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Character of the Season
Frail in body but dangerously quick of mind, Nikandr is the sort of character who proves that curiosity can be just as perilous as any weapon. A necromancer, inventor, and problem-solver with more ambition than self-preservation, Niki approaches the world like a puzzle box begging to be opened, even when what’s inside has teeth. Blunt, dry-witted, fiercely independent, and carrying a history best left partially buried, he has a knack for making even failure feel fascinating. Whether he’s raising the dead, moving across Caido to King's End, or experiencing a hangover for the first time, Nikandr brings a wonderfully strange spark to Caido, and we can’t wait to see what trouble his brilliant mind wanders into next.
Congratulations, Niki!
Credits
Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
OG Skinning provided by Kaons, with functionality and many custom plugins made by Neowulf!
High above the swelter of Haulani’s sky-spliced streets, where the jungle heat gives way to cloud-slick stone and bird-bothered railings, something begins to hum.
Not the breeze. Not the cicadas. No, this hum’s got teeth.
At the very top of the city—perched like a monstrous gargoyle where stilts give way to spires—stands Vox. All twitching limbs and swaying static, his hat tipped at a dangerous angle, his eyes (?) scanning the world below with equal parts melancholy and manic delight. The air warps faintly around him. It smells like ozone and spilled slushie syrup.
Then—he throws back his many arms, curls his limbs like a theatre curtain, and bellows:
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
The sound reverberates off rooftops and restaurant awnings. Windows rattle. Hels evacuate in furious clouds.
And then the rain begins.
Only it’s not rain.
It’s bouncy balls.
Thousands of them.
Candy-coloured, jewel-toned, neon-bright or glitter-packed. Translucent. Swirled. Shaped like hearts, stars, strawberries, one of them might be shaped like Noe’s face (alarming!) (beautiful!). They pour from nowhere and everywhere—out of his coat, his hat, the sky itself—and they bounce. They boing. They ricochet. They wreak absolute havoc.
They fly through fruit stands, knock over baskets of shrimp, ping off street signs with the velocity of a rubber meteor storm. A whole tray of mai tais is sent hurtling skyward. Somewhere, a small dog is riding a broomstick-sized drift of them like a wave. Children scream with delight. Adults scream with taxes. And still they bounce—down alleyways, over balconies, through open windows, under skirts, into seafood chowder.
And scrawled on each chaotic sphere in shaky, glittery ink are messages like:
"YOUR EYEBROWS ARE SYMMETRY MADE FLESH"
"I THINK OF YOU EVERY TIME I SEE SOMETHING ROUND (WHICH IS A LOT)"
"YOU ARE THE CIRCUIT THAT MAKES MY FUSES MELT"
"BOUNCE BACK TO ME, BEAUTIFUL BIRD"
"YOUR FRIENDSHIP WAS MY FAVOURITE GLITCH"
At the top of it all, Vox stands with his arms wide, twirling slowly like a deranged ballet dancer as he watches the mayhem rain down.
"For you, Noe," he purrs, letting a final orb fall from his hand—this one shimmering like oil-slicked starlight, inscribed with nothing but a small, hand-drawn heart.
It bounces once.
Then twice.
Then sails off a rooftop to knock over a city guard's hat.
The final bouncy ball fell, shimmering like a thousand pieces of broken glass, to knock off a city guard's hat. Then it bounced through the deluge and right into Noe's hand.
The girl had been in the apartment when the rain-that-was-not-rain had started, and at the sound of thousands of balls boinging off the roof, she'd peered outside to find a multicolored torrent. When her name was bellowed into the sea of balls, she shivered, shrinking away from the window. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed, tucking the covers up over her head.
Everybody knew the monsters couldn't get you there, after all.
But this was her fault. It was happening because of her. And so she'd thrown the apartment door open wide (letting in a few bouncing orbs in the process), stepped out into the downpour, and made her way to Vox.
Which was where she stood now, glimmering bouncy ball with a hand-drawn heart in hand.
Summoning bravery she didn't feel, she looked up at the eldritch horror. "Thanks, Vox," she called out, twiddling her fingers up at the creature with a forced smile. "This is super sweet and all, but have you guys thought about, like, maybe not forcing people to be your friends?" Then, softer, for his ears alone: "All you had to do was ask."
It starts with a sound he can't quite place—like laughter if it were round and hollow, like chaos given shape and too many colours. Then comes the rattle. The roof of the Hanged Man chatters with the first bounce. Not thunder, not hail—something lighter. Stranger. Vesper stills mid-pour behind the bar, peppermint stick paused at the corner of his mouth. He feels it before he sees it, the low thrum of what the fuck rising in the thoughts outside. A chorus of confusion. Delight. Panic. Lust? (That one might’ve been from the alley again.)
He sets the glass down and steps out, shadows slinking like velvet through the doorway behind him. The door creaks open on a street that is, by all accounts, being invaded. Not by enemies. Not by voidbeasts. Not by gods.
By bouncy balls.
They’re rolling like a tide over the cobbles now—skipping under tables, pinging off shutters, colliding with a particularly unfortunate crab cart that explodes into a clatter of shellfish and citrus. One bounces directly into a lantern, scattering sparks and glitter like divine confetti. Another boings past his hip and vanishes into the bar’s open window.
Vesper’s expression doesn’t change, but his eyes follow the one that caught the edge of a passing hel’s wing and ricocheted, somehow, into a man’s soup.
"...What in the actual fuck," he mutters, low and dry as aged whisky. He glances upward—just once—tracking the path of the storm back to its origin.
A silhouette at the top of the city. Arms wide. Hat tipped. The unmistakable hum of Vox.
He exhales through his nose and picks one of the balls up off the ground where it’s shuddering faintly against his boot. Glitter ink scrawls: “YOU’RE MY FAVOURITE SHADOW, DON’T TELL THE OTHERS.”
And I'm going down, where the waves will surround to the roar and the pound, Of the wild wild sea Talking sweet to me
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
☆ has a pale star tattoo beneath his left eye, and freckle-sized constellations move across his skin
☽ hair changes from bleached blonde to brown
☆ telepathic: Sunlit Shadows | The user can read the surface thoughts and emotions of those within a 60ft radius. Control is excellent. Note: "Thoughts and emotions" include anything written in a character's narration in a post.
I've done nothing wrong Except for all the atrocities
Listen listen listen –
Was Melita slightly envious that she hadn’t thought of this gods damned thing before? Yes. Was she mad that Vox thought about it first? Absolutely. Did that mean she was going to miss out on the absolute fuckery? No, of course not.
She could’ve done without the bellowing Vox theatrics, pondering if she should try again for some kind of arrow-infused motion towards the static-embedded cretin, when allllll the beautiful, marvelous bouncy balls collided onto the streets. Her eyes went wide at the havoc and chaos, watching and following some, if not many, of the vicious little spheres, bounding and leaping and cavorting into windows and buildings and kiosks.
And they were so pretty.
She obviously snagged a few, reaching out when one bounced right against her cheek. Turning it over, she marveled at its beautiful crimson hues, until she read the writing on the back, sighing. Ruined a perfectly good ball, really.
After a relaxing soak at Safrin's mirror, Hadama might have thought to return home to a peaceful hour or two of paperwork.
There was nothing peaceful about the scene that he teleported back to, however. The Tidebreaker arrived to purest chaos as he stepped from the Court of Stars, emerald eyes taking in the... everything... that was a veritable sea of small, dark, bouncing rubber balls pinging, bonging, spanging, and crashing their way through his city. Destruction attended them, the handmaiden and hallmark of the Family's interference, and the echoes of Vox's tooth-vibrating cry still echoed around Haulani as he looked up to floating islands and then let his gaze travel down along the waterfall of leaping, bounding ruin.
Where the balls landed in the canals or fountains they came to rest, their energy spent and clogging the waters, but many more continued to ricochet and leap throughout the buildings and off flesh and wood and stone. One particularly audacious specimen struck a pert pectoral and Hadama caught it on the rebound, his expression grimly neutral as he looked down upon what he held in his hand.
YOUR TRICEPS MAKE MY KIDNEYS SING it sparkled cheekily up at him.
Molars ground together as he drew a slow breath in through his nose and then released it before raising head and voice alike in a calm, steady rumble that filled the Court. "Bring the nets from the port," he ordered the guards - at least three without hats now - and anyone else who could hear him. "The finest ones, for the small fish. Use them to capture the balls. Abandoned with air magic and telekinesis, attempt to stop the ones still bouncing. Disintegration will work as well. Attuned with winged shifts, try to catch them while they are in the air. Move them to sand when you catch them, before they can do more damage. Ancients, Crack them, or use shadows to move them out of town."
He tucked the ball he held into a pocket of his trousers so that it would not continue bouncing and then gathered himself, feeling fresh strength and purpose flowing through him. It was instinct more than conscious thought that sent him stretching towards the sky.
Stretching up. And up. Lengthening, growing, changing as scales emerged across his sinuous body, black as night and shining with the echo of living stars. The Lóng Dragon leapt into the sky, wingless but flighted as he coiled with serpentine grace and the wind attended his passage, air magic swirling around him to snag the bouncing balls into the small, controlled cyclone he commanded as he sought to mitigate the damage.
A strange percussion overhead—irregular and rubbery, like hailstones drunk on sugar—and then the shriek of someone chasing a rogue ball past the door, followed by the unmistakable ping of one ricocheting off the gutter.
Vesper had lingered in the doorway, bottle of water hooked loosely in one hand, watching the tide of neon chaos begin to flood Haulani’s lowest quarter. His expression had hovered somewhere between dry bemusement and resignation, the kind that belonged to a man who'd seen gods pull worse stunts but still didn’t appreciate them near his liquor shelves.
Then came the barrage.
A cluster of bouncy balls slammed into the front windows of the Hanged Man with the force of a badly-thrown spell—thwack, thwack, crack—and that was enough to jolt him into motion. “Alright,” he muttered, turning back inside with a flick of his fingers and a roll of his shoulders like he was shrugging off rain, “that’s enough romance for one evenin’.”
Shadows stirred before he reached them, tugging open cabinet doors and hovering as if anticipating instruction. Vesper moved quickly, crouching behind the bar and beginning to relocate the more delicate liquor bottles—the ones Nova had waxed poetic about, or spent too much coin on because the label was “so dreamy”—tucking them down behind the counter with the care of someone handling glass roses. The older bottles, the sentimental ones that Caly had scrubbed the dust off with her sleeve just last week, he wrapped in a spare bar rag and slipped into the bottom drawer.
Then came the shutters.
He moved to the front windows, peering out just in time to see a glitter-packed orb bounce off a market awning and explode into a flurry of heart-shaped confetti. A dog in a sunhat was barking triumphantly nearby, its tail wagging like it was chasing comets.
He left the top half cracked—couldn’t resist the view entirely—but cast a shadow ward over Nova’s newest stained glass, just in case. The chandelier, fragile and brilliant and hung with no less ceremony than a crown, earned a second glance. His shadows climbed it delicately, bracing like a net.
Outside, the storm of bouncing declarations continued.
Inside, the Hanged Man held its breath, quiet and dim and somehow warmer for the effort. Vesper exhaled through his nose and leaned one elbow on the bar, twisting the cap off his waterskin and murmuring toward the ceiling.
And I'm going down, where the waves will surround to the roar and the pound, Of the wild wild sea Talking sweet to me
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
☆ has a pale star tattoo beneath his left eye, and freckle-sized constellations move across his skin
☽ hair changes from bleached blonde to brown
☆ telepathic: Sunlit Shadows | The user can read the surface thoughts and emotions of those within a 60ft radius. Control is excellent. Note: "Thoughts and emotions" include anything written in a character's narration in a post.
Vox gasps, the sound like a bubble popping inside a dial-up modem, rich with static and reverence.
The horror that had gleefully unleashed rubber chaos on an entire city turns, slowly, to Noe. His grin is a ripple of shifting shapes; his many mouths twitch with words that never make it past his lips. For a moment, it seems like he might burst: from delight, from shame, from something unnameable that coils in the invisible place where his heart might be.
Her words echo in him, vibrate through his jelly-like bones. Arguments rise—But I offered prizes! I built a stairway! I made everything colourful!—only to drop like anchors, one by one, into the silences between his anatomically placed ribs.
”Where we came from...” he begins, quiet now, quieter than anyone has likely heard him, ”asking was considered rude.”
One of his eyes slides sideways. Another turns inside out, blinking through misty static. A sigh—wistful, synthetic, sad—threads through his frame.
”I’ve been trying to learn Caidoian customs,” he admits. ”But they are so very strange and so very slippery. There are so many rules, and they change depending on who’s looking, and I—“
He cuts himself off.
Instead, one of his longer tentacles unfurls—the motion as gentle as wind through kelp— and in it rests a single, shimmering bouncy ball. Not like the others. This one is warm to the touch, humming faintly with a strange heartbeat. On its surface, in childlike scrawl, is a single word:
"Yes?"
Vox tilts his head, a dozen hopeful expressions flickering across his not-quite-face.
I've done nothing wrong Except for all the atrocities
She could hear Hadama beginning his orders some distance away; herself not included in the mix. Her eyes followed pathways and lines of the toys instead, wondering if Ludo would mind a few, then remembering all the inscriptions. With a heavy sigh, she pondered if she should be doing something, though none of her incantations probably favored whatever the Tidebreaker was cooking up nearby.
So instead, she pocketed a few more to probably throw at future irritations, before shifting into her invisibility demeanor, intangible within a blink of an eye, and scampered up a rooftop. From there, she could gaze down below at the destruction and chaos, narrowing her eyes as she thought she spied Vox and Noe from aways.
Realizing that it's the last thing she needs for leveling
On her way back from a very productive session full of meaningful discussion and honest vulnerability, Elizabeth was not expecting an assault of shouting and raining bouncy balls and utter chaos. She stood in the street for a moment, blinking as she took in the sight (insert pizza Community GIF here). It took a lot of self-control not to laugh as her first reaction, however, the destruction helped curb that response pretty quick, especially when she noted Hadama attempting to direct the relief efforts.
A ball smacked her in the arm, teasing her with a glittering 'WE COULD BE THE GREATEST LOVE STORY' to remind her of the books in her bag. Elizabeth pulled out the biggest one and lifted it above her head like a crudely shaped umbrella, then moved to Hadama's side with a nod of her head. "I'll see what I can do."
Her telekinesis wasn't the strongest, but she did her best to cast a blanket over the ones still bouncing in the streets, pulling them down into the cobblestones. They pushed against her magic as she smothered the ones within her reach. It wasn't much - thousands still rained around them - but once her small section was rolling calmly, Elizabeth made her way to the next, glancing at Noe and Vox with interest to see if they'd be able to overcome their cultural differences.
Noe heard Vox gasp - or at least that was what she assumed the noise was - and watched as he turned towards her. Where she'd once seen a friend, there was now only an eldritch horror who made her swallow to look at him. But even if he was terrifying... there was still something about him that made her wonder if maybe their friendship had been real, after all - even for all that it wasn't.
And when he spoke, quiet and maybe... regretful (?), even, Noe swallowed against the sudden press of tears. She'd never heard him speak of where they came from before, never considered how hard it might be to learn an entirely new set of customs and culture. And despite everything, she felt... sad. Sad for Vox, who had been trying so hard. And sad for herself, who still - still - felt pity for a monster.
So she reached out to take the shimmering bouncy ball that definitely thrummed with its own heartbeat, turning it over and over in her hands. And when Vox offered a hopeful tilt of his head and a simple question, Noe ignored the dryness in her mouth and the warning bells that sounded in the back of her mind telling her that this was a very, very bad idea, and she said, "I think I'd like that. But - no hugging, yeah?"
The way Vox vibrates is enough to rattle the bouncy balls still scattered across Haulani’s rooftops.
Excitement coils through his tangled mass, jittering through every fold of static and jelly. He nods—once, twice—then rapidly, in a blur that defies physics and etiquette alike. The air around him crackles like a skipping record caught on a delighted note. Yesyesyesyesyes.
"No hugs!" he chirps, far too loudly, his voice a symphony of cheerful modem sounds and television snow. "Definitely no hugs. Not even one. Zero hugging. Negative hugs, if that’s what you like. I can mathematically reverse the emotional probability of touch!"
And then, softer. A flicker of something almost...human.
"...Unless you ask," he murmurs, lowering a tentacle with uncharacteristic gentleness, the way a comet might lower its brightness just for a friend. "In which case...maybe just one. Just a little one. A friend-size one."
He watches her, reverent and delighted, as though she’s just agreed to orbit the same strange star he does. Then Vox looks around Haulani, at the chaos he’s caused and the shimmering echo of her yes still ringing in his many ears.
"And now I shall tell everyone!" he declares, rearing up dramatically. "Because this is very important news and all the bouncy balls deserve to know!"
Because to him, they do.
And so he scuttles toward the skyline with giddy glee—still not hugging, just in case—but glowing brighter than any storm-cloud sun could dare.
The storm of rubber chaos outside doesn’t let up—more than a few of the bouncy balls strike the shutters with unnerving force, thunking hard enough to rattle the hinges. Vesper winces as one sails through the open transom and smacks into a hanging glass, sending it wobbling precariously before he catches it with a flick of shadow.
"Godsdamn it," he mutters, slipping behind the bar.
The air inside smells faintly of lemon oil and starcrystal polish, still fresh from Nova’s obsessive cleaning spree, and that’s reason enough to keep the place in one piece. Vesper moves quickly, the lines of his body fluid and efficient as he wraps protective cloth around the decanters, shifts glassware into low cabinets, and gently eases a stack of crystal tumblers beneath the sink. His shadows help, stretching like obedient cats to nudge a tray back from the edge or lift a corked bottle to safety.
A stray ball slams into one of the new chandeliers—he hears it before he sees it, a sharp clatter of prisms clinking together—and he practically flies up onto a barstool to steady the fixture before it sways too far. A breath hisses out through his teeth. "Caly's gonna kill someone if one of these breaks," he says to no one in particular, adjusting the tension on the hanging chain with careful fingers. Probably him, knowing his luck.
And I'm going down, where the waves will surround to the roar and the pound, Of the wild wild sea Talking sweet to me
Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!
☆ has a pale star tattoo beneath his left eye, and freckle-sized constellations move across his skin
☽ hair changes from bleached blonde to brown
☆ telepathic: Sunlit Shadows | The user can read the surface thoughts and emotions of those within a 60ft radius. Control is excellent. Note: "Thoughts and emotions" include anything written in a character's narration in a post.
I've done nothing wrong Except for all the atrocities
Out of direct earshot, the intangible and invisible Honeybee could only pick up on some inflections from both parties. For the most part though, she just wanted to ensure, or maybe see, if Noe was going to be safe from Vox’s clutches. Could people be reinfected? That was a lackluster thought she didn’t want to dwell on for long – notions roaming back to her uncle, and Ru, and Ronin as well…
But maybe things had gone well, if suddenly Vox was having a dramatic fit, hastening off towards the skyline. Her gaze went back towards Noe, wondering if..well, anything bad had happened – or if things were simply going to be okay.
'No hugs' sounded like a very interesting compromise. Elizabeth didn't know enough about Noe to understand the history there, but she knew hugs from Vox meant infection, so it was a fascinating arrangement. If the staticky member of the Family was willing to not infect someone, it made her wonder even more what their motivation was. Most people were under the assumption that they wanted to infect everything, but if the young woman was an exception to the rule because of sentimentality and respect, then it begged the question of their 'humanity' and ability to compromise for their ultimate objective.
Whatever the truth may be, she didn't have time to dwell on it before another barrage of bouncing balls began pummeling the infrastructure nearby. She let out a small sigh, turning her eyes away from the interaction to smother another section of toys with her telekinesis.
