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 Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 1:04 pm
Serandite was humming to herself, rolling a pink plastic ring betwen her thumb and pointer finger. She stared down at the object, a secretive smile unfolding on her expression. She was content to simply sit there for the night, simply kicking her legs back and forth, bathing in the aftermath of happiness.
Unfortunately, happiness was fleeting.
Her attention was drawn away from the ring as a eerie purple glow shined from the sleeves of her kimono coat. Her small hand dipped into the large black fabric, pulling a large purple stone from it. Serandite's eyes widened, her eyes blinking several times, the bright glow from the stone was a rare sight to be seen. From the way it lit up, a powerful presence appeared in the vicinity only moments ago. But the alarming warning signified it wasn't a negaverse member. No, this almost unbearable bright glow meant.. a senshi?!
Even then, the glow looked rather odd for a senshi.
But that wasn't the only alarming fact. She didn't need the crystal by now to detect it was a signature even more powerful than hers. Serandite didn't think there was anybody in the senshi community that had acheived that yet-- a power equal to their General Kings and Queens. But apparently someone had. Leaping upwards to hide herself in the foliage of trees, a bead of sweat ran down Serandite's forehead.
How .. to plan this..?
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 1:16 pm
Black heels, glowing with the power of her new allegiance brought the Knight of Mercury into the park clearing. It was spring now and everything was wide in bloom and beautiful with it. Unfortunately she knew that it wasn't going to last long. "I know you're here. You're like a lightbulb in the middle of nowhere, especially on this thing." The scanner was turned into the light and arms were crossed guardedly across the girl's chest.
Lina had intended to simply wander by the park and make sure everything was alright when she'd felt the power signature of a higher-rank Negaverser. It was odd to feel things on this side of the moral fence and which Negaverser was hard for her to comprehend. There was a time when each of them had a power signature that could be clearly picked out.
Now? No. Not now.
Plus, now that she'd been gone, there was an obvious vacancy in the ranks. Had Beryl chosen to fill it? If so, with whom? There were faces and names, but names didn't match faces and their importance to her was blurred. So few remained intact inside the shattered fragments. It was quite awful but her resolve remained firm.
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 1:37 pm
Serandite saw the black-clothed girl from the back. That bright blue hair .. It's curly length .. That voice. It wasn't a senshi after all! Overcome by emotion, Serandite ignored the alarming bells that rang in her brain. Serandite stepped forward, her heel lifting for a jump to leap down and tackle the familiar silhouette from the back, her arms extended wide for a surprise hug. Serandite hadn't seen her in forever.
There was so much Serandite wanted to tell Lina.. and partially ask, where she had been when Tanzanite had been taken by the BMC. It wasn't as if Serandite had been in close contact .. but it was rare to go without contact. Not much had heard from Linarite, which has Serandite quite worried.
"LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINAAAAAAAAAA~"
From the way her voice stretched out the syllables, it sounded like a little girl shouting out "Leena," as she tackled the other from behind, the momentum of flying down causing both girls to hit the ground. In a mess of aching limbs, Serandite managed to sit herself up, sorely. Ok, ouch. Perhaps that wasn't the best way to hug Linarite. But it had been the first thing that came to mind when Serandite saw her.
"Did you level up? Your outfit looks great! I have so much---"
She was cut off when she realized something was very wrong. Was this Linarite? Why did it feel so .. off? Temporarily thrown off from the very sudden change in what Serandite had thought she had always known, the nearly impossible thought refused to show itself in the first few moments.
But with a cold and clammy realization, it soon did.
If Black Lady could do it, why not Linarite?
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 2:25 pm
It never occurred to Lina that Serandite hadn't immediately realized what had happened. It also never occurred to her that nobody had told the cheek-pinchingly adorable general what had happened. What the hell had happened since she left, that something so incredibly huge hadn't been told to one of the higher officers?! Too ingrained in her habits, Lina was absolutely indignant on behalf of her friend.
Sitting up on her elbows there was a smile that faded quickly at the look of the frozen expression on the other's face. "Ah. So you didn't know. What are you going to do about it?" Sitting back on her elbows, legs splayed in the grass of the park, the Knight of Mercury was acutely aware that she was very exposed. But her scouter was alive and registering the power levels of the young general. If she was going to make a power play Lina would see it and might avoid it.
Might.
She was also somewhat faster than before, though still weaker in several ways. Why hadn't she gone out with Castor? Stupid, stupid Lina. Still, the teen did the best she could to hold her expression neutral. A fight was the last thing she wanted.
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 3:35 pm
A lot had happened-- Apparently, the capture and kidnapping of crucial officers would eclipse the disappearance of a negaverse General. Of course, when said-general was generally in opposition to the negaverse .. that didn't go over well (prime example, a certain couple encased due to alleged opposition.)
But it was still rather sad at how little Serandite knew of Linarite's situation before and now. She had no clue of Linarite's previous love for Castor .. or that she had been in such a conflict between Castor and the negaverse. Serandite's hands, out of nowhere, reached out to clutch Linarite's furry collar tightly, her eyes wide with desperation. Both hands clutched the black collar, not out of hostility but anger. Anger that somehow, the ridiculous values senshi held had seemingly reached out and stolen Linarite from the negaverse's grasps.
"You can't! You cant be on their side .. Not you, Linarite."
Her head lowered, her eyes brimming with tears that refused to fall as Serandite's eyes lowered on Linarite's belt. The sight froze in her mind .. The symbol of mercury. A planet symbol. Her fingers loosened their grip, refusing to believe the nearly impossible reality in front of her.
"Dont tell me you forgot Tanz. Don't tell me you forgot about Nealite or General King Charonite! .. W.. Why would you ally yourself with ..?" She asked brokenly, finally taking a look. A look at the Knight of Mercury. Her outfit .. her eye gear .. She took it all in, her fingers clenched in fists.
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Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:31 pm
All things considered simply being shaken was heavily preferable to the alternatives. Sera's first instinct had been to shake her and deny but where things would go from there not even Lina could tell. She could never, ever forget that this pretty in pink girl was a General of the Negaverse and could brook no opposition. It was a good place to start her campaign though.
"I'm on my own side, Serandite. I'm not a senshi, I'm a knight, and I still think almost all of them are intolerable assholes with entitlement complexes." Mentioning that she was shacked up with the newest prince was probably not the best thing right now. Taking a chance Lina brought her hands up to rest on the shoulders of the girl's odd kimono. It had always been a useless battle costume, hadn't it?
"I will never forget Tanz. I didn't forget you. Or them." Saying their names felt wrong and though Lina knew in her heart she was doing the right thing, Charonite would have killed her. He wouldn't have looked at her and given a moment's reprieve. He simply would have killed her. "But I couldn't live under Beryl a moment longer. She's wrong Serandite. Wrong about everything. She's lied to us, used us, and then would toss us aside like toys when she's done." Eyes and hands dropped.
"I intend to do everything I can to save you all from her."
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Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 10:10 pm
Everything Serandite heard wasn't new to her ears. Perhaps, it was a lesson that hit the early members of the negaverse first .. Some newer members had the mistaken impression that Beryl was their savior. Their light in time of need.. but most of the Generals knew otherwise. Serandite was no exception. It was a lesson that had been pounded into Tanzanite, Obsidian, Nealite, Linarite .. and Serandite. Even the cheerful pink-haired General knew she was at the whim of their Queen. They were nothing more than knights on a chess board, ready to be used or knocked off.
But was that a reason to run away?
.. No.
"You're wrong, Linarite. Is that still even your name? No, wait, it's a negaverse name. It doesnt apply anymore, does it?" Serandite choked on the sentence bitterly, her fists rammed forward into a pole, reddening her knuckles. "You can say you're allied with neither but that emblem on your waist doesn't lie. Knight or not, you've got the symbol of mercury, don't you?"
Serandite's hand lifted to slap away Linarite's hands from her side, stepping back to stand above Linarite. Her eyes were cast down, bangs covering her eyes. Her posture turned rigid, stiffening, as the knight spoke. It was obvious she was not receptive. "Don't kid yourself. What, you're saying you have the power to beat both Beryl and Metallia now? That you can get all these 'intolerable assholes with entitlement complexes' to go home to their planets? Tell me, what exactly do you plan to do to save us, Knight of Mercury?"
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Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 10:02 pm
It wasn't going to be easy. That was something that the knight told herself every night before she went out, everything that she always said whenever she caught a glimpse of a Negaverse agent that had meant something to her. But that didn't stop it from hurting so goddamn much when they all looked down at her and disdained the help that she so freely offered. Why would they accept her though? The blind acceptance that came with the fact they were all family in corruption was the one thing that Lina truly missed.
Lina Knight was truly alone in almost everything she did. The price for the strength to stand up for something she knew was right was a deep loneliness that didn't quite go away, even with Castor. "I'm always going to be Linarite. You can't run away from what you've done even if you want to. They just call me Lina now." The tone was bitter and matter-of-fact. If any of her identities were dead it was the innocent Audrey Collins that had such high hopes. Linarite lived inside the body of the Mercury Knight and brought enough self-loathing to drive her.
"I am going to take away everything Beryl has. Just like she is taking everything from everyone else. Then when she's weak I'm going to kill her. I've known since the moment I met that red-haired b***h it was going to be me or her and I'm not going to let it be me." More bland, matter-of-factness in the face of Serandite's rigid anger. "Have you seen their planets Serandite? How could you. They're liveable. Do you think if given the option to die or go back to where they came from they wouldn't choose to go back and restore their homes? The way we want to restore ours?"
It may have been a shoddy plan, a false hope, but it was all she had to bargain with right now. "As for Metallia...why would you choose that if you didn't have to? Do you even know if she's from Earth? What do you even know about her? We didn't even know she existed until it was convenient! If you want to live a blind slave to that forever I don't know what to say. I will just have to try and stop you. For your own good." Which was the real sticking point. It was for their own good.
Why wouldn't she know what was good for them? It was good for her.
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Posted: Mon May 02, 2011 11:49 pm
Linarite-- Lina .. had some bold words. Hearing her words .. Hearing the thoughts that Linarite must have harbored all this time .. All this time and Serandite never knew it. How close has she been to Linarite really? Perhaps, she was the only one who thought she was close to the blue-haired general. But not so much, as this incident proved.
"I am going to take away everything Beryl has... I've known since the moment I met that red-haired b***h it was going to be me or her and I'm not going to let it be me."
She thought she would overthrow their Queen? She thought that everything would be fixed if their Queen was gone? What might have been the dragon's head being cut off could end up to be a hydra. It could bring on a multitude of problems that they never had thought of. If anything, the negaverse would only put someone else in power. Someone else in place.
Did Lina know that? Had she ever thought that far? Killing Beryl and Metallia didn't make the senshi problem go away. It didn't provide a solution to the earth eventually being overrun by invaders. It didn't solve the fact that even the Prince of Earth wasn't trying to protect Earth.
"Big news Lina. Do you see them going back home to restore their so-called planets? No. I don't. They insist on staying here, their home planet. But it's not their home, is it?" At this point, Serandite had walked over to kick a pole. Her foot throbbed in pain .. but at least, she wasn't kicking Linarite.
Something Linarite said afterwards seemed to soften her expression somewhere within her speech. Her hair whipped as she turned around swiftly, with each step, her anger seemed to dissipate into a new emotion. .. Melancholy? Something Linarite had said struck her core .. but which part was it? The blind slave? The realization that none of the negaverse had ever been introduced to Metallia? Or .. was it something else?
She didn't stop until she was in front of the female knight, her hand gesturing for the knight to lean lower. Almost like two girls huddled to share a high school secret or a discreet piece of advice. Her solemn expression.. her unguarded posture .. Serandite wasn't going to attack.
But she had something to say.
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Posted: Tue May 10, 2011 9:46 am
The hesitation in Lina's movement was almost painful for both of them. A few weeks earlier the teen would have leaned down with a smile on her face to hear whatever it was Serandite had to say and probably would have giggled at it. They had been constructing a careful bridge from mere comrades towards friends and the bluenette had been thrilled to see the construction. Now that was all torn apart.
Wasn't it?
Unconsciously, with a great tension in her body, the Knight licked her lips and leaned forward until her ear was level with the pink general's mouth. It wasn't far to go for they'd always been similar in height. If a hand shot inside of her chest now it was going to be incredibly painful and incredibly inconvenient. Maybe, just maybe, she could get her interference off. But Lina heavily doubted it.
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Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 5:23 pm
It was painful to see the bridge breaking between them. But it was the remainders of that breaking bridge that allowed this slightest bit of friendliness between them-- the faint trust that Lina would listen to Serandite's words. A wary trust that Serandite wouldn't dig her hand violently into Lina's chest to take the starseed, as she should have.
What was she whispering? The murmurs sounded like meaningless words at first, merely a list of nothings.
".. Evans .... Rachel ... Haru .."
Was it .. It was a list of names.. ?
"...Sarah Cole, Evelyn Marks, Daniel Rides, Rinna Sumire, Yayoi Machida..." Serandite would have continued on because the list seemed endless but .. she had no need to go on. Because for the earlier members of the negaverse, ones who came before the age of energy gathering, they would have known. This was more than a list of names. It was a list of starseeds.. A list of lives. Serandite's forehead leaned against Lina's shoulder, the fight seeming to have disappeared from her small frame. She sucked in a breath, letting it out shakily, her vision struggling to focus.
"I killed them all. I didn't mean to at first but ignorance is never an excuse. Even when I knew what I was doing later on, I still continued killing." Serandite gripped Linarite's sleeve, her posture rigidly stiff, brown eyes focused blindly on the glowing blue band. There was a lump in her throat that made words difficult to get past .. Linarite's sleeve was just a tiny bit wet at this point. She forced the words out, blinking to keep the emotion from overwhelming her.
"People say some mistakes can be forgiven .. but I don't think this one can be. All those families that cried and came to their graves .. I watched them all. I left flowers on as much as I could identify. But if I abandon the negaverse now, l know that I can't bring back all those starseeds I took. I can't stop because that means every starseed I took along the way... will mean nothing. I vowed that if I can use their energy, I won't take their starseed. But that doesn't excuse our dirty past, does it?"
Serandite's gaze looked up to search Lina's expression, large chocolate brown eyes stared at the new Lina. Did the new Lina have any more answers than Linarite did?
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Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 1:57 pm
Arms wrapped around Serandite as the girl cried into her shoulder, voice so reminiscent of her own those last few days before she had given up everything to change her own life. It was almost...no. It was painful to listen to that in the sweet girl's voice. That was something that they had all done once before when sitting around Nealite's apartment. All of those supposedly-hardened veterans of the Negaverse had looked at each other and wondered what this cute girl was doing with them.
She'd been proving them wrong more and more and had even held her own against Tanzanite when Linarite was swept more and more under the rug. Maybe it was those names in her head and those flowers on the graves that gave Serandite the hold that Linarite had been lacking. It made her think so much better of the diminutive general and touch her cheek lightly.
"Nothing excuses it." It was a hard truth, though Lina had said it as softly as she could. "We did what we did because we thought it was right, because we were told it was right. You did better than most of us. I don't even know their names, I never did. They were just part of helping me achieve my goals." A shudder ran through her with revulsion at the thought of what she had done.
"That's why I want to save you all. I am afraid that you are nothing to the ones you serve, just like they were nothing to most of us. You're so sweet Serandite, I'm afraid for you the most. You don't really belong in the dark any more than I did. Maybe less." And that wasn't really an answer per-se but it was her truth. She was so afraid for those boys and girls who had been thrown into the darkness. Sure almost all of them had leaped at it...but they had always thought there had been a point.
A purpose.
"I was forgiven. Maybe not by all of them but I don't like them any more than I did before. Senshi are still stupid and blind but that doesn't mean we have to kill them. We just have to send them back where they came from...as peacefully as we can. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dedicate my whole life to doing what we had always been fighting for without killing anyone. I think that's the right step to take." Arms squeezed around Serandite one more time before Lina released and stepped back.
"Just be careful. Can you do that much for me at least?"
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Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 10:14 pm
Serandite's tears stained the knight's shoulder, her trembling figure could almost be felt resonating throughout Lina's hold on her .. It was those soft and restrained sobs that allowed Lina's soft voice to be heard, each knowing that these words were vital .. Vital in saving their relationship .. or themselves? Perhaps, both?
Lina's soft explanation pierced her heart -- more than other members that Lina had tried to speak to, at least--Serandite's tight grip loosening as Lina's kind voice spoke of the concern that Serandite had never known she wanted. Her words mirrored Serandite's past concerns with a compassion she'd likely never find within the other members of the negaverse. That's why Linarite had been able to draw so many under her command-- Her compassion had always been a double-edged trait. It had forced her to stay loyal with her emotions in turmoil the whole time.
One conclusion was for sure: Linarite should have never been pulled into the darkness.
Serandite's heart tightened at Lina's last question, realizing how heavy the burden the knight had to bear. Even though some entirely selfish part inside Serandite didn't want the knight to give up on her, both of them knew it was for the best. Otherwise, they'd end up at unwanted odds with each other. How much it must have taken Lina to say that last line .. Leaving the friends she wanted to save. Her fear and concern for the General was a compassion lined with cruelty to the both of them. But never would Serandite say that she wished she had never met Linarite.
"I'm a sweet girl? I've always thought so--" her hiccuping sobs subsided, there was a sort of ironic laughter in her sobs--- "--It's something that the negaverse needs. God knows that the senshi have enough of sugar and spice on their side. Without a cute little girl like me, they'll be a bunch of working stiffs." The line was a final answer to Lina's unspoken question from the beginning of their meeting, Serandite's arms lifted to use her kimono sleeves to wipe at the tears that still rimmed her eyes. Lina stepped away, this being their first.. and possibly last hug.
"I will." Her voice was slightly muffled, her voice finally seeming to catch some sort of steady footing. "You're too nice-- You be careful too. I'm afraid, not everyone in the negaverse can be sweet like me." The unspoken warning, that everyone Linarite had considered friends wouldn't accommodate the new "Lina" in such a way. There were no promises .. The next time they met, Serandite might not be in a position to be lenient.
"No matter what I do or say in the future .. Consider these words as the real truth. You're an important person to me .. so be careful. Don't die. Live for your cause." Serandite's voice was firm and there was no note of pelading or begging-- just a sincerity that both knew to be true. All in all, both of them agreed to disagree. Unfortunately, it was left to that.
The next time they'd meet, words wouldnt be exchanged like this.
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Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 2:16 pm
Pockets. That was something that whomever created their outfits had never quite taken into consideration. Yeah sure you had that magical pocket to store miscellaneous magical things but when you wanted to simply put your hands in your pockets and hold on? Totally screwed. Clasping hands in front of her somewhat uselessly, Lina summoned up a genuine, wide smile for the girl in front of her. They had to smile.
If you couldn't smile, what was the point?
"You're a good friend Serandite. I'm sorry I can't keep you." Yet. There was a mental list running through the bluenette's head of people she had to save or she wasn't worth anything at all. Originally the only names that had lasted were the three boys from her old team and Tanzanite. Now another girl joined the ranks as the knight gave a light salute from her temple and turned to walk away.
It was the last gesture of respect and trust that the Mercurian could possibly give Serandite, the sight of all that curly blue hair and a glossy black back. There was no need to worry about her back tonight, no need to worry about much of anything. She was going to plan though. Endless plans on how to save the sweetest kid who ever walked into the darkness.
Lina Knight was going to keep her friends. No matter what.
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