not_in_the_book | Secluded Section of the Beach, Tuesday Early Evening

"I think that's setting yourself up to lose," Kaidan said frankly. He... was not completely confident in Ronan's assurances that he'd be fine. Go easy on him first, see if he had to ramp up later. "You, uh. Really don't want to try my cooking."

To be fair, Ronan wasn't entirely confident in his assurances that he'd be fine, but he was willing to give it his best anyway.

Hopefully no one would kill him if he ended up burning himself out for a few days.

"I never said you had to cook it," Ronan pointed out, laughing. "Just that we'd get to pick it."

He reached sideways into nothing and pulled out a pen, giving it a flick to shake it out into his sword.

Kaidan raised his eyebrows briefly, but hey, where he came from, guns unfolded from something the size of a pencil case. "Didn't know we were going melee weapons," he said. "I mean, I could probably set up an omni-blade..."

Ronan blinked for a moment before shrugging. "Either way," he said. "It's... as much a focus for me as anything else. And I keep a few spells stored in it for quick casting.

"So, what are our rules, anyway? Other than, y'know, no death or serious maiming. Maiming is bad."

"Maiming is very bad," Kaidan agreed. "Someone taps out, we stop. Someone gets injured past bruises... we stop and I get out some medi-gel."

He considered setting up the omni-blade, but... decided against it. "And I think I'll be skipping on the melee," he said. "It's... not really meant for anything but poking holes in people."

Ronan nodded, swinging his sword in a loose circle to limber out his wrist. "Ready when you are," he said, kicking off his shoes and stepping, barefoot, a little further down the beach away from the basket of food.

"All right."

Kaidan rolled his head - loosen up his neck a little - and hung back.

He was going to give Ronan the first move-- better to figure out what he was capable of now than run the risk of doing actual harm later.

There were a lot of spells Ronan could use without half-thinking -- as many for combat as for healing, despite where his talents now mostly lay -- but enough of those were... decisive... that he'd spent some time preparing some new ones for this bout, instead.

Kaidan had said that his biotic abilities revolved around manipulating mass and gravity, so Ronan decided to open with something along those same lines, dropping one spell circle, ready to cast, at his feet while using another prepared one to tell the gravity under Kaidan to be half as strong as it had been.

How does .5G feel, Kaidan?

.5G... felt like any other battle with another biotic Kaidan had been in, except less sudden, violent, and altogether easier to deal with.

True, tampering with his own personal gravity wasn't actually something Kaidan had a lot of experience with, but he knew how to control his fall so he wouldn't actually fall, moving quick steps backwards to get out of range of the... whatever that was.

His palm snapped forward, effortless, electric current breezing briefly through his body: throw.

For Ronan's sake, Kaidan hoped he was going to figure something out before he hit the water.

The force with which Ronan was tossed was a little greater than he'd expected, but the move itself had been planned for -- which is why, with a short, barked word to complete the spell circle, Ronan was back in his spell circle with a short pop of displaced air. He couldn't negate all his momentum, so he still stumbled back a few steps, but he caught himself before falling completely.

"You'll have to do better than that," he said, smirking, as he braced himself again.

Although he only had a couple more uses out of that particular spell before it got to be too much to work with. So hopefully he could find other ways around it, if necessary.

Kaidan was going to leave Reave out of his arsenal - Warp, too, because he didn't exactly want to set Ronan up for any biotic explosions. Obviously it was going to be hard to figure out how far he could actually go, but those seemed like good guidelines.

It did limit his tactics.

"Nice trick," he called. Strange, but on the other hand, he'd seen Vanguards pull almost the same thing. The blue shine of biotics colored his eyes now, as well as the rest of him; he focused.

Seemed like the idea would be to keep him out of... whatever he'd just used to make that move. Especially if he was bracing himself, waiting for some kind of forced push...

Kaidan shifted and hit him again... but this time it was just to lift Ronan's feet right off the ground. Nothing as easy as half a G: no G at all.

There was a moment of disorientation as Ronan's gravity just disappeared -- but he'd been in 0G before.

Just usually not so suddenly, and not while planetside.

Rather than try to solve the problem of lack of gravity, Ronan flipped his grip on his sword and slapped the pommelstone into his other palm. Red and blue shimmers ran up and down the length of the blade.

Which was a convenient distraction, hopefully, for the sinkhole spell Ronan was prepping with his other hand, dropping the ground beneath Kaidan by about a foot.

...Yeah, that was going to trip him up. Kaidan fell with a surprised shout, but he didn't linger-- as soon as the disorientation faded a second later, he was pushing himself up and out of the sinkhole.

Okay. That was new.

Using the Mason's Word to solidify a bit of air, Ronan grabbed onto it and used it to stabilise himself so he wasn't floating randomly, spinning around.

Concentrating while bracing himself against the solid air, Ronan pushed a bolt of force towards Kaidan, hoping to knock him off his feet again.

Probably a good thing Kaidan had been trained enough to recognize when he couldn't actually rely on his kinetic barriers to keep something at bay.

He brought his arm up quickly, using biotics to twist the gravity around him-- to make force bounce off instead of hitting him.

It wasn't his favorite move. There was a reason he'd picked the Sentinel specialty.

Ronan frowned, trying to follow the way that Kaidan had twisted the gravity. He thought he could -- not see it, but, yes, he'd done that, so if Ronan, with a few barked words, twisted it that way just a little more--

Sorry, Kaidan, but it looks like your 'down' just moved ninety degrees to your left.

And... that would be Kaidan's shoulder hitting the ground in a fairly neat if rather sudden tuck-and-roll. He'd gotten hit by enough biotics in his life to know what to do.

He could probably end this early if he put a reave on Ronan, but he really didn't trust himself not to make the field too strong.

Instead as soon as he was even remotely steady, he hit the ground with a shockwave, tiny biotic explosions shooting up in a straight line towards Ronan, shaking the ground and tossing aside anything they hit.

Edited 2012-08-29 04:58 (UTC)

Ronan blinked at the explosions, taking just a moment to process holy shit, explosions before throwing the first shield he could think of underneath himself.

Unfortunately, that shield... didn't absorb force very well, and wasn't anchored to anything, so it acted more as a platform to launch him into the air. Oops? At least he was on a relatively stable, if vertically-climbing, surface.

Before he started falling back to the ground, Ronan pulled out another of the spells he had stored in his sword. Time, he thought, to start getting showy. Which is why, in his off-hand, he now held a softly-glowing shape, vaguely reminiscent of a gun or a blaster; unlike the usual wizardly dissociators, though, this one shot blasts of colour.

So Ronan had maybe invented wizard paintball. Eat, uh, purple, green, and orange, Kaidan.

So that marked two biotic shields Kaidan was pulling up today. Yeah, next time they did this, he was putting his armor and omni-tool into play.

The shield he'd thrown up functioned more like a wall of solid force, causing the color to splatter all over it; for a minute, the blue, nearly translucent wall of dark energy went violently purple, green, and orange.

And then Kaidan shoved it forward. He had no idea if what Ronan had thrown at him was solid, but whatever it was-- it was going right back where it came from.

Having just landed on the ground -- and tumbled off the shield, because it wasn't exactly designed for smooth landings -- Ronan barely had time to brace himself for the biotic shield hurtling at him. Which would be why he was getting thrown back, although at least this time he was able to roll up from the hit.

With purple and green hair, and a large swathe of orange across his shirt.

Rolling his eyes, Ronan tossed the colour-blasting-thing-that-he-really-should-name aside, letting it dissipate, as he threw up a slightly stronger shield, this one designed to actually disperse incoming force along its surface. Hopefully this would give him time for his next move.

Taking a breath to center himself, Ronan concentrated on the ocean just a few meters away. He couldn't take it in, not like he had on Ordeal -- even if he'd had time, that was too risky a spell for combat, even sparring. But he still remembered what it was like to be water, however briefly, and he could use this spell to call up a wave behind Kaidan, hopefully knocking him off-balance.

... and now Kaidan was flat on his back, drenched, and really regretting his decision not to come here in armor. (His mind helpfully conjured up the memory of himself kicking around in the water on the surface of Virmire, trying to keep that bomb safe-- but that wasn't important, or rather this was no time to think about it.)

He scrambled to his feet, dripping onto the floor, and threw another simple throw towards Ronan just to keep him busy while Kaidan steadied himself.

Ronan dodged the throw, rolling away and back to his feet as smoothly as he could, and hoping that this spell worked the way he wanted -- calling up another wave, this time from the side, while preparing a shield to throw on top of Kaidan, keeping him down, when he (hopefully) was once again flat on his back.

Assuming this all worked, and he was right about how Kaidan's biotics worked, the shield should keep Kaidan from using much in the way of his biotic abilities -- it depended on how much space to move Kaidan actually needed, how precise of control he had over his muscles and the movements required to manipulate the mass effect.

Kaidan was moving now, away from the ocean, as fast as he could.

Not fast enough-- he slammed into the ground and felt the weight of the shield a second later. Well, shit.

Still, he wasn't immobile, and his fine muscle control was very good, thank you. His fingers itched as his hand moved back-- he was putting some faith into the idea that, one, Ronan's shield would respond to warp the same way most kinetic barriers worked, and two, that Ronan would think the ensuing blue glow was just the biotics cooling off.

So he stayed put and focused on making the warp field tug and push at the finer molecules of the shield.

Back in high school, Ronan might have considered that done with -- but, while his experiences out in the galaxy had been almost entirely positive, he had learned a thing or two while working in clinics in rougher parts of cities.

Which would be why he was taking what he hoped would be a few extra moments of Kaidan recovering -- because he was assuming Kaidan would recover -- to lay out a more complicated spell all around them. One of Ronan's beloved nested/layered spell circles, each node altered gravity within itself in a different way.

So you could be walking from .5G to 3G to .25G, step to step. Ronan held his ground in one of the few 1G nodes in the circle, waiting for Kaidan to get up.

Edited 2012-08-30 05:03 (UTC)

The shield shredded above Kaidan a few seconds later and he went quickly up to his feet. Took a few steps to get into a better position and... noticed the spell, yes, as one foot tried to float away while the other one clung very tenaciously to the ground.

He grunted as he had to shove extra energy into the simple feat of bringing the ground below his feet back to 1G while it felt like Ronan had just put up over a dozen Singularities. "Neat," he said, and watched Ronan for his next move.

And that move would be... letting the giant spell circle dissipate as he wavered a little where he stood, his eyes going a little glassy.

Well, Kaidan... could probably go for one more move himself without risking making the upcoming migraine even worse than he could already feel it was going to be.

But he wasn't going to.

"Call it a draw?" he said, dark energy very slowly dissipating off of him.

Ronan nodded, sighing with relief. "Yeah, draw works," he said, letting himself collapse back onto the sand.

"Soooooo I need to not do that spell again. Ever."

Kaidan made a passing attempt to wring some of the water out of his uniform shirt as he went for the basket. He leaned over and dug around until he found some of his migraine medication. "Well, it was pretty impressive," he said, "For about five seconds."

"Thanks," Ronan said, rolling over and getting, shakily, to his feet. "You've got some interesting skills yourself."

Stumbling over to the basket, Ronan grabbed a bottle of water and chugged it down before doing the same with a Gatorade. Letting himself fall to the sand again, he grinned over at Kaidan. "So that was fun," he added. "Even if I'm going to be paying for it for the next week."

Kaidan took some of his meds and chased it with a bottle of Alliance-mandated protein shake. "If we do this again, I think we need to add a few rules to this thing," he said, and ran a hand through his hair. "Starting with me wearing my armor... and you not flinging bodies of water around."

"What?" Ronan asked, and, because he's Ronan, continued, "You don't like when I get you all wet?"

Reaching into his claudication, he pulled out a towel and tossed it at Kaidan.

Always know where your towel is.

Kaidan huffed out a laugh-- definitely laughing at you, not with you, Ronan-- then caught the towel. "Thanks," he said, drying off his hair first - it was drippy. "More armor, less crazy stunts," he added. "I think that's probably a good guideline."

"But crazy stunts are what I do!" Ronan insisted, laughing back. "Armour sounds good, though, yeah. What's it designed to stand up to?"

"Biotic attacks, gunfire, explosions," Kaidan said. "Just your run-of-the-mill stuff."

You know. If you were Kaidan, and you used to run after people who did crazy stunts on a regular basis. Crazier, in fact, than what Ronan had just pulled.

He glanced up.

"And, uh... hate to break it to you, but what you do these days? Is teach high school kids how to go camping."

Edited 2012-08-30 16:25 (UTC)

Secluded Section of the Beach, Tuesday Early Evening

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