Summary:You can't trust them. Hades, Chthonic? Log Info:Storyteller: None |
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Ares, the God of War and one of the resident Avengers with a strong pantheonic heritage, was just sitting in the living area, watching some television. Nothing serious much happened within the past few days, but…you know, you really shouldn't count your eggs until they've all been laid.
…or something like that. Sayings are stupid somtimes.
But, Ares senses a surge of magic nearby that any reasonably-skilled magician could be able to feel. It was a portal. And what came out of it?
Demons from the depths of Hades. about fifty minions consecutively coming right out of it. Finally seeing a challenge, Ares stands up and leaps out of the window, which JARVIS helpfully opens before Ares actually makes contact so he doesn't shatter it outright.
Once out, the War God summons his mystic battlearmor to him, along with a sword and a battleaxe. "HAH! Finally, my uncle sends his pests against me. LET HIM HAVE HIS CHALLENGE!" Ares then leaps into the battle, but not before instructing Jarvis to release the call to anyone who wasn't immediately occupied. Including a certain Scarlet Witch….
'Pantheonic' heritage. That counts for something among at least three Avengers, past or present. Another adjacent to that, in the form of an elder evil taking distinct interest in mortalkind, gives reason for Zeus to traipse down from his snow-capped mountain every so often to hurl lightning bolts at horrific upstarts every couple of millennia. Alas, he dodged that one. As did Odin. As did nearly all the Skyfathers and Skymothers, cursed be their names, and so Chthon's toehold in the world is left to face down trouble.
The witch is soaking wet for reasons related to scrubbing something off her skin and out of her hair. Jarvis bleating threats somewhere in the mansion do not find her, but the relay on her mobile phone — another necessary evil — brings her head up. Irritation might have been present, for getting out orange ink stains is altogether difficult with a Mediterranean complexion.
Scowling at the device, only the insistent triple tones of a dour organ force her into motion. She wrings out her wrists and barely bothers with a towel, draining a sink. The stains in there will be taken care of later. Abandoning that safehouse turned to a temporary apartment, she steps forth. A flick of her wrist and reality warps to its bidding, the central anchoring point spinning around her. In a foregone conclusion, she steps through and follows the coordinates of the last call. Hopefully that is not in the middle of the Avengers Mansion, or she will need another hop to find where she needs to be. But /need/ to be is really a matter of function over form, magic operating on a twist of fate.
Her nose wrinkles at the distinctive stench; Hadean magic is all asphodel and earth, the pangs of heated metal rather than rot in the same way other death realms are. Dark leather boots touch the ground as she makes a rapid assessment — demon-hunter through and through, it doesn't take her long to draw daggers; one from her boot, another from her wrist-sheath. No one told them about that? She doesn't tend to dance with demons in front of the Avengers. Explaining their sudden terror or adoration now and then gets awkward. Hell lords get frisky. Or pesky. Ares in the middle of it /does/ hold her back a moment, though. "«What?»" she asks blankly in Transian, making a quick survey. "«This is your party?»"
Ares had just finished slicing two demons in half with the same swing before he looks at Wanda. Thankfully, the all-tongue is with him, so even though he doesn't know how to write or read Transian, he can definitely speak it. "«Not in the way you might believe. These are uninvited guests. Would you be a dear and help me be rid of them, comrade?»" after all, they were part of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Surely they help each other, right?
But then she pops out some daggers and seems to take a survey of the battle before joining. Then…one large demon enters through the portal. Looks like a demonic-looking cyclops. A big one…with a REALLY big axe.
Two demons down, ichor everywhere — if they even have ichor. The sort of trouble that would normally invite someone to run screaming for the hills, or at the very least Yonkers. Too much could leave a girl blind, failing to pay heed to the dangers ahead of her. Not Wanda; she hardly stands in line looking around lost, confused, terrified. Dropping into a defensive stance, she isn't rushing headlong into danger past the veritable god of war, but neither is she lurking. The flick of her fingers spins one of the knives, blithely insinuating it through a series of sharp, short motions. Anyone else, this is showing off. Anyone else, this is foolishness. Demons don't duel fairly, least of all with silly twits obsessed with leather boots, leather coats, and corsets.
Except Wanda is hardly a twit, her darkening gaze proof of that. Gold-green eyes lose their native shade, starting to spread beneath a cerise glow that likewise leaks from under her fingertips. The sharp cuts would impress the Moirai, were they given to watch. She turns briefly and slashes a line, and the air seems to shiver for a moment. As it does, the facets form, slowly, winding, twisting. A barrier behind her, around them, curls in a hemisphere; not complete, but fortunate. "«They will not get into mortal lands,»" she says simply as the Mirror Dimension starts to bleed against the borders of reality. Due diligence done, now it's time to play.
Now did Ares ever consider Wanda a twit? No. Perhaps a little on the shy or quiet side? Absolutely. But did he expect her to be popping out dimensions with the greatest of ease? Yeesh, Ares is kinda hoping that he wouldn't have to fight Wanda someday, but at the same time, she'd be a worthy opponent! "«Well good!»" But the Mirror dimension lets Sorcerers cut loose. In a way, this was a more dangerous call fo rthe two Avengers, but at least the civilians would not be harmed.
This is when Ares goes into a war frenzy.
He feeds off the battle and the conflict, making himself far stronger with each passing moment. He kills ten…no, twenty, in a flurry of strikes and slashes and stabs and kicks and punches and headbutts. And…is Ares laughing?
Well, War is his specialty. "«Appreciated, friend Wanda.»" Ares calls out to her, but he briefly worries if he will have to defend her in order for her to maintain the dimension. Especially since that demonic cyclops? Yeah.
ITs coming for her.
Intense, silent, brooding: these are Wanda's watchwords. She wouldn't know gossip if it hit her on the head or jumped through a wall with a pitcher of Koolaid. Sorcery comes to her fingertips with an ease that he displays with weaponry; Hekate to his Ares. The shift and the turn pulls the demons away from the risks to life and limb elsewhere, though it doesn't necessarily prevent them from hopping out of another dimension or wreaking havoc here.
She swallows when the Olympian bursts into violence, violence on a scale that makes her knives little better than tissue paper on the battlefield. Stepping back, the rigid stiffening of her spine meets with a shudder. Amplified slashes and cuts reflect off the faceted air, for the world itself is a display of crystalline prisms and sudden twinkles that don't belong. The hellspawn breathed out of Tartarus' shallows might know it, they might not, if their lives are not already forfeited before him. She does not fight directly with knives, though she has them ready to fling or cut. No, there is another game at play here.
Rooting her energy into the dimensional fabric, she splits the ground in front of them. Concrete pockmarked in the summer sun, aged and not yet found worthy of repair by the city splits in mirror images. And it twists, rotating on geometric axes to her hand gesturing. It has not the perfect precision of another master of Kamar-Taj, but a disturbing similarity all the same. "«Do not close your eyes if you end up inverted,»" she warns to one of probably three people among the Avengers who can fathom what she's actually saying. It beats her laconic English. Thrusting the heel of her hand forward, she sends those rotating platforms spun of a single few meters of concrete into fractal rotations, kaleidoscopic spins causing trouble for that cyclops. Yes, it has the advantage over her in every way physically, if it can /reach/ her. And that's the point. The principle of moving half as far forward on each step as the last is at play; it might not be able to vault the distance while she twists and bends space, forcing it to rotate through Esscher's hell.
This cyclops has no idea what just hit it. Its stunned for a minute, trying ot keep track of what it was seeing, but it seems to be failing either way at this kaleidoscopic masterpiece of a spell that was coming after it. It has to maneuver, it has to avoid. Something a creature that big can't possibly seem to do. But, good thing for Ares.
After slaughtering ten more demons with the jawbone of another demon, Ares growls as he sees the cyclops coming after Wanda. He picks his axe up and he chucks it at the massive demon! just as a few of the lesser monsters try and strike at him, their weapons shattering against the Olympian's armor.
The axe strikes the Cyclops right in the back of the knee, causing it to drop. If Wanda was going to attack proper, this was certainly a good time to do so while Ares finishes cleaning up the lesser demons.
The weight of the world isn't on Wanda's shoulders — or Ares. He has the benefit of the ground sliding under him in fairly orderly fashion. Nothing flips him up on a careening angle, though he does go up as the ground bends up at a forty-five degree angle, and it feels as natural as being on flat earth. Because it is flat, sort of. Other demons dancing around her keep the witch alert and on the run, which requires her to skid behind a mailbox echoed through the crystalline shapes and leaping out of the way of a scratching pair of claws that gouge through her boots.
One good kick and a replying slash of the knife don't evaporate the creature, not at all. She hisses at the one chasing after her, eyes full of a lurid shade of light known to no natural star. The wailing howl of her aura, so rarely observed in the real world, plays by different rules here. Triangles, inverted and upright, clash together in a forming lotus around her wrists but the soaring, cacophonous wail of music resonating from heavenly spheres echoes around her. There is something terribly offputting to the average person — demons and gods of war need not apply — but more telling, the hollow blankness where anyone with half a degree of musical talent would notice. It's empty. It's not there, and that lack is a stifling, deafening wrongness.
When the hex blast pours off her fingertips, it smashes into the Hadean demon and sends the creature hurtling over its own feet, landing with an unpleasantly sticky crash onto its own claws. Self-impaled is not pleasant. With the cyclops howling and roaring, she's still down, turning, rising in a stormy dudgeon.
Well. It has the chance to figure out how to get off a spiralling platform writhing like a geometric dust-devil, if it wants, but the witch or the war god aren't palatable targets, likely.
So, the Cyclops falls on his own natural weapon! That must suck, imagine if it survives and has to go back to its previous holdings? It'd be a laughing stock to demons everywhere. But, thankfully, it doesn't have much time left to consider before Ares is descending upon it with his greataxe, freeing its head from its miserable shoulders, killing the demon as it poofs into brimstone and asphel. "«OPA!»" Ares shouts in his native Greek tongue.
He leaps over at a surface near Wanda. «"Are you unharmed? We need to close that portal or else even more will come through»" The urgency was very present in his tone of voice.
Opa. It's not something that actually means much to Wanda.
It could. Maybe it does. But she staggers out of the shout and flings her wrist out to balance the dimension around them. Shredding it in twain, the Mirror Dimension folds and slides, leaving bodies that haven't turned into ash littering the sidewalk. Perchance they will not last overly long, but the factors are unknown, unseen to her.
Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. But when Wanda shreds out the dimension, Ares looks very impressed with her action. "Well done." he says in normal english, rising to his feet before he looks at Wanda, a snap of his fingers and his armor disappears, leaving only a taller-than-average gentleman with a black longsleeve shirt and some black cargo pants being worn. "Thank you for your help, Wanda. I appreciate it."
Did the War God need help? Probably. Those hellish portals have always been a pain to close, especially since he's not as adept at magic as his fellow Olympians. Namely Athena.
"Are you okay?"
Wanda shakes her head slightly at the sound of the English, raising her hand. "Why here?" A question made simply, as her halting accent slices and mangles less than it normally does. The crossroads of Europe feeds her — half Slavic, half Romantic, a dash of Teutonic for good measure. Transia, like its sisters in Croatia, Serbia, and Romania, is a nation overrun so many times. Ares' gratitude isn't lost on her, but she waves her hand to pass it off.
Aside from the deep gouge in her boot, not much to see by way of danger or trouble. It warrants a skimming frown, brief and no more than that. No more here, no more showing their face. She balances the blades, and slides them away.
"No idea. But it seems I will need to have a conversation with my uncle sooner rather than later." Ares, despite being waved off, will help Wanda back to her feet by taking her hand and supporting her elbow. She was nowhere near Ares in terms of pure physical power, so itm ay be easy for him.
Nonetheless, Ares smiles at her. "You are free to do as you choose again. It was a fun battle, and we should do so again soon. Though, perhaps after we eat dinner this time." That was a strange way of asking Wanda if she wanted to go have dinner with him THEN fight something dangerous, but hey.
Its just another day in New York. The bodies will eventually disappear, but it was a hard won day for these two Avengers.