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Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2014 12:10 am
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So, having had a debrief on all the different little Destiny City idiosyncrasies he could expect via Babylon Knight, Irinei was not actually surprised to see a cat exhibiting what he considered an unusual amount of interest in one of the paintings hanging on the wall-facing window. He saw the star on the forehead and the gems in the tail, and his expression went flatter than a three day old can of Diet Coke. "Pardon me for a moment," he said, and on his way to the back entrance he picked up one of the little sashimi variety plates. He wasn't fond of raw fish himself, but... more flies with honey, as Americans said.
(The opposite was actually true; flies were attracted to some of the mineral content of vinegar, so to say that you would catch more flies with honey was actually wrong. It was only that vinegar, being a watery liquid, didn't tend to catch them and hold them.)
By the time he rounded the front of the building, Irinei was gone, and Melanite was in his place. He set the little plastic plate on the ground and, with a gentle kick that seemed too smooth to be unpracticed, sent it over to the white guardian cat.
"Guardian cat," he said, with a curl of his upper lip and a sarcastic quirk of his voice. His Russian accent only made the words seem more mocking. "I'm sorry, you'll find no children to corrupt here. This event is only for those over twenty-one."
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Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 11:38 pm
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What a shame. He had hoped to catch the cat off its guard, and it looked like the cat was not going to bite. Melanite crossed his arms, and glanced to the party inside. No one had noticed his absence yet--but they would by the end of the night, when the gallery would want to settle up its fees. "It's adequate," he said, looking at the fish painting. Of all the things to hang in the window! He had one on the other side of the door, of course, one of the ones less off-putting: a simple back view of a woman, her head turned. Indoors was where they'd stuck all the horrifying ones.
As always, the real horrors were out here.
"I'm sure the catering is excellent," he said. "The cover they charge for the attendees was high enough for it." He hadn't tried the sashimi--he actually hadn't eaten much at all, generally distrustful of food he hadn't personally seen prepared. Paranoid maybe, but why not be that way? There were threats everywhere, including in cats. "I used to like animals like you. Hard to believe. Why do you do it?"
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2014 8:51 pm
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Melanite's eyes flicked to the tail as it twitched, and he took a slow, deliberate step closer. His feet barely made a song on the concrete sidewalk, an impressive feat if his boots were as heavy as they looked (and they were; oh, they were). "A child," he said, voice deadpan and completely without affect. "A teenager. One who has not graduated secondary school." Destiny City apparently rolled in teenage agents of the Negaverse, but that wasn't so in St. Petersburg. He rather thought his home branch might be more representative than this one.
"What is the English saying," he asked, stopping alongside Snowball. "Two wrongs, no rights?" Something like that. He deliberately pressed a foot on top of the cat's furry tail, shifting his weight onto the limb without a single change in expression.
He reached up to brush his hair back from his face. "You paint a bright red target on their backs and you say it is merciful? The unawakened have no need to die. But those who know what they are, those we are ordered to target." A cat like this had awakened his little sister. Little Jana. She had been eighteen and she had died slowly. In agonies. Right before his eyes. "Knights, we will corrupt. They can be of use. But senshi? The deti? They cannot command youma. They cannot learn the deeper mysteries, cat. Senshi we kill, and you have set them up so!"
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Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2014 9:23 pm
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Snowball's fur puffed with each step until the boy had stepped directly on his tail. Snowball let out a yowl and aimed claws for the man's leg to attempt to remove him.
"You my dear sir, are a pot calling the kettle black." Snowball hissed eyes narrowing when he finally managed to free himself, though he hurt his tail worse in the process. He moved away from the food tail curled protectively around him. Sully that, he wouldn't trust another negaverse officer when he was on the ground. "Your kind forces us. Your kind kills civilians with no mercy. How is that saving earth? How is that solving anything. The senshi are corrupted as well, have you not seen them or are you blind, deaf, and dumb?"
He wished he had a way for back up to come, or could use his human form though he was still unable to reach for it. "I have set no one up. Your kind, Chaos of all types calls for them to be awakened. The moment someone innocent is attacked by chaos be it a youma, officer or otherwise. They are in need of help, these innocents are not yours to use, abuse and execute as you please. Unless you and your kind wish to stand upon piles of bodies. Then, then what shall you have achieved?"
The cat moved up onto the window sill at least Melinite would have a harder time reaching his tail with that foot. His face was also turned away from the glass so they'd have a difficult time telling if the cat was talking or just meowing really stupidly. "I can tell you one thing. It won't be the utopia you're dreaming of."
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Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2014 1:47 pm
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Forced them? That's rich. No one in this stupid fight made anyone do anything, not by Melanite's rhetoric. Force... that implied that there would be consequences for no one waking up. Force? If there were no senshi, the Negaverse would have nothing to fight. If Jana hadn't been a senshi, she would be alive right now. She would be going to her college in Paris and she would be happy. That ******** cat. That ******** Dione. "A cat like you killed Jana," he said. "She was eighteen years old and your kind made her a target."
He sneered, then. "Destiny City's Negaverse branch is corrupted, just like you are," he said. "They think it's fine to awaken children to this war, and to promote children to the highest ranks." Children! He heard her again, in his head: Irinei, go! He hadn't gone. It'd been too late. It always had been, and always would be, too late. "They are not representative of us."
Utopia was a pipe dream. He was Russian; he knew better than to ever hope for something as high-minded and floaty as utopia. All there was to hope for in this world was... was nothing. Nothing at all and less. "I dream of nothing," he said, reaching out to grab the cat around the throat. "Not anymore."
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Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2014 7:42 am
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No one was innocent, but there were still moral lines. Melanite didn't argue for the Destiny City branch, which was--as far as he cared--a perfect example of the Negaverse's problem. "They wouldn't have hurt her if she hadn't been awoken," Melanite said. His voice never rose in volume; it stayed level, though strained. A star in her heart? Oh, indubitably, Jana had been a light to all who knew her, her joie de vivre had been utterly legendary in their social circle. He had protected her her whole life, except for the one time when it had truly, truly mattered.
"If she had not known what she was, they would have let her go," he said, and at those last three words his voice cracked, and he flung what had the potential to be a vicious kick at the cat. "That cat woke her up, she corrupted my Jana--" undoing eighteen years of work, years of trying to make sure Jana was happy, Jana was safe. "I. Dream. Of nothing."
Except a body, small and brunette, curled into his side like when they were children. Dreams so real that, when he woke, he looked for her--looked for patterns that might show where a girl of her height had rested--but it wasn't. It wasn't that kind of body.
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Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 11:22 am
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"If that is what you want to call it," he said. He didn't know what Jana would've wanted; he didn't know that Jana had even known about any of this. Just a baby, Revaillite had said, dismissively. Barely a challenge for people of our caliber. If there had been a war, wouldn't Jana have confided in him? Wouldn't she have made some sort of... decision?
He couldn't stop the rictus scowl that rippled over his face as he stalked after the cat. "<********> her calling," he shouted, finally gaining the volume he'd been lacking. "<******** it! She was a child!" Melanite called his bowl to hand and threw it, as hard as he could, at the cat. They were calling attention to themselves now, and he knew he had less than no hope of being able to kill the cat in full view of the gallery behind them. But he at least wanted the thing gone. "And she was mine."
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Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:21 pm
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Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2014 12:03 am
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