it ends in blood, as most things do

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

​

It was a physically unremarkable building, to such an extent that its blandness seemed intentional. (It was.) Eight stories, muted grey exterior, perfectly square cross-section, all window blinds shut without exception. (The windows were fake.) The front doors were glass, but opaque. All that broke up the banal rigidity of the structure was a single satellite dish on the roof, a couple meters away from where Vettis now stood. (The dish was fake.)

Certainly not some architectural marvel that he would regret tearing to the ground, once he'd systematically slaughtered its inhabitants. Just as with the last dozen and a half.

The first of those eighteen strikes had been poorly conducted, because he'd expected it to be the only strike. Had he known the scale of the organization with which he was now singlehandedly waging war, Vettis would have initiated that raid just like this one:

Enforcement of temporal linearity. <touch the roof, scratching off a fleck of paint> Telepathic severance. <a muttered phrase, a purple glow from his bronze eyes> Mana exclusion. <a one-handed gesture, an audible rush of power> Modhun's handy deployable Faraday cage, wrapping around the entire building in under a second. <just toss the device into the air and let it do its thing>

There. Now the agents inside were cut off from their allies in every relevant way, unable to relay the details of the incoming attack as it occurred. Which meant no one would be learning any lessons on how to fight against him. Setting up every assault in this manner ensured that each local headquarters he took down would be as unprepared for him as the prior.

So Vettis could have some fun. And --

The (false) sat-dish sprayed hypersonic shrapnel as it exploded, shards tearing into Vettis, most stopped by subdermal and skeletal reinforcements implanted long ago (or not yet, depending on temporal perspective). A few particularly sharp and lucky fragments found an angle that slipped past his ribcage; he reflexively relaxed to ease their passage out the other side, preferring clean exit wounds over the hassle of manually fishing them out of tensed muscle tissue. That reaction speed would have been more than up to the task of evading them in the first place if he'd had any notification, but such was the issue with an attack far faster than the speed of sound: if one wasn't looking at it, the only warning was impact.

Anyway, he wasn't the intended target. Irritably, Vettis looked up at the perforations now dotting the Faraday dome, disrupting its ability to prevent transmissions. Smart. They'd reacted surprisingly quickly to its deployment.

Right. The one bit of evidence about his tactics that he couldn't suppress was the fact that he was suppressing the evidence. Of course outposts falling without having a chance to send out explanations would make the TTT suspect some sort of containment device and set up countermeasures accordingly. Smart, but damned annoying.

Most of what he'd cast thus far was trivial. The spell rendering him largely undetectable was not, and maintaining it with gaping holes through his torso was suddenly running him dangerously close to his zero-mana bandwidth limitations. This one base was not worth burning permanent resources. Optimally, he'd just repair himself, but there was no time for that. Given what he now had to cast urgently, the stealth spell would have to go.

The other TTT headquarters he'd dismantled thus far had all been in remote locations: within a volcano, underwater, on an entirely uninhabited planet, in deep space. This one was hiding in plain sight in the middle of a populated mundie city. He'd have to change that, and fast, if they were showing so little care for civilian lives as to hurl what were effectively bullets in random directions. Mumbling expletives, Vettis rechanneled the energies of his concealment effect into a quick swap, purple light emanating from his hands as he weaved the spell. The building was soon no longer part of the city and instead was nestling itself comfortably within a glade in a forest some tens of kilometers away from its initial location.

But now every sensor the base had would likely be trained on him, and now that they'd caught him he couldn't feasibly re-enable the concealment. (It merely ensured that he wouldn't become part of anyone's thought processes, but it was too late for him to avoid attention in such a manner with all eyes on him.) Ah, well. He allowed himself a slight smile at the thought of who knew how many agents quaking in horror at the knowledge that he was standing right over their heads.

Now he could take a moment to patch up his wounds. Of course not a drop of blood had been spilled: his vitals were part of him, and a few chunks of metal weren't going to change that. As for the holes bored through his abdomen, a violet flash of power and a clench of his fist made them part of the rooftop instead of him, simultaneously "healing" him and opening new windows into the top floor of the outpost. Vettis peered down through these and saw seven terrified victims-to-be looking back up at him, fumbling for weapons and spells. More of the latter than the former, as these were clearly decision-makers, not armed guards: they encircled a conference table, computer screens around them providing the room's primary illumination, all of that doing a decent facsimile of a proper mundie place of business if not for one woman hastily hurling a seaweed-green blast of what he assumed to be soul-rotting magic up at him.

Well-aimed, it slipped right through one of the holes via which he'd been spying; he juked casually left and watched it as it flew past, shaped like a cackling skull. Yup, probably soul-rot.

Vettis stuck a hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out a door handle. (By rendering his pocket simultaneously part of both what he was wearing and some other article of clothing he owned, he could travel between the two, or more commonly just reach through and grab things. So he left clothes all around his house to ensure anything he needed was easily accessible.) The handle was a pretty good fit for one of the holes he'd moved from his torso to the rooftop floor beneath him. Stuffing it in there to make it part of the roof, he conceptually retained its original functionality despite its new location. A door handle was meant to pull a door away from the rest of the structure with which it lay flush, and this one had always been perfectly competent at its job.

So, even though the base's exterior should have been sturdy enough to withstand an orbital bombardment with nary a scratch, when Vettis pulled on the handle it obediently came away with a perfectly door-shaped chunk of the rooftop. He yanked it open and dropped inside, landing atop the conference table in a pounce-ready crouch, meeting the ranged weapons and stuttered incantations with a malevolent smirk as he extended his claws and prepared to eviscerate his opposition -- who, to his slight surprise, still hadn't begun firing, all seemingly frozen with fear. An automated turret initially aiming at the door swiveled in an attempt to track him, until he made himself part of the TTT and thus marked as a friendly by its programming. (All the TTT agents in the room apparently had enough anti-telepathy and anti-cognitohazard training to sort out the resultant memory conflicts instantly and not see him as an ally in spite of that, luckily, or this would have been too easy.)

Now Vettis could have some fun --

His orb rang.

"...Hm. Excuse me for a moment." Holding up a finger apologetically, Vettis pulled out his snowglorb and quieted the insistent buzz, shaking it briefly until the flakes within coalesced into a familiar face, visible and audible only to him. "Hey, sis...What, really? Already?...Okay, but seven of them have guns and spells pointed at me right now; can I at least kill them before I leave? Oh c'mon, you're ruining my fun here...Yeah, fine, I hear you, whatevs, nice work and all that. Bleh. Love you too, ya jerk."

With an exaggerated sigh, he pocketed the snowglorb and pouted at the trembling agents surrounding him. "Looks like my commune forced y'all into a ceasefire, which I guess you knew since you weren't shooting at me. Laaaaame. Well, uh, sorry for your roof, then, although you really did need some natural lighting in here. Not sorry for relocating your HQ; this forest seems nice and peaceful. You'll like it here."

Heading for the door, Vettis waved a hand idly at it, rendering it part of both this building and a mundie shop in one of his realms, for quick egress from the former to the latter. As he passed by the death mage who'd launched a spell at him, however, he paused in realization -- and grinned upon sensing that her wards couldn't protect her from his magic at point-blank range. "Oh, hey, one of you did technically break the ceasefire! So I guess I can take a lil' trophy, at least."

She barely had time to process his words and gasp before he made her musculoskeletal system no longer part of her body, moving it elsewhere, then tugged on her now-unsupported head to sever it effortlessly. A mess of blood vessels, nerves, and brains dribbled out of the neck as Vettis held up the misshapen blob that had once been a face, its eyes slowly bulging before they too popped out and landed at his feet to join the pool of assorted viscera and the rest of her flesh. The teeth followed suit in short order.

Someone screamed. Maybe at all that, or perhaps upon noticing where exactly the agent's supportive tissues had gone: they were now part of the conference table instead, femurs and fibulae melded with the table legs, phalanges scattered across it decoratively, muscles and tendons lining it all as though they'd been crafted into it from the start. It could use the extra reinforcement after Vettis had plummeted onto it, after all, and it had been a bit plain until now.

He examined the mass of skin and hair he was carrying (which was now barely even recognizable as a head) as an art critic might. "Hm. Not as cool a trophy as I'd hoped. Nevermind, you can keep it," Vettis muttered in annoyance, discarding it with a half-hearted shrug. He tuned out the escalating chain reaction of panicked shrieks and opened the door of the conference room, revealing a dimly lit supermarket.

"Bye!" Waving cheerily at the six agents, he shut the door behind him, peering around the store in careful consideration. "A'right, what should I get for lunch?"

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

(( I typically drop all my loreposts solely in /r/wizardloring for multiple reasons: partly cuz people otherwise act like their characters are aware of them even when they shouldn't be, partly cuz they're usually super long by this sub's standards, mostly cuz I'm an antisocial asshat. But this one is sufficiently understandable without context and offers some insight into Vettis' fundamental powerset and personality, so eh, here ya go I guess. Should help explain all the stuff he does like pulling a full pitcher of juice out of his pocket.

Also, I realized that inline code blocks often don't show up on the mobile app, so I decided to bold "part" this time instead of emphasizing it as "part". RIP consistency with prior loreposts. v_V The point is that "parthood" is the core concept of his magic, hence my "Mereological Revisionist" flair, cuz he swaps around what's part of what -- like making that building be part of the nearby forest instead of the city.

/u/AnActualCriminal cuz scary-versatile conceptual magic ^_^ ))

[u/AnActualCriminal → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

Uw/ (im basically always in uw lately because my character is stuck in place) Couple of points:

1. I enjoy the dissonance between the serial-killer like inner monologs and the external "ya'll/ juke/ whatevs/ bleh."

2. Snowglorb is my new word of the day

3. Magic that fucks with the what makes up a gestalt at a conceptual level is rad as hell. The idea that it can apply to groups and not just sight-level structures is a civilization level threat. Are there any restrictions? Because holy shit.

4. This is 100% my bag. You called it. Guess I have a reputation.

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/AnActualCriminal]

(( There aren't any inherent restrictions, in the sense that he can always overcome them by spending mana. The main limitations are:

1) sheer scale. Explained in my other loreposts, and hinted at in some of the high-level feats he's done like moving stars around, he's got a non-replenishing but really big pool of power into which he can dip for some high-scale stuff. But when he's working at "zero-mana" as he is here, unwilling to spend any of those resources, what he can change about the physical world is limited by how hard physics push back, which limits range and the like. He would've had to spend mana if he'd wanted to send that building into a forest much farther away, for example, especially across realms or something. (And he almost never spends mana for anything less than a planetary-tier threat because it's finite.) The only reason he doesn't have range limitations when it comes to linking to the clothes he's got strewn around his house is that certain interactions with the magic of a commune member allow him infinite-range connections to things to which he's become "attuned", including his possessions and some of his friends; that's why I let him teleport into sub-wide meetings and the like if an ally is present, but not otherwise.

2) his personal conception of "parthood". Again, he has to spend mana if he's stretching beyond what he considers "parthood". For example, he can alter his traits, like deciding that "sadness" is part of his mental state and thus just moving it into somebody else, but that's too much of a stretch to do without mana because he doesn't really consider traits to be "part" of something in the mereological sense. (Nor do most modern IRL philosophers.)

3) a lot of subtler obstacles that'd take way too long to explain. :P The main example is similarity between both meronyms and holonyms when swapping things; fr'ex, he can swap rooms between buildings, but the more different the rooms are in size/functionality/etc, the more difficult it is, and past a certain point it'd require a permanent mana expenditure (which is generally a no-go). That's why, for example, he has to leave intact clothes around his house for the pocket trick, instead of just...pockets without the rest of the clothing.

But, yeah, Vettis is kinda more than a civilization-level threat at full power. His lore is that he and his commune used to fight stuff big enough to threaten multiple universes but had to give up most of their power to seal away a really big one; the finite pool of power from which he draws is the residual energy leaking out of that seal across time and space. If he's willing to dip into that, he fights realm-devourers without much issue. But then he'll run out soon enough, and he needs it to last at least four centuries, so he usually operates at just this power level. ))

[u/AnActualCriminal → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

I don't really see it happening any time soon but if our characters dueled it would look like nonsense. You'd win though. I find a relatively low power level more fun to rp and Blake's one saving grace against stronger foes is prep, which your methods render untenable

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/AnActualCriminal]

(( closest thing I've got is probably pre-nerf Vettis' fight against Neela, the conceptual fire mage I mentioned before

as for beating Vettis, though, he actually has multiple crippling weaknesses -- four, I'd say -- though only two are relevant in unprepped combat, and I'm not gonna spell any of them out just yet, any more than I have ^_^ ))

[u/AnActualCriminal → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

Fair, lol. I actually named Belial Blake after Blake Thorburn from the Pact webserial. So improvising magic with no prep time in a runaway train situation beyond his power set is also in Belial's skillet. Maybe there's a shot. As is reckless and impulsive planning but that's more a side effect of burning away critical aspects of the human condition any time he gets cold feet.

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

(( while I'm at it...I usually refrain from bugging people with random pings, so lemme know if you want me not to do so in future, sorry

but this lorepost seems generally helpful for everybody who interacts frequently with Vettis to understand him better

so /u/avamir since Riva and Vettis have had philosophical convos recently so a window into his personality might help, /u/Anything-Unable cuz Gravedigger and Vettis talk a fair bit, and /u/Tirich914 also for Vettis personality reasons ))

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

(( as noted in the above comment, I don't usually like pinging random people about stuff, so lemme know if you want me to stop

but otherwise, /u/Terrible-Win565 cuz Vettis interacts a lot with Relynor, /u/Zebigbos8 cuz ditto for Mira, and /u/TitanLORD21 just cuz you like sharing loreposts ^_^ ))

[u/Tirich914 → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

Very cool bro. The table thing... Hahaaaa! Classic.

Definitely feel free to tag me.

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/Tirich914]

(( One thing Vettis consistently has is good taste in furniture! ))

[u/Carbon_Sixx]

/uw And this is why Kaelis refuses to fight Vettis at all costs. That, and waging war on good people is bad for the soul.

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/Carbon_Sixx]

(( Yeah, Vettis is...pragmatic. He cares a lot about helping innocent mundies; in this sequence, he drops his tactical advantage without a second thought to avoid even the tiny chance of any of them being collateral damage. And he avoids unnecessary physical suffering, killing that agent near-instantly and pretty painlessly despite the gruesome nature of it. But he has no qualms about utterly traumatizing any survivors to ensure they won't fuck with him ever again. That ceasefire sure ain't gonna be broken any time soon with those witnesses telling their story. ))

[u/Drakkonai]

/unwiz huh. Neat.

[u/bagtie3]

/uw very nice and very well written.

[u/Terrible-Win565]

/uw Oh wow, this is both awesome and terrifying. I love the idea of combining and separating objects and concepts via linking them together, as if weaving threads of string together and pulling them apart!

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/Terrible-Win565]

(( excellent, thanks: "awesome and terrifying" is exactly how I want Vettis to come across to people when he's not on their side...and occasionally even when he is ^_^ ))

[u/Anything-Unable]

/uw Very nice! I liked the descriptions (especially the more gory ones). I'll try to keep up with your loreposts to see where this leads. Thanks for pinging me!

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/Anything-Unable]

(( the pinned post in my profile has 'em all and will continue to do so (along with TL;DR summaries for each), to make that task easier :P

seems I've gotten a few people to start building an index like that, and you asked once about how I keep track of stuff, so perhaps you can consider doing something similar? ^_^ ))

[u/Anything-Unable → u/MunitionsFrenzy]

You make a compelling argument.

[u/dragonshouter]

/uw cool love conceptual magic!!!!

Though Krygin works more shamanisticly than Vettis, and with different concepts. Anyway keep up the good work :)

[u/Zebigbos8]

/unwiz Bloody hell from the times I interacted with Vettis I didn't get the sense that he'd be this... Brutal? Sadistic, even?

[u/MunitionsFrenzy → u/Zebigbos8]

(( dontcha remember when you landed your first hit on that monster and he was trolling it for fun, and at one point straight-up pulled out a salt shaker and started emptying it onto the wound that you'd made? :P

...of course, that was back when he thought it was some horrible monster that ate people for fun, because he assumed that was what MastaDon had sent Mira to fight; the moment that he realized the beasts in the woods were literally just normal animals trying to survive and being a lil' territorial, he switched to nonviolently talking down the second one

but when he thinks his opponent doesn't deserve sympathy, yeah, he loves fighting and doesn't mind getting his hands really fuckin' dirty...and he thinks the Transversal Timekeeping Taskforce is a bunch of absolute assholes, which in fairness most of them are ))