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 Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 2:48 am
Everyone else had said Astrophyllite drew the short end of the stick, but she didn’t look at it that way. So she had to spend her night showing a visiting lieutenant around - so what! All that meant to her was a chance to make a new friend and ask them lots of questions about where they’d come from. Maybe they were from Boston! Maybe they knew Trixilite and would be able to give her advice about whether she should move there or not! (Astrophyllite was still very much on the fence about letting her stepmother replace Avalon in her heart.)
Though her hopes of meeting someone from Boston were dashed once Natron briefed her, Astrophyllite remained optimistic. Russia was super far away and she didn’t think she’d ever met anyone from there before and if she hadn’t met anyone from there then how could she be sure it existed? So, like, meeting Melanite was like a whole country becoming real just like that!
Or something.
She was kind of thinking in circles and not getting anywhere and she was sure she’d stopped making sense ten minutes ago but now she couldn’t stop and it was a big problem and she needed to get herself under control. Astrophyllite concentrated very hard on her ouija board, reading and rereading the letters on it until she felt a bit more stable and centered, and then she looked around, feeling for her new friend.
She could sense him coming. Melanite was fragrant smoke and ocean spray and dark water and churning bone and the metallic tang of gunpowder… or blood. Astrophyllite turned towards him and waved excitedly. “Hiiii!” she cheered. “I’m gonna show you around! Are you excited? I’m excited!” Oh god, she hoped he was excited!
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:32 pm
He wasn’t excited, actually. He was like, the opposite of excited. Destiny City was very much not St. Petersburg, or any other metropolis he’d walked in his life; it wasn’t the charming hodgepodge of Old World tradition and New World glass-and-steel that he’d come to expect from big cities. It was… delineated. The Rackham Estate, in uptown Destiny City, was closer to what he had come to expect. A grand, sprawling stone mansion, and then a small army of tall, modern buildings around it. The estate had put him up in one of those loft spaces near it, and he’d been pleased… until he’d actually started wandering the city.
Melanite sighed, and gave the girl a restrained smile. She didn’t sound grown at all, he thought. She looked like a child, maybe fourteen? A young fifteen? And she sounded younger. “I suppose you are Lieutenant Astrophyllite,” he said. Her weapon was a ouija board, doubtless more useful than his bowl--although he supposed he could smash his weapon and use the sharp edges--no, he wasn’t here to wage war. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” He offered a hand to shake, hoping that she would settle a bit before they got underway. As his first introduction to the Destiny City Negaverse branch went, this one was not… ideal.
“Where shall we go first,” he asked, looking about them. This was a good way from the area he’d prefer to be, but… it wasn’t like they had a choice.
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:32 pm
“I am!” she confirmed, smiling widely at the other lieutenant. He was older than her - maybe the oldest lieutenant she’d met yet in Destiny City - and taller than her, which she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised by but it was just that Astrophyllite was taller than a whole lot of other people. Anyway, he seemed nice so far - he even said it was a pleasure to meet her! He was a bit formal, but maybe that was just because he was Russian? In her mind, everyone from Europe was more formal just by virtue of being from Europe.
Moving on, though.
“I’m supposed to give you a tour of the Historical District,” she said, flicking her ouija board away as she got to her feet. Maybe that was just, like, showing off a parlor trick or whatever? But she wanted to look competent in front of this cool older lieutenant. “Which is the neighborhood we’re in right now,” she clarified. “It’s trendy.” She added air quotes around trendy, but only because she’d seen a lot of her classmates do the same.
“There are a lot of bars and things where you can get your energy quota,” Astrophyllite explained, waving him along after her. She hopped up on the curb, treating it like a balance beam. “What kind of energy quotas did you have in St. Petersburg? Ours are pretty easy, I think.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
Melanite shrugged, which about summed up his entire feeling towards energy quotas. “I did not have any,” he said. “We did not lose youma at the same rate your branch does, so it was considered less important for someone like me to patrol than it was for me to work on my social connections.” He hadn’t been told that he’d have a quota when he left, but, he supposed it made sense. A trouble spot like Destiny City would have a dearer need for energy than St. Petersburg, where enough Negaversers had access to security that any sailor soldier’s awakening was promptly seen to, with extreme prejudice.
She was small, he noted. Most everyone was. And, as previously noted, childish. “How old are you,” he asked, because he was curious, because he didn’t want her to be as young as he thought she was--if the Negaverse recruited children, if they did, then that was monstrous. Young children, especially. He followed her down the street, letting her have the high ground and trying not to smile at her antics. “What are your commanding officers like?”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
“I just turned sixteen!” Astrophyllite told him excitedly. It was a point of pride, finally being the big one-six, even if she wasn’t going to get her license or anything like that. Sixteen just felt a whole lot different from fifteen. Like this was the year she was finally gonna, like, get kissed and start doing stuff with boys that all the other girls said you were supposed to do with boys when you wanted to show them that you were cool and liked them and stuff? Not that Astrophyllite knew many boys besides Kerberos, but maybe - maybe Kerberos would want to kiss her! (She kind of wanted to kiss Kerberos, after all.)
“My commanding officer is General Natron,” she said, tripping lightly off the curb. “He’s really cool! He’s been in the Negaverse for, like, four years? We fight aliens together and he says I’m gonna be a really good officer someday. And before that, Miss Avalon was in charge of me, but… she had to go away.” She’d died, and it was very sad and Astrophyllite was very torn up over it and didn’t think she could say it out loud yet or maybe ever. “And before Avalon there was General Bischofite. He was my first mentor and he was really mean to me.” She frowned. He’d hurt her. He’d hurt her a lot! She had scars from General Bischofite’s training.
“But,” she said thoughtfully, “Bischofite did a bad thing and he got turned into a youma because he did the bad thing so now he can’t hurt me anymore. Who’s your commanding officer? Do you like them?”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
Sixteen. Sixteen. It wasn’t like his life had been all that ideal at sixteen, but he hadn’t been a child soldier. He felt a little bit ill, at that. None of the Negaversers he’d met in St. Petersburg had been younger than him, not even one, and yet… here he was. A muscle jumped in his jaw and he started to reach out to put an arm around her, but he stopped himself, clenching one hand tight into a fist before shoving it in his pocket. “I haven’t met Persephone yet,” he said, and his voice was mellifluous and casual, almost floaty, like he was calm. “I am sure I’ll like them well enough.”
He tucked the name Bischofite into the back of his mind, as someone to be wary of. Anyone who would hurt someone like Astrophyllite--he’d known her for about thirty seconds, but already he felt begrudgingly protective--anyone who would hurt a child, really--they deserved caution and mistrust. “Avalon isn’t a mineral name,” he observed. “She was a corrupted Knight, then?” Not like it mattered. That person was gone now. Though, he’d never heard of someone being turned into a youma before…
“Do people often get turned into youma, here,” he asked, and tried to make a joke out of it: “Should I be concerned?”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
“Sometimes,” said Astrophyllite, dropping her voice a bit. “Bischofite did. But he was… he was very, very bad.” Youmafication was something she was personally very scared of - what if she turned out bad like Bischofite and someone turned her into a monster? Trixilite probably wouldn’t want her then. No one would want her then, and Kerberos would probably be afraid of her, and… it was all too horrible to think about. She’d rather talk about Avalon, as sad as talking about Avalon made her.
“She was a corrupted knight,” she confirmed to Melanite. “But Chaos made her perfect.” Avalon had been so perfect. Cool, and strong, and beautiful… if there was anyone who Astrophyllite wanted to grow up to be like, it was Avalon. “And she believed in me. She believed that I could be good and serve the Negaverse and that was really night, Bischofite only ever treated me like a burden.”
“But she died.” Astrophyllite frowned. “Maybe I’m just cursed and all my commanding officers are gonna have bad stuff happen to them.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
“I am sure she was right,” he said, diplomatically. The more Astrophyllite talked, the more he had the idea that she was… not all there, and… rather alone… and who had corrupted her? What possible use could Astrophyllite possibly render the Negaverse? Was there a point in dragging her out of her comfortable life and making her a child soldier? “I doubt you are really cursed,” he told her, putting a hand on her shoulder and squeezing gently. “Such things are not real. We just tell stories about the evil eye; no one has ever been harmed by it. Who brought you into the fold?”
Whoever it was, they deserved a worse punishment than Melanite could devise alone.
He stopped in front of a large, brick-faced building. “What is this one, Astrophyllite? I am not sure I understand the words on the sign properly.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:33 pm
Astrophyllite smiled up at Melanite, a big, friendly smile that used all of her rather disproportionately large teeth. “You really think so?” she asked uncertainly. Oh, she really hoped she wasn’t cursed. Being cursed would be awful. “But… how can curses not be real if magic is real? Bischofite and Avalon could both apparate, like in Harry Potter!” This just didn’t make any sense. Maybe she could focus on the questions she knew she could answer.
“General-King Zinkenite recruited me,” she said, glancing away as if suddenly shy. The circumstances had been less than idea. “He- he was having a fight with Bischofite behind my school, and I was taking out the trash- and it was that or he’d kill me and I didn’t want to die, I wanted to keep his secret, so he turned me into Astrophyllite so that I could be strong and protect the earth but- but Bischofite said it was to punish him, so that he’d have a burden and wouldn’t bother Zinkenite anymore, and now I’m not really sure…”
She sighed. “Everyone says I’m dumb and broken so Bischofite’s probably right. Even if he’s bad and a monster now.” The building in front of them was an empty shopping center. The specific storefront was a closed-down convenience store.
“That used to be a 7-11,” Astrophyllite explained. “But there was a fight and some senshi broke the front window and the owner closed and left town. Everyone around here’s just looking for an excuse to leave. Cuz of the alien invasion.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
She was so awkward in the face, thought Melanite. What a pitiful and ill-formed girl, for all her coloring was favorable and her nature was sweet. The world very rarely looked out for innocents like Astrophyllite. If her childish question didn't confirm that for him, her interpretation of her first mentor's antics did. He stepped neatly in front of her and put his hands on her thin shoulders, felt the muscle there. So she played sports. That seemed to mean she would have higher odds of survival. "If curses are real, you are still not cursed," he said, seriously. "If curses are real, surely you would remember being cursed, since it would have had to occur in the last five years."
He didn't want to lie to her and tell her she was fine. He didn't know that that was true. Her story incensed him, though, who the ******** would bring someone into this as a punishment? She didn't deserve that. No one did. "Thank you for telling me that," he said. "Come. Where are we going next?"
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
"But what if it was a sneaky curse," asked Astrophyllite, but trailed off even as she formed the question. Melanite seemed exceedingly certain that she wasn't cursed, and even though he was just a lieutenant like herself, he was still older and wiser and more worldly and for those reasons she was inclined to believe him. If Melanite said she wasn't cursed, then she wasn't cursed.
"You're welcome, I guess," she said, not certain she knew what she was being thanked for. It was okay that she told Melanite all that stuff about Bischofite and Zinkenite, right? Bischofite was being punished way more now than he ever had been with her for a lieutenant, and Zinkenite was a general-king and untouchable, so it wasn't like anything she said could hurt them. And it was her story to tell as much as theirs, anyway!
"There's a little park up here," she said, leading the way. "It's easy to find bums to drain. We take from people who won't notice. Drunk people outside bars. Sleeping bums. Everyone's gotta pay their taxes one way or another and this is just how we do it."
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
“I doubt it,” he said. “The sort of people who cast curses are not the sort of people who are sneaky about it.” He followed her past the deserted shopping center with its broken windows and half-doused lights, trying not to look too hard at it. Perhaps he’d come back to paint it, later. For now it seemed eerie, morbid. What a world the senshi were leaving for the next generation. Were they really so short-sighted?
They crossed the concrete sidewalks into a small park, and he paused there. “Their taxes,” he said. That jangled his nerves, tugged at them and said hey, buddy: are you there? “What do you mean?”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
Astrophyllite gave Melanite a bit of an odd look. What was Russia like that he didn’t understand something like taxes? She skirted the pool of light cast by a streetlamp and explained, “Well, the Negaverse protects Destiny City from the Alien Invaders, but we need energy to do it, and in order to get energy we’ve got to collect it from the people we protect. Especially the ones who aren’t useful in other ways and aren’t really gonna miss it? So, like…”
She looked around, and finally sighted some likely prey, a sleeping man on the bench of a picnic table. “Like that guy,” said Astrophyllite. “He’s a bum. he doesn’t contribute.” Like she had been afraid of not contributing, before the Negaverse found her and raised her up and made her stronger. “So we’ve gotta take some of his energy and meet our quota so the Negaverse can keep fighting Aliens.” She didn’t exactly know what happened to all the energy after it was collected, but she supposed it just kind of got magically distributed. Like radio waves.
“Do you really not do this in Russia?” she asked hesitantly. “So you don’t know how to take energy? Or grab starseeds?”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
The words that came out of her mouth made him a little sick. He had never drained energy himself, but he knew the concept; the Negaverse agent would take some of their life, and they would disperse it to the youma. The St. Petersburg branch had been energy draining for quite some time, as he understood it, although of course he hadn’t been there himself. He had been corrupted for… greater things than that. But he knew what it was, and that was the difference between him and her.
And, of course, she was an innocent little girl, and he was a grown man. He’d last been innocent when he was nine. “No,” he said, shortly. “I was never assigned to do that. My duty is otherwise.” He frowned at her, as if that would help him understand why she thought this was alright. Oh, she was slow--not all that bright, just a little girl, really--and that could excuse it, but these things, this talk of aliens, it had to have been spoon fed to her. She didn’t seem the type to come up with something so nonsensical on her own. “The Negaverse is not an army. It is not a public militia. It has no right to take life from anyone, not even the bums.”
There had never been a point in which the Negaverse was heroic to him. They had never been bright and shining protectors, not to Irinei Lazarev, and not to Melanite either. Before his awakening, senshi had been a nonissue; only the monsters roving the streets sometimes had been an issue; and now that he was one of them, he knew them for what they were: just another mafiya. Just another gang, teaching children to kill. “Astrophyllite,” he said. “Come away from there. We are leaving.”
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Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2014 3:34 pm
“It’s not?” she asked, confused. Not an army? But they were. They were Earth’s army. The men in black. They were supposed to protect the Earth! Melanite was older than her, so Astrophyllite would of course defer to him, but she was seriously confused. What kind of Negaverse did they have in Russia?!
She followed him away, but whimpered “I have a quota,” as they walked. “I’ll be punished. Really bad stuff happens when you don’t meet your quota.” Natron wasn’t a cruel commanding officer, but there were others - and Bischofite had beat a healthy fear of failure into her. Avalon and Natron spared the rod, but her first mentor… her first mentor had been cruel beyond imagination, and she still had the scars.
As they walked away, Astrophyllite tried to hold back her tears, but she was increasingly terrified of what would happen when she reported back without a single drop of energy. In spite of her better efforts, she began to sniffle. “How come you’re not scared?” she asked quietly. “We have to - we have to do our duty. We have to protect Earth or the Moon Queen will take over and make us all her slaves.”
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