Aather OOC

Here is a handy summary of the plot that happened this weekend! All of these events took place on Day 266.

Predawn: Heroes, Knights and Personae gathered and waited, on the Walls and at the Gates for the barrier to be taken down. Lancelot stood ready to fight directly with the heroes and Maleficent gave out crystalline hope seeds, which she has been trying to grow for some time.

Sunrise/Early Morning: As the sun rose, the bells rang and the gates opened. Inside the Great Hall, medics and noncombatants waited, and Queen Guinevere held down the fort.

Outside, fighters met the Darkness in battle with a couple of huge midbosses:

The Ry’lehphant: The Darkness started off its attack by building a colossus from the ground up -- a bipedal mammoth with a tentacled horrorterror for a face, which began to move towards the wall with smaller monsters climbing up it, ostensibly to hitch a ride over the fortifications.

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The Chasmfiend: As the ry’lehphant fell, a second monster rose out of the darkness -- not unlike a skyscraper-sized lobster, covered all in black chitin and armed with four massive foreclaws, its head arrow-shaped and equipped with a maw full of sharp and twitching mandibles. Smaller creatures climbed its legs and rode its back, but these were quickly swept aside.

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Other heroes used the time to go scouting, here! The scouts headed into a dark, uneasy wood. They came across numerous frozen statues in the snow, of all sorts of people and creatures, human and animal. Touching them resulted in an icy pain that numbed the body . . . they quickly (or not so quickly) learned not to touch them at all.

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Midmorning: After the lobster Chasmfiend fell, the forces of Darkness and Aather alike took a moment to regroup. Lloyd and Mithos planted two hope seeds here, which grew into a cluster of forget-me-nots, one on each side of the Gate. A few fighters made use of this earlier post to rest in the Great Hall as well.

The scouts returned from their foray into the forest here, and Arthur's ring was brought to Guinevere. Loki took a number of pictures of key events.

Late Morning: The bells of Camelot rang to announce the next threat, and the heroes, rested and fed, took up their positions once more. Before them stood the full might of the Darkness’s army -- thousands of man-sized monsters, no two precisely alike, but all well-armed with talons or fangs or stingers. Among them strode giants bearing hammers the size of small trees or bags of boulders to hurl against the walls, and some carried great wooden shields or scaling ladders. Above them circled a vast murder of gorecrows, giant birds with additional fanged mouths in their chests.

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At one point during the battle, the Great Hall was hit by a stray rock, but the defenses stood sound.

Midday: Immediately after the Darkness's army fled, defeated, into the forest, Selenia and Kira planted another hope seed near the edge of the forest, here, which grew into a blue hollyhock.

Everyone went inside to recuperate here, mainly in the Great Hall. The barrier went back up, the gates closed, and things returned to normal . . . with a few exceptions in the form of new landmarks: a visible patch of green in the black forest, where the scouts planted their trees, and some small patches of blue on the ground on either side of the gate, and at the edge of the forest, where other hope seeds grew into forget-me-nots and blue hollyhock respectively. There is also a new boulder, split in three, on the road by the castle.

Afternoon: Once the victorious fighters and healers of Aather had had a chance to recover, Queen Guinevere presented the Heroes and Knights all with a choice. After some discussion here (and in this poll), it was decided that the barrier will remain up and strengthened, and come down at planned, irregular intervals for us to raid and protect as we need to. The energy from the barrier may then be temporarily diverted toward protecting other elements until the raiding group returns. And everybody cheered.

Now it is time for sleep, and/or partying.

If you participated in these brave efforts on or offscreen, please feel free to summarize what your character did in the comments of this post!

Thank you everyone!! ♥