Duty Session 279: Spooky Scary Skeletons

A Hunter's Guild call had gone out for a mission and Jazz has responded. She is joined by Setsuna and Rory, the latter of whom she has not met before. The gothily-dressed Undine maid with the witch's hat and long coat stares off int he distat andstorm and shambling bodies that move across said desert, eyes half-closed.

"Beats the ocean," she utters, her voice as twee as the twee-est anime voice-actress one could imagine. It's just how it is.

"Guess we'll do that. Clearing out undead we can do. Right?" She glances towards Setsuna. "Call me Jazz," she adds, he eyes flicking now towards Rori as she introduces herself.

    Setsuna stands on the sea of sand as he looks at the sea of death. The necromancer's own skeleton knight stands behind him in dire need of something better then rusted old armor and a rusted great sword to go with it. Setsuna whistles to himself as he looks at the skeletons and shakes his head. " Such shoddy workmanship." Looking over at Jazuhanzu he speaks up, "You aren't going to dry up right? Do I need to spray you with water every few minutes ?" They are teasing words meant to invoke ease as they go forth to deal with the undead threat.

Rori scuttles a bit behind, dawdling along and taking in sandy and skeletal sights, entirely oblivious to the fact that she'd supposed to be on a mission until her teammates pipe up "Oh um, sorry, I got distracted." she chirps, frantically increasing the pitter patter of her little feet to catch up. "I'm Rori by the way." the diminutive isopod girl hums out with a whimsical beam flashing over her features as she bares a toothy smile.

"...well..."

Jazz looks back out onto the wandering monsters out in the distance.

"Well, I guess we go off and fight them, then." This isn't Jazz's first rodeo by any stretch of the imagination, but it's hard to see any trace of excitement in her as to what they're about to do. It's a more a certain amount of resignation and distance in her expression than anything else. She strides out into the desert, dust collecting on her boots promptly, long purple hair wafting in the breeze, giving her the appearance of being underwater wihtout actually being so. A simple shield of fair protects her from the worst of the sand and, as they reach the first hissing, dessicated undead Lander, she is quick to use that air to help provide bursts of speed to evade the majority of them, clearly expecting the others to work to slip through the net in their own ways. These are just distractions, and chasing them down or ending them isn't worth the time.

     Setsuna does his best to capture and set aside the monsters as he simply buries the monsters in the sand as h walks through the crowd. "Undead have simple patterns without someone playing puppet master. Just put them back in the desert sand." He shouts advice as he simply looks back at his own skeletal knight and gives a whistle as it runs toward him. Looking over at the others progress he does his best to bury the undead he can for them as well.

Trying her best to sneak around the side of the undead the overeager roly poly girl lets loose her capturing net just a touch to soon, alerting the monsters of her folly with a wide eyed "Oops." and a concerned frown "normally that works." she murmures with a series of blinks before taking a few attacks for her mishap. "Ahh, get out of here you meanies." sadly skeletons aren't great listeners and a bit of force has to be used to get them to back up.

It's not going well, initially. Jazz is more than a little annoyed as their efforts to round up the ghouls and avoid them is brought to a standstill by clumps of them. Her own ends abruptly when a ghoul raises its dead hand from the sand and grabs onto her boot, holding her in place to get ganged up on. Shield arts buy her time to figure out how to deal with this, and her answer is as it always is: blasts of water that stagger them followed by lightning shocks that delay them further. She applies more lightning directly to the foreheads of others, encouraging Setsuna and Rori to break free as quickly as thye can so they can move. A short fight later, ending a few of the ones that trail after them as they make their way deeper towards the oasis, the slightly more battered adventurers come upon a group of skeletons marching together in a line, directly in their way, acting relfexitvely of the military they may once have been part of.

"Ah, damn it," says Jazz, as javelins made of their own bones are thrown in fullisade against them.

    Setsuna looks up at the skeletons as they begin to throw their own bones at them and he frowns heavily. " That is just a waste of good bone. " With a flourish he draws an intricate dagger like weapon from his back as he kneels and uses the blade to quickly draw out several magical runes. " Hey girl I don't know the name of, you doing ok over there?" He shouts obviously to Rori and yes he knows he could just peak at the inspection tab, but it felt so rude. As he waits for the answer his rune goes off and several spikes of earth erupt under some of the skeletons.

With monsters beginning to close in on the group it seemed like a good time to pull out her Thorn Calamite ability, surrounding the everyone with some protective layers of spiney vines to steer the undead off, "Oh golly, why are there so many of these things over here?" the murmur came out as she swung her hammer around, cracking a few ribs of one of the creatures in the fray with her as another's blow pinged off her shield. "They can throw their own bones?" there was a legitimate sense of shock in her words as she raised an antenna and deflected one of the projectiles. "That's actually kind of neat, not going to lie about it." it was kind of cool, but didn't seem like a very sustainable resource of ammunition in all honesty. When Setsuna called out to check on her Rori gave a momentary thumbs up before continuing her melee "Yep, I'm good."

"Let the ground crack," exclaims Jazz, gesturing towards the marching skellingtons and, indeed, the ground beneath them trembles after the spikes erupt when created by Setsuna. The tremor drives severawl of them into the ground-spikes, disabling them and throwing off the cadence of the rest. It's enough to let them make shorter work of them within their capacity, breaking them up and allowing them forward.

Jazz agrees with Rori, though, "It's a neat little body horror trick, I suppose. Be more effective if they were fleshy rather than just skeletons, though," she adds, musingly, tipping her floppy witch's hat to one side to shield her eyes from the baleful desert son.

They now finmd themselves moving through an increasing, if still sporadic, set of structures long buried here in the desert. This is enough to give Jazz pause, as if she's interested in moving inside them, staring, peering., She bends down to collect a rock from the ground, only to find her hand snatched by a mummy-like undead, grasping and trying to pull her down to the earth, raking her pale flesh with its's crooked nails. More begin to emerge, thereafter, moving towards them quickly enough that their ragged linen waves in the wind behind them.

"Of /course/," says Jazuhanzu with a sigh.

    Setsuna looks at the mummies and lets them get a little to close in his curiosity as he is knocked back into a pile of sand. "Ouch , they hit a little harder." With a wave of his hand he unleashes fire towards the mummy, however it doesn't do nearly the damage he expected. Instead the mummy rushes through it and Setsuna has to duck away to try to avoid the mummies as he constantly lashes out with more nd more fire. Living the scale motto at the moment, 'If you are having a problem, you aren't using enough fire.'

It seemed like pulling out some of her light based powers was the right call for the situation as Jazz got ambushed by the unruly mummy that was being just a touch to handsy, despite it being a solid suit of abilities to tap into for dealing with the creature the surprise of the jump scare situation flustered her enough that her aim went completely ary, "Ahhh! Where did that thing even come from? You scared me Mr.Mummy" she chortled even though she'd nearly had a heart attack a moment prior. As her bolt of bright light shot outward into nothingness she proceeded to resort to other methods instead, those other methods mostly being a solid few bonks from her hammer to clear the way.

"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and its gets everywhere." OH NO SHE DIDN'T.

She totally did.

Jazz sighs heavily and quickly blasts the mummies coming towards her with gouts of scalding hot water. WHile the adventurers are able to defeat them, in time, it's not without more hit point damage they can ill afford at this point. Still, with a bit of time to recover, they're able to move on, delayed enough already.

Leaving the ruins behind, the oasis is now in sight and Jazz looks relieved. "We're almost there. I like the water almost as little as I like the sand, but this is per efrable, right?" She is taking a look about, careful, and that's when she notices the faint glow in the dsitance. An ephemeral, floating reaper, glowing eyes only visible behind the darkness of its hood untiil it looks towards them, itws skeletal face becoming more visible as they get closer. Coalescing from the darkness, it's obsidian scythe is raised as it speeds towards them with a howling scream.

"Don't fear the reaper?" offers Jazz, dryly, and not particularly helpfully.

    Setsuna looks at Jazuhanzu s they finally get away from the mummies , " What if we combine the two , sand plus water. How do you feel.." The necromancer trails off as he sees the reaper and grins with a look of gluttony in his eyes. As the reaper flies forward and tries to cut them down he raises a shield of bone to protect himself and his knight stabs around the shield to cause some damage. Hearing Jazuhanzu's words though he knows he is going to have that song in his head for the next few hours.

"I'm not so sure I can do anything other than fear that thing...he's a scary boy." Rori confessed, shooting an uneasy grin over to Jazz and dropping into a defensive posture with her shield up and ready to catch the reaper's attacks as the ghastly ghost pummeled into her. A quick shield bash managed to buy her enough ground to power up her hammer with a glowing holy energy before she trudged back in like a turtle, ready to attack. "We've got this guys." she voiced, doubling up Jazz's reassurance with her own two cents of optimistic cheer as her attack burst into the spector. "I know we can do it." with such confidence you'd think she had the higher ground, but she didn't.

Engaging the reaper is no small feat. The battle is ardurous, with only their combined efforts (and a not inconsiderable amount of damage delivered to Jazz in this instance when she tries to get close enough to frost shock him succesfully to weaken him) only finally chipping enough of those hit points that he withdraws.

...and leads directly into the final encounter that consists of waves of everything they've faced so far. Ghjouls, mummies, skeletoins, and of course, the reaper returning reconstructed and, at long last, the green light revealing the Lich that's brought all of this to bear in its defense.

"Aw, shit," says Jazz, as she waves her hand and great vines of kelp begin to sprout from the water, grabbing at the many and varied creatures. "Shit, shit, shit," she repeats.

     As the reaper keeps up the attack Setsuna keeps doing his best to shield the group and get an attack in here and there. This was all about rotation and just went they were reaching the home stretch the monster ran. Setsuna gave chase making sure the others were coming to when the reaper has managed to lead them right into the cause of this mess, a lich. Setsuna chooses to fight raising the dead with raising the dead as he summons up two skeleton minions to fight along side his knight against the horder of raised undead.

There are times in life where there's really only one answer...and that answer is FIREBALL! The vast sea of enemies caught a heaping dose of third degree burns as the isopod ignited her inner pyromaniac and lobbed a explosive blast their way. A shockwave of skeletal limbs jetted around the battlefield like some sort of pinball game as the lesser monsters were decimated in the blast, "Oh wow, fireball go boooooom!" never has a bug girl been so happy before, the excitement of the firework display she'd just set off was enough to get her giddily stamping her feet and cheering like she had pom poms in her hands while those enemy health bars hit zero, "That was really close there for a bit." she confessed, getting control over her joyous dancing, "I knew we could do it though." apparently, there was never a doubt in her mind.

It's not an easy fight.

At all. Jazz focuses on the defensive, buying time for Rori and Setsuna to do the lion share of the damage. She throws out binding vines that secure many of the undead and summons spirits of her own, drowned, phantsmsl sailors that burble forth from swirling, dark portals that open at her command. Bolts of lightning and sprays of water to stagfger and knock them aside where possible, and bubbles of water and air that seem to deflect blows at her command. It's not enough to stop her from being on her last legs by the time the battle is over, highly damaged and bleeding from numerous wounds and debuffs and more, but in the end, they're able to defeat the lich by shattering his staff, cutting the comamnd of the lich over them and causing him to let out a cry before he bursts into aetheric points of light.

As the dark cloouds ahead are cleared, the gem at tached to the staff clinks to the ground and shatters into small fragments they can (and inevitably do) collect.
% Jazz hits the ground and groans. "Ow."

But at least its done.

    Setsuna looks at the remains of the lich as it falls dead before it shatters into a couple pieces of gem. " Good job everyone. That wans't the most common bosses to fight." He congratulates those around but that is about all he is really going to say at the moment as he gets distracted by the shiny gem shard.

"We'll have to do some more questing together soon, we make a pretty good team." Rori jovially chattered, collecting the loot drop and placing it in her bag to be examined later. A few scurried steps and she was standing over Jazz, glancing down at her with her wide bug eyes, "Are you alright? Do you need some healing? Or maybe a hug?" both seemed to be available at the low low cost of entirely free. "...or maybe some food? I'm sort of hungry after all of that too." the cait sith earnestly expressed, continuing to ramble as the sound of rumbling in her stomach reminding her that eating was probably something that needed to be done sometime soon.