Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Trixie's Bar (Everyone welcome)

"Uhh... My odd strength that can let me push like a ton of stuff without tiring out myself much. Some people called me a monster because of this." Xueqing seemed embarrassed.

"Welcome! You are now an instrument of the Allfather's might!" He boomed as he picked her up

"Brother-Sergeant, please set Guardswoman Mimi down" he said with a smirk

Feeling her being picked up by Lord Graystorm, it took her from surprise as she stared down at him with a weak smile as she heard Donatos ask Ubba to put her down.

"Thank you, you two," she said as she turned to face them after being lowered back down to the ground. "I will serve the Allfather with pride!" she said to them as she saluted them with pride of her own. At that she awaited Lord General Aleksandr to anoint her private as she stood there with her weapon in her hands with a slight grin on her face.

"And here I thought Gjallarhorn was strange."

"What did you mean by that?" she asked as she took a quick glance in Aka's way.

"Nothing, nothing. Just the people I work for."

She raised a eyebrow as she said, "And these people are?" She was going to get answers from him while she waited on Aleksandr.

"Peacekeepers. Obviously."

"A little bit more than that, but yes."

"And that's my calling," she said to Aka before she turned in attention to Lord General Aleksandr as she got the speech. She stood there in a military stance, her arms against her side as he took in all the information from him. With the speech was temporary over, she nodded as she said, "Sir, yes, sir. I am here to serve the Emperor and my higher ups and learn amongst my comrades." She felt that thrilling feeling like Chrismas day when a child would open up their present. She saluted him again in respect. This was her chance to show him she could join the ranks of the Sisters of Battle.

His voice ranged in her head as she was given the rank private. To her, it was an honor and privilege to serve the Emperor and be watched as she would take out her foes without questions asked. She felt ready, her mind racing as she won't back down now.

Feeling his gloved hand caress her cheek, her purple eyes stared at his as her fiery spirit showed her resolve. "I will make you proud, Lord General. I guarantee our enemies will fear me and my expertise with weapons," she added as she stood there in front of him out of respects. He gave her the courage to face any obstacles to get to her desired destination; the Battle Sisters.

"Yes, Lord General Aleksandr?" she asked as she stood there with pride in her eyes.

She saw a muscular tall figure appear amongst them as she stood in military fashion out of respects of the scarred male. She did have few scars, but she knew not to be afraid or show fear to this man. If she wanted her rank to go up, this was the man she would have to prove to.

She saluted the general as she stood there listening to what Aleksandr had to say about him. General Martellan, whom she saw was daunting and intimidating at first. But she had always had a knack at fighting foes similar to this reality. It was like home away from home. And there was Captain Rolne whom she was to report to while she was on the battlefield. "Yes, Lord General Aleksandr," she said as she turned to the man now in front of her.

"Fighter. I will make our enemies fear us," she said coldly in response to his question.

She didn't take it to heart. In fact it thrilled her more as she prepared for him to speak to her. She had nothing left but to fight for their cause. His speech didn't bother her the least as she had seen horrors in her reality. This would be a refresher course for her. "I do not fear death. Death will fear me. For my comrades. If they die on the battlefield, they weren't ready to fight for the Emperor. And for the note; I ate worse in my reality. Far worse. Eating my comrades will sustain me strength to fight on," she told him with a stern look on her face as she stood there ready for more speeches from him.

She looked at him with respect as she heard about other regiments before the 5th and she felt proud even though his speech was meant to either detour her or strengthen her resolve. She wasn't going to turn tail. To run from the battlefield was treason and death would be the only option for her. She looked at him without speaking as her face stayed stern as she came to when she saw another subordinate show up by command.

She looked at him for one last time as she gave him a salute as she followed the other to her barracks and to collect her armor and uniform.

"Yes, sir. You will not see me out of uniform," she responded to him as she saluted him one last time. She followed the soldier as she became more excited to receive armor and uniform for her new service to the Emperor.

Feeling the weight of the armor, she got the feel of it since she would be wearing it from now on. In battle she will wear it with pride. It felt like it was better quality. Was it because if she succeeded, she would get the rank of the Sisters of Battle? She never understood him, but her hopes were for it to be true.

She sat down in front of the holographic screen as she stared at her armor and it's mechanics. And out of nowhere she was handed some type of manual that she felt between her fingertips as she stared at the man again in hopes of understanding what lied within the book. Hearing about the booklet, she knew not to lose it or death would be her only calling.

She saw the new weapon as she got excited from the explanation of what it did. This gun would be her best friend as she would use it with utmost precision as she would mow down over her enemies without hesitation. Finding out she got other things including a utility shovel and a combat knife. For her armor, she was told it protected her for the most part except for a plasmablast. She knew to take cover even with her petite frame. She would wear these items with pride and would show them her capabilities of a soldier.

She nodded as she was to report to the firing range to get a feel of the battlefield. "Yes, Sir," she said to him. She bowed as she went to the firing range for target practice as she prepared with the practice. She turned around and with a salute said, "Thank you." She walked off as she was prepared for the training and then hopefully the battlefield if she can prove her worth in the eyes of her peer.

"Well, you have fun with that. Armor and all...Well, that seems excessive to me."

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't need armor to do combat? It just seems heavy and impractical for a warrior."

The Character's sheet.

The tavern had outlived its baptism.

Whatever syllables the first signboard carried had peeled away with the paint. Leaving only a scar above the lintel that the regulars filled with their own blasphemous nicknames. To the magistrates it appeared as a forgettable coordinate on a map. In truth it functioned as a clandestine nave for appetites. A crypt turned inside out and furnished with stools.

Heat congregated within like hoarded guilt. The atmosphere possessed the viscosity of spoiled anointing oil. Lanterns of smoked glass bled a fuliginous radiance that clung to walls in diseased halos. Painting every beam in shades of exhausted amber. Pipe fumes crawled above the crowd as sluggish incense. Not sanctifying anything. Only varnishing lungs. The reek of spirits. Unwashed skin. Overused perfume. Roasted meat. These scents mingled into a single oppressive miasma that smelled like a festival held outside a shuttered temple.

Voices rose in profane psalmody. Dice rattled against scarred timber. Little knucklebones of parody. Coins rang as tawdry offertory. A musician in the corner coaxed a wanton melody from a cracked instrument. Each note staggering as if drunk on its own echo. Procuresses negotiated in low. Economical phrases. Patron saints of nothing at all were invoked in curses. No icon watched from the rafters. Only smoke stains and cobwebs stared down like cataracted eyes.

What vestiges of sacred objects survived had been degraded into curios. A cracked votive shield blocked a draft beside the door. A brass thurible. Chain snapped. Hung repurposed as a spittoon. Prayer cords looped the neck of an empty bottle where flies gathered with the devotion worshippers reserved for relics elsewhere. The entire establishment read like a palimpsest of sacrilege. Prior sanctity scraped away and overwritten by appetitive graffiti.

Winter took notice. It did not arrive with spectacular gusts or thunderous annunciation. Its advent came as a doctrinal correction. Warmth began to leach from the air in incremental thefts. Sweat cooled on clavicles. The hookah’s vapors no longer climbed but sagged and drifted along the floor. Their voluptuous curls collapsing into foggy rags. Lantern flames narrowed to thin bluish tongues that withdrew into their own soot like chastened choristers.

Then the door completed its arc. The alley’s night spilled inward in a single precise incision. Within that vertical wound. A silhouette pausing on the threshold towered above the interior rabble. For an instant she was only outline and contradiction. Height without detail. Presence without narrative. A shard of imported cold rode in with her. Subtle yet sovereign. Breath misted from the nearest mouths. Astonished and involuntary. Like prayers torn from congregants who had forgotten the words.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull entered the den. Her first contact with the warped planking birthed a fragile corona of hoarfrost that sprinted outward along the grain. Tracing old stains and knife gashes in crystalline script. Each subsequent step left behind a brief sigil. A pale mandala that flared then thinned to a persistent chill that sank into the timber. Anklets of aurichalcum encircled her ankles. Heavy rings incised with minuscule glyphs and set with jade cylinders and bone beads. Their muted chiming surfaced through the tavern’s noise as a clear alien tintinnabulation. The sound of a sanctus bell ringing inside a brothel.

Her legs proclaimed a theology of incarnate discipline. Bronze skin burnished to the hue of sun stroked sandstone poured over muscle dense as quarried basalt. Calves swelled with the coiled strength of a veteran climber of ice laden escarpments. Thighs carried the breadth of bastions. Functional mass shaped into luxuriant curves that mocked any attempted divorce between potency and allure. Along the outer arc of each limb laminae of lacquered scale clung close. Painted in searing turquoises and sanguine reds that evoked tropical plumage or heraldic carnage.

From these plates jutted shards of Necro Ice. They grew like glacial thorns. Irregular. Many faceted. Feeding upon the tavern’s warmth with quiet voracity. Their interiors seethed with corpse pale luminescence. Cyan currents writhing within the hyaline bodies. Refractions broke across the floorboards and up the legs of stools. Pricking the shadows with spectral motes like frost stars fallen out of a polar sky.

Around her hips cloth conceded as little territory as possible. A panel of dark weaving held fast to her pelvis. Its dye a shade that devoured the lantern light. Along its hem marched cramped sigils in metallic thread. Archaic ideograms that spoke in strokes of inundation. Famine. Winter jurisdiction. From the girdle that clasped the garment fell strings of beads. Vertebrae. Small carved skulls. They knocked together with every stride. The sound a soft abacus of bone keeping its own uncompromising tally.

Above. Her torso ascended like the central spire of a chthonic basilica. Crossing bands of leather dyed the color of deep ocean cinched around the generous architecture of her chest. Anchoring a harness that both exhibited and controlled the weight beneath. Armored crescents of dark chitin cupped each breast. Their polished surfaces bore incised labyrinths of web patterns and snow signs. Lines folding back upon themselves in dizzying repetition. Like the marginalia of some glacial codex. Between those crescents a vertical strip of exposed bronze carried a smear of turquoise pigment over the sternum. Anchored by a medallion of bone and jade. That ornament resembled a stylized inverted sun. Its rays curling inward as if crucified upon its own corona.

The chitin itself was not inert.
Necro Ice infiltrated it. Sprouting through seams and borders in minuscule crenellations. Inside those crystalline protrusions slow radiance gathered and faded with a rhythm not quite her heartbeat yet bound to it. As if some buried aurora had been pressed into service as circulating sacrament.

Warpaint consecrated the visible skin.
Strokes of turquoise coursed diagonally across her upper arms. Over clavicles. Along the prominence of her collarbones. Each band bounded by hair fine crescents of cinnabar laid with monastic precision. This was not cosmetic affectation. It read as jurisdictional gloss. Commentary written on living parchment. Between those strokes scars of deliberate origin traced faint pale lines. Remnants of initiatory incisions that had once opened arteries to let winter in.

Her shoulders carried pauldrons that resembled reliquaries shaped for war.
Layer upon layer of chitinous laminae fanned outward. Edges serrated. Surfaces painted in gradations moving from deep teal into ember red into an absorptive darkness that swallowed the lantern glow. Between these plates Necro Ice colonized like holy fungus. Thrusting hyaline tongues outward that oozed a lambent cyan. Within the armor sunken scenes revealed themselves when the light struck at a slant. Rows of penitents trapped mid kneel inside stylized ice. An inverted tree whose roots coiled about heaps of skulls. A river of swords frozen mid current. The imagery did not invite interpretation. It imposed dogma.

From the armored spine her supplementary limbs unfurled.
Four arachnid appendages emerged in slow hieratic expansion. Joints angled sharply. Carapace glossy as wet obsidian veined with elusive flashes of teal. Each extremity culminated in a curved scythe whose inner edge gleamed with preternatural keenness. As though it had already tasted mitigated flesh. Along the undersides delicate threads of frost stretched from segment to segment. Weaving and dissolving in continuous brittle metamorphosis. These limbs moved in counterpoint to her stride. Maintaining equilibrium. Framing her stature. Proclaiming an anatomy that obeyed a more predatory scripture than mortal design.

Her human arms bore their own constellation of relics. Bracelets stacked along both forearms until skin vanished beneath metal and bone. Gold cuffs engraved with minute glyphs nested against loops of leather threaded with teeth beside bangles of dark horn interspersed with shards of frozen crystal imprisoned in wire. Small charms dangled. Some worn smooth by habitual caress. Others sharp as new offenses. The backs of her hands displayed faint ritual scars crossing the tendons. Pale latticework mapping secret conduits through which the Tlāzōtlalpan siphoned energy.

Her throat and upper chest formed a shrine. A broad pectoral of turquoise plates and hammered gold spread across the superior swell of her sternum. Each segment inset with slivers of bone and chips of ice. The pattern suggested a stylized jaw encircling a captive star. Below. Cords hung with obsidian teeth and jade droplets cascaded toward the shadow between her breasts. At their convergence a single shard of Necro Ice rested like a suspended tear. Within its clear body a miniature storm smoldered. Pale light coiling upon itself in slow somber circulation.

Her face transfigured the monstrous into hieratic splendor.

Bronze skin lay smooth over prominent zygomatic arches and a jaw whose line suggested verdict rather than compromise. Her lips full. The upper carrying a natural subtle bow sharpened now by the hint of wry displeasure. The nose traced a straight unforgiving bridge from brow to tip. A profile suited to palace reliefs carved three stories high. Across this architecture pigments drew a cruciform of intent. Two thick bands of turquoise shot from the swell of each cheek to the outer brow. Beneath them curved narrow arcs of carmine that imitated suspended bloodflow. A further crescent hugged each lower lid. Transforming the gaze into a pair of permanent stigmata.

Her eyes were glacial jurisprudence made visible. Irides of saturated ultramarine encircled pupils with unnerving steadiness. Around each iris a narrow corona of ashen gold traced a thin ring. Less adornment than measuring instrument. These eyes did not wander. They audited. Whenever they crossed a face the recipient felt not looked at but entered into an account. No vulgar sorcerous glow disturbed them. Their intensity came from depth. From the sense of ledgers behind them already balanced.

Above. The headdress rose like a frozen litany. A circlet of engraved gold clasped her brow. Crowded with tesserae of turquoise. Obsidian. Bone arranged in quincunx motifs reminiscent of sacrificial platforms seen from above. From this foundation burst a corolla of feathers. Macaw plumes long and iridescent climbed toward the rafters. Their hues shifting from sea green near the circlet through incendiary orange into oil black at the tips. The lowest row carried fragile sheaths of ice that encapsulated each quill end. When she moved these frozen caps clicked softly. A crystalline arrhythmic chime like frost gnawed chalices touching in an abandoned choir loft.

Her hair fell beneath this avian corona in a dense torrent.

Straight heavy strands of black spilled past her shoulders. Nearly to her hips. Streaked with veins of cobalt that broke the dim light. Snow powder dotted the upper layers. Those flakes refused to dissolve. They persisted as hexagonal glyphs embedded in the sable cascade. Winter annotating her.

The tavern received her with the reluctant stillness of a congregation caught in sacrilege.

Gamblers froze with cards half fanned. A hireling climbing toward violence discovered his fist stranded midway to another man’s jaw. Laughter strangled into uncertain coughs. The musician in the corner let his fingers fall from the strings. His last note stretching into a plaintive squeal that died in the frozen air. Conversations clipped mid invective or mid innuendo resumed only in whispers. Each voice sounded like blasphemy uttered in a crypt.

The cold heaped around Ixqueya Jorgenskull altered more than sensation.
Condensation along the walls crystallized into feathery rime that crawled between splinters. Liquor within poorly sealed bottles grew cloudy. The surface of spilled ale shrank and tightened into amber scabs. Smoke sagged and spread across the floor in low sullen sheets. Resembling reluctant censer clouds forced to crawl beneath a foreign altar.

She advanced toward the counter as if approaching a chancel unaware of its impending consecration.

Bodies parted. Sometimes with deliberate deference. More often through instinct excavated from older hungers. Those too drunk to stand steadily still moved aside as vertebrae remembered older predators. Those who attempted to stare her down found their gazes skidding away. The way eyes retreat from a reliquary that has not granted permission. A handful watched unabashed. Measuring her with greed or curiosity. Her audit took note of them.

The arachnid limbs behind her angled outward. Edges tilting infinitesimally. Defining the volume she claimed. Frost rosettes continued to flower beneath each step. Ephemeral snow mandalas blooming and effacing in rapid succession. The tavern floor served as temporary scripture.

The proprietor waited behind his battered plank. A portly man whose armor consisted of practiced insolence and a smile polished for every sort of sinner.
Both protections failed him.

The cloth in his hands stilled upon the rim of a cup. Color leached from his cheeks. His eyes climbed her height in reluctant pilgrimage. Pausing at harness. At extra limbs. At headdress. Finally at her stare. Whatever welcome he had been assembling died unspoken. Salt glistened on his upper lip in sudden beads.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull did not stoop to take a seat.

She halted before the bar. Towering over its stained surface. Her fingers rested upon the wood. Rime radiated outward from the points of contact. Colonizing grooves left by decades of knife play. The lantern above her faltered. Its flame shrinking until it resembled a trapped spark. For a breath the entire room felt sealed beneath a bell jar of crystalline air.

Within her chest the Tlāzōtlalpan gave a measured convulsion.

The organ drank greedily from the accumulated heat of bodies. Lamps. Steaming dishes. Translating stolen energy into the ordered cold that haloed her. Necro Ice buds along her armor responded. Brightening a shade. An auroral flutter passing through their translucent flesh. She sensed the instinctive recoil of the living around her. Their blood thickening. Their joints tightening. Their hearts stuttering toward flight.

This bawdy grotto had never been inscribed upon her sovereign’s map of shrines.

Nevertheless. Under her scrutiny it began to warp into annexation. Lanterns mutated into unwilling votives. The bar counter into a parody altar rail. Patrons arranged themselves into ragged aisles. The stink of spirits and sweat thickened into a parody of incense. Where moments ago there had been commerce. Now yawned the suggestion of judgment.

When she spoke her voice did not rise.

“Wine.”

The syllable carried the timbre of distant ice calving from a glacier. “Not the sour indulgence you sluice into cowards and debtors. Draw something that still remembers the vineyard it betrayed.”

The barkeep flinched into action.
He poured. The liquid left the neck in a reluctant stream. Thickening as it met the gelid air. Frost feathered the cup in elaborate dendrites that resembled ossified prayers. By the time he slid the vessel toward her a thin film of ice trembled across the surface. Quivering like a nervous conscience.

She allowed the cup to rest upon the little frozen plinth. Her attention remained on the patrons. Gaze moved from face to face. From hunched priest hiding in his hood to scarred mercenary with medals tucked into his shirt. From painted courtesan assembling a new smile to young bravo with a hand too near his knife. Each received a fragment of her regard. Each fragment lodged like a splinter of ice.

This was not a visit. It was inspection.
The tavern had built its liturgy upon intoxication. Transaction. Oblivion. Tonight another sacrament arrived. Winter in the person of Ixqueya Jorgenskull stepped into the nave of vice. Carrying a colder catechism. The den might continue pouring envy. Lust. Despair. She had come to count them. To determine which hearts would leave with their sins sitting lightly upon their shoulders. And which would leave embalmed in Necro Ice. Names entered forever in a ledger that did not forgive. And never forgot.

(NOW THATS SOME WRITING ! *Standing Ovation*)

(*Clapping intensifies*)

Be stepped out of the kitchen and wiped his hands on a hand towel. He rested against the bar

"Keeping yourself busy, amica? Try not to drop dead from being too busy~"