In Which the Overlord is Flat On His Face

[badassfreakingoverlord]

It's going to be one of those days.

In the hallway directly outside the mess hall lay a book. The bright red body and overall size clearly pointed to it being the Overlord, for those familiar with him, but his back cover was the one facing upwards. No sign of any minion around. None of the cursing, struggling, and flopping one would expect from Zetta in such an undignified posture.

Just a tome, lying flat on the ground, as if a crew member had simply discarded it thoughtlessly.

Comments

[thewunderkind]

"Well what?" She replied back, knowing exactly what she was supposed to do, but still not moving. "If I don' do anything, you get stuck in that funny post for a while, right? Tee hee hee!"

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Naw," Zetta said. "If you goof around too long you skip your turn and I get to take it."

Seriously, the turn-based battle sequence was JUST an abstraction!

[thewunderkind]

"Aww that's no fun," Lash answered, but she had already taken that time to hatch a plan. "Whatever happened to fighting sportsmanship?" Uh considering the both of them, the answer to that was 'never', for the most part'.

With a swift movement of her sword, she turned it from Zetta's back into chopping down a tree, as she pushed it like a barrel towards him, the leaves making a sort of slapping sound as it advanced. She couldn't do any of the fancy stuff that Zetta did (legally anyway), so she contended herself by replacing the sword, with one that had a gun attacked to the bottom. There! That was much more her style and she wouldn't have to hold a gun with her other arm. Merging to the two together? She was a genius.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

The tree whonked Zetta in the back of the legs and he stumbled backwards as he turned around. "A tree? Seriously?" He kicked it off the side (out of bounds!), then stalked dramatically towards Lash, cape billowing and hair aflame.

[thewunderkind]

"What?" she said grinning. "Too many leaves for you?" And stalk all you want!

The wunderkind fired a few rounds from her revamped gun & blade, (which she expected Zetta to just dramatically push away), before advancing herself, blade right in front of her.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

Zetta just moved casually out of the way of the bullets, showing off excessively, then.... decided to toy with her a little.

He lifted one hand, mana dancing in it like purple flame, then snapped it shut. Scorching fire that same color shot down from the air above Lash in a column.

[thewunderkind]

There wasn't much time to react as Lash rolled out of the way just as the column struck, the fire spreading out turning the nearby sand into glass.

Someone was getting pretty serious. Or he was toying with her.

"Hey that's not fair," she teased. "Some of us don't have purple flame powers. But...I guess I do have..." she produced an overly comical small gun. "This!" as she pressed the button, the gun spread out, overtaking much of the tiny playing field, until it had grown much, much larger than her and required her to stand on a platform...even if the release trigger was still as small as before. The heating coils wasted no time to heat up with energy.

"Dodge that!" she warned, pressing the trigger. A large blast of white light shot right at him.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

Zetta became a mere silhouette in the column of light, then faded entirely from sight as the blast engulfed him. Obviously he had been atomized, right?

Of course, a moment later, a kink appeared in the attack, growing more and more pronounced by the moment. As the beam finally bent a full forty-five degrees, the Overlord reappeared, casually deflecting the energy with one hand. To note that light didn't work that way would be, at this point, trite.

"Lash, I get the feeling you're using a thing or two you wouldn't have access to outside the sensorium," he said, grinning.

[thewunderkind]

"Oh I'm just making things fair," she answered back. "Besides, I bet I could build this if I had the proper elements for it. It's just the ship is scares on resources, that's all."

That was true.

"But you haven't seen anything yet," she told him with a grin, and pressed the second button. Suddenly. Balls. Brightly colored balls that descended from the lower part of the laser all around Zetta. Phase one done. Then as it continued to shoot the laser he was blocking, she used the lower weapon to fire just as many brightly colored balls on him. Except these happened to be killed with explosives.

If you couldn't defeat them on a normal level, improvise. Bend the rules just enough so it was still plausible. Oh and also improvise hilariously because it was fun.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

See, this sort of thinking is why he likes her. He might like her a little less than he did if he wasn't confident in his ability to handle this attack, though!

With a grunt, Zetta used the hand that was blocking the laser for leverage to haul himself upwards. (Zetta, clearly, didn't care about the 'plausible' part of what he was doing.) He vaulted lightly on top of the laser, which promptly reasserted its normal course -- and shot off in that direction at the speed of light, taking Zetta with it.

So, for a moment, just a battlefield with a bunch of balls and a column of light.

Then a glint in the black sky resolved into a sphere, which gained clarity and definition and as it approached. That was... unquestionably a meteor. Which Zetta was riding, as it roared downwards towards Lash.

[thewunderkind]

"Ha!" she said with a bit of laughter, screaming and wondering if he heard her at all. "THAT all you got? Come on! Sturm used to pull up the meteor from the sky all the time!" Of course he wasn't doing it quite like Zetta was and obviously part of their battle was insulting each other. Besides, it wasn't that mean spirited, just insults of trying to outdo each other.

Speaking of which...the laser back to its tiny little pocket-size as Lash took out another one. The meteor was fast approaching and she didn't have that much time to loose. Back in Wars World, they had created Anti Satelite Defence Silos for just such occasions built by, who else, herself. It didn't take too much time for her to think about it, as the new contraption refolded and moved until she had quite a giant tower covering most of the tiny area they were fighting on.

She just had to wait the right moment and....now!

The press of a button as the small countdown started, the wunderkind jumping on it, putting on a pair of goggles. Ovciously if you were going to launch a giant missile at something, you should do it in style.

"Fire!" The entire thing took off as she comically held her breath as it shot out into space. But hell, who cared what rules they were breaking, Lash was riding a rocket launcher and it was way too amused about it to care.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

Just in time! The meteor slammed into the ground below, wrecking the tower in a gratuitous display of overkill and leaving the Overlord standing on the inexplicably undamaged underlying terrain.

"Oh come on, Lash!" he said, grinning up at her. "If you wanted to ride a giant rocket, I've been trying to get you to do just that for a while now!"

gdit Zetta

[thewunderkind]

"Yeah well next time I'll make sure I aim better and just slam into the meteor instead!"

Thank you Lash, for not understanding innuendo and anything of what Zetta actually meant.

She landed a few seconds later, dusting off her hands as the rocket exploded into the sky, sending sound waves and air their way.

"It seems we are evenly matched!"

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Or you're making up crazy things you can't ordinarily do and I'm holding back," Zetta said with a shrug. "Po-tay-to, po-tah-to."

[thewunderkind]

"Po-tay-what?" replied Lash, not exactly having been brought up in the subtleties of the different ways of saying potato.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Uh, it means saying the same thing in a different way, but it's still the same thing," Zetta said awkwardly.

This had 'uncomfortable pause' written all over it.

[thewunderkind]

"Oh uh...okay." She filed it in her brain under 'weird sayings'. "And anyway that's totally not true! I can build those things...just watch me do it if we ever get the materials for it!"

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Sure, you COULD, but you don't have the materials for it. Whereas everything I do -- uh, besides having these weapons -- is pure Zetta, baby!"

They both knew he didn't NEED the weapons to kick ass, though.

[thewunderkind]

"Yeah well my Commanding Officer powers are pure Lash!" why was she even...she conveniently ignored Zetta calling her a baby. "Besides, power isn't always everything! With the right strategy, anything and anyone call fall!"

Yes this is why Black Hole won all of their war--oh wait. At least Lash had the right philosophy.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Hyaaa ha ha ha ha! I always have the right strategy: annihilate with superior strength!" Though really, even Lash knew that Zetta was slightly better at tactics than he let on. One didn't get to be the Overlord without a certain knack at command, after all.

[thewunderkind]

"Right right," she answered, trying not to grin (and failing), "but even superior strength has a weakness or two to exploit. Ever hear 'bout the single finger to the forehead vs an entire body trick?"

Considering who Lash had hung out with for most of her life, there probably wasn't even a second thought or a doubt about it. In fact, this was probably why they hadn't had a proper army command battle yet.

[badassfreakingoverlord]

"Oh, where you hold someone down just by leverage because they can't move at all to lift themselves? Go ahead, try that," Zetta said. "The sheer power of my muscles will snap your finger like a twig!"

[thewunderkind]

She looked down at her hands and realized she did like having them.

"...on the other hand, let's not do that." But he did get bonus points for knowing that trick. "Actually this does make me wonder...do you guys ever get sick? And how does that work with mana powers?"

[badassfreakingoverlord]

After 35,000 years, he'd picked up a couple of common-knowledge things here and there.

"Since strong mana power usually correlates to a higher level, and a higher level usually makes your stats better, it's harder for a stronger demon to get sick," Zetta said. "But it can happen. We -- demons in general, get sick like anybody else does. Of course, it CAN be more colorful if the demon is more impressive. I once got a cold that was so nasty my hair clotted up."

[thewunderkind]

Lash responded to this by, what else, laughing and trying to imagine the Overlord with the world's worst morning hairdo.

"Must have been something else when you sneeze," she remarked. "I'm trying to imagine what that's like, and how many things either got ruined or called up when you did, tee hee hee!"

Uh weren't they fighting a short while ago, why did this always happen? It's almost liked they liked talking to each other.