfully suggests from off-camera.

He's currently whacking weeds, i.e., hacking through thorn bindings.

"That's a good one..." Yobi admits, and feels silly for not thinking of it first.

'It's exhausting.'
That's the thing Whiskey Sour feels. The natural joy of perfect execution is dim in the face of her weariness. An absolute state of marathon gaming beyond marathon gaming, far past the point of even reasonable unreason.

Between bouts of intensity, her eyes droop. Her blinks long and languid, as the bright magical light of the sun shines down on her and the party.

A skeleton, wielding a sharpened bone sword, rattles and clicks as it advances on her, frozen from the ice and smoking from the sunlight.

He's smashed through by Kauchemar on her way between larger, the bones are lit on fire by Att, and the ash-clung bones are turned into goo via a fierce stomp-of-opportunity by a passing Lightning Butler.

So Whis really doesn't have that much to do, defense wise. Perhaps this, too, is being taken care of. Parties really are great.

It gives Whis all the time in the world to aim her staff downrange, waiting patiently for a break in her trio of party members in an imagined template for the attack.

"If there's more and more and more, all behind, trapped and stacked up, even if I can't see them... I don't need to."

"Nobody needs to do anything." The pale blue-white ice glow from her left hand, and the green-gold sunlight from her staff mingle into crackling magical force as she braces herself, extending her stance and leaning into the outreach of her staff with both hands placed along its length.

The crook twists with a blinding flash of light--

"There is no need for a healer in my garden of sunlight! Call for mercy--!"

"BUT NOT FROM ME!"

The gathered energy fires off in a coruscating beam of magical energy that sweeps the onrushing arc of hidden foes, a tight cone of brilliant destruction.

The front line is effectively stopped in its tracks. Att's barbed wire fence of glowing thorns combined with the light of Sanctuary and the fading Icy Rain area of effect makes it practically a no-ground-movement zone for incoming enemies. That puts them directly where Yobi is presently leaping back and forth exploding the ground, wiping out clustered skeletons and charring the ones that make it through, doing tons of damage across the field with impressive -- if not catch-phrase-style snappy -- results. He is conveniently not in the path of Kauchemar's weird scream, a sound effect that makes Att flinch and look towards the source. The damaged skeletons come apart at the joints, collapsing into inanimate piles of bones that rapidly discorporate. The ghouls rattle and stagger.

"What the heck was-" The shield rings and reverberates like a gong. The returning wave cuts a swath through the vulnerable enemy lines. Few arrows fall, now.

"Oh. Okay. Sure." Att readies his blade again. He's on frontline tanking duty, focusing on parrying and counterattacking to accumulate critical hits. It's slow-going, and he works his way to one side, across the enemies whose debuffs are starting to wear out.

Then he squints, because suddenly the area directly next to him is very, very bright. He doesn't turn to look at it; he doesn't want to stare directly into a beam from the sun.

When it fades, a path down the main street of the village has been cleanly cleared of enemies, fog, and some of their broken barriers. The twilight edges of the Sanctuary seem to bend in that direction, making it more like the tail of a comet. The enemy force out there must have been shattered, because the mist is starting to retreat, and the reinforcements finally taper off.

The night turns quiet after that. It's almost peaceful, now; serene, even. If you ignore the smoldering piles of ash and bone, anyway.

Whis, after her Cut-In Beam Finisher, releases her staff, her glows, and also her energetic state of actually pushing, deflating and slumping back into slouched-over gremlin mode. Her eyes rest, half-lidded, on the middle distance.

"We did it. Nice fighting."

She weakly heart-hands over her chest. "Commendations for everyone, except the locals."

Kauchemar casually takes a few steps back and to the side, to avoid both the sonic waves return pass since she has no way to reflect it back again, and MORE IMPORTANTLY the massive beam of light that tears through the enemy forces like a magical orbital laser strike.

"Well," once the blast as passed she summons the haunted shield back to her side. "I guess they saw the light at the end of the tunnel!" Then strolls over to finally wrest the sword of the pair free from the wall it was stuck in. "Another victory for Plant Hwyaden."

Yobi watches the cut-in attack with a whistle. "That was like...oh what issue was that...one ninty eight of Savage Star Sailor Hearts," Yobi comments with a thoughtful look. "Or was it Imperial Slayer Lady V?"

    With a shrug he dismisses the thought. "Yes, well fought. Let us retire so that we can enjoy a late night meal."

"Turtle school." Whis mutters, eyes down and away. She will not make eye contact with anyone for the rest of the night, because of this.

    "Oh," Yobi says with some surprise, but full knowledge of what Whis just admitted to. "It was impressive."