Tarrins body begain to glow, a soft green tinged glow that threw colour back into the cavern. Fireflys had the power to cause their abdomin to glow with such a light, Tarrin taking part of a transformation now gaive his skin the same power hopefully it would be enough to give the NPFer's the light they needed, Either that or he just made himself the best target around.

Later he would think about his actions a decide that the latter was more of a deffinate, for now however the Hydras were starting to move towards him again.
A few of them were taken up by some weird mix of hydra/girl that was eating them by the droves... the fact that it wasen't attacking him gave Tarrin pause to not bother it and turned his attention to the serpents that now had lunged at him.

OOC: Well, this is what you get when I don't wish to delay things any more after my own busy-ness and I go with the first crazy idea I come up with. Blame Futurama. Windmills, hah! As you may have noticed, these things all have the fact in common they have nothing directly to do with a character's powers and everything to do with questionable logic. Er, the bad kind of questionable logic. Not the good kind. Most definately not.

In the wake of the various events after Garud inexplicably decided to do whatever you call the reverse of shedding light on a situation, the admixture of stern Law imbuing the chamber and the seething Chaos seeking to boil up from underneath had a very strange effect indeed. Or at least that's probably what caused it.

Inbred had found that slowing down while trying to get up a pillar by momentum alone was a very bad idea. Progress slowed to a crawl, he scrapped the Wind Edge along the pillar in front of him, trying to create sparks so that he could see a little better, and so that he could start cutting through the vines. But, some other nebulous presence was at work.

"SPARKS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!" it boomed. While they may look dramatic, they are not very good at lighting a place up. Inbred felt a massive impact, like some cosmic force smacking him on the back of the head. While not life threatening, its stunning effect meant the vines creeping up around him. They were hardly coming from just in front of him after all. Thorny creepers snagged at him, wrapping about limbs and trying to pull the man-chocobo more fully into their jagged embrace.

Hawk do not believe he was having much in the way of problems. He even suggested a suggestion. Sure it was darker, but he had the eyes of a hawk and hawks have very good eyesight. So he could see in darkness, right?

"HAWK EYES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!" An invisible force flattened him into the soft sand, a reasonable sized concavity about him. Hawks are daylight hunters for a reason. The intangible presence seemed to hesitate, and then hit the bird again for something about prisms that may or may not have happened. The overall effect was much like a rather fat man sitting on a chicken. Thankfully the sand was fairly loose.

Garud had come to the realisation that his darkness was not welcome, and so he pulled it back into an orb of ominious darkness in his hand. The demon slayer believed that taking the darkness away would replace it with some strange, unnatural light that repelled the sunlight.

"LIGHT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!" Some manner of invisible, cosmic sucker punch caught Garud, feeling much like getting hit in the gut with the universe.

Flare had lit the area around her with her fiery shield, believing the heat would stop mindless vines growing towards her.

"VINES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!" the voice thundered. It was like a hammer hitting a nail. Flare was the nail. And the hammer was invisible. Possibly because of quantum. In other words, it was almost nothing like a hammer and a nail. Flare found herself somewhat concussed and buried up to her neck in the sand, having been driven into it like a tent-peg by a sharp blow to the noggin.

Seeing part of this spectacle despite the poor visibility and most definately hearing it, Arhra spoke to herself, "Crap. They've pissed off the universe." Considering what she was, she winced, then opened an eye, surprised to find it didn't come for her. "Must be afraid of me." she gleefully concluded. Just in case, she tried to bury her perpetual motion machine before remembering she didn't have one. Instead she was trying to kick sand over a snake, a bulge moving up its throat as it prepared to cough up a snake basket.

Hydra was off gulping down snakes some distance away, just a shadow in a dense path of the sand storm. Arhra would have to defend herself on her own. Face rather expressionless, she grabbed it by the throat. The snake made funny hissing noises as it was forced to swallow the expanding lump of a snake basket again.

Needing something to amuse her while she sat on the sidelines, Arhra carefully twisted the snake into a knot, still able to breath, but not able to bring up anything. She dropped it, seeing the basket had reached about its full size, making a rather large bulge in the snake's profile and then sat on it like a cushion, back into working on cat's cradle, important magical spell version.

Thankfully, there wasn't really any danger for her to worry about here. A shoot pushed out of the shifting sand a metre or so away. Arhra ignored it - she'd said there was no danger for her to worry about and there damn well was going to be no danger for her to worry about.

While Syttulg believed he was in front of the Caryatid, he was mistaken, as evidenced by the fact it wasn't killing him. 'Twas merely one of the inanimate statues scattered about the place. It showed no sign of becoming animate any time in the near future.

The Caryatid hadn't moved at all. The flurries of sand, all the other moving objects, the expectation that she would have moved and the fact she was the same temperature as her surroundings had definately complicated things. Seeing the Caryatid would have cleared up quite a few mysteries.

She crouched at the top of the stony pinnacle, drawing power into her out of the earth and recuperating from Skyshot's Harm spell. Her viny hair, formerly hacked off short facing Skyshot, now a luxurious mane. It carpeted the sheer sides of the pillar, had sought to entangle Inbred in its thorny grasp and its lengths vanished into the sands.

The Caryatid was an intelligent foe, and had developed two plans, one had been already in motion and a second had been developed to take advantage of the disarray that Garud's actions had caused. As the ground had shifted, she had been making things ready. Tentacular vines, barbed with wicked thorns, burst out of the sand and began lashing and grabbing at the NPFers.

OOC: As you can probably guess, the people closest to the pinnacle would be worst affected - less distance the vines had to grow. Given the number of pyromaniacs we seem to have, I should remind people that a mass of vines does not burst into flames like a mass of oil soaked rags gummed together with tar.

IC didn't need the sparks since Garud got rid of the darkness, but he now had another problem. The vines had managed to wrap him up, so he was stuck, and being poked by the thorns. So he pulled his Wind Edge free, grabbed a vine, and stripped it. Cutting at the vines would take forever, but if he was correct, she was the one growing them.

So he grabbed the thornless vine, and pulled down hard, using the pain of the other vines as motivation to get the Caryatid off her high place and down with him.

As the vines came towards him, Syttulg tried to use his power to psychicly talk with plants before he remembered that he didn't have that power, and simply settled for shifting his arms into whirling blades of doom. Now, this may seem counter to his status as part-plant, but to be honest, these plants were competitors. The more other plants there were, the less sunlight there was for him, the less water there was for him, the less minerals there were for him, and most important, the less love from the Caryatid there was for him. He got to work on weedwacking, stopping from time to time to eat the hacked vines to get his energy back up.

In the utter chaos following the Caryatid's ascent to the pinnacle of stone, Mauve had been first overlooked and then completely forgotten by the hydras and whatnot. Probably because she hadn't DONE anything worth paying attention to. That didn't particularly bother Mauve; it meant she had less things to worry about. Now all she had to look out for was the wind and the sand and the lasers and the vines and the ever-present threat of being teamkilled.

The mage ran forward, slicing through one of the aforementioned vines with her knives. There had to be SOMETHING she could do; she had been sitting around doing practically nothing for most of the fight. And that just wasn't her style.

She supposed she should do something about the plants that were currently trying to impail her with thorns or trap her in vines. Slicing them in half worked well enough in the short term, but it was slow going and wasn't always easy to do. So, Mauve came up with an Idea.

If the Laws of the Universe were becoming involved, then it would stand to reason that these plants would follow some form of said laws, since no disembodied voices had yet shown up to say "PLANTS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!!" And if Mauve knew anything about plants-- not that she knew too much, mind you, as gardening wasn't her hobby of choice-- it was that plants and drastic temperature changes didn't mix.

While she had been pondering this, the vines had moved in closer, forming a lopsided circle around the mage. She sighed. Meh, it couldn't hurt to try it.

"Deep freeze," she said, and huge chunks of ice materialized in the air above the circle of vines. Mauve nodded, and the ice fell down onto the vines, crushing and freezing them.

The sand around the plants was hot, and so some of the ice had already begun to melt. That's when she realized that plants plus water equals happy plants.

"Crap," she sighed. "Oh well, forget that plan, then." She held up a hand. There was one good thing about getting the plants wet...

"Thundaga!!" It meant they would conduct electricity well. Mauve briefly wondered if the electicity would affect the roots of the plant, which might kill the whole thing. She readied another volley of lightning.

"Wait, so what just happened?" Steel asked, confused. Recent history had just been retconed several times in quick succession, and that's going to have an effect on someone who experiences time differently from your average human being.

"Ok, so, no encapsulating darkness or anti-light means..." He muttered, brain catching up, "Those lasers should be-" A sun beam zoomed past him, just missing setting him on fire again. "Damnit!"

Ok, there has to be something I can do, right? What do we need?
Defeat the cary... how do you pronounce that? I've heard it, I've even said it a few times, but I'm still not-
Focus! How do we defeat her/it?
Right now the best bet would be throwing Skyshot.
And that wont work because...?
Rei can't see the... you know... through the sand storm.
So I can...?
Get rid of the sandstorm.
And how do I do that?
Can't. Waaaay beyond my powers at the mo'.
Right. So what else?
Rei mentioned she could see in other ways. I'm assuming infrared’s in there somewhere.
Right. And?
Skyshot cooled down the area. Actually it is rather chilly...
Focus. The ca... her body wont produce heat will it?
Nope.
So to hit her...
We'd need to heat her up!
And how can we do that?
Fire?
I don't have any fire. Unless you count my cape.
Which was...
Set on fire by a sun laser!
One of which just passed me. Aha!

Steel burst into a run. Catching up with the beam didn't take long, it hadn't gone anywhere. Quickly he froze about a meter of pure, undiluted death beam and swiveled it around, aiming at the top of the pillar. It probably wouldn't hit. But when at first you don't succeed... He froze another section and aimed again, this time a little higher ant to the left. Repeating the process he moved after the sun beam, filling the sand cloud, and hopefully the caryatid, with laser.

"THAT'S IT" Tarrin had done his utmost to defend himself and to a lesser degree Arhra, but snakes, lazer beams, big rocks and now vines, he had had just about enough.

Tarrin wasn't the type to get mad infact it took quiet alot to make him so, but with everything happening and the fact his arm hurt from the laser that hit him earlier he was not a happy chappy.
Turning his back from the oncoming serpents he begain to charge at the Caryatid, as he closed the gap he changed and in his stead charging across the sand was a large and very pissed off Silverbacked gorrila.

Once again, Hawk was in trouble (so what else is new?). Being temporarily dazed and then surrounded by killer plants while ones powers of flying away flight were non-existant tended to have that effect. Abandoning his attempt to disrupt the sand vortex surrounding the pillar upon which their foe stood, he attempted to make a swift retreat tactical withrawal and come up with a new plan of attack.

Unfortunately, the aformentioned killer plants were between him and freedom from this madhouse safety. A tentacle swung at him and the thorny monstrosity barely missed taking his head off as he ducked beneath its swing. A second vine followed the first, this one attempting to crush him under its bulbus, thorn covered end. Hawk threw himself forward as it smacked into the sand where he had been but a second earlier. Hawk wasn't agile enough on the ground for this kind of thing and as he tried to get back up onto his feet, the ominous shadow of the tentacle loomed over him once more. Hawk saw it and knew it was over. He was out of breath. His wings ached from the exertion of trying hopelesly to disrupt the vortex with his gales. He was battered and bruised from a variety of injuries (crashing headlong into a tree, falling out of the air at high speed, being dropped to the floor by Steel, being punched by Steel and then smacked around by the universe itself). Hawk often prided himself on being able to take this sort of thing, but it was all of a sudden beginning to take its toll.

He closed his eyes wearily as he heard, very faintly, the swoosh of his oncoming doom above him.

As soon as I was recovered slightly, I shook my head, and tried my hardest to force my way out. "Damnit! I was NOT going to do anything to your precious vines you stupid construct!" I yelled at the voice, my eyes now a firey red. "Caryatid, listen to me. What these people are trying to do is save this world, and you are impeading in their progress. If you kill them here, then this world, along with you, will be destroyed. None shall be spared, regardless of them being on the side of Law or Chaos. The people arn't just doing it for themselves, or for the Forces of Chaos. They're doing for everyone."

But the sound of approaching doom does NOT sound like that of a vine swooshing down to kill you. Instead, it sounds strangely familiar. It sounds a bit like this:

"Vvvvvvvvmmmmmmmm".

As Hawk closed his eyes and anticipated the end, he experianced,

LOST STYLE FLASHBACK TWO...

The two men stared each other down warily, each one daring the other to move. Each held a simple sword in his hand, ancient and deadly. It was the older who struck first. Hawk parried the attack and the second which immediately followed AND the third after that, before he was finally able to go on the offensive. An observer of this duel would easily tell you that the older warrior was clearly the superior swordsman. He moved and struck without thinking, his abilities pure reflex. Nether the less, the younger man was more than capable of holding his own.

The battle continued in this vein for some time, each combatant countering the other before they too, were countered. At one point the blades became locked together, as the two men fought with pure strength against the other. Hawk made the risky maneouver that broke the lock, twisting his blade away while exposing an opening for his enemy. But the move had also thrown his foe slightly off-balance, and without wasting time or giving his opponent the chance to strike, Hawk whipped the blade back around and caught the other mans arm, drawing blood. A cry of pain (or was it fury?) came from the wounded as he returned the assault upon Hawk with a swipe so forceful that the blade was flung from Hawks hand. Before he could react, Hawk was thrown to the ground, a blade pointed at his throat.

"You're getting better, but you still make stupid mistakes", Cort (the older) said, "but it has been a long time since someone drew MY blood first, in practice!"

He withdrew the blade from Hawks throat. "You may yet become a somewhat competant warrior!", Cort laughed cruelly.

Hawk stood and each of them bowed. "Thank you teacher", Hawk replied without emotion.

"Now get out of my sight before I draw YOUR blood!"

Hawk turned and obeyed without arguing and once outside of the Training Arena the young man who had been quietly watching this "lesson" joined him.

"That was brilliant Hawk!", his good friend Marcus said to him, "I've not seen Cort lose first blood to a student before! We need to go and celebrate!" Marcus was jumping for joy and laughing.

Hawk smiled at his friend. "Best idea I've heard all day".

Six weeks later, Marcus was dead and Hawks life changed forever...

LOST STYLE FLASHBACK TWO...

Vvvvvvvvmmmmmmmm!

As Hawk returned to the present, he realised something... he wasn't dead! Opening his eyes cautiously, he looked around to see that the vine that had been about to crush him was lying to the side, severed by a stray sun laser. It seemed the universe was letting him off the hook this time.

"Ah, how fortunate!"

Then he realised, Fate ITSELF had granted him this good fortune, so he must use it wisely. Pushing through the pain and exhaustion he continued on his way, striking at vines as they sprung up out of the sand around him. Air wasn't the most effective element against plants, but it knocked them back far enough to allow passage through the sandstorm.

And so it was that he came upon REI, who was standing around looking slightly lost.

"Let's end this already!"

With all his remaining strength, Hawk summoned up all the power he could and channeled it into another gale attack, directed it toward the Caryatid and unleashed the pure power of the wind. Another tunnel of air opened up in the storm, bringing the Caryatid into view.

"Attack now, before it's too late!" Hawk looked at REI, hopeing she would get the message."You know, we've REALLY got to work on our communication skills!"