NyNES Preview: Carnival of Pen and Sword

Is the voting for the winner of a match based off the quality of the stories?

Condor_green said:

Is the voting for the winner of a match based off the quality of the stories?

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Yes, exactly. Superior storywriting is what wins the rounds, rather than having a character that say...shot nukes.

One will, one kill. Thuraen stood absolutely still in the ring. His eyes were shut, his mind slowly molding to kill, to become the instrument he had always been. His finger stroked the smooth dagger, and he knew.. He was prepared. Come fist, come blade, perchance even a sphere of lead, he would be there - and then, gone, like a leaf in a gust, he would prove his poetry, he would show the audience his supremacy, and he would stare the dying in the eyes. It was his priviledge; in his mind, he knew you could stare death in the eyes like any man. But he saw only the dying, and so his life was that of living Death.

Once again, the reaper would be proven. Once again, Death would grant his cold touch of steel.

His fingers stroked the blade, his eyes flashed open, he was alive.

One will, one kill.

Germanicus watched in humor as this strange fellow talks with his rock, "What a fool this guy is." Finally he grew tired of watching the idiot play with himself and decided to explore the arena, perhaps finding a good location to make his stand should it be necessary. Not daring to trust the people on this island, he hung his shield behind his back and hung his helmet off the shield and headed off to explore.

The first thing that captured his eye was a big wheel that seemed to go to the heavens, perhaps he could communicate with Mars from the very top. But how to get there he wondered as he searched the strange contraption, he came upon the words 'Ferris Wheel' but he could not read that language and simply pushed a button that was next to it, nothing. Perhaps he pushed the wrong button, so he pushed the next one, again nothing, frustrated he slammed his fists on the console and broke it. Unfazed Germanicus instead began climbing up the wheel, shield and everything hanging on his back as he made his way to the chair at the very top.

Once there, Germanicus took everything but his grey dirty clothes off and placed them nearby then took his knife and stared to the heavens, "Mars protect me in battle. Give me power to vanquish my enemies. Give me strength to fight. For you Mars, I give you my blood." With that he cut his hand and allowed the blood to drop freely to his feet as he stared into the heavens. Satisfied Germanicus took out his blanket and laid down. He would rest before he would have to fight for Rome once more.

Jiefin looked up at a figure in armor climb up the wheel curiously.

"That looks kind of fun!" Jiefin said to himself. "What's that Boulder? Oh yeah. Good point. That guy does seem a bit off. Sometimes its just better to let strange people be alone."

After his short conversation with Boulder, Jiefin looked around. But he saw nothing interesting. Boulder had told him not to go on the big wheel thingy, and the strength tester was broken. In times of utter boredom, there is only one thing to do for Jiefin. Sleep. Jiefin dug a deep hole into the ground and chucked Boulder in with a dull thud. Then he layed on the ground, using his robe as a blanket.

"Tell me when the fight starts Boulder," Jiefin mummbled.

OOC: I would like to note that Boulder is an official familiar of Jiefin. No messing with him until the fighting starts.

Pulling out. I don't think I've got time for this one.

Exclusion, silence, isolation... The carnival bar. All mean the same thing and all represent the tranquility Nolan has come to love so much since the war. Alone, with his chemicals he can finally feel again. Slowly, deliberately taking one of the syringes out of the bag he lowers it to the cannon. Placed it slowly to the circular opening of the metal contraption and placeing it to his exposed flesh he Scrapes the skin with the needle to get a glimpse of what is to come. Tantalizingly, achingly close to bringing himself as near to the meaning of his exsistence he will ever reach he continues to tease back and forth goes the needle and back and forth it goes again but suddenly no longer able to take the wait Nolan plunges the syringe and empties the contents into his blood stream bringing forth from his lips a gasp of utter bliss as his the metal casing around his arm begins to glow, radiant with energy that can be seen passing in waves just below the surface of his aura as majestic streams of electricity passes to and fro his clenched fingertips And for the first time since Nolan arrived to this purgatory he felt truly..... alive.



My second story ever. How was it? any suggestions?

They were without a carpet of stars that night. Strawman Hickles was fast asleep in his seat while Tok-Tok was holding the whip in silence. Soon he was bound to enter the arena; facing the deepest fears of his. His straw was chewed some hours ago; he couldn't sleep. This, of course, Ol' Man Hickles took plenty of use of; therefore his noisy sleep beside Tok-Tok was a fact. The only sounds at this time were him, of course, and the muffled steps of the ox, let alone the wolf cry which was led out every once in a while. The night was cloudy as ever, Tok-Tok finding the peace to think. He took the metallic instrument forth in his hands, looking at the black trees, those that were green before.

He was afraid of death. Not necessarily to die himself; but he hated death. He did not remember for how long he had lived where he came from, or how many hostile trespassers he had been bound to take care of with force. His fingers were trembling in the holes of his silver tool; he remembered every face of each stranger passing his small hut. His body was just way too short to stand in a field, allowing his eyes to see everything. He had to look at the corn around him; he pullled in the end of his flute, making it longer. He felt a warm thrill from the touch; the length of it being ever impressive to anyone who might have been watching at the time; he carefully pinched the side to let a small button show itself; it was a deep golden colour. And as he pressed it, a pretty rainbow of all; violet, red, yellow, green, cyan, and the colours of the oceans all floated out to shape the perfect item. Now he had his flute unfold into what he adored; and he appreciated what he had created. It was perhaps the most impressive musical instruments of all times; and with his fingers spreading and parting to more than just ten, his better melodies were played for him; all the while Strawman Hickles was still asleep.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHTFmJk7fH0

(The above is Tok-Tok's theme. I can't figure out YouTube tags.)

Nice stories guys, but save some for Round 1

Nylan, are we judging by triumvirate or individual judges to each round? I think triumvirate style would be interesting.

I agree it also makes it harder for the judging to be biased.

Condor_green said:

I agree it also makes it harder for the judging to be biased.

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We're all biased the same way.

Of Course!
We all love the underdog, but im sure one of us here is an "unbiased" old cynic.

“Harry, the other papers have reporters orders of magnitude more competent than you,” shouted Boss McKinley through the phone. “Get that piece done in an hour or I fire you... again!”

Harry was sweating. He nervously replied, “Yes sir!”

Beep. McKinley was off the line.

Crap.

He was supposed to be writing about the recent Pentagon disappearances, then to tie them to alien invaders somehow, but he just wasn't feeling the BS just then; while his boss and a good number of people from The International Enquiry did believe in all the nonsense the paper spewed, Harry felt that writing for it was a natural extension of his degree in Creative Writing.

Of course, he wrote for food; if it came to writing or starving, he had to make himself feel the BS just then.

“Now,” he said, not talking to anyone in particular. “What to do?”

Instinctively, he went to the World Wide Web to get a good deal of the facts. Well, facts that the government was willing to release, possibly falsified... Oh crap they're rubbing off on me, he thought, but he doubted, and used, the information all the same.

“Officers Gordon Brown, Roger Frost, Samuel Biggs,” he mumbled, reading the list of missing Pentagon employees, jotting it down on his notebook.

He preferred to use real notebooks and real pens over computers, as he was a bit of a technophobe. Quite the computer klutz, actually, managing to become the only person in his office to be banned from using most of the electronic equipment; even the kook with the aluminum foil-covered radio-hat didn't get that far.

Harry yawned a big, manly yawn. It was two in the morning, the last he checked. He checked again and found that roughly twenty minutes of rushed note-taking had passed. Seeing that he was finished, a new mini-era was about dawn, namely the mini-era of rushed bovine excrement production.

“ABDUCTIONS AT THE PENTAGON, BIG GOVERNMENT COVER-UP” he began, in frighteningly large and garish letters on another notebook, which was less of a note-book and more of a draft-book. He continued to write, first by stating the facts then degenerating into all sorts of crazy claims of conspiracy.

“... what we must learn from this, my friends, is that we can never trust any president, because he might be black on the outside but green on the inside,” he ended. He noticed that he went over three pages, but it was a small notebook and he wrote in big letters.

He felt rather proud at the 30-minute wonder he produced, and read over it several times, turning the pages quickly. He did this several times until he got a paper-cut.


“Oh my frigging God, I just got a paper-cut,” screamed Harry. It was unusually painful and his hand was glowing a faint red, so Harry decided to investigate.

On the edge of the responsible page, a sliver of blood was mixed with paper and ink... ink which conspicuously glowing green. Not so conspicuous that Harry would notice before, but conspicuous enough that it could not resist casual scrutiny.

Of course, this fired up curiosity in Harry's mind. Why the frig is it glowing green? he thought. Why the frig didn't I never notice this before?

“Harry, your ink glows green,” said McKinley casually, a week before Harry was banned from working within the International Enquiry premises on grounds of 'potential health hazards.' “I was diagnosed with ocular cancer last week. The kind you get from staring at goddamn radiation every goddamn day.”

Harry was staring at a full body photo of Mrs. McKinley, who was unusually hot for someone of Mr. McKinley's roundness, sitting on top of the Mr. McKinley's desk.

“You better stop staring at my wife,” said McKinley. Harry looked at his boss's face, which had a permanent grimace fixed on, though it looked more grimace-like than usual.

Harry snapped back to reality.“Yes sir!”

Okay, maybe I should have noticed it before, he thought. He stood up and checked the label on the bottle of Conglomerate Inc.-brand ink he had. It had a warning: “MAY CONTAIN CONSPICUOUS AMOUNTS OF RADIATION.”

Oh snap. He felt his eyeballs, and realized that somethings the sizes of grapefruits were growing on them. Oh holy snap, I have ocular cancer!

He looked down at the cut on his hand. It was then swollen, glowing with the bright red of several traffic lights on a good rush hour traffic jam. Holy snap!

He was panicking. I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die! My bones are gonna melt and my flesh is going to rot alive, like in those Hiroshima tapes! My skins gonna peel off and my frigging muscles will make me look like a frigging zombie... and it's gonna hurt like hell, too!

After an hour of straight mental panicking, Harry felt his eyeballs and looked at his hand again. Yep, tumors were still there. Yep, the swelling was still glowing a horrendously bright red. But now he was calmer, cooler, more collected, so he turned to Google.

He typed in: “RADIATION INK HELP.” Almost immediately, a Google advert caught his cancerous eye. Clicking on the link, he was greeted with large, multicolor flashing letters against a deep-purple background.


“HAVE THAT NASTY FEELING OF BEING IRRADIATED? WELL, HAVE IT NO MORE!”

Below the big, flashing letters were poorly-arranged pictures of radiation victims; some pictures were from stock photos of World War II and Chernobyl, others were screenshots from old video games. He scrolled down until he saw more flashing text.

“RADICAL NEW TREATMENT FOR RADIATION POISONING!”

He saw a variety of medically-related pictures, from pills to bloody cutting, recognizing a few gut-wrenching ones from Google Images results on “surgery” which he used for the paper some time ago. More scrolling down led him to what he wanted to see.

“AS AN EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE, YOU GET IT ABSOLUTELY FREE!*”

Scrolling down further, he saw a timid little piece of text, in black, a bit hard to see, save for the e-mail link in light blue.

“EMAIL US AT dr_radiation@medicine.com.”

Despite the generally questionable nature of the website, and how poorly it reflected on the people running it, he was desperate and desperately poor so he quickly wrote an email to “dr_radiation,” describing his sordid state and his willingness to be subject to any kind of newfangled treatment to be cured.

Kraznaya said:

Nylan, are we judging by triumvirate or individual judges to each round? I think triumvirate style would be interesting.

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Triumverate. I'll be sending a PM once I put up the full thread with the details.

LightFang said:

We're all biased the same way.

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Well, I save plenty for round one. Or don't. I don't know, I don't expect my entries to win anyways.

(Looks at flyingchicken, and covers for Iggy's epos-to-come, flees from English native speakers and all hail to Tuborg the Danish beer - skål, mester.)

Nylan you also might want to categorize different encounters like lets say an encounter involving someone retreating as apposed to killing their opponent would have a slightly higher chance at victory.

Condor_green said:

Nylan you also might want to categorize different encounters like lets say an encounter involving someone retreating as apposed to killing their opponent would have a slightly higher chance at victory.

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Quality of storywriting is what I judge. Everything else is entirely up to the players.

Ok. and will tactics be involved in judging or is judging based exclusivly on a stories kickassness.

Anesthesia had elected to take a boat to the tournament. This allowed her the luxury of a cabin, and some privacy. She did not, however, sleep, as she had not felt the need to do so for nearly a year; it was an aspect of her abilities that she did not understand, even at a basic level. This did not frustrate her; it had been a long time since she had felt anything negative.

Instead of sleeping, she took time to remember. For her, introspection had immense practical benefits, in addition to being a source of inner strength as it was for more ordinary individuals. And so she thought back, thinking to the last of her murders, to the time before.

She had meant it to be a murder-suicide, her final act. Two syringes of morphine, one for the victim, an elderly man she had been taking care of for almost two weeks, and one for herself, for she had finally realized just what she had become, how harmful her nature was to those around her. And she succeeded, in a way. She used both syringes on their intended victims.

But not everything continued according to her plan. Instead of dying, she had simply begun to feel nothing; at least, nothing negative. Physically, her attempted suicide had rendered her immune to pain of any kind; she proved this to herself almost immediately through a series of escalating field tests, culminating in scalding her feet with boiling water. She felt nothing.

Mentally, the experience had been even more strange. She began to feel happy, enlightened; she found herself smiling, and incapable of stopping. It had been a long time since she had smiled before then.

It took her longer to realize that she no longer felt anything negative about the world. Frustration, anger, all such emotions were gone; even less obvious things, such as jealousy, were lost to her.

The first truly clear memory after leaving the house of her last victim was that of renting a room in a hotel and attempting to fall asleep. She had stayed in the room for almost three days, leaving only to pay the receptionist. Still, she could not succeed in sleeping, even for a few moments. But she was not worried. She could not do that, either.

It was several weeks before she realized that she could effect others with her state through proper concentration. It was then that she decided that, maybe, she could help people. She took on another job, this time assisting an elderly man with chronic pain issues.

There, for the first time in a long while, she felt useful, a benefit to society. The old man no longer complained about his pain. In fact, he no longer complained about much of anything. Still, he kept her on retainer, allowing her to stay close, to keep him peaceful.

One day, about a month into her work there, it all ended. She was with the old man, keeping him free of his burden. It was then that she began to leak, randomly shedding pain into the only nearby vessel equipped to receive it. The old man received so much pain at one time that his death was nearly instantaneous, his mind closing and his heart finally giving up.

Anesthesia did not care. The release of the pain gave her something, something that she needed. It was more important, more powerful, more gratifying than, at one time, the act of killing had been. More than that, she saw, heard, felt everything. When she moved, she did so faster, with more purpose, than she ever had before. So quickly that, when she turned to run, she was outside of the building almost before the old man had died.

It was then that she reasoned with herself. She realized immediately that she was addicted once again, to meting out pain as she once had been to killing. But here, she believed, there was a difference. Pain was a punishment. She took it away from those who felt it needlessly, and gave it to those she judged deserved it. This was justice. And that was why it felt so good, why it gave her such strength, such speed. More obvious still, because she could not feel pain, her decisions must have an inherent correctness to them. Only if a decision caused her pain was it an incorrect one, an unjust one.

She began to experiment after that. She learned many methods of inflicting pain, so she could take it away, store it for future use; this was just, a payment that society gave to her willingly so she could carry out her function. She learned the limits of the strength and speed granted to her when she gave others of others pain, learned that the more pain a person was given, the faster, the stronger she became. She found no real limits, merely practical ones.

Anesthesia discovered, also, the other side of her ability, one connected to her inability to feel negative emotions. She found that she could give and take of these as well, although it was much more difficult than the more physically oriented half of her ability.

However, the few times she gave others emotional pain, she found her mental abilities enhanced. While she could not read minds, she could judge body language to create an accurate picture of a person's emotional state. She could predict movements of individuals and large groups accurately up to around five seconds into the future. She even, during one particularly interesting test, proved that she could memorize several books in only a few minutes, as well as solve particularly difficult logic puzzles in moments.

The final portion of her experimentation had been the study of pain without her ability. She learned the art of knives and the sword, and especially how to use them with her physical abilities properly enhanced. She became an expert at torture, although it was questionable as to whether or not the causing of pain without any particular goal in mind actually was torture.

It was less than a year, but when she got word of the Carnivale and its reward, she knew what it was she would do. It was outside of the realm of possibility that any could defeat her, even with her knowledge of her own abilities so restricted. And it was then, while she was beginning to narrow her search within her own mind, that the boat landed. She left, quickly.

---

OOC: Again, not quite top notch. I'll make sure to actually go through and revise the later stories, especially when it comes to diction.

A suggestion, though, is that you allow for battles to come to a sort of draw, in which one or the other contestants loses but makes a proper retreat and is capable of continuing fighting. It will make things longer, but I hardly see a problem in that.