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 Posted: Sat Sep 18, 2021 3:43 pm
His body left the Scar on the back of a weary goat youma, but his mind clawed its way back over the blasted, deadscarred landscape to the gaping hole in the cliffside. Kept dwelling over Rakovanite's choice to pull a starseed, to castigate him for his orders, to split the team a hundred different ways. He kept thinking about how he and Kamacite hadn't found anyone, and returned to Jet with nothing but more weariness for their efforts. And Rakovanite wasn't the only one to pull a starseed, either. He couldn't count himself among the responsible ones, he realized, as he held fast to clumps of the goat's black hair.
He asked himself what he should've done differently, and his thoughts maundered to Jet. He'd threatened to call the mission off should they be late returning, and made known that he thought it should've been called off. But Faustite pressed on, naively disbelieving that another starseed would be pulled.
Three times. A dozen deaths. The mission was a technical success. but 62 scales was hardly a sum to equal the lives they lost.
"Stop," he muttered in the youma's ear. It halted, looked back at him with glowing, square pupils. Demonic bleat for his command, and Faustite threw a leg over its side and slid off, slid out of Albite's grasp. The boy always complained, always berated him for separation, but Faustite started away from the beaten path. "Take them to the Citadel," he tossed over his shoulder.
But Albite never let such things go. So, once Faustite crested a small embankment, ha half-turned and shouted his reason back to his subordinates, with hands cupped around his mouth: "need to take a ******** piss!"
Once he was sure the better half of the agents heard him, Faustite continued down the embankment. Braced, he skidded down, and a tumble of rock and loose dirt came with him. There, the ground leveled out for a few paces, then dropped down with the beginning of another split in the rift. Austere, parched ground held fast under his feet, however; Faustite jumped down the escarpment into a gather of desiccated, corrupt weeds.
That was well enough. Straightening, he unbound his pants. Pulled himself out, felt the instant relief of pissing all over the Rift. Like it was somehow vindicating. Like it was deserved.
Til the crunch of footsteps jolted him, and Faustite stared back at a disappointingly familiar face. The youma General frowned at his unwelcome visitor. "You again."
Staring back at him was the spitting image of himself as a Captain. Every detail was precise enough that Faustite hadn't questioned it -- cheekbones sharp as glass, eyes too dark for definition, uniform encased by iron rings, smoking pipes from its back, military pants tucked into steel toed boots. Even the posture was correct for how he held himself. That image needn't say anything; its cocky smirk was enough to boil Faustite's blood.
"Second time you stalk me, and you show up for ******** what? To watch me piss?" He reoriented, pissed on the thing's shoes. "Get a good ******** look."
The Captain scattered -- pulled apart like a burst column of salt, spilled into the air as a hundred fireflies. The things danced and scattered about each other, with a handful lying on the ground flapping futilely. These were the ones soaked with black, though the rest of the collective seemed unperturbed by their urine-soaked plight. These creatures, they flashed a bright orange as they scattered about each other, an electron cloud of activity. Their excitement belied urgency.
Faustite could only stare. This youma imitated him somehow, but it was a cloud of bugs. Flashing bugs. He zipped up, bewildered. "******** wrong with you."
The fireflies, adamant, slowed down their flashes. Coordinated things popped their signals in perfect order. Two flashed, then three, then two, then one, then three, then three, each in a perfect pattern to be replicated by the next. Faustite thought it a complex communication, with each of the flashes equating to a word or a letter, and the placement of those flashes in the cloud referring to how each of the 'words' related to one another. But that was a guess, and the lot of it gibberish to him.
Still, he couldn't stay for this youma's nonsense. He had to get back, rejoin the others, march back into the Citadel, assess damages, conduct interviews. Faustite turned from the youma and leapt back up onto the escarpment.
Until the collective thing buzzed up and roiled madly around him, a clockwise storm of thunderbugs that demanded he jerk his attention further away from the group. <******** --" Faustite hissed breath between his teeth before deferring to his curiosity. "Fine, but be quick." Down the pair went, and Faustite was led by the flashing cloud through a trodden, burrow-laden field.
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Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:53 am
The trek was further than he dared stray from the group, though no one had yet gone looking for him. By then, they reached an austere place where not even the petrified remains of plants dare lay, and the paths grew more and more cluttered with stacked rock. The smallest stack reached fifteen feet in the air, with a circumference wider than Faustite's wingspan. It was a familiar place to him, but only vaguely so; he knew flying youma roosted atop these unfathomable columns, and that serpentine youma took to the dark crevices made by the few columns that fell during energy storms.
As he wove through the columns and leapt over the fallen ones, he recollected the day he spent here years ago. It was by no means an eventful day -- Faustite spent the better part of (what he thought was) a day resting his injured leg after a tumble. The fallen rocks offered shelter enough as an electrical storm bore down, and a collection of youma gathered with him in the darkened space. That was the first time he realized that youma didn't always imitate life; while the serpentine youma and the avian youma observed some of the same behaviors as their namesakes, they didn't copy the predatory patterns. Sometimes the snakes would form coils around the inert avian youma, as if to make beds.
They had passed what he thought was the spot, though his new acquaintance slipped from his sights. Faustite leapt from one column to the next, building up more height as he went, nearly losing his balance on a wobbly one, until he reached one of the tallest at roughly a few stories. From there, he spied around, squinting under the unending glare from the rugose sky.
All he found were a few crow youma staring quizzically up at him. He spotted one that reminded him of Arsenopyrite's youma, though he couldn't be certain it was the same. It reminded him -- he never did much to thank the officers who helped him in the Rift, did he? Though, he supposed, thanking a few would mean thanking the lot of them, and a handful made it to his shitlist. Faustite frowned back down at the weird beast with the blasted out face. "He's better than I thought he was, you know."
The bird didn't answer. It settled the scraps of its face against flat rock and hibernated.
He started back down, darting from one column to the next, smooth and quick enough until the precarious column gave out under him. Sent the General, and a spray of rocks, clattering down to the ground, with a few thocking with shattering force against the next column. That one fell, too, with each rock crashing thunderously against the much larger boulders that framed the area. Faustite himself tumbled down and rolled with the inertia. When he came to a stop, when the Rift dust cloud cleared, he saw he was in the same place before.
Would've mistaken it for a memory, if it weren't for the destruction he just caused. Faustite saw himself, as a Captain, lying in the short space between staggered stones. A snake youma akin to a rattlesnake was coiled up next to him, likewise inert, and the facsimile-Faustite used it for a pillow.
Faustite approached the alcove, then squatted next to it. "Been watching me since then?" It was too precise a scene for a secondhand story. He looked on, expression tense as the creature unraveled Captain Faustite's appearance and swirled out into the free air.
He stood, turned, watched it. Leaned against the rock with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Waited for it to speak, or flash, or do whatever it wanted.
The thing flashed in a series first, and Faustite looked on with no comprehension. Then it formed a large green light, right in the center of the swarm.
That, Faustite could understand. "Why? You never made yourself known. Never saw you back then."
The thing -- pack of things -- coalesced again. Lightstorm turned semisolid, with swaths of the creatures offshooting from the center. Bloomed open, those flagellating appendages a swirl.
Faustite swallowed back a surge of grief. Fought to keep his yearling voice even, keel to kilter in a storm of emotions he didn't invite. "Squiddy found me first," he said, recognizing the form.
Another green light.
"Isn't that your ******** loss," Faustite snarled at the congregation of creatures, as they imitated the youma he lost. Fire whirled in him before it burst from beyond the grate, raveling out, toasting a dozen of the fireflies into glittering cinders before the rest escaped to a respectable distance. "Don't you ******** mock my squid again, or I'll bring you to ******** Ganymede!"
The surviving fireflies coalesced atop a fallen ridge, steady in their watchfulness. They looked on as the tempestuous General turned from its explanation and began the long trek back to his comrades.
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Posted: Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:28 am
He took the wrong bend twice before he finally reached the long road they had taken to the Scar. Youma tracks and boot prints enjoined in the more impressionable clay, spelling a cavalcade of movement in the direction of the castle. By now, Faustite estimated, most of them would have reached the Hall of Shadows. The only stragglers would be the more grievously injured, and the few youma that joined them on the journey. Perhaps he would find Albite standing with a Captain, for all he wanted was Faustite accompanying him.
He started trudging toward the Citadel, though he could not bring himself to want to return. The General paused, spared a glance back through his smoke toward the ridge from which they first spotted the Scar. He knew what to expect with youma, knew their backstabbing to be delightfully transparent. Knew he spent years among them, stalking the creature that they just mugged for a number of scales. If he stayed, he would live among familiar folk.
If he stayed, he'd return to living off of caches. They were finite, he knew; he doubled back to the same ones he'd emptied several times during his years down here. It wasn't practical, for the environment was hostile toward any shred of humanity.
If he stayed, he would be abandoning his subordinates. One chose him of his own volition, and the other was assigned to him expecting a positive outcome. Could he dump them back into the system and expect them to stay? Was it fair to them for him to do so?
If he returned to the Rift, what kind of an example would he be setting to his peers? What of the as-yet-unpaid favor to Jet, who carried him out of the Farnsworth? Or Sylvite, whose subordinate he lost? He'd never get an opportunity to break his knuckles on Rakovanite's face, or eat Xenia's starseed. He wouldn't have access to Axinite's seemingly infinite confections. If he returned to the Rift, he would worry Yuuri again.
Faustite sighed, turned from the ridge, and trod the path on weary legs. He spared a second glance back, expecting to see his Captain form staring back at him for the lingering youma aura he felt, but found only his own smoke. Likely it was Salthiss trailing him again; the snake youma was seldom one for speech without its nutria partner.
The Citadel loomed, albeit distantly; Faustite estimated it lay a couple miles away. The slow journey afforded him time to reflect, whether he wanted to or not.
Their mission started well enough. Sure, they lost a couple to stupidity, but Faustite was quick to write those ones off; they would've died in some ridiculous fashion, and it was better for their starseeds to go toward feeding their ex-humans. Jet and Aqua's team was diligent in tracking their target down, while Kamacite's team weathered a barrage of youma to discover more important pieces to a staged encounter. In the years that Faustite spent watching their target, he never knew it to stage a scene like that. Curious, the wit of youma.
But there were more glaring failures than positives. His team didn't finish their objective, instead splintering under his command and eventually sabotaging itself. Rakovanite's antics ended a handful of their lowest ranks and split the remainder, who Faustite and Kamacite couldn't find. Their fight with the target was the worst of it, with Xenia pulling her starseed, with so many agents getting youmafied, with Jet taking command over a ********, with himself finally feeling good after becoming living fire. Somehow they pulled it out without everyone dying to other people's stupidity. Somehow they walked away, mostly intact.
But Faustite yearned for that fleeting freedom. He glanced over his shoulder again --
and the ******** fireflies blocked his view of the distant ridge. "******** sake," he sizzlehissed as he turned in the creatures. "You've been following me the whole time?"
Helpfully, they coalesced into a green light.
Faustite rolled his eyes. "Opportunistic piece of s**t. You're the same as my subordinates. Fine. Come." He waved the thing on as he turned back to face the growing structure of the Citadel. "But you're learning how to use a tablet. And make tea. And order Albite around."
He sniffed, nose wrinkling. "And you're taking a bath, too. You smell like piss."
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