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 Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2013 7:55 pm
There was a diner a few blocks away from the scene, a small hole-in-the-wall place that served a decent plate of hashbrowns and adequate coffee, sparsely populated on a rainy evening despite the rush of people leaving their offices for home. There were few better places for the conversation that would follow, except perhaps the comfort of her own home, which was out of the question when one considered the leering behavior of her present company. On the other hand, a bar might have provided more suitable beverages.
It was a tempting notion, one Marissa might have followed had she fonder feelings for Michael Gallo.
Her first stop upon arriving—once she’d managed to return to her normal appearance and Michael’s damaged bike was temporarily taken care of—was the bathroom. Her clothes were soaked and beyond help without a cycle through the dryer, but she did what she could to finger the tangles out of her hair, pulling it back with a stray elastic once she’d rung it out and it dripped less than it had upon entering. There was nothing to be done for her make-up, so she washed it off and pattered her face dry with a wad of paper towels soon thrown in the trashcan.
She caught a glimpse of her reflection on the way out and saw nothing abnormal about her appearance. The pink and the frills and the teapot and the tiny symbols of Venus were gone, though they would return, she knew, when she needed them to.
She just wasn’t entirely sure why she needed them to.
Frowning, Marissa marched out of the bathroom to make her way back to the table where Michael sat, sliding into the booth across from him and putting an order in for some hot tea before jumping right in as soon as the waitress had gone.
“Okay, so talk,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”
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Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2013 9:24 am
”You could start by asking nicely,” Michael pointed out, his arm draped over the back of the booth he’d chosen for them. He already had a mug of coffee with him, seeing as it took Marissa ages to get out of the bathroom. The coffee was probably old and bitter, but it was mostly for appearance sake. He’d have something stronger once he got home... however he managed to accomplish that.
He was staring out the window as she started her demands, frowning darkly at the rain falling outside. Things weren’t supposed to happen like this. Why now? With the number of youma that showed up, the amount of senshi and knights grew. Which was probably all well and good since in large battle like the ones he’d experienced, their numbers were often cut.
But more being born to replace those who had been lost wasn’t something he agreed with, despite knowing there wasn’t much of a choice in the matter, usually.
“I don’t know how long it’s been happening, but I awoke shortly after coming home,” he started, his eyes narrowing in a way that seemed almost uncharacteristic. “Thought civilian life would be better for me... but then, well...” He glanced her way then, doing a quick once over to make sure she wasn’t too injured.
“There’s a war going on. All those reports and stories of ‘super heros’ and ‘terrorists’ and ‘vigilantes’ running around the city...? That’s all real. And you just got pulled into it.”
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Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:27 am
“I’m not a terrorist,” Marissa pointlessly countered.
Sitting back in her seat might have been more comfortable, but she found herself leaning over the table instead, her arms folded on top for support. It put her a little closer to Michael than she would have liked otherwise—the table wasn’t exactly wide—but she figured it was probably a good idea to keep their voices down anyway. The diner wasn’t empty, and she wasn’t too fond of the thought of anyone else being able to overhear.
Maybe they should have gone somewhere else, after all.
Regardless, they were here now and she was a bit too interested in getting all the necessary information to pause the discussion and pick it up at a later time.
“So what’s this war about then?” she wondered. “They don’t talk about that part on the news. Just the people doing it, not the reason for it. And it just happens randomly? These… terrorists… when they pop up. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t like this yesterday.”
She was fairly certain she would have remembered something like that if it'd happened before.
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Posted: Sun Jan 20, 2013 1:39 pm
”Sorry, Princess, but you are one now,” he said with a said, not sounding at all amused by the idea of being terrorists. He spent a good seven years of his life protecting the country from threats of terrorist acts, and this is how he’s repaid? By becoming someone labeled as one, without any thought as to why or how or who?
“Of course they don’t talk about the war on the news. Who would believe it? There’s magic involved, and good versus evil... movie plot stuff,” he said with a small flip of his hand to emphasize the ridiculousness of it all.
“It doesn’t always happen randomly. Usually only when youma or other agents of Chaos are around and causing trouble. If you’re lucky you make it out alive... Some people are happy they are like... what we are... others disdain it. It’s all a choice now, really. You don’t ever have to power up again, if you don’t want.”
But then it was a matter of whether or not the guilt would eat away at her... or anyone. To have all this power and not use it...? It was tough sometimes to choose.
“Other than us knights, there are senshi and guardian cats. You’ll be able to feel the difference in their energy when you’re powered up. The guys you have to watch out for are Negaverse agents, Dark Mirror Senshi, and corrupted Senshi. Basically, their goal is to either kill us, or corrupt us. From what I’ve heard, those who are corrupted usually lose their memories with no recollection of who they were... brainwashed, really.
“Oh, and the best part... we’re the oddballs. Most of the people we have to deal with are between the ages of... eight and eighteen.”
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Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2013 6:15 am
She really hated the “Princess” remarks, but since Michael was the one with all the information and she didn’t really have much choice—at least not for the time being—she let it slide without comment.
Though she might have glared her frustrations at him anyway. Smug a*****e seriously needed to drop the attitude. He might be good-looking—what Gallo wasn’t?—but that didn’t give him the right to be a patronizing p***k, particularly to someone who had nearly a decade on him.
“Great. Kids are out trying to save the world from monsters, teenaged gangs and magic cults,” she said.
It was not a welcoming thought. Her mind immediately turned to her own kids. Perhaps she wasn’t the most maternal of mothers—she hadn’t had need to be in years, and nowadays she was a bit too focused on her career (perhaps selfishly so) to put as much into the raising of her second kid as she’d put into her first all those years ago when he’d still been able to fit securely in her lap—but she wasn’t without maternal instincts. She had a protective streak, and a fierce one when it came to her oldest kid, whose life she had much less control over these days. Unlike her youngest, who was still very much a baby and sheltered by a more attentive father.
“Alright, so we’re at war. And we’re knights,” she allowed, but it was clear by the tone of her voice that she was still having a hard time believing it. Her comments still came off as half-sarcastic. “And there are agents of Chaos and… senshi? What’s the point of it all? Aside from getting rid of the youma. When and where and how did the war start?”
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Posted: Tue Mar 12, 2013 2:49 pm
”The point of all this,” Michael started with something of a grimace in exchange for his typical cocky grin, “Is so the universe can ******** with our lives, and if we refuse to play along, we’ll forever have horrible, nagging guilt eating us from the inside out.”
Or at least that’s how he felt. Even if he didn’t want to mess around with monsters and agents of Chaos, he didn’t feel right just letting people get hurt in the process, especially if there was something he could do. Not that he was going to share all that with Marissa, who would probably laugh in his face, anyway...
“From what I’ve gathered... it started hundreds of years ago when us magical people were still out in space. Something happened and now we’re all reborn on Earth for the fighting to continue,” he explained, hoping she was willing to drop the ‘this is BS’ thoughts for a little while and let him try and help her make sense of it all.
He leaned across the table then, his expression serious. “You once lived on Venus... Ignore the science and logic of it. Close your eyes and really focus on it... You can go there, you know. To your Wonder. To Palatine. The place and you are one in the same.”
Okay, so a lot of this was kind of crazy to think about, but how else would he let hew know what was going on?
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Posted: Mon Mar 18, 2013 2:57 pm
So far, none of Michael’s answers were terribly informative, but something told Marissa they hadn’t even broken the surface of the issue yet, and so for the time being she held back any further complaints.
“Right,” she said, still with that tone of disbelief. “Sure. I’m from Venus.”
She almost gave into the urge for immaturely and had to bite her tongue against a recitation of “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.”
Anyway, it seemed in this case men were from Jupiter.
Holy hell. Of all the crazy-a** things she could have gotten herself involved in, it had to be this.
She wished she could deny it. She wished she had more than sarcasm at her disposal, but there really wasn’t much more she could do but make a half-hearted attempt to convince herself that Michael was lying to her when she already knew he wasn’t. She’d seen the youma, she’d seen Michael transform, she’d felt the power within her when her own transformation had taken place. As strange as all this was, it was very much real.
It was just going to take some time to accept it.
“What are we supposed to do about it?” she asked. “Get rid of the youma, fight the bad guys, and then what? And how the hell are we supposed to do it in the first place? I have a freaking teapot,” she said, lowering her voice into a quiet hiss and quickly glancing around to make sure no one else could hear any part of their conversation. She turned her gaze back to Michael only when she was satisfied that no one cared what two grown adults were whispering about in the corner. “I don’t think a teapot is going to be much help in winning a war. I’m not a soldier. Okay, alright, so I’m a knight, whatever. You think I have any idea how the hell I’m supposed to be doing any of this? I can only kick a monster in the face so many times before it bites my foot off.”
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Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2013 4:17 pm
Michael would be the first to admit that he didn’t know Marissa very well. She was his mother’s friend and his little brother’s future mother-in-law. She was an attractive woman, but for what he could make of it, she more or less disdained him.
Not that it really bothered him. He had more important things to waste his life on than worrying if people liked him or not. If they didn’t appreciate or understand his morbid, facetious sense of humor (or just didn’t care for it), then it was no skin off his nose.
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said with a small shrug. “To be honest, I have no idea why we’re here or what we’re ultimately supposed to be doing.” He grinned in amusement at her frustration, but only because he could relate.
“My stormglass used to be no bigger than a keychain,” he decided to share, before moving on to answer her questions. “I wouldn’t suggest you running after youma on your own. Many senshi and knights you’ll see around will say they’re ‘out on patrol’. I don’t know who originally came up with it, but it seems to settle most people’s desire to put their powers to use. You know... dusting monsters, stopping agents of Chaos from stealing energy and killing or corrupting the rest.”
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Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 7:18 am
The lack of concrete answers only made things even more frustrating, but Marissa did a remarkable job reigning it all in. She clamped her mouth shut before she could start ranting and took the time to allow her brain to begin processing some of this. It was tempting to deny it, to forget this had ever happened and go about her life as normal, but somehow she didn’t think she was going to be able to.
Maybe if she’d been left ignorant, she could have. But she wanted information. She wanted the facts, the truth, the whole story. And with that swirling around in her head she had no choice but to keep going.
The waitress arrived with their drinks, and Marissa kept her silence until the waitress had gone again. She went about preparing her tea instead—a spoonful of sugar and one container of cream.
“When did your stormglass change then?” she asked when she thought it safe to continue the conversation. “And how the hell do they steal energy? What kind of energy? What are they using it for?”
So many questions, so much confusion. At this point she could only hope for a fraction of them having an actual answer.
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Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 7:49 am
Michael spared a glance at the waitress as she left the table, before looking back at the woman across from him. He wanted to help her, but there was only so much even he knew. A lot of what he knew was intuition, not actual answers from either side.
"A while ago... After I'd been doing this for a few months. Just like awakening, it'll change when you need it, or when your own power deems you worthy... or some bullshit like that," he added with a shrug. He didn't know how it worked, but one way or another, he had his stormglass on steroids now.
"They steal energy with the youma and mirror wraiths... sometimes themselves. Sometimes with objects that suck up energy... It's all complicated. They've taken it from adults, from children... whatever they can get their hands on. Although at least with energy, it can be regenerated... once the starseed is taken, that's it." And he would rather keep his starseed in one piece, thanks.
"I'm not sure what they're using it for, aside from feeding their leaders. Pumping energy into Chaos or whoever controls them. I don't ask questions, I just stop it from happening. People need their energy... especially if they're out on the streets with nothing to defend themselves."
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Posted: Wed Apr 24, 2013 8:57 am
Mirror wraiths? Starseeds?
The more she heard, the more confusing it all became. She was unfamiliar with the terms even if everything about it felt… not quite familiar, but still that strange sense of rightness. It was perhaps one of the oddest things she’d ever felt, considering she’d never felt it before now and it seemed to come to her at the same time her powers did, but at the moment she saw no point in denying it. The rest seemed like a joke, sure, and she’d inevitably require a lot more convincing, and probably some first-hand experience in order for it all to sink in, but going about her life pretending as if none of this was real…?
She didn’t think she’d be able to do that no matter how tempting the notion might be. Whether she’d been dragged into it or become this willingly didn’t really matter. She was a part of it now regardless.
And that concerned her for a variety of different reasons, though as the conversation continued the thought of her kids came more and more to the forefront. Lilah she didn’t have to worry about, because Lilah was barely even a couple months old and could only end up being involved by some fault of her parents’ or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had some level of control over Lilah’s protection, which was more than she could say now for her older kid.
As her thoughts turned to Paris she began to consider his behavior, his mental and emotional state, the various injuries he’d had, bruises mostly, bumps, scrapes, a broken wrist, all injuries he could have come by in some way or another during his dance classes and practices or, in the case of his broken wrist, falling out of bed.
But now there was this… knights and magic and monsters and starseeds, and try as she might to convince herself that everything in her son’s life was safe and normal, there was still a nagging concern.
Finally she looked up at Michael and decided for frankness. “Is Paris involved in this?” she asked.
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Posted: Wed May 22, 2013 1:49 pm
Of all the things Marissa could have asked him, he didn’t know if he should be surprised that she went with one about her son. She just... didn’t seem to be the nurturing type. More of an independent woman, eager to be free of the responsibilities children came with.
Michael stared at her for a few moments, not because he was trying to think up an answer for her, but because he might just be seeing her in a new light. He hadn’t taken her to be selfish, but her desire to know of Paris’s involvement, well... he wished someone thought of him that way.
“You’re the only identity I know, and you’re the only one who knows mine. I’d like to keep it that way,” he added, finally taking a sip of the coffee in front of him and making a face at how it’d gone cold.
That wasn’t to say he didn’t wonder if others he knew were involved. It was difficult to keep tabs on his sibling when they didn’t live together, after all.
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Posted: Sun Jul 07, 2013 12:30 pm
Michael's was not a reassuring answer, but it was best she could hope for at the moment—not an outright “no,” but not a “yes” either.
She was probably being paranoid, giving into guilty fears and letting her imagination run wild with all the new information she was hearing. There was absolutely no reason to believe that any of Paris's injuries had something to do with anything other than dance. He had always been an active child; she supposed it was to be expected that he didn't always avoid harm. And his behavior was relatively easy to explain. She'd had a part in it, leaving all those years ago, and then of course with Henry...
Nope, not going there. That was a difficult subject to wade through at the best of times. It didn't seem right to get lost among that sort of baggage now.
“I'm not going to tell anyone, if that's what you're worried about,” she said, eyeing Michael seriously across the table.
She had no intention of speaking about this to anyone, particularly if she had no idea whether or not they were involved. She wasn't the sort to discuss very many parts of her life with other people anyway. But this? Who would really believe this? And if they did believe it, well... there wasn't any guarantee they'd be at all supportive. Being a terrorist came with its own sort of baggage.
“But I want your word you won't tell anyone about me either,” she added.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 9:04 am
”I’m not worried about it,” he countered with a shrug. “You finding out was an accident. I’m not planning on letting anyone else find out if I can help it. Besides, you have your own identity to worry about, now.”
Michael figured Marissa would want to get him to keep her secret, and he fought back an eye roll when she wanted him to give her his word. “Yeah, yeah, I won’t tell anyone the cosmos barfed pink all over you,” he said with a snort, picking up his mug to swirl the contents in and then set it back down.
“What are you going to do now...? Never get involved again, or kick youma a**...?” he wondered, although he wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to respond. After all, it was a lot to take in. It wasn’t like she signed up for the job, it was kind of tossed onto her.
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Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2013 9:15 am
“Barfed pink?”
Crude. He was crude. And obnoxious, immature, arrogant, completely full of himself. It was difficult to take him seriously, which didn't help matters at all considering the serious situation she now found herself in. That her only means of information and... support?... turned out to be this was not reassuring in the least. Worse was that she couldn't determine whether it was purposeful or not; was he forcing it or was this all there was to him?
Talk to his mother and Claire Gallo would insist upon the former, but Marissa hadn't seen much evidence to support it.
Suddenly she felt a bit as if she were wading through all this on her own. Perhaps Michael had shed a bit of light upon certain things, but how was any of it supposed to help if she couldn't even take him seriously?
With a scoff and a roll of her eyes, Marissa downed the remainder of her tea—and struggled not to spit it right back out considering it was still close to steaming hot. She forced it down as gracefully as she possibly could and let the mug set back on the table with a clunk, at which point she rose from her seat and began to collect her things.
“That's for me to know and you to find out,” she said, and turned to stalk away.
The truth was she didn't even know the answer herself.
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