The Assassins' Guild - May Week News

Not sure about the pseudonym - what do w need it for? reports: Spotted Baron Geddon as I was cycling away from Jesus Green at 12.45. Sadly I didn't manage to achieve my fantasy of conducting a bicycle drive-by shooting - since the trusty banana had been left at home. Instead, had to pass him, dismount, and a few quick clean stabs with the trusty poignard. Far less elegant, but did the job. He was a true gent about it too.

Baron Geddon reports: I regret to Report that ted loveday killed me yesterday at 12:45 exactly. It was a stabbing in front of my horrified friends. My apologies for the late notice, mayballing happened.

Umpire Haymitch's note: Worth noting that although bicycles are Water With Care, no other projectile weapons are legal for use on or by cyclists, unfortunately including even bang-kill weapons like the traditional banana.

Not sure about the pseudonym - what do w need it for? reports: Yes, Christof again. Around 2.15pm this afternoon. At... guess where... the Union. (I know this probably starts to look like rulebreaking or respawn camping. I'll honestly say that we do lots of extracurriculars together and simply bump into each other lots. He really needs to keep his guard up a bit more...)

Unicorn reports: What a beautiful day for a raid. Didn't have too much time to go through all the colleges, so went just to the near ones.
Me, hi and tassia101 left our fort at about 2:30 pm and started heading North. We hardly even started discussing our plans when Effie appeared just two stone-throws away. Missed opportunity for a large bounty. Imagine that you are sitting around, dreaming of cake and out of nowhere the most beautiful cupcake you've ever seen rolls on wheels past you. The most logical thing would be grab it of course, but you don't. You're too shocked, you let it go. Blast it...
So... Continue North to the first fortress. No success. Everyone's locked every passage to the staircases. I must return next time with an inside person...
Second fortress.
We head to Jay Wratten's camp first. Unfortunately he hides in his cave the moment he sees me, don't even know if he spotted the rest of us. No point knocking. His two trustful friends outside the door will report everything they see...
Next we headed to Geoff's place. He cunningly put the "out" sign on his door, but we were no fools (or the opposite) and knocked on his door. I knocked on his door. The moment it opened the Unicorn was shot twice, but Geoff made a fatal mistake of underestimating me and held the door open. He did so just long enough for hi to shoot him down. My death was avenged and tassia101 just sat somewhere beside the events without the need to do anything. My ghost also escorted the two to Tissue-hime's place, just to make sure they know which door to knock. She didn't seem to be in. We headed back.
End of report,
Unicorn

Umpire Effie's note: While I was disappointed that these fine young warriors chose not to engage me, I do appreciate being compared to a beautiful cupcake.

Geoff reports: Door was knocked just before 3pm. I claimed that I was not dressed properly and loaded my rubber band gun. I opened the door and shot a girl (Unicorn, apparently) standing outside. Then I was shot with a rubber band by her accomplice.

Dr J. Angleton reports:
Two figures stand, illuminated faintly by a sickly pool of feeble, dead light. Their shadowy outlines are dwarfed by the vast, monolithic outcroppings of the rocky abyssal landscape that surrounds them, but the jagged mountainous peaks that loom out of the darkness seem beyond distant, almost hollow, like a painted backdrop eased into the background of a movie shot almost as an afterthought. All that is real is the moment unfolding here. Now.

The figures step slighly closer, and as if in response the sickly immaterial light seems to grow faintly. One is withered, almost emaciated, a faint memory of hair covering a wrinkled domed head, a tweed jacket almost as battered and aged as its owner, who stands regally, hands clasped behind him. The other figure is enrobed in black, its form concealed in folds of a garment without form, but cut from a material as black as midnight, broken only by the weird markings that cover the top of its cowl; malevolent patterns in yellows and gold that seem to blaze in the darkness like a perverse mockery of a cat's eyes.

The tension, the concentration, is palpable. There is no sound, its manifest absence almost a presence in its own right. The icy stare of the wizened old man is matched by the relentless thoughts projected by the Other; a swirling, snarling, voracious hunger, and lurking below that, a cold unforgiving incomprehensible intellect.

There is a sudden orange flash of movement, a flurry, and the swarming, craving thoughts erupt, rushing after the meagre segment of life that has just flicked from the man's hand. And then there are two. Cold intellects that survey each other as the seconds drag out, stretching, stretching, and before it can begin it, is over. Fire blazes, ripping and tearing then there is silence. The man is on his knees, bent over and clutching at his chest, an antique revolver fallen at his side. The robed figure is sagging limply, something putrid oozing through the folds of its robe.

"Well played," the man struggles. There is a flurry of thoughts from the other; they are confused, radiating shock and fury. The man manages a choking chuckle, teeth clenched with the exertion of speaking. "I missed you." There is another flurry of rage, and something wholly unnatural that one might imagine could almost be pain. The figure seems to be sagging more, the folds of its garb are starting to flap and writhe now, like desperate, panicked passengers deserting a sinking vessel.

There's a new spark in the dying man's eyes now. "You can't be dying boy. I clipped you at best," he spits. The thoughts of the creature continue to rise in volume and desperation, swirling and howling, the sickly ichor no longer seeping but spilling from beneath its robe. And suddenly the man's eyes clear. And he sees.

"It's not real!" he snaps at his adversary, the hand clutched to his chest now slick with blood. "You're not dying, I didn't hit you, there's..." he chokes, wheezing a fainty powdery spattering of blood onto the dead ground, "...there's somthing else here boy." The faint sickly pool of light is barely big enough to take in the two figures now, and with a sudden shift of perspective, the darkness surrounding it is no longer an absence of light, but a physical presence, a creeping, crawling sprawl of unholy blackness rushing in, clawing at the sickly pale globe of illumination.

"You stru...struck me down, and...and you survived," the man hisses, struggling haltingly with every syllable now. "This is real...that! That is..." He slumps, unable to continue. The eldritch figure convulses, thoughts still raging around it like a whirlwind and seems momentarily to halt in its furious yet lazy deflation. There is a ripple of movement under the cowl, and deep within its fold the faint hint of two pinpricks of eldritch light like glowing embers. The fallen man, too weak to speak, looks up and his piercing watery eyes meet the cold inspection of the other figure. A thought, focused and icy, and conveyed by powers not of this world, nor ours, lances out from him to the other. And something passes between the adversaries. Something like understanding. Not pity, remorse nor sympathy, but an understanding of sorts. The figure sees what he does, the revolver firing, the shot going wide, ripping through an outer fold of the figures robe. If feels the superposition of his reality, and its own, and how they diverge, and the wedge that is being driven between them is suddenly illuminated in silhouette as if by the light of a nuclear blast and that wedge is a hungry devouring maw rushing out of the darkness to consume all before it, and in the sudden light of understand the figure realises that it is still complete and whole and that it is immortal and cannot die. Reality, warped and twisted snaps back like a elastic band snapping back into shape, and the tendrils of unholy abhorrence rushing out of somewhere beyond darkness smash headlong into a suddenly impenetrable energy barrier as the wavefunction they are riding collapses.

An alien sun dawns over a dead plain of black sand; a solid mist of impenetrable blackness turns to dust and blows slowly away on a non-existent wind as the foul would-be-consciousness that was holding it together is banished. Here and there it disperses less slowly, masses and chunks of decaying sand drop to the ground along with unnatural objects. A twisted piece of alien metal here, a rock carved with shapes that evoke primal memmories of things that swam and swarmed in aeons thankfully passed, and some distance from the figures, a scrap of black fabric and a burnt piece of plastic still enigmatically bearing the initials N.V.C.C.

Two figures remain, illuminated by the blazing glare of an eldritch sun. Their tiny forms are dwarfed by the vast, monolithic outcroppings of the rocky abyssal landscape that surrounds them, but the jagged mountainous peaks that loom out of the darkness seem beyond distant, almost hollow, like a painted backdrop eased into the background of a movie shot almost as an afterthought. All that is real is the moment unfolding here. Now.

The eldritch form regards the withered husk before it. It doesn't understand death. It can't. But it understands something is ending. It is not sad, or sorry about that, it is only hungry. Still hungry. It is always hungry. That hunger drives it always. Its thoughts swarm around the fallen figure as the figure's consciousness begins to flicker and its thoughts begin to lose cohesion. "Death? Yes. It looks very much like it boy," he responds to the curious locust swarm of inquisitive half-thoughts that ripple around him. "Fatal?" he forms the thought's logic into a facsimile of human language, "I doubt it. Never has been before..." and as a faint scornful chuckle echoes across the dead alien plains, he dies.

Umpire Haymitch Abernathy reports: That [REDACTED] woke me up. There I was, having a well-deserved nap after, a, uh, hard day of umpiring, and I'm woken up by someone making a right racket in trying the door handle. He didn't even give me credit enough to assume I'd locked my door - which I had. You learn *some* things in the Arena. Finding a ready-loaded pistol, and waiting for the sound of his retreat, I opened the door a crack - enough for him to see what I was holding, and for me to see he had nothing but an RBG. I closed the door without locking it, tempting him into advancing again, while I took the opportunity to pick up a slightly more substantial weapon.

An exchange of shots later, and the tribute was dead on the floor, while... well, I never needed my left arm anyway. Good effort, though, and he nearly got me - for a moment, what with the nebulous uncertainty as to whether or not I'd actually died, I felt almost like a tribute myself again. Left a food offering for his bravery on his corpse in true Hunger Games style, and am awarding 3 style points for an impressive report which required sending as an attachment.

Foxface reports:
We saw Ian McKellen today
(So that really wasn't very good)
He was giving a talk at college
(My blood did boil with rage and fury)
Which made me rather late for a thing
(The clock ticked agonisingly slow)
So when it ended I was running
(I prepared a blade to face my foe)
Which regrettably made me careless
(But Tolkien himself taught them to fight)
And thus I died.
(And thus I died.)

Foxface reports:
To Jesus
I went
To hunt
To kill.
Knock knock
No answer.
Knock knock
Nice try.
No knock
A neighbour
She's sleeping
(Apparently)
Don't want to wake her.
Buzz buzz
No entry.
Blight.

Umpire Haymitch Abernathy reports: You know what I hate worse than raccoons? Raccoons with guns.

The bounty on Effie Trinket has been lifted.
Bounties of 5 points are placed for kills of the following by any player of lower rank than their victim:
Foxface (Curtis Reubens)
Random Strategy (Matthew Fitch)
Tom Nook (Thomas Ruddle)
Morgoth (Emily Room)
Not sure about the pseudonym - what do w need it for? xx (Ted Loveday)

Morgoth reports:
As the afternoon sun began to fade into evening, Morgoth returned bearing the precious and sacred texts from the great halls of wisdom known in the Common Speech as "the CUSFS library". So entranced was he by the texts he bore, a mortal man passing by escaped Morgoth's notice. A foolish mistake, for the man carried a weapon designed to kill the Dark Lord and did spray him with a foul, burning liquid. But know this, mortals of Cambridge. The Dark Enemy Morgoth cannot be truly killed so easily, and shall once more arise to resume his reign of might and terror over the people of this land.

Dr J. Angleton reports:
  Hello Bob
  Correct boy, as you so astutely deduce I am 'not dead'. Honestly I would have

thought you of all people would be unsurprised by that.

  Why yes Bob, I do have a new head in my collection, thank you most kindly for asking.
  Safe? "Safe"? Boy I'm unable to express, at least without resorting to Enochian

metagrammar, quite how bewildered I am that you think that word even has meaning
given how close we are to the conjunction. But no, even in your most limited use
of the word, I'm afraid we are not 'safe'.

  The entity with which I had a, well, let us just say a 'run-in' with yesterday

took the form of small, dark-haired, sinister-looking female engineering student
from Cambridge University, so I decided to track it down on its home turf.

  Yes, boy, I am aware there might be more than one fitting that description, and

if you had informed me of that fact a couple of hours ago, it might have actually
been useful.

  No boy, of course there's not going to be a FATACC enquiry; we've enough problems

right now without adding Admin to them. It seems that this one was working for the
enemy too, so we've been lucky this time.

  That's right boy, watch your back. The original one is still out there...
  Taken down by an economist from Finance? Don't be puerile boy; I don't care for this

wretched modern humour.

Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs reports: It was a cold, dark evening. The sun had just gone down, and we'd met that night, continuing to fight side by side slaying zombies. But the peace was not to last.

He turned on me as soon as the last of the horde was dead. I fended him off for as long as I could, but I was knocked out by a cosh to the head.

I was then brutally murdered with a spoon. As I lay on the grass, in my last few breaths, I whispered, "Knife to meet you too..."