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 Posted: Mon Jan 24, 2022 7:14 pm
It had not exactly been a fun or exciting evening. Alkmene could still see that fancy aurora up above him, shining its miserable sparkly light down, and it no longer felt like something to wonder and stare at.
He hurt. All over. Even in places that shithead Knight hadn't punched, which was an incredibly fun experience that he definitely did not recommend. And sure, he definitely intended to deliver the message he'd been given--probably not with the valence Michel intended, but that was fine.
He slumped against a tree, and pulled out his communicator.
"Hey, Faustite? It's Alkmene. Can you summon me to wherever you are?" He took a breath. "I've got some bad news, and also, fair warning, I just took a pretty solid beating, so I feel more bruise than person right now."
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Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2022 6:40 pm
Faustite drew in a breath as soon as he saw Alkmene, even heard it sizzle on the way in. He rose, his stool pushed out behind him. He looked to Headache, who manipulated the communicator. Damnable thing was in a mocking mood, this time, and had assumed the figure of Nembus.
He hadn't responded to Alkmene's call because he was certain Headache would play obtuse if he asked the youma to turn the mic on. His acquiescence was instead his action — he pulled Alkmene through the chaotic black to the other side of the desk before him.
He could tell immediately — Alkmene was underplaying his injuries. Blood and newly-minted bruises, all over him. Looked terrible, disheveled. A redness traced his scalp. Pretty boy looked pretty beaten.
Faustite frowned. He rounded the desk as he pulled his cincher from subspace, donned it in enough of a hurry that he could start assessing damage without adding to it. "Headache, fetch bandages." He didn't wait for the Captain version of himself to dissolve into bugs before instructing, "tell me what happened."
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Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2022 10:09 pm
Alkmene had sort of expected a verbal answer, but instead, there was the pull--much more efficient, he guessed, even if the jarring suddenness of place-notplace-newplace sent his already rattled head spinning briefly with a fresh wave of dizziness.
"Hi," he said, like that wasn't the stupidest thing that could possibly leave his mouth right then. He would give himself some leeway, though; he'd just taken a nasty beating from someone two ranks above him, he was allowed to be a little confused. And Faustite was Faustite--blessedly direct and to-the-point about the whole thing.
"I got ambushed by a Knight. Saturn. Tall, blond, giant clock hand for a weapon. Think he snuck up on me powered down." He inhaled, sharply. "He's looking for Lysithea. I told him a little--that she's assigned to you, mostly. Nothing else. I also lied a whole lot, but." He took a deep breath, to try and steady himself, and wince,d when that hurt. "He wanted me to pass on a message, so here: he wants her back, and this is a warning, and he's going to start leaving corpses if he doesn't get her. Said he'd kill all of us if that was what it took."
Not exactly pleasant. Not what Alkmene wanted to be relaying. But the truth of it.
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Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2022 2:17 am
Faustite listened, but he didn't stop checking Alkmene over to give him eye contact. When Headache returned with gauze rolls, pads, and and tape, he began decorating Alkmene with bandages. There was nothing to be done about the bruises, though; he could only either send Alkmene to Amazonite or tell him to use ice.
He crouched to get started on Alkmene's legs. They looked less severe, less damage from split skin and likely more from falls, cuts from a concrete jungle.
That this Knight looked for Lysithea was problematic; that he was willing to kill for her was dangerous. Jet had mentioned a Saturn Knight before, and Faustite had thought it strange at the time. Clearly this one was persistent, and by the looks o Alkmene, willing to deliver on his promises. He disliked how delicate this affair was going to get, and his expression grew a little sour as a result.
He spoke as he worked. "Tell me the lies." Better that he knew what was said, in detail. He might find it useful to work with when it comes to confronting this one.
He wrapped a roll of gauze along Alkmene's thigh, outside to inside to outside again, ever watching the places where he touched the soft material for the first signs of burns. It was habit, he knew; the cincher wouldn't allow for burns, but he needed somewhere respectful to leave his attention.
"Guessing he didn't give you a meeting place."
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 2:17 am
There was a sense of safety, in knowing that there was someone else to look out for him after he'd been injured. Although Alkmene hadn't been a Senshi long before he'd corrupted, he'd gotten into his share of scraps, then, and he'd had to hide his injuries and tend to them himself. Always a complicated process when he was regularly getting smacked around in ways that left bruises in difficult to reach places.
But with Faustite tending to his injuries, Alkmene actually relaxed, in a way he hadn't been sure he would be able to until he was home.
"If he'd given me a meeting place, this would be way too easy," Alkmene sighed, "which is probably why he didn't. Too simple to set up an ambush that way. Not that we couldn't try anyway, but there'd be too few guarantees."
Not a bad idea, though. Leave out someone low ranked as bait, hide powered down...a thought for another time, when he could actually plan and his head didn't hurt.
"Anyway, most of the places I bullshitted were about our relationship," such that it was. "Told him you didn't trust me with your plans, that you mostly kept me around as decoration." He shrugged his shoulders--obvious that he didn't actually believe that. "The less he thought I knew, the better, I figured."
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 3:37 am
"Don't know how he expects to get her back, then. Sounds like he doesn't intend to." To provide a meeting place was to stake a claim on the setting and determine the advantages he wanted to draw from such a place. Sounded like this Knight was a lone actor, too, and clever enough to power down before attacking; perhaps he expected to just keep going until he ran into Lysithea or Faustite by chance, or he wanted to break agents as long as he could ride this motivation.
He hadn't let Alkmene call while he was there, so he didn't intend for any agent he encountered to have Lysithea delivered to him. No, this one wasn't after his quarry. If he was, that was a secondary goal.
Faustite stood after he finished the last of the bandages. He hesitated a moment, as if unsure what to do with himself, or uncertain about the action he would've taken. Seemingly deciding against it, he rested a hand on his hip as he started to pace.
"Not a lot to work with." Felt the burn of it regardless, knowing this Knight had gotten to Alkmene. He unfastened the cincher, let the fire breathe, and left the strange piece of material on his battered desk. "Saying you don't know anything makes you less useful, more expendable. To keep up that charade would be costly. He knows you're my subordinate, and that I have Lysithea. He's going to keep targeting any agent associated with me, then." Which meant they were all in danger — from Albite to Celadonite to Jadarite to Lilith.
And they had no way of contacting this Knight or ascertaining his location. He let out a smoky sigh.
It wasn't enough. "******** sake," he muttered, as he drove his fist through glass.
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 4:31 pm
Alkmene nodded. It seemed a convoluted solution anyway--just grab any Negaverse officer, throw them around, and hope one spat out useful information on Lysithea.
He watched Faustite move with a slightly nervous edge, trying on the fly to decipher what might going on in his tempestuous General's mind, but just trying to turn through all the potential sources of Faustite's obvious distress was a lot to ask him to pick apart when his head still felt rattled around.
"...True," he acknowledged. That Knight might have decided he was better as a corpse than a messenger. He'd been lucky that wasn't what happened. And even revealing as much as he had might have been a mistake. "I'm sorry," and he wasn't sure where the urge to apologize came from, except years of instincts, "I was trying to do the best with what I had, which was one pissed off Knight and magic that decided not to ******** work tonight." And even if it had, he doubted loss of access to his spell would have stopped what Michel had done to him.
The contact of fist and glass made Alkmene wince. Hard.
'Faustite is not going to hit me,' he told himself 'He just spent time and resources bandaging me up, he's not going to waste that--'
A breath. A discomfited shift in his seat.
"...What's the next play?" Was there a next play, or was he just bringing down bad news with no good answers, because he hadn't gotten enough?
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 5:01 pm
"Don't be." Teeth exposed, Faustite began picking the larger chunks of glass out of his hand. He flicked them away as if they offended him, black-tipped as they were now, and he threw one of the larger chunks hard enough to spear a youma rat's tail off as it scurried from a rat hole behind the bookcase.
"You did what you thought would work. Putting you on desk duty for a while. Can always use someone to pen the reports without them catching." He rolled his eyes at the thought.
Shifting, he started to pace. His now-injured hand leaked small rivulets of black, but either Faustite didn't notice, or he didn't care. That hand perched on his ip, where it stained aubergine pants as he enunciated his words with his unhurt hand. "Plan is to give him what he's looking for, soon as I find him. Don't know the statistical likelihood of blonde Saturn Knights with clock hands for weapons, but I doubt there's many.
"Want you to get on writing a Database report. Make note of everything you could. If he used his magic on you, delineate that and record how long it lasted, if you recall. Going to speak with Lysithea about this, after. Get Headache trained. See if Kamacite's willing to lend his aura.
"All that leaves is finding him."
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 7:49 pm
Faustite was Faustite.
If there was one thing that Alkmene had mostly learned, it was that he could trust Faustite not to rise to violence against his (human) subordinates. The rat youma were a different matter--he watched one's tail be sheared off by discarded glass with a quiet snort--but he'd yet to see an instance of Fautite doing harm to the people that served him.
He had to keep reminding himself of that, in the face of instincts that expected retaliation for failure.
"Yeah, I think desk duty sounds good," he acknowledged. Much safer than risking himself again. And the only sane thing in the face of the injuries he'd received, really. He took another breath and pushed himself up as Faustite explained the next steps, going to where the bandages and gauze had been left and picking them up himself. No reason to let Faustite continue bleeding, when it could be helped.
"I'd like to draft that entry while the memory's fresh, but I think I'll want to give it a pass after I've rested some, just to make sure I don't tangle anything up." Couldn't be sure he didn't have a concussion, which was the unfortunate thing. "Give me your hand," he gestured, and hoped that tucking the request in among acquiescence would make Faustite give it up easier. "Wish I could be part of trapping him. Being able to shut down his magic would be good. But." He frowned. "Too unreliable." There was no point planning around his abilities until he had whatever was throwing them out of whack sorted out.
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:07 pm
"Mm?" The request was an odd one, earning a look from the General as he continued to pac.e He'd never met any infections that could tolerate his heat, and learned early on that no wounds really needed to be wrapped, so long as they weren't deep enough to bleed forever. In that way, wound care was more for people.
And Schörl so loved to remind him that he wasn't a people.
There was little harm in letting Alkmene poke around the wounds, but for the pain of standing still. He relented in his pacing, offered up the hand. He stood perpendicular to the boy; it was easier to hide the way his free hand clenched into a fist, his nails dug into his palm.
His brows furrowed at Alkemene's offhanded remarks about his magic. "Explain."
He'd never known anything but reliable in senshi magic — a senshi calls on their magic, voiced or not, an the magic responds. It responds in the same manner, in the same intensity, in the same duration, like clockwork. Dependable and certain as the fire in his gut. What more reliability could Alkmene ask of his?
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Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2022 10:48 pm
Alkmene was gentle when he took Faustite's hand, and careful bandaging the cuts. It was a quick job, but not a rushed one; efficient, certainly, but quite the opposite of careless. He checked the bandages one last time, and then let go, to let Faustite get back to pacing, while he looked more than a little guilty at the demands for an explanation.
"My magic....sometimes doesn't work. Or works too well, or anything in between." He shook his head. "I wish I knew why--if I had to guess, it sort of feels like me and my magic aren't quite...on the same wavelength? Like it's not really ready to respond to me."
He put a hand on his chest. "I know I was Awakened a lot later than a lot of other Senshi. Most seem to be like, 20 at the max, when they start out? So I wonder if it's that? Or something else?" It was hard to guess, not really having anything to compare to. Lilith had never indicated her magic behaved poorly, certainly.
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:15 am
"Oh what the ********." Faustite's eyes narrowed at the prospect that one of his subordinates had been coping, all this time, with magic that didn't ******** work properly. Part of him wondered if they should shoot their chaos weapon at wherever the ******** Planet Alkmene was, jam enough chaos down its holes that it started behaving, or Metallia replaced its power with something more reliable. Would that work? It better work. It better ******** work —
He huffed, his breath sizzled, and smoke wended out from his mouth. He resumed pacing once his hand was bandaged. "Have to find out if anyone else has, or had, that problem. See what they're doing about it." If anything could be done.
If not, Alkmene might be on desk duty for much longer than Faustite originally intended.
"Don't want you out in the field with no way to defend yourself. Can split your quota among the team; if you have to go out, take someone with you.
"Ask around about the other senshi. Don't need to reveal that it's happening to you — explain you're doing a study. Trying to improve efficiency. Whatever. More datapoints and we can find the commonalities."
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 3:52 am
"Yeah, that about sums it up," Alkmene agreed, and he dropped himself back in a chair, shaking his head. He hadn't bothered mentioning it before because his magic was barely useful at the best of times; for a while, he'd thought he was mistaken, and it was working fine, his enemies just weren't reacting because it didn't do anything noticeable.
But there were too many instances. And too many instances of absolutely nothing happening, like what happened with Michel.
"I can ask around. There's gotta be someone else that's dealing with this bullshit, right?" There were so many Negaverse Senshi. Surely one or two others had run across faulty spells. "I might see about poking around on the other side, too." As distasteful as he found it. "See if there's people over there dealing with it. Would be good to know for us, if nothing else."
After all, if there was the chance that a cornered enemy might have no magic at all, that was a blessing in disguise. There had to be an answer, anyway.
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Posted: Thu Feb 03, 2022 4:15 am
Faustite nodded. "Report it so we can starseed them." Better the Negaverse got rid of the faulty ones and fixed their own.
Too many pains in the asses were cropping up now, when he already had a mission on his hands. Alkmene could be shielded from the brunt of the fallout, but anyone else — they were easily up for capture, with the majority of them being below a Knight's rank. Albite and Jadarite could teleport, get themselves out of danger, and Lilith now, too; but the rest? Sitting ducks, unless he could summon them. And Faustite couldn't know to summon anyone without a working communicator. Headache was still learning how to use one, and only ever wanted to commit crimes with it.
"Take a rest first." As he paced back behind the chair, nails danced along the rim of the back. "If you suspect anything's broken, get seen at the clinic. Ask for Bloodstone if you have to." He didn't know the General, but he was sure he wouldn't want any participating agents to be distracted about the health of their subordinates.
"If you need anything else, come to my office." It was a generic phrase, but one he seldom offered, since it truly meant anything.
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Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2022 8:40 pm
"Understood," Alkmene said. It struck him as a bit wasteful, but on the other hand, examining those faulty starseeds might provide answers about the fault in his.
Perhaps that was an idea. Have someone pull his starseed out of his chest and check it over. Probably not Faustite; it seemed cruel to wave it in front of him; but there were plenty of other people that might be good to make a comparison of. Perhaps he ought to put it beside Lilith's, see if there was something wrong about his.
He hoped it wasn't something fundamentally broken in him--but surely that wasn't the answer.
He stood, and winced as he did--so much still hurt, there was no question that he would have to stop by the clinic as advised.
"Bloodstone, got it." What a name for a doctor--apropos, in a grim sort of way.
The offer made him pause, briefly, and he smiled.
"And I will. And, Faustite? Thanks. For being someone I could trust to call."Strickenized for sure! on yours or possibly on my next one?
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