Pyros leapt over Toastburner B, using the safety of the bigger cat. The big dogs stopped short as they neared the Reindeer Cat, and Toastburner looked particularly menacing for a giant cat with antlers. But even before Toastburner could react, a giant meteor crushed the dogs and was shortly exploded by a lightning bolt, sending bits of ash and rock flying everywhere. To the two cats, it was if they had a chimney emptied upon them.

"Yeck, ptooey! Ah, I just took a bath!" Pyros whined as he coughed up ash. Pyros attempted to lick it off his fir. "Eck! pweey! MEerow! Nasty!" He coughed.

All in all, Ecurt thought that it had been a rather normal day. Sure, Krylo did turn him into a duck, but things like that happened all the time to him-though he did wonder who the hell made that a Mod power. In fact, aside from being utterfly ducked, he thought it was turning out well-especially since he got the High Score on DDR. Or he would have, anyway, if the stupid machine hadn't blown up in his face.

Coughing, the now pitch black duck had to flap his wings to blow the smoke away. When it cleared, he noticed that there was a message on what was left on the monitor: Come to the North Pole immediately. The enemy has laid siege to the Clause Castle. We need your help.

PS: If you don't come, we'll roast you for Christmas Dinner.

Not one to be cooked to a delicious golden brown, Ecurt immediately took off in his motorcycle, and a few moments later, he arrived where the battle was taking place. "You know, you'd think I'd notice all this fighting going on a few hundred feet from my house..."

There! he thought, spotting what looked to be a group of suspicious people fighting off guard dogs. They must be the ones who were attacking Big Red's home!

"Eeep!" yipped Mauve, dodging away from a falling meteor. She picked herself up and dusted the ash off of her hat. "Well, at least my x-wing is okay," she said, trying to look on the bright side. "That was a pretty tough landing."

At that precise moment, a stray meteor decided to smash right through the ship's windshield. It tore through the thick metal of the floor and smashed into the ground beneath it. Tendrils of smoke rose from the sizzling electric wires and scorched leather interior.

"Oh, yes, now everything is PERFECT." she said crossly. "Thank you, Michael."

There was a sound from behind her. Mauve cast a glance over her shoulder to see a lone dog that Mike and Raiden's Mega Doggie Doomsday Combo had missed. It growled and shook itself before running towards what seemed to be the weakest target in the group. Mauve frowned.

"Do you mind?! I'm in mourning over here!" she yelled. The dog leaped at her, mouth open, not caring for her loss of X-wing. Mauve pointed at it menacingly.

"Petrify!" she cried out. She leaped sideways and the dog crashed into the ground. It was frozen in a leaping position, turned into stone. Mauve nudged it with her foot.

"Stay." she commanded. "Good doggie."

"Screw you, CT. I don't clean up my messes, I don't clean up Mike's messes, and, darn your sexification, I ain't cleaning up yours. Good day sir." Phil spun on his foot in the snow, with his nose in the air. He took one step, then stopped and spun around, rushing at CT. "Also, can I have your autograph after this is done?" he said in full-on chibi, clutching a pen and notebook.

Regaining his composure, Phil noted the wonderful effect of his summon. All of the doggies had been either crushed, incinerated, or electrocuted. It wasn't important that he wasn't responsible for the latter. He also noted that his gif apprentice (with is, apparently, not as important a position as RP aprentice) and favorite foil had arrived. Since RMB was closer, Phil obviously ignored him and ran at Mauve. "Hey Mauve!" he yelled over the arctic winds (that weren't blowing very loudly), "did you get that note about how you can't make a paper hat? I was afraid it might've burned up in re-entry." He then saw what became of the last devil dog and remembered what normally happened when he messed with mages, and wracked his brain for a clever distraction in case he had to run for it.

It was a one-sided fight, really, and Ecurt could tell exactly why Santa needed his help. If his security could get their asses handed to them so easily by a group of...of...what were those people anyway? They looked familiar, but he just couldn't place...

Anyway, he knew what he had to do, and this time he would get to be the hero. And, of course, he knew exactly what he had to do.

With one motion of his arm, he gestured down to the ground. "Rise, my minions of the damned! Be reborn by the night and my might and smite my enemies tonight!"

And then, he remembered that wasn't his powers in this RP, so he went to plan B.

With one motion of his arm, he gestured up from the sky where a portal opened up in the air. Anybody who looked up probably would have been shocked to see giant cat plushies to be falling from the sky, or overwhelmed by their cuteness. "Come, my stuffed feline friends! Crush them with your magnificence!"

(OOC: They're just giant cat plushies, nothing special aside from the fact that they're big. Oh, and if you're wondering what kind of plushies they are, think of the Cat from Trigun.)

The surviving devil dogs broke. The sudden influx of multiple, powerful beings, which wiped out the vast majority of the pack, was more than the half-demon beings were ready to handle. With a mournful howl, the few living devil dogs broke away from the fight.

A final blast of red light, and the final death cry of a devil dog that fled too slowly, ended the battle. Toastburner shook his paw, removing the remains of the last devil dog from it. With a sigh, he turned and faced the group.

"Thank you," he said. "Thanks for coming. I'm sorry to pull you away from home on such short notice, and on this night, but I well and truely needed help."

Toastburner looked over the group, and smiled...in a cat-like way. "I wasn't really expecting this big a group. I just told the Naughty-Nice-Network to deliver my message to whatever NPFers were at hand...I didn't know the NNN had you guys under such a close watch...some of you must of been borderline" TB said with a small laugh.

The glare of the others, standing outside in the artic blizzard, made him cut to the chase. "Okay...here's the deal: As it turns out, there are forces in the world who don't like Santa Claus at all. These are generally beings who thrive off of darker human emotions: despire, fear, hatred, and the like. Needless to say, Santa's yearly trip negates many of these emotions...and as such, weakness the other beings."

TB sighed. "I was hired as a bodyguard for Santa. It was suppose to be a easy job...fight off a few demons here and there, nothing big. It had gotten to the point that the beings...demons, devils, whatever you want to call 'em...made only a token effort to stop Santa.

"Only this time...it was more than a token effort. More than a few sorties on the flight. They came down on us before we even left his castle...which was the odd thing in the first place. Santa's place is hidden by powerful magics...it has been for centuries. Truthfully...I was caught off guard...and I was the only combatant inside the castle."

Toastburner B shook his head, as if to sort out bad memories. "There were too many. They poured over the wall, and took the courtyard in seconds. I fought a running battle through the workshop...but I couldn't kill enough to slow them down. These," Toastburner said, lifting a paw at the devil dogs, "are but the least of them.

"The last thing I was able to do was to pass the message along the NNN, grab the dust that allowed me to do that," TB said, pointing that the still glowing ice mound, "and run with my hide intact. Truth be told...I don't even know if Santa is still alive."

Toastburner took a deep breath, and looked at the group. "Questions? Comments? Concerns? Now's the time to air them. The stage is to head over to the castle. Like I said, it's location is hidden. Once you see it, you are in this for the duration. If you want to leave, now is the time to do it. We'll have to get over the walls...which are certainly defended now."

Toastburner sat in the snow, his cloak billowing in the wind, and waited to see if anyone had any comments.

"Just an urchin livin' under the street. I'm a hard case that's tough to beat. I'm your charity case. So buy me somethin' to eat. I'll pay you at another time. Take it to the end of the line" the computer speakers blared as Krylo stood infront of them, sans shirt, moving through combat forms fluidly, as he did nightly before bed... for about fifteen minutes. He was really too lazy to do much more.

"Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green, and the girls are pretty. Take me home!" the chorus played, and Krylo sang along the first time but, the second played back a bit odd: "Take me down to the North Pole where Santa needs help, and elves need pity! Please come to the North Pole immediately!" It didn't even fit with the music. At all.

"...The hell?" Krylo wondered outloud as he stopped moving and turned to stare at his computer moniter. Those OBVIOUSLY weren't the words, but it couldn't be serious... or at least that's what he thought until his scrolling marque screensaver came up. Krylo's eyebrow rose in disbelief as he read, "Please come to the North Pole immediately. Santa's Castle has been taken by unknown dark force. Need help in freeing St. Nick before midnight. When you reach the North Pole, look for a signal...you'll know it when you see it.

Toastburner"

The words scrolled across the screen about three times before his eyebrow drooped back down to normal and he reached over to shut off the moniter, shaking his head. "The hell is this all about? Santa? And why would Toast be bugging m..." he trailed off as he looked toward his television only to see the same message playing.

"Jesus! Fine, but I hope you have some cash, I don't work for free..." Krylo shouted, and then grumbled as he slipped back into his shirt, and slid his duster over his shoulders in one fluid motion. The, full, holsters for his various guns, sown onto his coat, thudded against his torso reassuringly, as did the various packs of ammo he kept for all of them. He slipped his hands into a pair of black leather gloves, and flexed his fingers, making sure his knuckles were resting in the powdered lead 'padding' perfectly before grabbing his black, steel toed, combat boots and lacing them up.

The look was completed as he grabbed a pair of dark sunglasses and slid them over his face, officially making him look 'over done'. The only thing saving him from being mistaken for a Neo impersonator was the fact that he happened to be wearing a white shirt instead of something else in black. Well, that and the fact that his face wasn't constantly locked in a 'goddamn, I'm a dipshit,' expression like Keanu Reeves.

A razor thin cellphone was pulled from one of his pockets and flipped open along the path to his ear.

"KP," he spoke into it, and the phone dialed automatically, within moments connecting him to Kneumatic Pnight.

"Eh... what?" KP voice came through the receiver, rather unenthusiastically.

"Send me to the North Pole," Krylo said as he shifted his weight, taking on a rather impatient looking stance.

"...You too? Meh. Whatever," the staticy voice returned as a white light enveloped Krylo.
---
Almost instantly Krylo appeared in the North Pole surrounded by a pillar of light, that lasted only a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, he also appeared directly in the path of one of Phil's or Mike's, depending on whether you wanted to blame the caster or the summoner, meteors, which, as it happened, was only about a foot away from his head.

Obviously, impact with a hunk of rock moving so fast that it's actually ignited into flame is rarely good for one's cranial resilience. In fact it tended to reduce one's head to mush, and Krylo's head was no exception. Indeed, not only was his head reduced to mush, but it was reduced to mush in a horrible explosion of blood, littering grey matter and flaming bits of skull for ten feet in every direction.

Amazingly, however, his body staggered about for a few seconds after that. It may have staggered longer, if not for the fact that some genius had ALSO decided to call down indiscriminate lightning bolts of doom, one of which just so happened to strike the staggering headless corpse right in the torso.

Krylo's body was thrown directly down onto the ground twitching for a second or so, before standing up, blood gurgling up out of its windpipe noisily. A second or so later and anyone watching could see his spinal cord begin to grow back and then some of his neck reformed around it. The noises, at this point, became louder, like some sort of horrible indistinguishable yelling, as the body bent over and its lower jaw began to form, followed by the upper. Once there was an upper jaw the yelling was no longer indistinguishable, but rather came out in a series of curses, "FUCK, CUNT, SHIT, ASS, MOTHERFUCKING OUCH, GODDAMNIT, JESUS FUCKING ARRGH, THAT FUCKING HURTS, GODDAMN SONOFABITCH, JESUS FUCK CHRIST ON A FUCKING JESUS POGO STICK WHAT THE FUCK IS FUCKING WRONG WITH THIS CUNT FUCKING SHIT," etc. etc. until his head was completely healed, and even a few seconds after that, with his hands grasping his newly recreated head like someone with a sudden migraine might do.

In fact, the screaming was only muffled by the fact that a giant cat plushie fell on top of him with a resounding 'THWUMP!', muffling the noise completely.

A second or so later, however, more 'thwumps' could be heard as bullets ripped through the otherside of the giant stuffed Kuroneko, the gun shots muffled by the plushie much like Krylo's screaming had been, followed by Krylo crawling out of the hole he had made, while reloading his revolver.

"Goddamnit, someone is going to fucking pay for THIS bullshit!" he shouted, just in time to seem like he was responding to Toastburner, as he reached up, instinctively, to pull off his sunglasses, only to remember they had been smashed along with his head, "And my goddamn glasses!"

As the obscenities flew, CheshireThief perked his ears up.

"I know those flavorful words anywhere!"

He sprinted across the battlefield and leapt into the air.

"KRYLO! IT'S BEEN SO LONG, MAN!"

With a loud "Oomph," CheshireThief landed squarely on Krylo's chest, knocking him to the ground. Straddling over the man, CheshireThief grinned as he pulled out his Ibanez and started playing a bass groove, albeit an octave high. He was momentarily interrupted as a cat plushie landed on the guitar, but he knocked it to the ground. He began purring to the music. To anyone that was watching, they could all but swear the words "Fan Service" appeared in the air above the specatcle with a neon glow.

Garud shook his head and put his mature, silent, badass, ignorent look on and muttered "Whatever".
Turning to TB, he asked,

"What kind of demons are we up against? Chaos? Nether? Kappa?"

Garud closed his eyes, and tried to visualise the next demon on his lips. He hoped that there would not be any of those inside. Their very presence would bowl anybody over. They took entire armies to even scratch and had ver few weaknesses.

"We aren't fighting Omega demons are we?"

The demon slayer braced himself for the answer.

Raiden floated back down to the ground and surveyed the destruction his lightning had caused.

"Another day, another dollar."

He was happy. He was being violent, and for all he knew, he was getting 'Good Boy' credits on Santa's list for it. If they managed to pull this off, he could expect some kick-ass presents under the tree the next morning. Hopefully something of the 360* variety.

Raiden looked down to see Krylo being straddled by CT.

"Damn Krylo. What truck ran you over?"