Powering up occurred more frequently through a compulsive sense of urgency that he didn’t fully understand. Something wanted him as a page, drove him to it, yet never offered explanation for what needed his presence and why. He imagined it was part of the wonder’s doing, though he lacked means to prove it. Was this the force that everyone felt? Did this incessant prodding inspire others to carry on the ancient war that Ida tried to explain? That coupled with the absence of prior possessions when powering up explained the lack of guns on the battlefield, and he imagined warfare including tanks and other artillery proved too cumbersome and difficult to obtain for these measures.
But Scholomance wasn’t ready to call this a war.
The page sat on a decrepit, sun bleached bus stop bench with a hand pressed gingerly to his face. One of the sodium lamps overhead flickered incessantly and threatened to wink out permanently, but nothing around it offered a care. Trash collected in thick slopes against grungy building walls, and collected in the deep mortar cracks between bricks. Wind from the riverfront whipped through the buildings at a liberal pace, stirring up errant newspapers. His hair crawled across his features repeatedly and fought when returned to normal position. The Saturn pin, he found, spared no usefulness for keeping hair from his gaze.
Occasionally he spared a glance toward the skies, where clouds billowing overhead blocked his view of the stars. It felt safer here, with the thick overlay. Sometimes thunder crept along the clouds absent rain, and the brilliant flashes that carved stark lines out of the dreary cityscape illuminated a figure he hadn’t seen before.
Scholomance knew not what type of aura projected from the man, but it felt every bit as grim and foreboding as his very own Wonder. For a brief moment, he speculated that the sordid chunk of marshland somehow sent this man. That same wrenching in his gut compelled him to sink between the wooden slats of the bench and hope that his stillness might obscure him from notice.
Ashanite was, despite all whining and protestations to the contrary, actually generally a fairly eager officer. The entire point of his deception was lost if he wasn't out actively engaging the "enemy" (not that he had much respect for Order as an opponent, on the whole). He might not enjoy the mechanical aspects - draining energy was a pain in the a** when you were doing it on a making-s**t-up-as-you-go basis and not doing particularly well at actually hitting the mark - but the interpersonal play of selling his lies to Order was legitimately enjoyable.
So the pricking of a Page aura was absolutely enough to send the Captain in the poor sod's direction. He paused for a moment on the rooftop above, so that a flash of lightning could illuminate, briefly, his "target."
A figure on a bench was not exactly the most threatening sight, and that left him far more at ease to approach than he might have been otherwise. A leap from roof to ground put him in a position to get a closer look and --
For a brief moment, he stood stock-still and stared. The symbol the Page bore was all too familiar, echoed in broken form on his own new uniform. This wasn't Mont Blanc, though - it was someone different, a member of his old order he had never met before.
Which meant he was an opportunity, if Ashanite played his card right. But there was also something particularly...disquieting about being reminded of what he had given up.
"If you're trying to disappear into that bench, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it really isn't working," he said, and his tone was as light and friendly as he could make it.
”And there ends my long and arduous forays into statue impersonation,” he shot back dryly. The broach of conversation put him more at ease, and Scholomance started to question why he felt so helplessly afraid before. Surely the ambience of this night spoke of ominous ends, but unless this half-naked wonder was the type to flirt Scholomance’s pants off and stab him to death before the page had a chance to stick it in, chances were fairly in his favor that the night might proceed well.
Though, on the other hand, he considered it fairly difficult to stab anyone to death absent actual weapons, and he saw none on this man.
Not that he had many places to hide them.
Scholomance gathered himself and stood slowly, brushing away some of the dust transference from his particularly poor choice of seating. “I think you might find it’s a lot easier to converse with someone when you’re not standing on top of a building.” The thought occurred to him to ask after the man’s business, but unless he crept upon the page in the name of Scholomance, he couldn’t fathom anything worse. “If you have nothing better to do, then come down here and tell me a story.” He could use one, given his frayed nerves.
At least in the presence of company, however questionable, there was an ease to that pervasive fear.
Ashanite laughed, and vaulted himself casually off the roof. He was finally, he felt, used to the physical enhancements that came with this form - he hadn't tried teleporting yet, but other than that (and, well, actual combat, but he would prefer to avoid that if at all possible - the primary reason his weapons were almost never drawn) he had a decent handle on what he could and couldn't do. It meant that his landing was easy and on his feet, rather than a misjudging of capabilities that left him embarrassingly on his a**.
A good thing, when ideally he would impress this unfamiliar Page - particularly since he had a rather attractive air of mystery, with the face mask and those fascinating golden eyes.
"Are you sure you want to hear my story? It's terribly depressing," he said. Selling it was certainly his objective, but opening with it probably wasn't going to get him very far. Best to catch the Page's interest, first, before going into spinning his tale of woe and forcible corruption.
"Ploutonion," he introduced himself, offering a hand. "Formerly Squire of Saturn, currently Captain in the Negaverse, though not by choice." This was the most important part, and his first real chance to try the spin on a complete stranger who, as far as he knew, hadn't witnessed his "capture." "It's a bit of good luck either way, to find another of Saturn's Knights." Hopefully this was someone who considered that a form of kinship - he had yet to really meet a Saturn Knight who didn't, but his experience was not exactly vast, and whatever conflict there was between Camlann and Megiddo suggested it wasn't perfect.
But this was neither, and he would worry about what ifs when they became relevant.
”The best part about sad stories is that there’s no requirement to empathize,” Scholomance answered back simply. Before he finished, the man had landed before him in an easy manner, without fully bending knees to the ground. Inertia simply didn’t seem to affect him much; the page wondered if that ability came with the ranks of powered life. It must, if he were allowed to now top buildings in a single bound.
Up close, vivid purple eyes looked out beyond thin rimmed glasses and proved the most striking of his features. Freckles mottled his complexion, providing a younger look to him than Scholomance would’ve initially guessed. Of less obvious proportions, hair dark blue hair tucked back into a braid that he hadn’t noted the length of until he jumped - and for that moment, Scholomance wondered if hair alone constituted his weapon. If not, well… He’d taken someone to the bedroom with hair like that, and knew more than a few uses to suggest to this man. Open jacket and low-rise pants presented far less decorum than what Scholomance often noted on other outfits, with the dragon buckle over his pants standing as most notable.
“Formerly,” Scholomance echoed, maintaining eye contact with the shake of hand. His grip did not linger; this man felt toxic and abrasive, and the prickling paranoia stemming from his wonder seemed to grow stronger in his presence. He couldn’t make sense of it. “That’s already a story. I wasn’t aware that anyone could pop on over to a different side.”
Gloved fingers rolled down the half-mask that cluttered his speech. His gaze roamed shoulders openly as he spoke. “So tell me, Ploutonion, what sad story left you a captain of the Negaverse? I’ve been warned a few times here and there to look out for Negaverse agents, and told emphatically of their brutality, but… Well,” he shrugged in a cockeyed manner, “you’re more the male version of femme fatale than an intimidating pillar of pure enmity.” This s**t really is all teenage gang wars.
Ashanite nodded lightly. Well, at least this Page seemed interested so far - and if he was the man's first exposure to the ability to change sides, perhaps he would do for Scholomance what Quartz had done for him. It was an eye-opening experience, to learn that one had a choice. And even if, to keep his little rise running, he wouldn't be presenting it as pleasant or positive, well - Quartz certainly hasn't sold him on the Grand Glory of the Negaverse.
"Oh, yes, that can happen, and not always because you want it to. Sometimes it's because a General-Queen decides for you." There was a hint of bitterness to a casual tone emphasized by shrug of shoulders. It wasn't exactly hard to notice how quickly the Page shied away from his handshake, even if - by his read, and he considered himself fairly good at this - the other man seemed at least somewhat interested in him, on a purely physical level if nothing else. If one thing had gone right in his corruption, it had to be his uniform, because his job was so much easier if people were already seeing him as nonthreatening because of it.
"Oh, the Negaverse is absolutely dangerous, but if I drag you to your doom it will be entirely by accident." The association with the term and classic noirs was an odd thing to remember, but he was long past questioning what had and hadn't stuck. "But whoever advised you to steer clear and be wary was giving very good advice. I had someone tell me the same thing, and I didn't listen.
"I had a mixed bag of luck with officers - my introduction to being a Page involved having my soul extracted from my body, but that's entirely another story - and I dealt with a few who were willing to talk. One of them must have told a General-Queen I seemed amenable to choosing to join their side, or told someone who told her, however these things go," which was of course a complete falsehood, "or maybe I'm just horrifically unlucky, because I ran into her late one night in Central Park. General-Queen Laurelite, was her name. But I wasn't interested in what she had to offer - you lose a lot, going, and I wasn't on for giving up everything I was, a huge chunk of my memories, and whatever else corruption might take.
"She wasn't interested in no, as an answer, and I called for help and she called for backup - it was a mess, but the end result was that a Captain took me down and she stuck her hand in my chest and corrupted me right there." It was a long story, certainly, and only about seventy percent of it was anything even close to true. "So now, here I am, repurposed into something I think Laurelite expected to be useful. The long-term irony is that I'm s**t at just about everything that would make me useful, and frankly I'd rather stay that way because I certainly didn't sign on to help take over the world or destroy it or whatever the bloody ******** the endgame is, here."
Much of Ploutonion’s story came off as wholly fascinating, and Scholomance’s rapt attention stood evident of that. The page remained silent throughout the explanation, hands frozen in a lattice over his stomach, and he reserved judgment for the tale until it concluded. The lack of detail spoke of a summation, but he knew so little about the topics present that he could not confirm or deny it as truth.
His story contributed an element of subterfuge to the Negaverse, but nothing that warranted outright avoidance on Scholomance’s part. He found no particular allegiance to Knights or the White Moon, and saw little difference between them and the Negaverse. Aegir informed him somewhat of their danger but the page saw little reason to swallow it all as a legitimate threat without direct experience in their apparent animosity. Ploutonion provided exactly the opposite - an effectively pitiful story with equally nonthreatening presentation that indicated no interest in stealing Scholomance’s energy or his soul. Not that he figured he had one to steal.
“So I expect that, if you can become a Negaverse agent, then you can go back to being a Knight. Or is it like losing your virginity?” The rhetorical question was dismissed with a wave of hand. “Anyway, I doubt the Negaverse is all that bad. Or much different. If you’re stuck in their ranks, what’s stopping you from learning to enjoy it? Unless it’s all this ‘loss’ you spoke of. And what is there to lose?” A shitty wonder, perhaps? Or maybe Ploutonion lost some friendships in transitioning? Scholomance hadn’t the faintest idea - much of the magic scene seemed unpredictable and preposterous to him.
“Personally I think taking over the world or blowing it to hell sound like fantastic goals. Consider me the first to volunteer my wonder as a nuclear testing ground.” Hands balled into fists and found their place at the small of his back.
Afterward he referred back to the story. While he spoke, his gaze combed Ashanite once more, though for purposes of detecting any manner of change from his transition. “So what did this ‘General-Queen Laurelite’ do to you, anyway? You don’t look irreparably damaged. No stupid-looking symbols stuck in your hair, at least.”
Noir Songbird
posted up! can edit your color/size mod tags in if you like!
