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 Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:00 pm
Daedalus’s chest hurt.
That had become a familiar refrain, the longer he was on Earth. And ever since his last visit to his planet, when he’d noticed the strange migration of the little goo-beasts he’d recognized as little manifestations of the poison on his world, it had been getting worse faster.
But he was still alive. Still drawing breath, in spite of what the Chaos probably wanted. And he wasn’t alone. He’d recognized, as soon as he saw the monsters on the move, that he needed to get help—so he’d asked Murikabsuhi to come with him, so they could investigate the odd occurrence.
When they arrived on the planet, it was near the outer edge of the city. Daedalus knew this place well—there had been a forest here, once, with a trail that led to a lake that had been popular with visitors and Daedalan families alike, from the richest to the poorest.
The forest was dead, now, hollow and fallen trees all around them, but the path still looked clear. And, while part of Daedalus had been concerned that when he returned, the migration would have stopped, it was clearly still going on—dozens of the little monsters scurrying over the ground, paying no heed to Daedalus and Murikabushi. All in the direction of the lake.
Daedalus had a very, very bad feeling about this.
“You see why I was concerned,” he said, turning to Murikabushi. “This is…strange. Wrong.”
And it felt a little difficult to breathe, but Daedalus wasn’t going to say that. Better not to draw attention to his deteriorating condition.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:04 pm
Murikabushi didn’t consider himself an expert in magical space travel by any means. Besides his own world, he’d only been to Ida’s, Fang’s, and Blossom’s so far, and the second of those, only because Fang had needed help to rid his world of the Chaos. (There had also been Astraya, but he strongly preferred not to think about that.) As far as Wonders went, he’d seen Amsvartnir’s, and he had a date to see Kaifeng’s.
Obviously, Murikabushi hadn’t even seen a statistically valid sample size of everything out there in space. So, really, what did he know, when it came to what did or didn’t constitute “normal behavior” for magical space-worlds?
………Still, something about the scene that coalesced into being around them distinctly felt wrong. Glancing around at the array of probably-once-beautiful buildings, he didn’t see anything that should have been wrong. Black, soot-looking stains smudged up the surfaces of the old pathways through the city and the crumbling brick walls, even some of the nearby trees—which only enhanced the steampunk-adjacent appearance of everything. The mental point of reference that Murikabushi had for the architecture didn’t match with the one he had for his own world. Where the Murikabushian capital city reminded him equally of Revolutionary Paris and Edo period Japan, what he could see of Daedalan architecture made Muri feel like he’d stepped into sci-fantasy Victorian London.
Aside from the stains, which looked strange but not unexpected, all of the trees looked incredibly dead. On Murikabushi, he had instead encountered the opposite problem. The only dead plants Muri had found so far were the true-black roses he kept finding strewn about various places in the capital city, always around statues or paintings of Airan. Everywhere else, the planet teemed with life, overflowed with it even. None of it had any sapience, and more than a few doors seemed to have been bound shut behind overgrown vines or roots or something else, but some kind of life remained on Murikabushi regardless. Yet, everything on Daedalus seemed dead.
As much as Murikabushi wanted to dig through all the history here, he had to nod in agreement at Daedalus’s assessment: all of this was wrong. Inarguably.
“The way those little guys are scurrying only makes it all feel more wrong,” Murikabushi said, sticking close to Daedalus as he watched the little beasts scamper. “Is there anything in that direction they might be interested in……?”
Murikabushi looked out at the trail and the fallen trees. He didn’t say “We should follow them”—but, frankly, that would’ve felt a bit like stating the obvious. Some kind of Chaos monsters had taken shape on Daedalus’s home-world. The two of them were here, senshi, with the power and the responsibility to stand against destructive forces like these. Of course they were going to follow the beasties.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:05 pm
Daedalus frowned, down the winding path into what had once been woods. His boot tapped against the cobblestones of the path, and he considered the question.
“There is a lake that way, with an island at the center. It was a popular spot to spend an afternoon, once.” He paused. Considered. His eyes widened. “....And a little while before we were cut off, it was shut down. No explanation. I tried to demand one, but I kept being told that it wasn’t anything I should worry about. Absurd, but—I assumed someone was doing some sort of unethical business out there that they didn’t want me busting up.”
He exhaled.
“These things, heading in that direction…makes me think it was much, much worse.”
Surely they wouldn’t have hidden the root of a Chaos infection from the Senshi. Surely that was the one thing they absolutely would have come to him about. And yet.
“I am sorry that your first visit to my world is like this,” he said. “I wish I could show it to you as it was.” Not that it would ever be as it was again, bustling and loud and alive, but….something better than this.
He coughed, and brought a gloved hand up to cover his mouth, and was glad when the fit was over in a moment and he could turn around and start down the path—wide and paved, designed to be walked by families with children, once. But damaged now—cobblestones pushed out and cracked and left to crumble.
“Come on, it’s not far. And watch your step.”
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:06 pm
“Well, I’m not sorry,” Murikabushi said without needing to think about it, following Daedalus down the path he’d pointed out. “I’d love to have seen how your world was before. And I’ll be excited to see what happens when life starts coming back. But I’m not sorry to be here for you now so you can make that possible.”
Everything else Daedalus had said, that merited more consideration before just popping off at the mouth. The cobblestones complicated things somewhat; even if they’d laid out normally, navigating them in pumps would’ve taken a bit more focus than Muri usually needed to put into walking. With all the damage, as well as the train of little beasties plodding along, he needed to put more effort into actually honoring Daedalus’s request so both of them could make it to the lake in one piece.
They’d be easier to get past next time, though. Murikabushi would have a better sense of how they liked to sit, then. Already, a few moments on them were making things easier.
“Even if there’s something more nefarious out in the lake? I don’t think anybody could blame you for having assumed that whatever went down here was more mundane,” Murikabushi said gently, after both thinking things over and getting a bit more accustomed to how these specific cobblestones played with his pumps. “Hiding a Chaos infection from the senshi is astoundingly stupid, but at the same time, if the people involved were particularly arrogant? Maybe they thought they had it handled themselves. Maybe they didn’t entirely realize what they were ******** around with. Maybe……”
Murikabushi swallowed thickly, an uneasy frown twisting up his face. “I don’t like suggesting this. I don’t even like thinking it, really. But……given some of what you’ve said? About how people hated you for doing your job and standing up to them? Maybe some of the idiots thought they could use whatever power they thought they had to either put you on a tighter leash, or kill you and get a new senshi later.”
The very idea sounded stupid, saying it out loud. Who in their right mind would think that they could harness the power of a Chaos artifact or monster or whatever and actually use it for their own ends? But at the same time, people could do some pretty stupid things when motivated by power, greed, and a desire to smother other people’s freedom in order to make themselves feel ever so slightly better about their own pathetic lives.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:07 pm
Watching Murikabushi carefully navigating the cobblestone path, Daedalus was glad—not for the first time—that he had sensible, flat-soled boots and not heels or something else fancy. Sure, he still had to be careful, but not nearly as much as someone with less practical footwear.
Not that he didn’t have to be careful at all—he felt a loose stone under his foot and had to skip away to avoid twisting his ankle, which would have been…very embarrassing, all things considered.
“There are….plenty of reasons they’d have wanted to hide things from me,” Daedalus acknowledged. “No matter how stupid.”
There was something about the suggestion that made Daedalus tense, and he exhaled. Stopped walking, for a moment, and watched the little beasts scuttle, seemingly disinterested in him and Murikabushi. Strange, really. Two Senshi should be a buffet for anything Chaos. That there was something more interesting was extremely concerning. But Daedalus was dodging, even in his own head, and he knew it.
“I never told you why I was in such a bad way when you found me, did I.” He said, and it was more of a statement than a question. “Because you’re not far off, with what you’re suggesting.”
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:07 pm
Murikabushi blinked for a moment at Daedalus’s non-question, then tried to recall what all had happened on the first night they’d met.… Some of it was a bit of a blur for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with Daedalus (and Murikabushi hoped to keep things that way, considering everything about Faustite and his behaviors). But at the time, Murikabushi had thought that Faustite had gotten wholly youmafied and he had felt a kind of grief about that. Meeting a magical dragon-man who’d known Airan had gotten through the fog of that grief, but all the same—
“I don’t think you explained that, no,” Murikabushi said after racking his brain and coming up with nothing. He frowned as he kept walking, not at Daedalus but down at the little Chaos creatures. Maybe these guys worked differently from youma, hence them ignoring him and Daedalus? Then again, maybe they were only ignoring the pair of senshi because nobody had done anything violent as yet. Stepping even more carefully, lest he clip one of them with his pumps and unintentionally start something, Murikabushi shook his head. “In fairness, I could’ve asked more, too? But from getting to know other space senshi, I felt like…you’d probably been through a lot just getting to Earth, and maybe it was rude to ask too much. Or like maybe it might have overwhelmed you.”
Especially considering the Chaos aura, he chose to leave unsaid. Maybe it had been an issue back then, but it wasn’t anymore.… Yeah, Murikabushi had arguably been trying to avoid meeting too many new people. And yeah, with most of the new folks he had met, like Lanting and Parsifal, he’d largely held back the fact that his fuku hadn’t always been white (—not with Grieve or Madriu, though, but them having known Airan before made them feel……different, not entirely new even though they kinda were). And yeah, maybe he didn’t want to get to know someone only to have them find out that he’d been a Mirror senshi before and judge him for it, even hate him for it or accuse him of, like, misrepresenting himself or getting to know them under false pretenses or something, Muri didn’t know.……
But the menacing Chaos aura wasn’t an issue anymore. Or at least it didn’t need to be. Especially when Muri didn’t really feel like he’d changed at all from having purified. He was the same old b***h as always, so his ever having been a Chaos senshi didn’t need to be A Whole Thing.…… But still, part of him felt haunted by that past.…… Maybe helping Daedalus restore his world would help, though. Helping Grieve, Madriu, Helene, and basically any space senshi who would take him up on the idea—maybe it would let Muri give himself some ******** peace.
That little slip into his own thoughts didn’t last very long, but it only took a moment to step wrong. While trying to avoid a cobblestone that was cracked down the middle and looked pretty loose, Murikabushi brought his foot down on one of the little Chaos goops instead. He cringed at the squelching sound, at the feeling like he’d just stepped on one of Tatsuya’s sensory squish toys, one of the little plastic-y bags with the glitter gel and tiny stars inside—and at the expectation that some violence might start, now.
Instead, the splattered little goop oozed out from under Muri’s toes, quickly reforming itself and skulking back into the line. Undaunted, that one and the others pressed on down the trail, toward the lake.
“……Whatever’s in the lake, these little guys are serious about it,” Murikabushi said, unsure if he wanted to laugh or throw up a little. “And they’re apparently pretty durable, which is……concerning, to say the least. The Chaos beasts on Fang made a lot of trouble for some of the folks who went up to help him, but physically, they went down really easy. If stepping on one of these guys doesn’t slow it down too much……”
Murikabushi shrugged, shook his head again. “One incident isn’t enough evidence. But it may be something to keep in mind?”
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:08 pm
Daedalus was only still for a moment—they weren’t far, now, and he knew in his heart that he couldn’t afford to hesitate. Not when the longer he walked, the more tired he felt. Not when there was something in the back of his mind—maybe the part of him that had simply gone for too long—whispering that he should just sit down. Take a rest.
Stop.
But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. Not now. Not yet.
Maybe when all of this was over, when his world was cleansed, his lungs would finally give out and he would be able to lay down and rest. That almost sounded…peaceful, to save his world and then be allowed to die. It wasn’t what Daedalus wanted, no, but it felt like what was approaching.
Perhaps waking up in his own tomb had been an omen.
“I don’t think I would have talked about it,” Daedalus admitted. He exhaled, which led to another round of coughing—these ones loud and racking, coming from deep in his chest.
He had to stop walking,t o take a moment, to catch his breath even after the coughing fit ended.
“Ugh,” he groaned, and he smashed his fist against his chest, as if that might help. As if anything might help. “Sorry. Working in factories as a child does your health no favors. Never mind everything else. Because, the thing is—someone did try to kill me and get a replacement Senshi. Probably would have succeeded, if my world hadn’t decided to put me in stasis instead.”
He made himself start moving again, putting one foot in front of the other, carefully dodging loose stones and little beasties alike.
“I don’t really know everything that happened. I remember eating something, and then feeling—dizzy. I thought it was because I’d been pushing myself too hard, but I stood up—and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in my own tomb. A thousand years later, with my world dead around me.” It still wasn’t easy to talk about. “I didn’t know it was empty, yet. Screamed myself hoarse hoping someone would hear and get me out. But there was no one, obviously.” He shook his head. “I wonder what they thought. If things lasted long enough for them to realize there wasn’t a new Senshi. If they just thought they hadn’t found him yet. I—” He stopped. Smiled, in a miserable sort of way. “I suppose I’ll never know.”
Who was left to tell him?
The squelching sound made him jerk, turning to watch—and he full-body shuddered, seeing the creature wriggle its way out from under Muri’s cute little shoes.
“Thanks, I hate it,” he said, a remembered phrase from the bored teenage daughter of a client at the mechanic shop. She’d said it to one of her friends on the phone, and Soren hadn’t been entirely sure of the context, but it had embedded itself in his brain and escaped here and now. “Hopefully magic will do more to damage them than shoes, bur you’re right—not a good sign.”
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:09 pm
Sometimes, Daedalus said things about his world as it had once been that made Murikabushi feel like he really understood why Airan had considered Daedalus a friend. Aside from all the fairly obvious reasons—Daedalus was kind, he was snarky and fun, he had good political opinions and cared so ******** much about using his senshi power to fight for people who’d been outcast or downtrodden by ******** Society—it seemed like they probably had a lot of similar experiences. Between Airan spending so much of his life as a glorified prisoner, hated by his own people despite tearing himself apart to help them, and Daedalus being exploited by people who, per this story, eventually tried to murder him for just doing his job. How could they not have felt some sort of camaraderie with each other?
………Well. A lot of ways, probably. But thankfully, those ways hadn’t happened.
It made Murikabushi glad, in a way, thinking about that. What pieces he knew of Airan’s life so far mostly consisted of suffering, some adventures about rescuing Grieve and the Nameless from getting arrested, and dragging a very drunk Saturn Knight out of a tavern on Liberation Day, then pawning him off on Helene.. Airan having had an actual friend sounded like something he had desperately needed.
Which made Murikabushi’s heart twist that much harder when Daedalus started coughing. He hesitated, but only briefly. It took some delicate steps, but he came to Daedalus’s side and placed a gentle hand on his back. Silently, looking at Daedalus with a soft, concerned expression, Muri hoped that this would only provide the comfort he intended to give, and that it wouldn’t come off as condescending……as if he was trying to decide for Daedalus what he was capable of doing instead of trusting him about his own limitations. Just because Muri so often treated his own limits as more like guidelines than actual rules didn’t mean that other people were the same way, and it didn’t give him the right to decide for Daedalus what he could or couldn’t do, what he could or couldn’t handle.
He could just……provide comfort (hopefully) and remind Daedalus that people cared about him.
“Considering everything people did to try and stop you from just existing, you’re doing really well,” Murikabushi said, which felt mostly true? That coughing fit still worried him, but relative to how badly off Daedalus could have been after a lifetime of working in factories and then of his people trying to murder their own senshi? “And I don’t know, you might find something about what happened after? Maybe not, but it’s definitely possible.”
On one hand, Muri didn’t want to distract Daedalus too much from the task before them, not when the Chaos infecting Daedalus’s world was so important.
On the other, he didn’t want to make this all about himself. Plenty of people probably already thought that about him, that Murikabushi was nothing but a useless drama queen who always made everything about himself. Because obviously, any Dramatics™️ on Muri’s part could not possibly be an expression of genuine emotion, no, they had to be performative—but only ever in the sense you heard from people who’d learned the word from phrases like performative activism and never bothered looking it up outside that context.
Obviously, it couldn’t be that Murikabushi understood how all social interactions and simply existing as a person in a society involved some degree of performativity. It couldn’t be that he chose to lean into that because so many people accused him of being a fake in every conceivable way, from his gender presentation to his concern for others, when he only wanted to be himself. It couldn’t be that he simply felt more things than he could handle, pretty much all the time, and his “performative” “dramatics” were the best way of venting them without hurting himself.
No, no, the only possible reason why Muri ever seemed “performative” simply HAD to be that he was a useless drama queen who thought that everything needed to be about him.
Considering why he’d really purified—never mind how he’d tried to explain it to people who were still with Chaos—Muri couldn’t even begrudge some people—including some he still cared about very deeply—for feeling that way about him, if they actually did. They hardly would’ve been the first to do so, and at least their incorrect conclusions had some actual basis in Muri’s own choices and behaviors.
But on the tentacle, as he and Daedalus drew nearer and nearer to the lake, Murikabushi felt this increasing sense that……things really didn’t need to be so difficult for him. Maybe everyone else had a point when they’d spent his whole life telling him that he did Too Much, that he was too loud, and too femme, and overall too ~ *~ * Loudly, Proudly, Aggressively, Unapologetically, Often Imitated, Never Duplicated, Perpetually, Shamelessly, Irrepressibly Queer * ~* ~.
Maybe it would’ve been better for everyone if Murikabushi had just……stopped.
If he just……let it all go and stopped.
People would’ve liked him a lot more, no question. The enormity of Murikabushi’s desire to be liked disgusted him sometimes, but maybe if he were less………whatever he was?
Maybe if he were just Less?
Then maybe Reiki would’ve just let Greg have his way and they’d be married now instead of Kiyoshi being single, and useless, and kinda drowning under Feelings for two boys who were objectively too good for him, even in light of Faustite’s lengthy list of crimes against pretty much everyone.… Maybe if he’d been Less, Reiki wouldn’t have been such a distraction that Elior-But-By-His-Old-Name took time out from important work to befriend him, wouldn’t have gotten Reiki Awakened in the first place, wouldn’t have discovered what he had in Mirrorspace and burned down his life, completely abandoning his sister and Acubens-oneesan in the process.… Maybe if he’d been Less—maybe if he would ever just stop—then he wouldn’t have caused so much trouble for poor Fang, first with his magic and then with treating Michel as hostile when he had (from Reiki’s point of view at the time) been acting ******** hostile.
Maybe he wouldn’t even know Fang, under those circumstances. Maybe none of the Mauvians ever would have noticed his starseed, and he would’ve lived the rest of his life in quiet desperation without knowing why, and everything would be better off because in that reality, Reiki Rokugin would have simply stopped……given it up……let it all go and faded away for everybody else’s sake, the way he should have.
And feeling all of that so poignantly, Murikabushi burned to do the opposite. Whatever garbage this was, it felt too much like Mirrorspace—and even before he’d fought his way out of there, he’d never been one to give up without a fight. Not as Reiki, not as Kiyoshi, and not now, as Murikabushi.
“Like, granted, I haven’t gotten to do too much digging around on my own world yet,” Murikabushi picked up his previous thought, keeping his tone insistently optimistic and sticking close to Daedalus (hopefully not so close as to crowd in on him, but near at hand in case he decided he did need help). “But some of what I found suggests that Murikabushi the world might have carried on for a while after Airan died. Which—I still don’t know when he died, or how it happened, or anything? But I’ve found some interesting relics, signs that people were praying for him to come back.”
His expression softened as he looked away from the path and back to Daedalus. “Maybe your world put you in stasis before things got apocalyptically bad, is all I’m saying. And once the Chaos is purged from here—I know I can’t exactly read Daedalan or anything? But I’d love to help you look for any signs people might have left about what happened after they tried to murder you.”
Aside from the history of it all being utterly fascinating on an intellectual level, Daedalus was Murikabushi’s friend. If understanding more about what had happened to his planet while he’d been in stasis could help him at all, then Muri wanted to contribute however he could.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:10 pm
There was a part of Daedalus that felt like acknowledging that he was tired was just acknowledging the obvious. He was always tired. There was always a part of him that knew he needed more rest than he gave himself, that he ought to take more breaks, that burning the candle at both ends was never going to be sustainable.
He had never once listened to that part of himself, and even if it was louder now, this was certainly no time for it.
(Even if just sitting down and taking a rest really did sound like a lovely idea.)
Daedalus felt a little ashamed for it, but he did lean on Muri somewhat for a moment, given a hand on his back and a comforting presence at his side. Really and truly, part of him wanted to sit down on the path and just….
Stop.
But he couldn’t. Not now. Not here.
He reached over and gently squeezed Murikabushi’s arm, flashing him a friendly little smile. He was lucky, he thought—to have found Airan’s reincarnation, and to get to be friends with him again, across two entire lifetimes.
“I credit that to infinite stubbornness and a refusal to give those people what they want in any way, shape or form,” he said, a little deadpan. Then, he straightened, and this time, despite the urge, did not take a deep breath—that seemed to be a bad idea, and they couldn’t afford to waste any more time. “And maybe there are some records. I haven’t gone looking—there’s been other things I was focused on.” But perhaps if he went back to their little revolutionary headquarters and poked around, he might find something. Or in the statehouse, a record of reaction and repression.
Either would at least be…something.
“We were looking at serious ecological devastation,” he said, “but that could have taken ten, twenty years to really kick in—or it could have tipped over into a catastrophe earlier than anyone predicted, considering the Chaos of it all.” It had been what they’d feared most—why they’d tried to push so hard for immediate action in an effort to save their world.
It hadn’t mattered, in the end.
Probably nothing Daedalus had done or would do would ever matter.
He shook his head, briefly, to clear the thought.
“We’re almost there,” he said, and they cleared the edge of the decayed forest—to find a lake in an open clearing, with an island in the center and four pretty stone bridges leading into it. Around the lake was a rusted iron fence, and Daedalus realized several things at once, looking at the scene before him.
One, the fence had been broken through at multiple points.
Two, the water of the lake looked…black. Ichorous. Poisoned.
And three, though the dark water made it impossible to tell if there were more under the water, around the edge of the lake and on the island shore beyond, he could see—bones.
He hadn’t thought to wonder why he hadn’t seen a single corpse on his charnel house of a world. Everyone was dead, but it had been centuries—perhaps the bones had turned to dust with time.
But that wasn’t the case.
They were all here. As if they had been lured. Called.
“Watchmaker’s tools,” Daedalus swore, softly, taking a half-step back.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:11 pm
There was a sort of comfort in Daedalus accepting Murikabushi’s concern, in him allowing someone else to care about him and acknowledging, even only briefly, that he wasn’t entirely okay. But as they got closer to the lake—as they moved toward the broken fence and the garden of bones, as they got close enough to see the lake and the black that came not from the depth of the water but from something being utterly, horribly wrong here—Muri’s sense of relief proved incredibly short-lived.
If not for the Chaos poisoning everything, the lake might have been a lovely sight.
Part of Murikabushi wanted to say so, wanted to say that they could get this all cleaned up together and everything would be okay. Even if he couldn’t know that for certain, getting closer to the lake made Muri’s head throb so much harder, flushing hot and sick with the feeling that he didn’t need to keep fighting.… Why did he fight so hard about everything in the first place? Because he was Obaasan’s grandson? Sure, that was fine and dandy, but on the other hand, he technically wasn’t Obaasan’s grandson anymore. Dr. Murasaki Rokugin and Kiyoshi Sakurazawa, on paper, weren’t related to each other at all.
Looking out at the black lake, at the trail of goo-creatures that kept slouching toward it as if they didn’t realize that Daedalus and Muri existed, Murikabushi felt exhaustion trying to crush him under its bootheel. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, he thought, taking in the sight of the bridges, and the bones, and the little beasts. I had not thought death had undone so many.
Muri shuddered, but kept that stray thought to himself. There was a time and a place for TS Eliot, and this moment right here didn’t qualify.
“Should…… Should we—?” Murikabushi held out a hand, getting ready to summon his magic. But he stopped himself before he could perform the gesture or call the incantation. Looking back to Daedalus, he said, “If you want to fight them now, we can fight. I don’t know what my magic will do to them, but I’ll do whatever I can.”
A thick gulp. A tense exhale. “But there’s no shame in pulling back to get reinforcements. Especially with how many of these guys there are.…”
He’d had a similar thought up on Fang, when the giant zombie chrysocyon had summoned all her little helper-wolves. Yuki had told him once that the best way to make one’s players struggle with a combat encounter was to make them fight a bunch of little bastards who all needed to take damage, rather than letting them focus on one big b*****d and feel like badasses. Whether there was more to deal with out here or not, the sheer amount of the little Chaos oozes made Muri feel like getting help would be the best course of action.
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Posted: Sun May 26, 2024 12:12 pm
Daedalus was frozen in place. He’d known his planet was devastated. Known that it had gotten worse in the centuries he’d been in stasis. Known that there was something fundamentally wrong.
But to see an entire lake turned to toxic inkspill, to see so many little monsters and so many abandoned bones—
His world was ruined. Broken.
Even if they cleared the Chaos, how could it ever recover? What could ever come back from such devastation? Was there even a point in trying, anyway, since all the people were gone and dead, bones abandoned in a lake, never to come back?
How many of these bones were his friends, the people he’d come to care about over the years? How many were his enemies—and even they hardly deserved such a miserable fate? Was it even worth it, to try to save this murdered world?
He barely heard Murikabushi’s question. Could barely begin to contemplate it. Fight? What was the point of fighting? Why bother, when the war was already lost?
“We can’t,” Daedalus said, and he felt—dizzy, tired, it would be so much easier if he just
laid
down
and stopped.
It hurt to breathe. Hurt to think.
The water moved.
Something massive started to sludge out of the water and onto the shore. Like a massive blot of oil, climbing out of the lake and into the island, and the little monsters scurried towards it—
“We have to go. We can’t do this alone,” Daedalus said, and without any further hesitation, he grabbed Murikabushi’s arm and teleported them both back to Earth.
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