Time always seems to slow down when you're falling, but relativity is what it is; the descent only took a little over one second. Nyoque squealed and tried to flip and adjust its body during the fall, but Linduin's hands had a death-grip of steel upon its ass cheeks and the added mass really threw its instinctual sense of balance off-kilter. It screamed into his face, unsure of what would happen upon impact but certain that it wouldn't feel good. Linduin rolled his eyes in disdain.

Ulbert's two-fisted blow landed upon Cheis's upturned face, knocking her backwards into apparent unconsciousness (and also dislodging her lower left bicuspid and giving her a black eye). The physical strike was merely a symbolic l'apunt final in a long and multiplexural series of metaphysical actions, culminating in a highly imaginative and extremely philosophically deft maneuver which struck Cheis's soul unerringly with a tremendously precise transfinite vector and shunted it into a temporal axis whose discrete quanta were measured in complex numbers. The practical upshot of this was that Cheis's soul, while still quite solidly in place in her body, was now experiencing time in a fashion rather orthagonal to the standard progression of entropy, and to temporally contiguous observers it would look rather like her soul had been frozen in time. Ulbert wheezed, panted for breath, and started the laborious process of trying to stuff his consciousness back into his skull.

As the igg's tentacular pseudopodal extrusion crossed the ereignishorizont of the active node's field, its controlling demon made contact with the igg's teleological quintessence and the two began to exchange information. To them, it was the equivalent of a rapid and stimulating conversation, but since the node was still in superposition with the infernal hyperreality there were a large number of side-effects. The first of these was that everything within a hundred yards of the node performed a rather fetching and highly synchronized pirouette about various axes of reality, causing various phenomena ranging from combustion and implosion to quantum reordering or inversion. Trees, squirrels, bricks, and people variously exploded, warped into deeply improbable dimensions, went rocketing off at strange angles through time, or turned somewhat precipitously into other substances such as lead or chocolate. Localized thermodynamics threw up, shat its pants, and called in sick to work.

At the absolute last few microseconds before impact, Linduin applied a rapid series of carefully-controlled bursts of telekinesis around and between himself and Nyoque, which rotated the pair such that Nyoque was between Linduin and the ground and Linduin was being pushed with progressively greater microblasts of force which slowed his descent at a rate within the constituent material tolerances of his physical tissues (while, not coincidentally, pushing downwards on the air in front of Nyoque with equal force). The practical result of this is that Nyoque impacted into the cobblestones below with nearly twice the force of their combined fifty-foot fall (well above their unified terminal velocity) and that Linduin landed mostly intact with only a bit of a jarring blow to his left arm and shoulder. Nyoque splattered a bit like a watermelon, black fluids fountaining in every direction, but did not die or even lose consciousness, though the pain was singularly impressive and quite impaired its faculties for a few moments.

Cheis's earring, which did in fact count "invalid timelike states" among its very, very long list of trigger conditions, took a few moments to execute its search parameters and parse through the deeply weird returned dataset before firing off a series of corrective thaumaturgic scripts. Cheis's mystical essence and accompanying consciousness transmuted through several dimensions of unreality before arriving safe and sound back in its normal set of defined parameters of existence, and Cheis groaned and thrashed about on the ground, fishing about with her tongue for her missing tooth.

Galar Kayle, giving his wife a final hug and tender kiss upon the forehead (and consequently generating a large number of "UNAUTHORIZED CONTACT: CONSUME PARTICIPANT? Y/N" queries into Velinaer's stunned and reeling mind), summoned the energies of Santorana and leapt impossibly high into the air towards the igg and the boiling maelstrom of alien sidereal space which had moments ago been an attractive and beautiful island. Leveling his tiny-in-comparison spear in the direction of the towering eldritch monstrosity and the disaster it seemed to be generating, he fired off the largest blast of holy power he could muster.

Ulbert Malbruggen raised his left hand above Cheis's forehead, intending to do what he could to stop her before she reawakened, but was visited by a profound and deeply unwelcome sense of déjà vu; suspicious, he stepped outside of his own consciousness, fractured his contiguity of self into infinite discrete teleological projections, and goaded them into a rapid entelechy of elenchus. In moments, he identified the signs of Nyoque's work, purged them from amongst his meta-selves, and connected the dots as to what all must have occurred. He dispatched a number of copies of his sub-animae into the motes still whirling about his brow and sent them delving into the slumbering psyches of the other council members, undoing what damage he could and retrieving as much data as could be recovered regarding the true state of affairs. Regretting the necessity, he reified a ruptural principle in his fist and drove it downwards between Cheis's eyes.

The igg and the router demon, which had been undergoing a sort of fusion-slash-metasynthesis, were rather taken aback by Galar's unwelcome burst of holy energy; the process jerked to a halt and much of the delimited reality disruption fell apart and collapsed into more stable quantum states such as screaming, burning, and exploding. With a burst of pneumic power, the igg flung Galar away, blasting him nearly a half-mile across the bay and into the sky above the city at tremendous velocities. Galar prayed fervently to Santorana, clutched his spear, and hoped for salvation in some form or another.

Linduin rolled to his feet, clutching his wounded arm, and eyed Nyoque's recumbent and rapidly-regenerating form with displeasure; this hadn't worked out at all the way he'd hoped, and his options were becoming increasingly limited. With deep regret, he decided upon his next course of action, and steeled himself for the unpleasantness which was sure to follow.

Cheis of Veraleigh's eyes flew open and she reached up, lightning-quick, and grabbed Ulbert Malbruggen's wrist as their eyes locked together. Their atmai instantly heterodyned, and time slowed down as an infinite subjective arena opened in the metaspace between them. Ulbert's empyrean essentiae, arrayed with features and concepts deadly to look upon or understand, traded transphorical strikes with Cheis's rather pedestrian but astoundingly resolute oversoul. The battle lasted subjective hours to them, but was over in less than a second of real time; Cheis wrestled Ulbert's hand away, struggled to her feet, and kicked him savagely in the balls.

Velinaer, who was quite lost in his own problems for some period of time, abruptly found himself being tossed backwards with enormous force as his jujoram, sensing imminent threat, overrode its directives and launched him away as the leading edge of the disruptions consumed the skiff. Meloria Athbel's body glowed brightly, sent a final communication of "DESECRATE, RETRY, FAIL?" and dissolved into ephemera.

The bound energies of the jujoram, deprived of a valid host, rocketed outwards in a titanic explosion of unleashed power roughly equivalent to that of a fifty-kiloton bomb; the blast vaporized huge swathes of water, accelerated the already-airborne Velinaer's velocity several more times over, and rocked the igg's physical body decisively; its concentration lapsed, and the breach it had been rather carefully cultivating tore open entirely. Existence became motion, space became time, and time became possibility as a slowly-encroaching field of total quantum insanity began to ooze outward from the active node.

Galar Kayle, protected by a recursively-reinforced shield of beatific power, crashed directly through several buildings and slowed to a heavy stop as his motion arrested itself somewhere in the city's southeastern district. He leapt to his feet, bounded up on the side of a building, and launched himself back towards the fray as demons and other monsters began to sprout like weeds out of the substrate of reality around the bay's edges. He landed in the middle of a picturesque park and lashed about with his spear, felling exoforms as quickly as they spawned.

As Cheis muttered an apology to Ulbert's prone and gasping form, Linduin's voice echoed clearly up through the broken window. "Hey, Cheis! Any idea how to kill a tiger-headed manipulating creature that seems to regenerate from everything?" Cheis whipped her head around, cursed, and began hustling over to the window.

Nyoque, recovering its faculties, sprang up nimbly and began sprinting down the alley towards its next tappable resource. Cheis, swearing profusely, hopped out the window and fell seven floors, impacting with a superhero-like pose on one knee as her kinetic buffers flashed warnings about tensile refraction into her visual range. "Get out of here! Hide, or something!" She snapped at Linduin, who scowled as she ran furiously after Nyoque's retreating figure.

"Are you fucking kidding me? I've been hunting this thing for days; I'm not about to quit now." He fell in beside her, boosting his own movements as much as possible with tiny microbursts of telekinesis. His magical reserves were getting extremely drained, but he had come up with a desperate but useful trick -- which required destroying his own memories and feeding off the resulting entropic decay -- a few hours ago; he devoured his seventh birthday party and felt his energy stores refill.

Velinaer, doing his level best to shake off his universe-sized funk, crashed into the side of a large container ship and left a huge dent in its hull. He flopped rather unceremoniously into a dinghy anchored below him, which snapped its hawsers and plummeted into the sea, but managed to at least remain un-capsized. He struggled to his feet, desperately working to maintain his balance on the thrashing water, and looked upon the apocalyptic destruction reifying before him. This was super, mega, ultra-hyper-giga-fucking-zetta-goddamn bullshit. He wanted his mother.

Galar spun his spear over his head and channeled as much spiritual might as he could muster; a wave of celestial power blasted outwards from him, striking down dozens of demons in an instant. He panted, looking around for threats, and blinked in surprise as he saw a familiar figure dash by him into an alley. No, surely he was imagining things.

Nyoque, giggling to itself, made its final turn and whipped around, deliberately putting its back towards its goal, as Cheis and Linduin rounded the corner and stopped in front of it. "Good sir and madam," said Nyoque dramatically, "may I introduce you to my acquaintance, the good Lord Ivan Wall?"