Beneath Stella's feet is the deck's hard wooden floor, meaning that her geomancy spell conjured up the mysterious Will O' the Wisp. The blue fire blocks the path Nepeta was leaping towards, and the troll girl is barely able to miss jumping directly into it. Landing beside the fire, Nepeta tries to escape the azure fire as it burns up the deck's floor. The flames ignite her jacket, but Nepeta immediately stops, drops, and rolls. The flame is quickly put out, and the troll girl is only slightly flustered from the unusual flame's burns.
Nepeta decides to switch to the offensive, charging toward the orator like a cheetah dashing towards a gazelle. Stella clumsily fires off a shot from her gun, but just because it was clumsy did not mean it failed to hit. The bullet tears right through Nepeta's side, turning her predatory sprint into a pitiful tumble. She tumbles right into Stella, sending the two tumbling together in a ball towards the ship's handrails. The two girls untangle themselves from each other and dust themselves off, and then Nepeta takes a swipe with her claws right at the orator's stomach.
Stella is just quick enough to prevent the claws from breaking her skin. Cloth is torn away, but no real damage is done. Nepeta begins to swipe more and more as Stella is backed into a corner. Stella tries to pull her gun up and fire, but the troll's blue claws bat the gun towards the floor. The gun fires a shot, but rather than a bullet, the magic spell Blizzard is cast by the gun. The ground beneath the girls freezes, causing Nepeta to slip up and land on her rear end. Stella uses the handrail she was cornered against to support herself as she began to cast another geomancy spell. Now that she stood on ice, it was the spell Snowstorm.
A flurry of snow whips up around Nepeta, who begins to scamper off on all fours to try and escape the spell's range. The snow digs into her with surprising strength, causing her green blood to spill out and dye the snow a sickly hue. The snow finishes its assault and dissolves as Nepeta disappears into the cabin. Stella readies her gun and prepares to follow her foe into the lower decks.
The lights are off in the lower decks. Doors line the hallways, each one a possible hiding place for the troll dressed like a cat. Stella spots a trail of green blood and begins to follow it. A rug was beneath her feet, so she was able to cast Will O' the Wisp to light the hallway. As soon as the light comes on though, Nepeta dashes out of the darkness and slices off some of Stella's fingers. Her trigger finger is gone, and she drops her gun. Using her non-dominant hand, Stella pulls the gun up and fires as best as she can at the troll. Three bullets make contact, all in Nepeta's right arm. The troll cries out in pain. She ducks into a room to assess the damage to her arm.
It wouldn't move. Nepeta tried and tried, but the right arm didn't even budge. On the bright side, she could not feel the pain in the arm as it began to freeze over. The door of the room slams open. Stella barges in, launching bullets like a madman. The bullets hit nothing. Nepeta sneaks back into the hallway unseen and enters a different room. Stella realizes her opponent had left the room and goes into the hallway to find her. The wisp's flame was gone, and her opponent could be hiding anywhere. She reloads her gun before she begins to check each room, one by one. Then, she realizes it probably was not the best idea to put herself in the way of a possible troll ambush by opening the doors to a bunch of dark rooms.
Stella clears her throat rather loudly, and then her face settles into a blank expression. Then, Stella begins to ramble about abilities.
Nepeta was out cold for a while, giving Stella the time she needed to search the hallway for the room the cat-troll resided in and prepare for the confrontation they would inevitably have.
Nepeta may have been bored to sleep by the almost supernaturally dull tales Stella regaled while mimicking Darlavon, but she wasn't quite as vulnerable to its effects as a human. Nepeta often took cat-naps, whether or not this was part of her cat-imitation gimmick is anyone's guess, but she was already well rested, so she had entered a very light sleep rather than the usual deep sleep the speechcraft often inflicts.
Why is that important? Because Nepeta was awake as soon as Stella turned the door handle to the room Nepeta was in. It wasn't quick enough for her to stop leaning on the door though, because as soon as the door opened, Nepeta came falling out on top of Stella. Stella's gun falls from her hands, and Nepeta uses her good arm to slice the weapon apart. The claws were apparently rather strong. Whatever they were made of had just slashed open the ammo, causing a huge blast of ice to fill the halls and freeze the two combatants, Nepeta still propped on top of the orator.
Stella couldn't move her arms or legs, but she was able to speak. Stella began to speak of Nepeta's demise, and soon, Nepeta began to feel odd. She had been doomed by the speechcraft skill known as Condemn. If Nepeta couldn't finish the battle soon, the doomcount placed upon her by Stella would kill her without fail. And since they were frozen solid in layers of ice, Nepeta was at a serious disadvantage at the moment.
Nepeta tries to free herself from the ice, but it is no use. That is when Nepeta remembers her odd inventory system. The sylladex contains items that can be jettisoned at high speeds if a new object forces them out. Nepeta begins to ponder what she could use to force an object out of her inventory. Well, she was frozen onto the orator. Stella's silly hat is added to the sylladex, forcing out a different item from her sylladex. Which item, you ask?
Catnip. A huge bag of catnip.
The catnip is launched out of the hammerspace that is Nepeta's sylladex, flying at an alarming velocity through the ice. The ice around the girls shatters, and the two immediately leap up. Stella looks at her gun, now too badly shredded up to be of any use. She looks at the ground, hoping to find a good geomancy surface. There was ice and carpet, which she had already used to only minor success. But wait, there technically was another surface in the hallway...
Stella leaps up onto the bag of catnip and casts a geomancy spell.
The geomancy is slightly delayed as it attempts to identify the surface its using as a base, but it settles on using Tanglevine to represent its odd surface. Vines reach out of the bag of catnip and begins to strangle Nepeta, who slashes at a few until suddenly she freezes up. The vines have inflicted Stop upon her. As the vines recede back into the catnip bag, Stella sighs in relief as she sits down to wait out the doomcount. Since Nepeta couldn't move, Stella could just wait out the effects of Condemn and win the match easily.
Stella sits around for a while, thinking up possible ships and trying her best to consider possible ships using the troll girl's odd shipping quadrants. While Stella tried to occupy herself, Nepeta's doomcount is getting closer and closer to zero, but luckily for her, Stop wears off before the doomcount is over. Nepeta leaps forward as soon as she can move again, puncturing Stella's stomach with her claw. The orator leaps up, clutching at her stomach to keep her intestines from spilling out. Stella tries to run away from the troll-girl, but Nepeta jams her claw through the back of Stella's head.
When she reaches the top deck, she finds the referee tanning.
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