#viewed ic

Taking a deep, steady breath as he scans the room, Mads picks a point on the black and white marbled sharp-edged floor supporting the couch and focuses hard on the details of something he owns, something he wills to be here for the sake of his own fairly arbitrary desire. It's a warmup, in part, to make sure he still has the ability to manifest in this place like he could before, and it works, a tripod and relatively magical video camera arranged appearing to watch the room from the lack of wall to his left, a hopefully panoramic view for this facedown. He grins with a small reflexive fist pump as the recording starts, satisfied with his success.

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The view shows Mads Altair and Cookie glaring down the room, the former bearing a blue suit, shining gold wings and even brighter golden hands. The room in question drips from dark nowhere with viscous black strings, the void beyond increasingly filled with opening, focusing green eyes, some appearing as light and others far more realistic, inconsistent in shade and occasionally shaking in rage as they centralize their awareness on this space again, and the beings who have dared to return.

The puppet on the couch rises on its green strings, hanging rather than standing in its half-connected pieces but its glowing green eyes focused on the pair of men.

”Puppet, my puppet, you return, have you come to throw yourself at my mercy?—” The droning voice echoing from the open hinged mouth cuts short, almost seeming to flinch, many of the surrounding eyes growing wider. “No…What is this divinity? What are you? An angel with a powerful soul is still only human in nature—”

“None of the above, jackass!”

This bold interruption sparks the figurative flame of how he feels about them. Deep, bitter rage rises in Madison Altair's throat as they call him that /fucking word/, his magic-supported mind pushing away the pain it triggers to give the young divinity room to gain strength to avenge its cruel intention instead. Their intentional string pulls are just another reason to get them the Hell out of here.

“I'm a god too right now, strong enough to keep your power out of my head, stronger than /you/ and your lame-ass, timeline-restrained, obsessively controlling domain, for sure!“ He wasn't sure, yesterday, but now, after lots of mantras, for the purposes of this, and maybe, if he can prove it, for the foreseeable future, Mads /knows/ he's stronger, better, and fully out of His god's reach.

They spend long enough silently uncomprehending of such a change that Mads takes the opportunity to keep taunting the puppet to its face, stepping aggressively forward and looking it in the eyes. “I had this place perfect and then you brought your shitty psychological torture chamber and gross personal problems into /my/ awesome space and fucked it all up.”

The lecture is so intense that the puppet actually flinches, though manages to insert a response before its matching soul continues. “You are no god, merely a pretender. This domain you call your '/awesome space/' is mine; theft does not alter ownership, and I have every right to reclaim it.”

“No you fucking don't. If you wanted it back you shoulda said so back when I got it, months ago, fully on accident, y'know; I didn't steal your shit on purpose, it wasn't even /hard/.” He laughs in their face and shoves the puppet bodily, taking a stomping step forward. From where his foot makes contact with the marbled floor a pulse of purple light emanates outward, making several brighter green eyes flinch shut. Spreading from under his foot, the surface starts to turn solid, vivid Mads Altair Purple, an effect that immediately draws every eye's attention. The god can feel intense divinity surging through him, connecting with the metaphysical material he's already so familiar with and with every confident word saturating it with his own soul, entirely displacing the other god's temperate, unresisting passive energy with his intense and willful power.

”It was in /my/ soul all this time, I can change it as well as you can, and now I'm going to claim it properly, my friend told me how. Because my friends are smarter than you, and gave me everything I need to evict your ass. Here's 1 of those objective facts you love: this piece of the Astral Plane belongs to me and me alone, and there's nothing you can do about it.“ Mads Altair lets go of his grounding point and steps firmly forward again, another footprint of color staking his claim, and tosses the puppet aside bodily, its strings following. Considering a moment, he turns to the couch, hands in his pockets, and kicks it over with 1 foot and a loud thud. He always hated that fucking couch, and it's not as satisfying as it should be to see it destroyed like that.

”It's /mine/. End. Of. Story.“

The couch dissolves into purple sparks when the growing patches of colored floor spread beneath it at a steady pace, and Mads looks up at the darting, panicked eyes with a dark, smug grin. ”So this is our opposing forces of will, huh? What's wrong, getting nervous? Not so sure if you're in control anymore? Good! You're not. Now get out of my fucking way.“

He doesn't need to reach down and put his hands to the surface of the plane like he did before; with this power, he doesn't even need to make further contact. All it takes is Mads Altair raising his hands and slamming them fisted downward with intent to cause another shockwave of increasingly dense sparks to radiate around him, not just coloring the floor now but spreading beyond it, expanding into the previously vast, open area Sarandiel had turned into an awful little box. It grows beyond the cramped vicinity of the eyes, all they can do is watch, and perhaps finally get a word in.

“You cannot possibly- this is not how it works, I will not permit it. I will NOT PERMIT IT--” Too shocked to actively resist, only now do they realize the firmness required to push back, but it's already too late.

Though the protesting puppet dissolves as well, the initial open door remains after everything, the green and white funnel within floating now at the far edge of the visible plane where it had been created. Reaching back to squeeze Cookie's hand again, Mads releases it and steps toward the door without hesitance or fear, under the deeply hateful gaze of dozens of eyes and with green strings of light extending towards him only to vaporize in his glowing aura.

“Alright, Sarandiel, you bastard, get the Hell out of my domain,” The god announces, eyes blazing like 2 suns in the sky, “And /don't come back/.”

The door is slammed near-violently shut without allowing Sarandiel another word, turns purple, and quickly dissolves into sparks. Every green eye floating in the void blinks out and in moments colored sparks come rushing back in from where they'd been repelled, gold, pink and purple clouds interrupting the dark. Brushing his hands together like he's cleaning them off, a massive, satisfied smirk on his face, Madison Altair turns back to the fully purple surface of the wide piece of Astral Domain that he's claimed, as well as his ecstatically proud boyfriend. Cookie waits only until Mads has thrown his arms in the air and cheered goofily at his own accomplishment to throw himself into the god's arms, pulling him into a passionate kiss that's onscreen for all of half of a second before the recording ends.

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> Madison Rook paces on the beach, leaving parallel lines of bare footprints in the sand alongside the edges of the surf's reach, as their gathered audience comes down to the water from the beach house and settles in. They're not *nervous*, of course, just buzzing with anticipation, it's been, for them, after that simulation, a long time since they've shown off to friends, and a long time since they've had friends to show off to. Calling on the power of the endless body of water in front of them is a rush to the tiefling in the first place, but they always love an audience.

Adjusting their cloak, reaching back past their large, curving horns to fix their ponytail, Rook makes sure they look the part before a tattooed hand disappears under their cloak, drawing out their long, spiraling silver wand with a small blue sphere on the hilt. They fiddle with the beads tied to the silk strip wrapped around the handle while their finned tail swishes behind them the others finish chatting, taking a final moment to go over their plan in their head again; they have to do this perfectly, to get a good grade in impressing their friends, which is normal to want and possible to achieve.

After a dramatic pause once attention is on them, Madison Rook holds out their wand stiffly in front of them, and with only a thought it expands into a similarly designed staff, intricate silver and violet engravings in the grip and a spherical sea-blue crystal set at the top. This version of their casting focus intensifies their magic; they'll need the precision of its handheld form a little later.

Twisting the base of the staff in the sand, Rook mutters their first incantation, free hand performing a quick and highly practiced movement. A point in the waves several feet out from the group indents, rippling outward in rings and causing the waves in an area to slow and smooth down into a wide, tranquil circle interrupting the tides.

The end of the staff is swirled in the sand, a similar spiral growing in speed in the center of the space. They lift the sphere towards the space and raise it up, drawing with it the vortex, pulled up in its spiral from the water to form a thickening waterspout that rises over their collective heads, another muttered spell causing it to intensify, spread in odd directions and stretch in shape as the direction of its flow defies physics in favor of the caster's practiced command. When the water's violence reaches its peak, it slows for barely a moment, then bursts outward and down in a heavy fall of seawater. From where the water had been forcibly flowing, when released from its structural hold, it spreads into a set of spread wings, a towering horned head, and a spray of mist at the group from its stage out in the water.

Long before this visual is even completely formed Rook is casting another spell, moving their staff in a broad stroke up the deluge of a dragon, which stills before the droplets can fall. The staff shifts into a wand mid-motion and the tiefling's purple hands twitch in intricate and intentional manipulation of the energy here, the tip of their wand drawn through the air like a paintbrush in each direction that the water reaches to freeze the entire artistic shape on its sturdy stand of spiraled ice. They look to their audience with their hands on their hips, smirking proudly.

“But there's more, naturally.”

Their staff, once more, waves over the sculpture, which is suddenly smothered by the darkest black there could be. Wings of shadow still spread, the points of darkness where its eyes would be glow red for a few seconds, before the entire dragon disappears, base and all, leaving a smooth circle of water again.

”Now that's out of the way for now, I've got something else cool.“

Another cast, and a large white sphere of cold energy, shedding mist onto the water, appears in the air over the circle. Wand in their grip, one hand gestures patterns that are drawn through the water like their hand passed through it physically, while the wand points to the sphere and draws from it a beam of freezing cold to trace right behind the movement of the water, capturing lines and shapes that float still on the surface, almost like a laser printer of instantaneous ice. It's fascinating to watch, but when it seems finished, Rook still has more.

”This obviously isn't a great angle to see what I made, so-” The circle of water rises up from the back into a towering wave, the ice still positioned carefully along its face into a detailed recreation of the back of a Duel Monster's card, rendered in shapes of frozen seawater.

“I can make tons of beautiful stuff but you guys will really enjoy this next experience, it's 1 of my favorites.” The wave collapses, the ice floating adrift, and as Rook gestures everyone forward, the surf retreats in a path out into the sea, parting before them and their staff as the heavy-clad but barefoot tiefling leads the group out through the water without touching a drop. “You don't have to get wet yet, but you have to see this before people start doing other stuff and miss out.”

Soon they're fully under the water, a large dome above and around the group holding back the sea like a solid pane of glass over a ring of dry sand, though the unseen ocean is right there to reach into if so desired. It's a great view, and surprisingly comfortable, Rook seems to have no issue maintaining the dome until people want to head back to shore.

When they reach the shore, the frozen droplet dragon will be waiting for them on the shore, now proper black ice with glowing red eyes. They can never show off too much for Mokuba specifically. The sorcerer will gladly teleport him up onto its head, and make a fun little ice slide to help him get safely back down.

The statue will be either melted or shadowed back away, and once it's gone Rook will act for a moment like that's the last of it, before starting to step backwards into the water proper. They grow gills and webbed fingers, but before either properly take shape they're already a humanoid shape of darkened water melting into the sea. The still water starts to churn and arcs of liquid start to jump from the surface like living things, some sinking back in and rising in strangely shaped waves, some never splashing down, instead spiraling like threads through the air, around each other, woven through by more fast-moving water in some recognizable shapes and some abstract. It's an extremely precise display Rook can only pull off by being a large part of it, knowing exactly where every drop is at all time while they control the sea with both their magic and their body. It's also definitely overkill, but they have no reason to *not* to show it off.

An expert in emptying harsh liquids down his throat as fast as possible, Mads downs half the container before he even flinches, his expression a journey of fascination as the conceptual taste hits him. This is a man who has swallowed liter after liter of random red-colored food items processed together in a horrible mixed-texture sludge and finished off a dozen bottles of whiskey in under an hour. If he can perform any task of ridiculous tolerance, it's this. The unknown factor of the substance's experience is overwhelming to the senses in a way he tends to actively seek, as opposed to generally overwhelming for any given organic's relatively sensitive stomach. It greatly helps that he doesn't have 1.

Halfway through the bottle, though, he /does/ flinch, as a broadening sort of dizziness hits him, a widening orbit of thoughts like his mind is expanding in ways he can't comprehend. A patch of static starts from his chest and expands faster than the bottle empties, once his soul has begun to properly process the first heavy swallows. It spreads over the angel's form in seconds, erasing his tattoos, face, and colored hair, quickly replaced with shadowy static in his own shape. It still supports his clothes, as well as the bottle, empty and lowering as the static-faced figure stares into the camera, wisps of dark almost-smoke coming off his shoulders and hands.

Infused with the essence of mystery and shadow, far too much of it, Mads' soul embodies the energy it was given to process, as it generally tends to: he understands nothing and everything at the same time, his mind a mystery, the room unfamiliar, but concepts he'd never understood opening wide before him for flashes of comprehension before they vanish back into the static. To his perception the world around him has faded to dark greys, his feelings to vague questions, and the glow within smothered in the darkness he's embodying. His senses are everywhere rather than nothing, instead of floating in a void the angel pushes through a dense haze of meaningless information and stimuli, understanding none of it until he does until he doesn't, reaching for something else, mind now existing far beyond his body, reaching into space for the mysteries he /really/ cares about.

Mads Altair's static-blurred shape darkens to a void as he drops the empty bottle and grips the post of his bedframe. Thankfully, the darkness isn't endless; stars begin to blink into view throughout his soul, shining in place of his skin, scattered across his chest like the night sky. 2 shining lights show in place of his eyes, burning balls of fire millions of lightyears away that, for the moment, he completely understands. The experience is incredible, and the only thing he feels is awe.

Staring at his hands, looking beyond them into the stretch of space they represent and seeing dozens of stars despite their distance, the shadow-drunk angel now embodying the mysteries of the darkness of space finds, deep among its rocks and space dust, a reminder of what the fuck he's supposed to be doing at this exact moment. Those starbright eyes rise to the camera when he figures it out; the words that spill from his mouth are the sounds of burning stars and the hurtling of meteors through atmospheres, incomprehensible even to him. Realizing, vaguely, the issue, his hard-to-define hands fumble for a moment as he struggles to figure out where his body /actually/ is, but soon he figures out how to pick the bottle up, turn it upside down to display its empty state, and shape his hand into a thumbs-up.

As Mads moves forward and reaches for the camera, he seems to look to his left and jolt upright. There's something there he /definitely/ shouldn't be seeing, and, afraid it'll somehow show to his innocent viewers, the space-angel hurriedly grabs for the camera, ending the video.]