okay, attempt number two at posting my voct 2 entry. this one should stay posted. ^^



Kemthis pressed himself harder against the wall as he watched. He had made so many preparations and been so careful. For twenty minutes he had evaded his opponent for this and now he was about to spring the trap. His red dragonoid face being held deep in the shadows, his golden eyes still glinted slightly in the dim light. The four tentacles sprouting just under the wings from his back held him anchored in the darkness of one of the obsidian pillars.
His friend Tailsie had pleaded and bagged for him to play this game. Kemthis, not being much of a gamer, had denied the request till it had become clear it would not end till he did. Now he had gotten himself stuck in here somehow. He had been dragged off by the aforementioned friend after an announcement about their predicament and the offered restitution. The irony had been that he had made it past the preliminaries and his overly enthusiastic friend had not. After a long conversation and much halfhearted agreement, Kemthis had agreed to try and finish the tournament.
Normally, Kemthis preferred to talk through his battles, but he didn’t see how that would work in this situation. The only way out was for someone to get eaten and, after all, no one was really getting hurt. What harm could it do if he let his wits take care of these battles for him instead of his heart?
“If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right.” he had told Tailsie while boarding the tram to the event. “Expect me to come back with a full belly.” The parting words were said out of friendship and he intended to hold true to them. There was only one way out of every match and he hated the idea of getting eaten himself. He was going to play it safe and wear them down first. Then they’d have no chance of escaping him.
Kemthis had done just as he’d planned and his opponents were now entering his magical minefield he’d prepared for them. The dragon like chimera watched and waited as the two of them made their advance. In front an almost pure white cat boy hopped from stone to stone with fluttering wings. A black circular mark that almost could have been a melted on him it was so black, covered the right upper portion of the anthropomorphic feline’s face. Trailing behind him a portly orange and white tabby cat moved spritely along. The two of them were talking back and forth in muttered tones he could barely hear, let alone understand.
“Were could this guy be Lucas?” Mizuhiro asked in exasperation as he leapt to the next pillar. “I thought this was supposed to be a fight, not hide and seek!”
Lucas was about to reply with something along the lines of how everyone fought differently, when Kemthis’s first trap was sprung. The two watched as a field of red and blue runes of all shapes and sizes spread from under the catboy’s landing feet. They flowed to the edge of the surface before halting their progress and fading slightly in brightness. He felt himself pulled to the ground as if gravity demanded he halt his progress.
Lucas made to jump to help but Mizuhiro was quick to shout for him to stop. “You can’t! It’s the first blow and you’re stuck till I can summon you. I don’t want a kitty pancake if you’d fallen.”
“At least he can only sneak up to close on us Neko.” Lucas said as he looked around for the impending attacker.
The catboy wasn’t taking any chances and getting out of this as soon as he could. While trapped in this spell he was at too much of a disadvantage. He laid his paw not holding a staff of light against the obsidian face beneath him. Using his water and fire magic he sent a hair thin line of erupting steam down into the rock, diagonally and toward the edge. A moment later it gave way with an ear shattering cracking noise and the circle of rules was destroyed. The sliding slab of black stone slid into the pillar Lucas stood upon and rested there.
As the tabby cat was asking if his friend was okay, the chimera was finishing etching a single rune with his claw in the dark wall he rested against. As it sealed, his head sank into the stone and came up from just such material directly behind Lucas. It had yet to reach a height were Mizuhiro could see it and he was already summoning him. As he finished the call for his friend, the tips of the claws came into view. He tried to shout out a warning, but could do little more than yelp before the tabby was pulled down into the rock. He scrambled up to try and catch his outstretched paws. His finger tips fell just a few inches short before the pool of blackness the threat had emerged from, disappeared.
When Kemthis pulled the house cat from the hole, he did not risk facing it or even letting it fully see who had done this to him. He was flung to the depths of the island toward flaming rivers of slowly pulsing lava and magma. A moment later he dislodged himself from the wall and sprang off of it to the next tower over, a freely flowing zit of the earth. He spiraled upward around it with exotic hand motions that left streams of light trailing in the air.
Lucas recovered his wits about half way down. He forced himself to calm to the point where he could concentrate. His mind reaching its center, the feline’s legs went to its side, they started to fuse and elongate till they resembled the wings of a glider. Catching the thermal heat of the Earth’s blood below, he flew as fast as he could back up the sides of the pillars. A flash of red scales had been all he had seen, but it would be enough to find Neko’s opponent. As he reached the open air again, he saw the almost dragon nearing the completion of his spell. A webbed dome of red and blue light surrounded the top for the spout.
Mizuhiro was casting a spell of his own and it looked to be quite a strong water spell at that. Steam billowed around him as showering beads of hydration fell on the hot rock all around. Above him a growing sphere ebbed and churned with its growth. As he saw Kemthis reach the end of his spell with the dwarven volcano, a shaft at least a foot thick shot out from the center of the aquatic ball. It hurdled toward the chimera with astonishing speed. As it made its advance, Lucas made the wise choice of veering away before such levels of heat and cold could mix.
Seeing what was going to happen, the rune mage shouted out a short sentence that seemed to ring in more than the air. It pulsed in the very fabric of everything around them. Distance seemed to mean nothing and neither did the roar of the water overhead, the catboy could hear every unknowable word in perfect clarity. At the same time, Kemthis’s fingers etched something in the air over the current hemisphere of his magic. He had been planning to use this as a turret of sorts, but what he could do with both attacks was far more effective.
When the water struck his magic, the chimera pulled it together and waited to see if his half alchemical creation would work. The water passed into his creation and a vicious tearing of earth could be heard. A split second later the gate he had opened inside the dome and the one he had made under the surface of the rock below Mizuhiro was filled.
The obsidian below the anthro feline exploded upward with the force of shrapnel and several pieces drove their way into him. He heard the warning sound of his life counter taking a major hit and was barely able to register it. His body was being thrown into the air with the scalding steam that had followed after the exploding rock. By the time he was able to right his body and fly, he had to be at least two hundred feet in the air. Below he could only see the dot of his opponent and it looked like he was already weaving another spell.
Luckily for Lucas, Kemthis had become fully distracted by both the concentration needed for his spells and his focus on the tabby cat’s friend. He landed on the edge of another pillar, than changed his form into a miniature cannon with its fuse lit. It was aimed at the section of the small magma chute facing the enemy. A moment later the fuse ignited the powder and a roaring cannonball impacted fire bleeding surface. The section of rock just below Kemthis exploded outward and caught him in the wing. His spells shattered as he was knocked back onto the center of the stone column behind his former location.
The chimera cried out in pain, surprise, and anger. He’d thought he had dealt with the cat, now it was apparently sitting on the rim of a mesa not too far off with a smug look on his muzzle. As he rolled over on to his front he started to grow in size and the vain look of the tabby disappeared. He was doing it at an incredible pace and was the length of the football field sized earthen pedestal in no more than five seconds. He was reaching out one of his now massive claws for the mostly terrified kitty.
Lucas fled as fast as he could, but the creature that had become a giant had too fast and far of a reach. The monstrous grip he was in far exceeded what the small cat could defend against. Before he could tell what was happening, he felt himself move rapidly. A few seconds later he was tossed viciously into the back of the giant’s throat. As he impacted against the wall of it, he felt parts of his body give way and he fell into a state of semi-consciousness. The next moment he was being swallowed and knew nothing else from that island of his own experience.
Mizuhiro had rushed down to help as soon as he saw his Lucas in trouble. His wings had carried him fast enough to save him, but he had not expected the segmented tentacles of the beast to bat him out of the air before ensnaring him in a coiling grip. They crushed him with amazing force and made it impossible to even think over the pain. He felt his bones wanting to break, bending, but they hovered at the edge of their threshold.
As the anthro feline was just getting enough of his mind together to fight back, he too felt himself thrown. He nearly passed out from the speed of his movement before having the light around him snuffed out by snapping jaws. He had been spinning too fast to see anything but swirls of color before he was being sandwiched between the roof of a mouth and a tongue. With not a seconds hesitation, Kemthis threw his head back and swallowed hard. The cat boy was shoved down his throat and into the depths of his stomach. Mizuhiro struggled as the throat around him pressed hard and dragged at his body. He could feel no pain, but now it seemed impossible to breathe regardless. The slime covered walls gave nothing to brace against and to try and catch his breath as he descended. Before making it half way down, the second feline had made its way to the land of unconsciousness.
With a sigh and release of his rage, the chimera began to shrink back to his normal size. Just before he reached it, he looked up at the sound of large propeller burdened motors. From out of the clouds was emerging a zeppelin that could have rivaled the Hindenburg for size. On either side of the cab hung two engines that stood at least five stories tall. It was lowering a small platform and announcing his success.
Kemthis looked around at the destruction of the terrain around him and didn’t feel very successful. What he hadn’t told Tailsie was that he was also doing this to become better at controlling his temper. If he could make it through a whole match without losing control, he’d give up on the next one after it.
As the platform raised him into the airship he thought to himself, “I’m an intellectual, an intellectual can control his temper…can’t he?”