ZOMBIE FORUMS

Time magic.

(Yes, Poe once said that the Elves have some pretty damn good combat-reflex spells, but sweet mother of scary-little-devil-girls, time magic.)

I think the fight's still up for grabs. We've never yet seen an elf dodge bullets. For all we know, the time-slip ability is an entirely new technique unique to the Ensignarium.

Of course, Warrel's already been flashing that around in front of Sarine, and she's still pretty confident. And Warrel has yet to kill Sarine... really, spending all that time talking when you could have put a Durus Flamma between the enemy's vertabrae in less than the time it takes to say "You will die, elf whore..." there's no excuse for how Warrel's behaving. Except maybe "I've run out of prepared spells for today and am trying to bluff my way out."

Jon, his revolver, and two elven troopers beg to differ. He gunned one down cold and delivered the coupe-de-gras on a second who got thrown to the ground by Ian's Big-Honkin'-Akira-Toriyama-Energy-Blast-Effect.

God I hate d20...

wait, Sarine's drunk? :o

Jon and Ian managed to trash a group of elves, but that was also a group of elves who hadn't faced real combat in thousands of years. Their behavior was cocky and overconfident and they got their asses handed to them because of it. Sarine has spent centuries surviving real fights.

The flip side is that yes, I think Sarine is overconfident against the Ensigerum. She thinks she knows all of their tricks. It's not at all clear that she realizes that these folks have learned a few tricks since the Elves taught them. The idea that humans could make progress and learn things on their own hasn't occured to her.

Admittedly, it is rather curious that this is the first time in centuries that a Ranger has encountered one of the Ensigerum. Of course the flip side is that outside of missions, the Ensigerum doesn't get out all that much, and there aren't that many Rangers around. And for that matter, past leaders of the Ensigerum may well have decided that they didn't want to mess with the Elves, unlike the current leader.

Doesn't seem that way at all. Time magic is more likely the extremely-taboo-for-a-reason outright magical manipulation of time as an independant discipline.

If Warrel is one of the monks that Anita derides for slacking off on the physical component of Ensigerum training, yeah, maybe he's just tired. He was potentially waiting in a time fugue for Jon to fire so he could catch the bullet- Jon took his sweet time there, has been jumping around like a grass hopper, 'stick and move' against a six-shooter, more jumping around, getting tagged by a damned shotgun... bad landing, blood loss, lots more time-enhanced jumping around, followed by even more jumping around and a healing effort.

Imagine 30-year-old white-collar guy in the middle of an intermural basketball game. That's Warrel.

Against a WNBA starter. That's Sarine. But it's also Sara.

(Jon's the 30-year-old blue collar guy in the middle of the intermural basketball game. Same difference, but tends to look better sweaty.)




Well, more it's like she's in a room with strobe-lights and a techno-beat track at volume '11'. Durus Flamma effect on elves.

No, but if you remember the info about the Durus Flamma blades, they have very distracting side-effects for elven users. Poe mentioned something about the effects being equivilent to fighting while strobe-lights and car horns are going off all around you.

That should be fun.

Note also the large hole in Warrel's gut that he just slapped a patch on. Note also that he stressed his wounded frame quite a bit before he had a chance to use the spell. It is a pretty good motive for stalling all by itself.

Unless he's got better healing magic than Sarine, the patch and a pain killer should be all he's accomplished so far. Really a question of how many organs Poe decides got ventilated by the sod-ff. Liver, kidney, gut perforations, all much more dangerous to the health than a severed hand, because they are much more complicated organs than artery, muscle, or even lung.

On the other hand, Jon could be quite correct and he's not even in the fight anymore.


Word. In this situation, I can emphasize with Jon.

I run a 10th level Wildlander (Ranger) in a party wtih a souped up fighter and barbarian. I save the party's ass time and time again with my ranger skills, but all they talk about is how I should be up there in the front lines with the fighters. What they don't get is that d20 isn't like old D&D. Anyone who hasn't got access to fighter bennies isn't just second string, they're a placeholder, trying to hold the bad guys off until a fighter or a wizard does something to win the fight.

And I get just as pissed off about it as Jon does having to share the field with ole' Glorfindel-with-curves, there.

From what I gathered those side effects make the Durus Flamma less that ideal for battles, where hundreds or thousands are swinging swords, yelling, firing off blasts of magic and overloading the brain of the person using the Durus Flamma. But, the hightened senses are a plus in a duel, like this situation where Sarine will be toe to toe with one, maybe two people. Well, an advantage as long as Jon doesn't go all Chow Yun Fat and starts blasting off with his pistols while jumping through the air.

I can remember reading somewhere that time magic was something that the Ensigerium taught themselves, as it was something not even the elves would dare touch.

Ah, must have forgot that. The basic Durus Flamma sensory enhancement should still help when fighting them, though - time magic just sounds like to me something the Ensigerum would have learned through obsessing with the properties of the blades in the past. (Moreso than an elf.)

Uhm, that's like a block from my school. I pass it almost daily on the way to my favourite coffee shop/smoking spot. That a photo from Sakuracon, perhaps?

Messing with time magic does seem like a very human thing. We tend to mess with stuff that usually has the potential to bring about doomsday. Atomic bombs anyone?

He gunned down elves who were focused elsewhere, aren't trained to deal with guns, and were unshielded by magic. Jon had one hell of a set of force multipliers working on his side there. Swords and close combat, however, are things the elves have known literally since the beginning. She is going to be shielded and throwing assorted effect spells at Warrel in addition to just cutting him up.

Just fuse his shoes to the ground for a second or confine him in a force bubble or try a mind attack or cast something to annul or scramble time magic. The time ninjas spend their short lifetimes fighting each other and killing people who basically can't fight back.

Hell, there record on prepared attackers aren't very good, if you look at the assassination of that other guy, the Time-Ninja not only failed to keep the dude alive (He did seem close...) he even got killed himself.

No he has a still not-dead gunner, and a Swords person that is both trained and prepared for a magical-sword fight. I don't see him getting a flawless victory here, when he couldn't even take out a normal human gunner without getting shot.

On the other hand, we have never really seen the Time-Ninjas get into a real all out brawl, so either way its going to be an interesting conflict, and will let us gauge their power better.

Ian did pre ripped jeans? Oh that fucker is going to pay

I'd have to disagree. If you can finish a battle in less time than it takes to exchange the first sentence with your enemy, then why not spend some time beforehand talking? It's not as though there's any rush to finish. Besides, you might pick up valuble information to report to your superiors after your victory.

I wonder if it may be Sarine's time to take the fall. It'd be a shocker that would certainly add to the drama and building tension in the storyline. The whole "Ensigerum has grown in power, surpassing the elves... omg, what do we do now" situation. Then Sara refuses to take Jon out, and does Warrel in.

We haven't seen any main characters die, though... so it's unlikely. But by no means impossible. :P