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 Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 12:11 am
It had taken a while for it to happen, and a while longer for Aquarius to admit it, but her research was at an impasse. She had logged every character in the fraction of the books she had read into her master notebook, and had organized lists based on appearance and structure into other notebooks and binders. She had isolated what she thought were the main characters of the Aquarian language, as well as partial alphabets belonging to as many as twenty-seven other languages. She had tried to make her own words and sentences, but without knowing how the Aquarian language worked, she couldn't. Her only options were to look elsewhere. The library had many more books than the ones she had looked through, but one could only read illegible books for so long without wanting to start a bonfire.
So instead, she had copied her alphabets and partial alphabets into another notebook, and this one she carried around with her when she went on patrol. Which wasn't terribly often. She had gotten so used to avoiding other auras, regardless of alignment, that it took her a long time to run into someone that she thought might have some worthwhile input. It probably helped that the person in question didn't have an aura that she could avoid.
"Hey! Um... Zirconia, right?" Wow, she remembered! Aquarius smiled and ran forward to catch the glimpse of light curly hair. "Got a sec?"
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Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 7:51 pm
Zia paused and whirled around, brow furrowed in confusion for a second. Usually she had to approach others. She chalked it up to being on high alert while energy blind where others came to depend on auras when they could feel them. Just another theory in a thousand.
But the confusion was fleeting and as soon as she caught sight of that very distinct fuku, she brightened. "Aquarius!" Though the expression she defaulted down to was a wry sort of unamused. "Ha... yeah, not quite. Zirconia isn't coming out a lot these days."
She clicked her tongue and jerked her own thumb towards herself. "I'm Zia, the original owner of this meat suit. But uh... I could have a sec if you're still interested in me."
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Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:26 pm
Wait, not quite? For a moment Aquarius was horribly confused, wondering how she could have gotten the wrong person when the wrong person clearly knew her. The explanation helped clear things up a bit, but not enough for her tastes. "So... you're different people still, even though you've only got one starseed? That's kinda trippy. You're like Zue, except you're not." Aquarius didn't like making comparisons, but Zue was another exception to the usual cat rules that she'd tried to make sense of. If he had different personalities, she couldn't tell, since at least around her he was grumpy and angry all the time.
Zia, thankfully, seemed neither grumpy nor angry. "Sorry for the mix-up. I'm Aquarius and... and you already knew that. How does that work?" She was always willing to pounce on a new puzzle, even when she had a huge list of them piling up. The languages could wait. They had waited a thousand years already.
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Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 7:07 pm
Zia frowned. Zue sounded familiar, but she couldn't quite place how. It was just a name, mentioned in passing years ago.
"Well, it's like... you know how Zirconia's starseed is here but her body's elsewhere? She's using mine. Except when I get sick of where she's driving the car. But she's in the passenger's seat listening! And... I just realized how creepy that sounds," She rambled with a nervous laugh. "Uh, I'm Zia," She couldn't remember if Zirconia had given her a proper introduction.
"Who's Zue?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 7:41 pm
Car analogies were not the best way to get Aquarius' attention, unless they referred to the mechanics of one. She was more of a bicycle girl herself. Still, she understood the gist, nodding slowly as she filtered the information. "Nah, it's not creepy. It's kind of like how coma patients are supposed to hear what people are saying to them on some subconscious level." Which was one reason why her visits to the hospital when Laney was there were so frequent. "I get it, more or less."
The repeated introduction was more or less ignored, which was one reason Aquarius was so bad at remembering names. Instead, she focused on the question. "Zue's the princess' cat. And kind of responsible for the rest of us, I guess? He's the one who gathered us up both times, anyway. Oh, and he's a total grump and annoying as heck, but he's kind of got a similar deal where he ended up in a human. I don't know the details; you'd have to ask him for that." As interesting as a human-cat hybrid would be to study, his personality didn't make it easy, and Aquarius had basically given up on that idea.
Especially since a new subject had presented herself.
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Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2012 7:55 am
"I don't think that makes it less creepy," Zia said with a dissonant smile and nod. The thought of willingly going into a coma was unsettling. The idea that doing so also let someone walk around with her face even more so. Creepy context was creepy.
"The Zodiac princess? I guess that makes sense," She said with a nod the more she thought about it. "The cat is usually bonded to the authority figure." Though, someone else with a cat in them made her frown. The implications were unsettling.
"Why would Zue need a host if he's from this universe?"
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Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 10:15 pm
Comas didn't particularly scare Aquarius anymore. She had been to that ward of the hospital many times, and even been a patient in it once. Coma patients looked peaceful and almost happy. Laney had always looked that way to her, anyway, and the only fear Aquarius had felt was that she would never wake up again. Since that wasn't an issue anymore, there was no fear at all, which meant there was at least one thing in the world that she was not afraid of.
"There's cat rules?" Aquarius had always figured Zue was with the princess because he liked her. It had never occurred to her that it was because she was the princess, but then she'd never thought about it much. "You should really ask him for specifics, but I think it's because we died. He wasn't like that before we died, anyway, so that's probably got something to do with it."
Aquarius tensed visibly as she spoke about dying, and smoke filled her vision, but when she closed her eyes and opened them again, the smoke was gone. That was a good sign; it didn't usually go away that easily. Maybe she was finally starting to get used to talking about it.
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Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 5:57 am
"Oh god, cats have so many stupid rules," Zia said with a snort. Even though those were probably just Zirconia's rules and not universal cat rules every feline was honor bound to follow or anything.
She made a mental note to put Zue on her list of people to find. Again. Totally forgetting she had already done this year back when she heard about him from ********* noticed Aquarius tense, though, and felt a wave of concern. "Is something going on? Are you okay?" Her first thought was that the senshi was sensing something she wasn't, and she glanced over her shoulder with a cringe.
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Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 10:11 pm
"And I thought being a Zodiac was bad." Not at first, she hadn't. Not until the bad things kept piling up, one after another, until she collapsed under their collective weight. None of the other senshi seemed emotionally traumatized in that way, so Aquarius figured it was just a Zodiac thing. Lucky her, for drawing the figurative short straw in the cosmic lottery.
She blinked again, and looked back at Zia blankly. "Hm? Oh, yeah, fine. Nothing's going on." By now she was well aware that the things she saw and heard when she was stressed or scared weren't necessarily real, but she didn't want to let other people know that she was totally nuts unless she had to. Nobody would take her seriously if they thought she was genuinely insane.
A change of subject was needed. Since this whole thing was really a digression, she had one handy. "I've been working on that project I told you about- er, well, I told Zirconia anyway. I'm working on translating the books up there." She pointed to the sky, hoping that her meaning was clear. "Mostly focusing on Aquarian, since that's the largest body of works, but I've come to a standstill and was kind of hoping someone else might be able to give me a nudge. See something I'm not seeing." Or even better, actually recognize something, but Aquarius wasn't going to hold her breath for that.
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Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:01 am
"Oh," Was Zia's flat answer at first, until she processed it a bit more, which in her brain usually meant, more or less, conferring with Zirconia. And then "Ooooh... Oh!" For someone who had more or less been building their own library-- even though she called it other things like information station and jerryrigged cat base-- she suddenly slapped her forehead for not thinking of the Aquarian library sooner.
"Right! Because you have... oh my god, you have all of those books."
She bounced on the balls of her feet in excitement. "Can we go there? Please?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2012 9:32 pm
For a moment Aquarius wondered if she should have been more explicit after all, but Zia got what she was talking about in the end. Which was kind of a relief, because explaining the entire project from scratch would take forever. Or at least a really long time. She'd been working on it for more than a year at this point, in bits and pieces, and had put a lot of work into her research. It really sucked that she didn't have more to show for it.
Her relief was short-lived, however, as Zia asked to go to the library. This had not been on the agenda for that evening, and she wasn't sure she really wanted to deal with her outpost right then. On the other hand, Zia was clearly excited about this, and Aquarius didn't want to disappoint one of the few people who still thought she was capable of doing stuff. Maybe going together wouldn't be as maddening as her solo trips tended to be.
"Okay, why not?" It had been a while since her last visit anyway. Aquarius pulled out her phone and slid it open. "Keep a hand on me somewhere, or you'll get left behind," she warned, shutting her eyes and focusing on the call of the Surrounding. Focus was not her strong point, so it took a few minutes for her to single it out, and then-
As always, she arrived at the gate to her outpost, which creaked open as soon as she touched it, revealing the dusty grounds with the building a short ways away. "Thank you for riding Aquarius Air, please make sure you have all your limbs before attempting to exit the plane."
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Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2012 11:41 pm
Zia clung to Aquarius. She knew she only needed to keep a hand on her, but she very intently know they were going to hurl through space and that led to the split second decision to throw her arms around the senshi in a sideways hug slash vice grip.
And then they were at the gates. Zia's heart fluttered. The gravity holding their feet on earth felt so crushing and restricting sometimes. Being lifted away, and on circumstances she had requested, was a burst of exhilaration and freedom, even if it was a glimpse of a ride on someone else's signal. She sustained a vacant hold on Aquarius for a split second with a gaping expression of awe that turned to childish glee in a second that was released with a squeal and a squeeze. And then she ran off ahead. Zia was a terrible guest.
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Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2012 2:58 pm
Aquarius always had mixed feelings when coming to her outpost. She supposed that it should have felt like home, but it didn't, at least not in the way that she expected it to. Having to immediately share it with a bunch of angry people hadn't really helped. Because of the lengthy periods of time she had spent there, she was reasonably familiar with its layout and comfortable moving around, but she was still waiting for a spark of recognition that never came, and that kept her on edge.
Zia, on the other hand, suffered no such problems. Aquarius was still for a moment, reacting to her usual unease along with the unexpected hug. Then she was off running to catch up, skidding a bit on the sandy ground. "It's not a race, you know!" she called out, but she was laughing as she did. Seeing her guest so full of enthusiasm was enough to send her mood soaring, and she put on the speed as she ran for the doors of the building looming ahead of them.
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Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2012 3:16 pm
"I knoooow," Zia said, rolling her eyes and grinning all the same. Books. Those books. Once suitably surrounded by the deluge she puttered around them examining the covers and spines for some form of familiarity and dismissing them when nothing clicked. It didn't change the fact that she coveted these things like no one's business.
"You know I've been collecting information," She said almost passively as she thumbed through the pages of a book she didn't find familiar, but have very pretty writing. "It ain't a pretty library, but it's at least a coherent collection." It was a grungy collection of binders, files, and a server in a temporary aluminum structure meant for experiments with mirror magic, it was most certainly not pretty. But then she also didn't mean to sound like she was drawing a comparison, because she wasn't. It was a thought that was gleaned from secret desires to steal some of these texts for her personal collection.
"You find anyone that recognizes any of these alphabets?"
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Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 10:30 am
As always, the doors to the outpost opened easily, and they burst into the entrance hall. Evidence of its use as the record office was still there in the form of papers everywhere, and supplies stacked almost neatly on the table by the stairs. Pens, pads, binders, folders, paper clips. Someone had probably raided an office supply store last year. Maybe several someones. With the way things ended so quickly, there had been no way to return things to the people who donated them, but Aquarius wasn't complaining, since she got good use out of what was left.
Her master notebook was in the library, but inventory binders and other notes were downstairs. As were books, of course, scores and scores of them on the shelves and piled on the tables and floor. Aquarius picked one up at random and flipped through it while she listened to Zia. "Really? What kind of information have you been collecting?" One of the things she had tried was to establish the contents of the books based on what the Aquarius of old would have wanted in a library, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to the choices as far as she could tell.
The question hit a slightly sore spot, but she tried not to show that. "No, not yet. I, er, haven't found many people to ask, I admit. Which is one reason I was so glad to run into you. I thought, because if your unique situation, you might find something familiar here." It was a long shot, but so was everything these days.
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