It floated uncomfortably squeaking as it didn't like this at all. ~rats not for fly.... rats for in ground...~

As jack works on the mandala he can see it start to brake down slowly as he builds it, little imperfections forming as it's made. It's not much but as he works it becomes noticeable, like a game of telephone the fractal patterns spread more flaws. The order nails help maintain them but they are not enough. Grand scale magic would likely take more than Jack alone and this place's Bias for entropy is just too strong. He could reinforce an area and protect it from entropy for some time but entropy would brake down his reinforcements and it would return to the way it was given time.

From the looks of things this place use to be a technological wonder, what ever happened here to cause such an exstreame entropic bias must have been devastatingly powerful and likely the cause of what ever apocalypse befell them.

Even Jacks flight spells were being eaten away at and he could tell they wouldn't last forever.

However people lived here, and if the battle on the plateau was any sign maybe even thrived here, so the entropy wasn't choking out life... just cutting it a tad short. Stella or the helmet would estimate people would live 60~80% as long as they should depending on where they lived.

Also every time he looked at the plateau his helmet would ping it with a mark, If he looked a legend to see what the mark was it said it was for "re-spawn points".

“Come here little one, we’re going down,” Jack says when he notices the effects of entropy on the mandala and goes around to collect his nails. He’d probably have to start much smaller and make the Entropy enforce it, but he doesn’t have the skills for that particular Order magic, yet. He’d never learned that from Mr. Magehammer.

Turning down toward the ground, he teleports to the ground so that he can drop and renew the magic keeping him aloft.

“So, who should we approach? I imagine we should find out what is happening here and see if there is anything to learn. I’m not feeling any pull, so there must not be any other versers,” he is talking aloud to the rat, but mostly just to himself.

The city they landed in was in ruin, the large pit created by the collapsed roof didn't help. Near the pit there was a city center where there was no entropy imbalance at all... it was a small park with a statue of an anthropomorphic ferret (at least you think that is what it is, it's rather rusted and worn apparently it wasn't always protected from the entropy) in it and a a small metal tree with shimmering metal leaves, merely a sapping. The park also had a 3 meter wide, 1 millimeter 'deep', vertical pool of liquid metal floating just off the ground near one edge of it. Oddly the helmet showed a level to the tree, however it was glitched, and marked the pool with a circle with a dot in it over top of it. Nothing Jack had could make sense of the tree or the pool. Though the tree seamed to be orderly while it's leaves where full of chaos, and the pool seamed to be quite full of order.  The anti-entropic affect seams to be coming from the pool of metal and don't have a very large range to it.

There was a path of utter destruction leading away from the pit up into the city, what ever had come out of the pit had did quite some damage to the city and must have been quite large. Least the size of your classical dragon in a story a true monster. It seamed to grow bored of trashing a dead city though and had headed off to the highway in the distance where it seamed to have damaged something if the billowing smoke was any sign.

The rat pointed in the path of destruction ~went that way~
This message was last edited by the player at 23:21, Thu 21 Apr 2022.

Turning into a massive cartoon Order dragon of his own, Jack starts to head in the path the destroyer has left behind, exhaling breaths of cold Order all over the place as he goes. Trying to contradict the actions of the creature it has decided to follow for the time being.

“Let’s see how this works,” he says to the rat as he trundles along.

The rat scrambles up onto Jacks back, not particularly a fan of the cold ground Jack leaves behind.

He soon comes up on the smell of burning diesel fuel and a woman among the wreckage of several vehicles trying to repair something that looks like a cross between a neojapanise race car and an off road madmaxian war-car. Cursing up a storm as she works on it pealing away and kicking to the side damaged panels of armor to get to the damaged machine parts underneath. All the other vehicles seam to have dead bodies or are abandoned, she's put the fire out on her's and is trying to fix it... or at least see whats salvageable.

When she see's you coming along breathing fire all over the place she pulls out what looks like a gun of some sorts.... one cobbled together from a mixture of high tech parts and scrap laying around. "Oooooohhh fuck no. You best best turning around with that shite right the fuck now. Bad enough some 30 foot tall mecha-ratzilla comes through here trashing our race, but my zoommies leaving me behind, and now your fat scally ass.... you so much as look funny at my baby and I will blow your god damn eyes out the back of your fucking head!!!" She reaches pulling what looks like the kinda junk-punk grenades the girl on Arcane makes from a pouch too as she steps away from her vehicle.

Shrinking his size down to a more viable humanoid one, Jack turns into a person and gently reaches back and puts the rat down on the ground beside him. “I was just trying to fix things. Should I go and slay the ‘mecha-ratzilla’?” he asks, trying to think of some way to help this situation for these people.

She looks over Jacks and laughs a little "A Charmer like you? I...." She shakes her head putting her weapons way as she goes back to work "I can't say I've known many from Charm to be ones for fightin' but sure take you shot... least your not a toy of some kind so you got that going for you... but if your color starts to fad-" She blinks realizing what she said. "I would paint some color on you, if it starts to go all gray scale on ya' then ya' know your in trouble out here. More conseptials like you need to watch out where the Instantiator system is all buggered. It can't support no fiddly diddly drawing if the nanites start shorting out yah in a dead zone..... that happens best hope your backup is fresh."

Something tells Jack that she is using Charm as a proper noun and charmer as a person related to that proper noun.

She sighs and goes back to work on her vehical. "I superpose some gridshamans will get together and do something about it eventually, or someone from the table will see it as good old fun and games to smash it to pieces.... but in the meantime we are stuck with it.  I swear if this is part of some art war or some art project I'm going to find who did it and tie them to the underside of my rig next race.....  fuck might have to kill'em a few times.  Fucking assholes think that just because Down is 'a right fucking trash heap' it's real good fucking fun to unleash a god damn kaiju or two!" She yells up into the sky at no one in paticular "Well this right fucking trash heap is some peoples homes you right ass!!!!"

“I can paint myself,” Jack tells her with a smile and listens to her as she mumbles her explanation of what is happening her. “What is a ‘Charm’?” he asks, just for his knowledge.  Even as he talks to her, he returns to his cartoon form and then reaches up to the top of his head and unzips his skin from head to crotch, and steps out of the dragon suit as a Technicolor Dragon and then starts to grow again, though he's careful not to step on her things, he grows and keeps growing.

"What is.... " she blinks a little confused looking up "Charm, ye old land of positive emotions, all disgustingly happy happy happy toys and toons and people in creepy suits wondering around with nothing on there minds but spreading joy and happiness." She turns to him giving him an odd inquisitive look while holding a socket wrench. "Your not some charmer just offering to slay this beast because it will make people happier...ish?"

"That's.... weird... but what ever it's the mess (another proper noun)." she goes back to work.  "Huh... I'm not sure if your safer as a toon or flesh as I can't imagine transitioning from toon to flesh would be very ideal anywhere the Instantiator isn't running top notch.  But it seams to be working for you for now, so if you have anything non-conseptiual you can be I would do that out here.... this your first time in Down?"

I would note the roof of the place had a track on it that two large orbs ran across and many countless lights. The lights served as stars at 'night', while the orbs as sun and moon. However the track was broken and the moon seamed not only to be stuck over the ocean but was ether hacked or had some form of holographic devices set up over it making it project various images around it.... they looked like adverts.  The sun still moved on it's track, though it could likely only move back and forth over maybe half the track considering the poor shape it was in.  This left one side always in night or twilight, while the other half shifted from night to day normaly as the sun moved about and turned itself on and off.  Though this ruined any imagery of a sun and moon moving across the sky.

Then again the very notion of a sky was rather ruined already by the hole in it, so it didn't matter to much.

The sun still put out heat however it seamed to be malfunctioning so the amount of heat it put out varied and the days where seldom normal being ether too hot or too cold by at least some amount, thankfully the ground was heated to simulate geothermal heat.

“I’m not from this world, I’m from a different world entirely, one you’ve never heard of or seen,” Jack answers the woman and seems to be trying to puzzle out the meaning behind her words. “What’s an Instantiator?” he asks directly.

She rolls her eyes "Should have known you weren't a charmer.... tend to be made of Imilexene more often than anything else rather than some conceptual. I mean Imilexene is a lot more reliable and can do just about as much as you would like it to do as animated conceptual forms....  all in all fairly useful stuff. I use it from time to time on my rig."  When Jack says he's from another world she sighs. "Fuck, don't tell me your a Teran... it's not funny... listen there is no Earth some ones fucked with your head." She shakes her head and sits on the hood of her vehical. "The Instantiator is a system of nanites in, well everything. Fucking everywhere. You can think of it they will respond and do it... though some people have to use some interface device. Would have figured you knew this the way you had your Saizho on, but I guess who ever got you must have fiddled with your head to make you good at Saizho'n out. But yah you can mess with other people if you over power there will, which includes getting rid of there memories and replacing them with those of some other world that don't exist." While she talks she gets out some data pad and fiddles with it and then winces hard. "Shiiiiit, they got your back ups too. That's rough.... sorry.  Maybe who ever it was keep hard copies of your back ups on them and you can get them back and figure out who you use to be."

(something wrong?)

"A Terran? Never heard of the place. My homeworld was not called 'Terra'. But if you say so," Jack concedes that it is in fact possible, however unlikely, that all of his experiences with people like Mr. Magehammer and a cartoon world that let him turn into a cartoon dragon were just some fiction planted by someone for 'reasons.' "In any case, what's Imixelene? And what's a Saizho?"

"If you got retconed to be from some weird world that didn't exsist people are going to call you a Terran, due to the fact it was considered a lark to retcon people to think they where from Earth for a while there until the joke got REAL REAL FUCKING OLD." She moves around to rummage through a storage compartment in the back of her rig. "Saizho... it's.... um.. hum.  Shit, it's hard to explain. Frostbyte came up with the concept, he's doing it alot though I think he's only doing it because he's hitting that digital power-up drug he made, Ring. I think it tweaks his brain so he's in a Saizho mind set, though he's a fucking adict for the shit. But Saizho is like when you are so comely and totally disconnected from any normal sense of thought like gravity, hight, depth, width, weight, momentum, and the like... .just you know, general physics shit that it might as well not exist in your mind and you have INFINITE confidence in yourself. It's hard as hell to get into a state of Saizho and fucking impossible to sustain it unless you tweak your brain some how so you like forget what laws of reality are but some how do it in some way you still have a reference to whats going on, and delete every failer you have ever witnessed.  But, if you Saizho out your like completely fucking unstoppable..... you have a little bit of a Saizho vibe going the way your rocking the whole conceptual shifting about with no effort at all."

"AHHH here we go." She yells and retreaves a small perfectly clear plastic looking cube and walks out to some where tossing the cube on the ground. "This is Imixelene, Demo mode." When she says that the cube expands suddenly decompressing into a cube several feet wide. It starts shifting in colors, transparency, and material taking the form of verious rubber products from rubber tires, silicone, latex, a cube of bubbling oil, to nilon. It also takes several shapes that move around mostly animals and people made out of rubber products, at one point it's a fish made of oil swimming in oil. It's kinda wild to watch it move and shift so rapidly before it plumps back down and shifts back into a clear transparent block. "I don't know exactly how it's made, has to do with the latest generation of rubbers and imipolex, and of corse some magic mirror for the freaky shit going on.... how the managed to work with that stuff I don't know. But that means it is still ... still fuck what the hell is it called. Let me check the info-sphere." She looks down scrolling through her data pad. She says like she is reading something she don't know how to pronouce. "A biocybernetic supercomputing medium.... whatever.... means if your leg gets chopped off or you have a masive wound in you, you can just rip off a chuck and stick it on you and it will interact with you thoughts and flesh and form what you need. So makes for good field medic shit out here where the Instantiator is a pice of shit. Hell I could chop your head off, and shove your brain in there and you would be fine and have an Imixelene body. Storage mode" It shrinks back down to the small size and she picks it up and tosses it to Jack "It's a must have out here you should take it with you."
This message was last edited by the player at 07:16, Sat 23 Apr 2022.

Jack listens to the woman talk a lot and just says, “Huh. Not really something any use for me, but that’s neat. Well, I'll go try to destroy the rampaging thing, I guess?"

As a side note the rat that had been with him was now taking apart one of the wrecked trying to get to something, and seams to have forgotten about him.

The woman shrugs. "No use now, but you never know, so best to have some." She nods looking off in the distance. "Yah that would help out a lot, though I would get some weapons or something. Unless you plan on keeping up the Saizho stuff and going full on god mode on it. That would be fairly crash. It headed off to the old giant robot graveyard, probably looking fix itself up... or maybe make some friends." she shrugs and points off into the distance.

“I mean, what’s the worst that happens?” Jack shrugs and starts growing some more before he takes off flying toward the robot graveyard. He doesn’t much care for this world and their nonsensical way of speaking, so he’ll just fight and maybe die, and hope the next verse is a bit less insane. Or he’ll kill the problem, and help repair this place to be a bit less of a trash heap. Win-win.

What Jack found was a large crater in the ground, that opened up in places to the under ground like the pit had, exposing water pipes and electrical wires that ran through the structures ground. In it was what was clearly some ancient battle field where large machines of war had fought, mecha of every size and large robots littered the battle field in various levels of disrepair and being striped of parts. Some looked nearly pristine save for the wares of time and weather, others had been hacked or blown to pieces, or striped down to nothing but a frame.

In it he found a sizable machine stalking about a tare in reality. Some rift had opened up into what the compass had told him was a spiritual realm and various spirits of entropy, pain, and suffering where flowing out of it to swirl around the machine.

It had the body of a mechanical rat, though it was held up by several spider like legs (one of it's front ones was sheared off at the end), along it's back where several long electrified quills, and it had a scorpion like tail that ended in a M61 Vulcan that some one had thankfully melted the firing mechanism to slag. Between his equipment he could tell it was possessed by a very powerful and monevelent spirit of pain and darkness and it's level was in the triple digits. It had trapped several 'people' of various races on it's quills electrocuting them conscientiously so the smaller spirit where drawn out to feed on there pain and suffering.

It had gathered a pile of corpses in front of the largest most intact mecha it could find and was smearing blood on it in some sorta runic patern.

Yes, it did seam it was making friends.

Pausing at a distance, Jack layers himself in protective and enhancing magic. Stoneskin, blur, true seeing, enhanced physical capabilities, haste, an additional layer of flight and then Order invisibility, and a renewal of his Order enhancement to make himself even more powerful, loading himself up with counter-runes.

Once he’s set, he approaches to his maximum distance and starts to bombard the mecha with strafing runs of Order breath.  Hitting as broad an area as he can.

(I'm going to assume that Jack is avoiding breathing on it's back where the people are stuck on it's quills... let me know if I'm wrong there)

Jacks Order breath don't seam to affect the machine that much, if anything it seams to improve it's condition a little. Cold and order are rather useful for machines and the spirit seams not too be affected yet.

The other smaller spirits however that get caught up in Jacks breath however slow down, and seam to be stalled up as bits of order cling to them... one becoming calcified in order unable to move and frozen in air.

The machine moves to the rift and starts pulling it open while giving out a cry that causes Jack unimaginable pain hearing it. It seams to cause pain to the people impaled on it too, even Stella and hearts in Jack's sword seam to suffer from the cry.

Something tells Jack it's calling another of it's kind.

Deffently in pain from her voice responces. "The foul mouthed racer mentioned Saizho, that your able to do anything if you believe in yourself enough and don't disbelieve it's possibility.... Your already a toon here, all your magics work here. You have nothing to lose."

Jack alters his cartoon self to remove his ears, because if he's going to be bothered by screaming nonsense, why bother to listen at all! Hearing the words of Stella, he understood to begin with, but her words serve to remind him to take advantage of the trick while he still has such power in mind.

Reaching a dragon hand up to the top of his head, he slithers out of his skin, and now has three heads. One red, one green and his normal head.

The red one starts breathing intense flames while the green starts breathing great deluges of acid.

Saizho is a kind of zen in a way, and being in a dream and an order mage, doing zen is a little easier for him. So while the pain isn't coming from the sound believing it is from the sound is just barely enough to protect him from the pain. Breathing acid over the machine was much more effective melting parts of it away, though it was more effective on the parts he didn't breath order on.

The machine was dead set on widening the rift, though jacks attacks made it harder for it to do so as he took out it's legs.

The more into the zen like state Jack got the more effective his attacks where, he didn't seam limited by anything more than what he believed what he was capable of doing. However the tiniest amount of doubt was devastating.

Seeing the effect of his attacks, Jack gets excited to have found something new and to know he is saving these people from a mecha-tyrant. Like a flying Godzilla, he continues to blast downwards, though his Order head pauses briefly to throw out Dimensional Anchor. A blast of green energy flying from his mouth now (that’s new!) as he prevents any further usage of dimensional energies and seals off the Gate.

Once he has the Gate sealed, he throws the beam at the mecha.

“Your tyranny ends now, mecha-jerk!” he pronounces and then starts to inhale Order from the mechanical monstrosity, drawing it inward.