Taubitha was standing there in the dark, fluorescent party room as the music bumped and popped with exceedingly high decibel variations that made her feel like her eardrums were being stretched every which way. She was cornered by a group of four ladies who looked even stronger than she was. Strangely, they seemed to her all the more beautiful and perfect as they finished performing various keg stands and smiled at her menacingly.
"I think we ought to train her up a bit," said a lady in a tank top who'd led Taubitha into the blimp. "What do you think? Does a good fight make you feel like, oh ya?" She was twitching and dancing a little when she said this, looking a little like a chicken getting struck by an electricity elemental.
Oh ya? Taubitha sighed mentally. These folks must've been from Flumbolia or something with that accent.
"What do you say?" hissed another one of the ladies, whose voice was so high pitched it might as well have been the beep of a shell enchanted with the ability to detect radioactivity. "Wanna fight?"
Taubitha cracked her knuckles. "Let me do a keg stand first."
"Okay, we can do that, ya?" said the first lady. She slung her tightly wound braid of hair over her left shoulder. "What kind of beer do you like to keg stand with? We have Lindendroogles and Elemental Bock."
Taubitha didn't even have to think about this one. "I'll have the Elemental Bock, please."
"...Okay, we can do that, ya." The lady looked a little sad, a little offended, and maybe a little concerned and judgmental as she rolled out a keg marked BOCK with her huge, bulging muscles. "Who you want to flip you upside down, ya?"
Taubith laughed. She didn't need help to do a kegstand and she was ready to show everyone that she wasn't scared of them. So she flipped up onto her hands, feet in the air, and walked right on over to the keg. Then, with a knowing grin, she reached out her right arm and grabbed the tube connected to the keg. It was, as they said, time to pound that shit.
All the ladies gasped and muttered words of shock. The one lady said Oh my ya and it almost made Taubitha spit out beer and cackle like a banshee in result, but she persevered and kept on chugging.
Finally, after a good five minutes, Taubitha was done.
"You finished the whole keg, ya," said the lady with a face covered in confusion and discomfort as Taubitha popped the keg nozzle out of her mouth and flipped back around, standing now on her feet.
"Yea, that was a good one," said Taubitha, seemingly unaware of how disturbed and confused everyone surrounding her looked in that moment. "What? Elemental Bock is pretty light, isn't it?"
"My ya, she's going to have a big headache in ze morning," said a lady.
"Whatever!" said another. "I don't care if she has a headache right now! We said that we would fight her, and we should fight her!"
It wasn't very long before Taubitha was once again being sized up by all the ladies. And it was at this point in time that she started to feel like it didn't necessarily matter whether she wanted to fight them or not, they were determined enough to do it regardless.
Not that Taubitha was upset about this development - she'd just done a keg stand, so she was feeling no pain, and furthermore she was so irritated about losing her fight with Kahli of all people that she really desperately needed a win right now. So Taubitha cracked her neck and popped her jaw, a trick she'd learned long ago. And then she got ready to throw down!
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Omar was walking home from the Gifflenberg Historical Society when he saw the sky. It took him out of it for a bit, and filled him to the brim with fright for a moment. But Omar was an older person, and to him, there was nothing new under the sun.
Sure, it looked like the starry sky had somehow become more like a bleeding orifice than anything else but he didn't have the energy to wonder why, or to try and dream up scenarios where he understood the implications of that why. Instead, Omar decided to chalk it up to the most reasonable explanation, which was that there had to be something wrong with his eyes.
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Of course, the usually crowded streets of downtown Gifflenberg were decidedly sparse to the point that almost made it disturbing to walk down them with such a bloodied sky, and still Omar felt at peace. He'd walked through empty streets in ghost towns before, and even if he wasn't used to Gifflenberg feeling like one, he had a feeling that it was going to be absolutely fine regardless. He allowed this strong confidence to be his guiding light, not unlike the fire within him.
Omar remembered when he'd first realized his fire elementality. He was very young, trying to cook a marshmallow on a stick by a campfire, but every time he held the marshmallow close he caught it on fire. It was not long before Omar started doing this on purpose so that he could see the beauty of the fire, which disturbed his parents to no end. It was through this passion that the proverbial, or literal indeed, fire in his heart grew strength and how he developed his fire elementality.
This was generally extremely startling to his two water elemental parents, whose cool moods couldn't always handle his extreme fieriness, but in the end it had all worked out. Omar moved out and became the firebrand of an asshole he was always meant to be. To this day, he would burn small creatures whenever he got the chance because it was just so fun. He just had to be sure to keep experiencing the element of fire as much as possible so that his elementality wouldn't wane at all and he was good to go.
And so instead of concentrating on the fact that it looked kind of like the sky might've recently been on fire itself, Omar just flicked his elemental arm on and off with glee. It was like playing with matches to him, he enjoyed it to no end even though Hauff was probably more than a little frustrated with him to doing so.
Sure, maybe he should've stopped himself from attacking that bee. But, then again, the bee was attacking the mayor, and the mayor was allergic to bees, so really all that Omar did had been done in order to perform a needed public service. If Hauff had just been able to realize that, Omar would've never had an issue. One day, when Hauff was a little older and wiser, Omar was sure he'd understand. Sure, Hauff had spent all that time building the gate, and sure, maybe he considered Omar dead to him or whatever, but Omar didn't think Hauff was right to be so frustrated with him considering the stakes.
"Ah, Brahd! How the fuck have you been?" Omar patted Brahd on the shoulder. "I was just about to pop in for some grub!" said Omar with a smile as he walked up to the clawed hand-have wearing an apron outside his favorite local seafood joint, The Salty Sardine.
"Oh, yes, of course," said Brahd, looking at the sky and not at all at Omar. "Uh, by the way, and know that I'm happy to work on your food, but by the way, do you have any idea what's going on with the sky? Needless to say, it's been a little distracting to come out here and see it like this. I'm worried that the end of the world is about to happen of something."
"Oh, come on now, that's just fucking ridiculous!" said Omar with a laugh. "Everybody knows all apocalypse talk is, as I like to call it, honey bunches of bullshit. Sure, sure, it's not completely outside the realm of possibility that apocalypses can happen, I'll give you that. And, I mean, I'm definitely not of the feeling that it's impossible for the entire world to end. I just think it's highly unrealistic, and completely unaligned with every experience in my life to the point that I think of it as more of an absurd assertion of non-truth than I think of it as a serious threat. Sure, Brahd, you might look up at the sky and think, damn, that's some really fucked up shit right there. I mean, the motherfucking sky looks like somebody just severed its cateral artery, and it's the sky, so who the fuck even knew if had a fucking artery in the first place? But at the same time, here I am, standing in the street, talking to you about it. And neither of us seem to be in any real danger, now do we? Sure, the streets make it look like a bit of a ghost town. And there does just seem to be a general aura of gloom and doom around here. But, do you know what else? There are studies that say that tauman beings are capable of what can be considered mass hallucinations. As in, tauman beings can see, as a collective, something happen that doesn't actually happen, or something happening that isn't actually happening. It almost makes one question reality to its motherfucking core! Well, almost. Heh."
"...What are you getting at, exactly?" asked Brahd, ready to bring out the word of Theseosus if Omar so much as briefly lapsed into a Solipsistic diatribe.
"My point is, who gives a fuck about what's going on with the sky, right? Now let me in to your fine seafoodery so I can give you money and you can give me some delicious seafood. Please."
Brahd sighed. "Fine. I just hope the meteor doesn't crash and kill us all while I heat you up a crab cake."
"Oh, I'm sure it's fine," said Omar with a smile as he followed Brahd into the restaurant, only briefly glancing back up at the sky to spot what looked like a dark, rapidly approaching meteor engulfed in a menacing blue ring of flame. "Meteor shemteor, if you ask me."