Nature’s Boon (10) : Flowers are blooming at an incredible place across the city and sometimes barren patches of grass can be overrun with flowers overnight. There have been heavy showers and a high pollen count but there doesn’t appear to be any other explanation. It is not uncommon to find trees with nearly double the leaves they usually have, with vines twisting up houses, flowers covering the front yard, or local fruits to have doubled in size. This isn't the first time Destiny City has seen such oddities, and there doesn’t seem to be any negative effects to this; scientists are questioning climate change. Or is it radiation??
The plants were so extra lately that Niter couldn't believe it. If it didn't sound like so much extra work to go outside as Laike and try to acquire cuttings for his own collections, he would've taken home a piece of nearly every plant he found. If it didn't seem too scary to have a conversation with a stranger, he would've likewise gone to ask the various homeowners what they were using on their plants, because he'd never worked out anything that amazing.
Even the park foliage was showing off, Niter found. It wasn't as readily apparent at night, but he saw the difference — the trees were Extra Leafy, the ferns were Extra Fluffy, and even the ground cover had become the apex version of itself. As Niter wandered farther into the park, he wished the foliage could be this robust all the time.
Then again, that would really suck for people with allergies. But apart from them? He couldn't imagine anyone complaining.
Once Niter reached the beginning of one of the walking trails, his laziness returned in force and he decided against the trail. Instead, he chose a nice grassy seat at the base of a gigantic oak tree that spread its foliage far overhead. The way the wind soughed through the trees was a delight; if Niter wasn't on draining duty, like he was on any given night, he'd have given up his henshin and taken out his Switch. Instead, he threw on his blank hoodie from subspace and waited for any nighttime joggers to make his quota a little easier.
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Posted: Sat Jun 17, 2023 4:17 pm
This was the most beautiful thing that Pendour had ever seen.
She knew it might not be good, knew it might be some result of global warming, or else some kind of unexplained magic causing these changes. The festival tended to bring magic with it, she knew, and that magic could be dangerous.
On the other hand, it could make Earth plants look otherworldly,look like they were something out of someone's imagination. Pendour walked through the park slowly, reverent.
She talked to a sprig of ivy as she went, and a twisted oak that seemed to be leafing out again, and a patch of gladiolus that was reaching far over her head. She told them how lovely they were, how healthy, how strong, how much she loved them.
Even though she'd powered up so that she could sense dangerous magic, she'd ended up distracted. She hadn't noticed the aura until it was right next to her, and there was a person right next to her, too.
She stopped mid-murmur of calling the grass itself beautiful.
She saw the hoodie, but she also saw the pants peeking out that looked far more ornate, the long hair that was perfectly styled.
"Are you trying to pretend you're not a senshi?" she asked, voice soft.
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Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2023 7:30 pm
He knew she was a knight by feel. Not just a knight, but a Knight, with the extra-shiny aura that sparkled like a Pokemon game from the early 2000's. She practically made Pokemon noises when she came into view, but instead of weird garbled Gameboy sounds, it was a "You're beautiful" said to… Trees? The grass? Probably the grass. That was nice of her. Plants deserved that. Plants were good listeners, too.
But because she was there, and she hadn't immediately noticed him, Niter kept very still and very quiet and hoped very much that he would not garner the same notice that the trees and plants and flowers and grass had received. But, much as he liked to hide and pretend not to exist, his aura screamed his presence and his outfit screamed look at me.
And look at him, she did. It was then that Niter felt very small, not for the Knight's stature (though she was very tall), but for her power. Niter was only a Super; he had no business getting in the way of someone who could go toe-to-toe with a General.
When she spoke to him, he felt like she was talking down to a child. Maybe it was an honest question, Niter couldn't tell. He reached up and pulled on the sides of his hood, bringing the top of it low over his forehead where it finally covered the hole. "It's not working?" He asked quietly. He drew up his legs, too, to make himself smaller.
stari_maga
Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2023 6:53 pm
Considering his question, Pendour took a moment to look at him, at his disguise. She didn’t meet his eyes, not quite, but she faced all the way towards him so that she could see instead of trying to shy away from showing her scars the way she sometimes did.
It wasn’t bad, she decided. The hoodie was perfectly nondescript, the rest of the outfit not strange enough that she would have given it a second glance under most circumstances. She might have thought the pants pretty, but that was all.
She glanced away again, feeling the way he already seemed to be shying away.
“I think it would work for most people,” she said. “Um, I can sense auras, that’s all. That’s what gave you away.”
She wasn’t going to pressure him about it, either way.
“Do you want me to pretend I didn’t notice?” She asked.
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 9:27 am
Niter heaved a dejected sigh. The aura always gave him away; there had to be a way to ditch the aura so he could drain energy in peace.Or like, at least not traumatize people with it; they were already giving up their energy to a good cause and didn't need any more bother.
Besides, if they caught on, that usually meant conversations. Like this one.
"Oh, n-no," Niter answered hastily when the knight asked their question. "It's, um, it's okay, I'm just, you know," and he sighed again, because there wasn't really any good way to have this conversation.
"I just want to sit with the plants and not really do my job today." There, he admitted it, and now he could wait for crushing shame to have its stranglehold on him.
stari_maga
Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2023 8:53 pm
"That's okay," said Pendour, her voice soft as ever. Her smile was soft, too.
She liked this senshi. His voice was nice, and there was something about the way that he tried to hide behind his hoodie that she understood. That was her, sometimes, on the way that things got hard.
She didn't think that she'd even have to offer him her own energy to keep him from running off and draining someone. She didn't think she'd have to use her magic to calm his mind.
They could just talk, a little.
"All I want to do is look at these, too," she said, turning her back to him so that she could walk over and run her fingers against the bristled, ridged stem of a hollyhock plant that reached up towards the sky. Hollyhock were always tall, taller than a person, and often brushing second story windows, but this one looked like something out of Jack and the Beanstalk. "They're the most breathtaking things in the world, don't you think? It's nice to see something magical that's not all," she loosely waved a hand, "Violent."
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Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2023 6:49 pm
Niter was silent for a moment as he tried to figure out how to respond to what the Knight was saying without potentially giving himself away. Himself as in Laike, that whole part of his life that he was trying so desperately to salvage, even though he had to rely on other people to do so. With a small sigh, he decided it was better to go with the 'my friend' angle and leave it up to interpretation if he meant himself or Niter actually had a real-life friend.
"My friend, um, had a bunch of hollyhock for a while. Before he moved out. He bred some that were a really dark purple, almost black. But, they couldn't really come with him when he left home." He'd leave out the part about them being long deceased, owing to his sister's carelessness.
"Those ones are super tall, though." And that was nice. He liked being shorter than something; it let him dream on about being diminutive and easily missed. It led him to wonder, though — why couldn't he be the senshi of invisibility, or camouflage or something? That would've made his life leagues easier, especially when it came to draining energy.
Missed opportunities, he guessed.
"Do you know if this has happened before?" Niter drew his knees up to his chest and pulled the hem of his hoodie over them. "The plants growing super tall. Or do you know how to make that happen more often? I kind of like that better than, you know, the other stuff."'
stari_maga
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2023 4:58 pm
Sadie might not have been making direct eye contact, but she was listening to what the senshi said about flowers all the same, listening with a blissful expression to the talk of carefully bred, night-dark hollyhocks, even as she stared up towards the top of this one.
"It sounds beautiful," she murmured. "Hollyhocks, they're something out of a cottage garden, aren't they? But if you got the dramatic coloring like that, it'd be something almost out of a fairytale."
And there wouldn't be the need for any magic, then, anything like this that was fierce and beautiful but hard to predict. Although, she did have at least enough of an idea of what was going on to explain it to this boy.
"There's, um, latent magic in Destiny City that's not controlled by Order or Chaos," she told him. "My friend described it as, um, Destiny City shenanigans? I don't know if that's the most, um, formal way of saying it, but-" it was as good of a way to put it as anything else that Pendour could think of.
"You see it around holidays more often than other times," she said. "I don't know if that means anything."
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Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2023 5:14 am
Niter wasn't sure if it meant anything either, but there was probably a reason for why these things cropped up around holidays more than any other time. Niter didn't know what that reason would be, and trying to think of one made him more tired. He didn't come out here to think, he came here to look at plants and be sort of, more or less, invisible and maybe scalp a little energy from passing joggers.
They definitely had enough energy if they jogged. They could spare some.
"It always seems to go away, though, right? I like the plants big." He didn't want them to reduce to their normal size on whatever magical time table was applied to them. DC could become a jungle, and honestly? It would be pretty neat. Maybe Niter could even ride a plant to the store or something.
"You'd think they'd, like, call a truce or something and try to figure this magic out. Wait, does the White Moon like, have a leader? Am I allowed to ask that?" He looked up at her from his huddled hoodie, wondering.
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Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:55 pm
"That sounds so much, um, more sensible than what we're doing now," she said, standing up on her tiptoes just so her long arms could barely brush the tip of a leaf.
"If we could work together for something nice instead of all that fighting."
Unfortunately, she didn't think that many people would be swayed just by the way that the plants were growing bigger. Even people who weren't infected by Chaos ignored the beauty of nature in favor of conflict so much of the time. It was a nice daydream, though, and she gave herself a moment to savor it.
"I don't think we have a leader, like that," she said, which was the other problem. Getting everyone to agree on a course of action almost never happened. "There's some people who are respected, though? I could ask around, and you could ask your queen."
And while he was doing it, she could go and watch the shooting stars and wish for a miracle.
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Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2023 11:55 am
Niter didn't think it could happen. The Negaverse, the White Moon, they were both at each other's throats for like, a million years. Or maybe longer than that? Niter didn't know how far that stretched back, but something that's been going on since before he was born was unlikely to go away until someone won. He didn't know what that would look like for either side, but he knew there were more than enough people on both sides that were so married to the conflict that Niter couldn't see them abandoning it.
He also couldn't picture Jet setting down his glaive long enough to garden with Ganymede. He couldn't really imagine the reverse happening, either, or with any of the high-profile people on both sides. It was kind of sad. He liked plants; he thought everyone should get to enjoy them.
He could put that aside for now, though. This lady seemed nice enough. She was open with him, too, so Niter didn't feel particularly pressed to be efficient right now.
He blanched at the mention of the Queen, though. "Um… I don't think…" He wheezed his soul out of his body as he imagined it. "I could, maybe, try one of the General-Sovereigns." He could try Jet. Jet would explain it to him if he was doing something wrong. Not once did he try to murder Niter for insolence, so that left him feeling pretty safe about it.
"And like, respected people are kind of like leaders, right? It doesn't have to be the whole… Um, side, I don't think? But some people from here and some people from there would be better than nobody at all."
stari_maga
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2023 12:55 pm
"Anyone who you want to talk to is fine," said Pendour with a small nod.
She didn't know if it would help, really, since two of the General-Sovereigns had tried to kill her at some point, which usually wasn't a sign that someone was about to take your advice seriously, if you sent that advice through a messenger, but anything was worth a try.
Besides, even if all that failed, at least she'd found one person who understood.
"Anyone respected. Anyone at all, really."
In an ideal, unrealistic situation, maybe peace could spread like wildfire. Pendour smiled for a moment, just at the thought of it.
"I think I'm going to go see what other plants there are, but it was nice, um, getting to talk to you."
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Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2023 10:07 am
Niter gave a brief but meaningful nod at her words. He'd try — if he could get up the gumption to try. It mattered to him, of course, but when he started to think about the ramifications of talking to a higher-up, even if it was Jet, the idea started to sound flimsy and unsupportable with his current evidence. Like he couldn't make a case for it in his own mind, so why would a Sovereign take him seriously?
It'd be something to work on. He huddled into his own hoodie for it, wondering if he'd be able to get anywhere with this as opposed to investigating planetary stuff.
"Okay, um, nice to meet you," Niter called back, though it wasn't much of a call. The evening was quiet which meant they could use indoor voices that carried well enough, and he liked having that. He liked not needing to exert himself to be heard.
He'd stay for a while longer, he supposed. Even if he didn't get anything more productive out of the night. It was nice to just… be, for once. It was nice to not have to be efficient and productive all of the time. He could save that for quotas and video games.
