Destiny City is a large place, with a large population. It’s not uncommon to find a lost item here or there. Maybe a keychain, an earring, a book.
But, a six sided die? That’s different.
While traveling through Destiny City, you find a strange little object. It looks like old, stained wood, but something shiny in it catches your eye. How could you resist picking it up? But then, maybe you've found one of these dice before. Maybe you remember the Gameboard, already.
That's okay.
Even if you know better than to pick it up, all you have to do is look at it, and it's ensnared you. Again.
It looks like a normal die in terms of shape, and each side has a gilded number, one through six, carved into it. The most interesting part of it all is that the dice seems to be made of old, stained wood with fossilized opal throughout the whole piece. Something about it called to you, and now that it has your attention, a harsh wind slams into you. Darkness falls all around you–and then, slowly, a path illuminates. It’s black all around you; there’s no light, but you can see clearly marked spaces.
Halloween was a weird time of year in Destiny City; it was known.
Patrolling around town with the tramp-stamp lower back wings of an eternal senshi gave Murikabushi a greater feeling of control over the situations around him, though. All of it illusory, ultimately. He knew that, as much as he hated admitting it to himself. Just because he had the power of an eternal senshi didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to encounter problems or that he could handle everything or everyone who might cross his path in a negative way. (For example, any of the non-Faustite General-Sovereigns. As far as Murikabushi knew, he only had any kind of pre-extant relationship with one of the General-Sovereigns, so he didn’t dare assume that he could handle anyone but Faustite.
Being honest, he probably couldn’t handle Faustite either, and only really survived by whatever good graces Faustite decided to extend him at any particular moment. His case was simply one where Muri accepted that fact as a part of interacting with Faustite.)
Feeling a Negaverse aura on his own power-level, Murikabushi diverted from the course he’d been on. Part of him hoped that he’d find Albite on the other side of it—no matter how much Yuki insisted on holding him to their agreement about non-Hybris Chaos friends counting double against Muri’s weekly allotment of powered-up time, Albite was worth that—but he was ready in case it wasn’t. Maybe the Negaverse operative in question would simply be minding their own business and Murikabushi could be on his way without much incident, or maybe there’d be some kind of conflict. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be any conflict, because the fact that Muri could take care of himself in a fight didn’t mean that he wanted to fight anybody, or that he enjoyed fighting.
Touching down in the alley where the other aura felt the strongest, though, Muri let his eye get caught by something else. Something shiny glimmered under some nearby trash, and it wasn’t until Murikabushi picked it up that he processed what it was: a die, six-sided, polished wood with inlaid opal making up the numbers. God, this ******** s**t again, he thought as he watched the endless black fall around him and watched. the gleaming gameboard spaces appear
Muri choked down on the sigh when he looked to his right and saw whom, exactly, he’d gotten thrown into this situation with, and the boy’s familiar head of purple hair.
“Well, I guess it’s not Halloween season without more of this bullshit,” Murikabushi said, “but at least the company’s a lot better than the last two times I had to do this.” Not that Yuki was bad company generally, but he’d been in A Whole Mood during this s**t last year and finding out about Reiki running around as a Mirror senshi had exacerbated that. The year before, babysitting a civilian—specifically, one whom Murikabushi now knew as Kaifeng of Saturn—had been an exhausting headache. “Hope you were having a good night before this happened, Heliodor. Have you been well?”
Maybe Murikabushi should have been afraid, doing this with a Nega-senshi and no one else, but Heliodor was an overall decent person, regardless of what his aura suggested. Besides, better a Nega-senshi who could protect themself than a civilian who couldn’t.
Kolina
Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2024 12:12 am
The man dropped to the ground in a controlled manner thanks to the corrupt holding onto his arm. Heliodor may have wanted the drunk's energy but he didn't have any intention on hurting him further. Instead, he was going to let the stranger sleep it off, tucked safe in the ally. The weather was still warm enough over night to not bother.
It was right about then he felt the aura approaching fast. He huffed in annoyance.
Nudging the man up against the wall to rest, Heliodor turned just as he saw the figure in white descend from above. IT took amoment for him to register that he did, in fact, know this senshi. There were now wings involved and more layers to the fuku but, none-the-less, the man was familiar.
What in the world caught his attention? Brows furrowed, the young m an was honestly surprised that Murikabashi chose to ignore him and instead be distracted elsewhere.
Then he saw what Muri held and the world shift. "********." Oh he knew this place and the nonsense that was about to ensue. To top it all off he was now stuck here with an order senshi. Sure, he and Muri had gotten along in the past, but that was when the senshi was more aligned with chaos. Now....now, Muri was a defector.
"Bringing trouble wherever you go, I see." Helio responded in kind. "My evening was going splendidly until you showed up. Had just finished my quota and intending to head back home." So much for those plans. Damn. He had been looking forward to curling on the couch with Beans, having some left-over sushi and watching TV too.
"Were you a magpie in your past life? Picking up nonsense you see laying around?" A heavy sigh.
“Gurl, you know it,” Murikabushi snarked back without missing a beat. “If a b***h knew how to behave himself, I’d still be letting Mirrorspace tell me ‘Oh, I love you, you’re perfect, now change literally everything about yourself because I know what’s best for you better than you do.’ Y’know, as though me walking through a mirror one time means that ignorant b***h knows even the first thing about me.”
In the face of Some Certain Attitude out of Heliodor, he shrugged. Resolved inside his own gay little brain to just let Heliodor feel like he was really doing something and take as little of it to heart as possible. Acting like everything was normal and nothing had changed in the face of a pretty major palette swap couldn’t work on everybody, not even some of Muri’s now-fellow Order senshi or Knights. So, whatever. If Heliodor needed to be in his feelings about the big cosmic bleach job that had been done to Muri’s aura, starseed, and fuku color scheme, then okay, he could do that.
Besides, the dice needed rolling. They wouldn’t get out of this mess by standing around, being clever at each other.
Strictly speaking, they probably wouldn’t get out very quickly by making s**t rolls like the first one that Murikabushi came up with either. Still, he’d get invisible walled if he tried to move past the first gameboard space. The spectral chuckling elicited a roll of Muri’s eyes, and he distracted himself by looking back to Heliodor.
“Anyway, am I the only drag queen you’ve met before? Most of us in my profession have a compulsion to pick up shiny things just in case we can put them on an outfit.” As he pretended to scrutinize his own six-sided die, Muri spoke with the dry tone he liked to use when he was sort of exaggerating but it nevertheless came from a place of truth. The “I don’t know what the seriousness to exaggeration ratio here is either, but I’m gonna have a cute time and enjoy myself about it” tone. “This one probably isn’t gonna work. If I had more of them than just the three, I’d consider making them the end pieces of a statement piece fringe moment? But it really wouldn’t be worth the time I’d need to turn them into beads.”
Kolina
Kolina rolled 1 6-sided dice:
6Total: 6 (1-6)
Posted: Sun Oct 20, 2024 5:14 pm
Quote:
Space 6: You hear a shrill, humming noise; it sounds almost like something is firing past you–and sometimes, you even feel a sharp burst of air, like something has just missed you. Maybe, even, it does get a slice out of you. Sharp, bladelike threads seem to string up around you; you’d best be careful not to get cut on any of them between now and your next dice roll.
Great. They were stuck playing this damn game because a queen couldn't keep her damn hands off of garbage on the ground. While he certainly couldn't claim to be innocent of making mistakes, cause he'd made some big ones in the past, it didn't mean that he couldn't feel annoyed by this one. Not to mention that now he needed to figure out his own complicated thoughts about Muri being decked in white. They were, quite literally now, on the opposite side of each other in this war. Muri was, in all intents and purposes, the enemy. Though, some on the team would beg to differ, maybe even their illustrious leader.
"So, instead you'd rather bask in the lies of sunshine and rainbows of the order side? Their hopeless in their attempts to stymie chaos. Do you think you found your way to the winning side?" His tone was matter-of-fact with a touch of disgust coloring his words. "I can fix it for you. Call a certain General King to stain you black again. White really isn't your color."
Cause honestly, while Helio could understand leaving the mirrorverse he didn't understand why it was order that Muri fell to. Why he stopped there.
A die lay at his feet, and he begrudgingly grabbed it. Muri was right about one thign. They needed to play the damned game if they wanted to get out. So, he tossed it into the air. He watched as it clacked around on the ground in front of him before landing on a solid six. Good. Maybe we can be done with this quickly.
He moved past Muri's pathetic spot of 1 and to the sixth square. He glanced around himself wondering what was going to...
Something whizzed past his ear causing him to jump and step to the side, right into more threads that cut through his robes easily enough. Thankfully, the fuku had done its job and kept his skim just barely safe as he stopped his movement just in time. Warmth trickled down his ear though and onto his neck, marking that at least the first one had landed a blow. He cursed as he reached to check the damage. Just a clean slice along the cartlidge of his ear. It would bleed horribly, but wasn't anything serious.
Space 7: Something is twitching and flapping above you, and while you might be minding your own business, something is a little too invested in what you’re doing. You can’t see them, but you suddenly hear shrill, high pierced noises that are disorienting and confusing. They can bring about dizziness and pain and can cause vertigo if you’re stuck in them for too long.
“Oh, b***h, please.”
Murikabushi openly rolled his eyes at Heliodor’s little recruitment diatribe, which was about the only response that such nonsense deserved. Not that Muri was going to leave things at that, but honestly, he was tired of needing to explain and justify his purification to people. Sure, fine, those reasons were new to Heliodor. He hadn’t heard the whole explanation before.
But Muri had explained the situation to more people than he wanted to count—even if he hadn’t really explained himself to that many people—and he’d felt with more than one like he wasn’t really being heard. He’d actively avoided anything to do with Fang’s bestie because he seriously doubted that any conversation with Michel was worth the effort unless Michel ever planned to apologize for having threatened him over the crime of Existing While Dark Mirror. If Heliodor was one more person who didn’t want to understand and only wanted to put his own narrative about things onto the situation, then whatever. Muri thought that Heliodor was better than that but <******** whatever.
Even as he watched Heliodor swish forward to space number six, though, Murikabushi knew that he wasn’t going to leave well enough alone. He wasn’t going to shut up and let Heliodor think whatever he wanted about the situation..
At the moment, Murikabushi only focused on rolling his die in the hopes of getting closer to the other senshi. A good, solid six—then, the quick little stomp that followed—was nice for that. As soon as Muri stood in his new space, he did his best to ignore the weird, flapping sounds going on around him and the sense that somebody was watching him. Instead of giving this s**t the attention it wanted, he turned back to face Heliodor.
“First of all,” Muri started, folding his arms over his chest, “I didn’t say jackshit about ‘oh, winning side this, that, or the other.’ That’s all on you because it’s not what I think.
“Secondly, I don’t think anybody in this war is the winning side. Nor do I think anybody has the right answer. Both of the ultimate factions—Order versus Chaos—apparently need each other to exist. I’ve been talking space-history with some of the aliens rolling around, and sure, they did fight Chaos a thousand years ago, but more than that? People fought each other. This idiot who one of my Knight friends is sleeping with? His people’s entire thing seems to have been ******** fighting people. Most of the people they fought didn’t have anything to do with Chaos.
“Ignore the Dark Mirror as a possibility because they’re not going to stand and fight for anything. Mirrorspace doesn’t want them to do that, and most of them don’t want to fight either. But if Order annihilates the Dark Mirror and Negaverse, they’re just going to turn around and fight each other because nobody has a plan for what comes after and all some of them know is how to fight. If the Negaverse annihilates Order and the Dark Mirror, then Metallia’s just going to turn on all of you who made it possible and go find someone else to consume because that’s literally what she does. It’s what Chaos itself does. On the whole, none of the factions here offers any options outside of bullshit tribalism that relies on simplifying the universe into ‘us vs. them’ terms that never work out for <******** anybody.
“So, no, b***h, I am not basking in sunshine and rainbows or whatever just because I haven’t asked Faustite to shove his hand in my chest. I still think that nobody has the right answer and that anybody from any side can be a ******** d**k. See, for instance, the enormous alien who my Knight friend is sleeping with. I don’t know what his issue is with people who’ve been dead so long that only my mom’s family has documentation about what our ancestors were doing at the time? But he keeps making it my problem that he didn’t like the people who lived on Murikabushi-That-Was a thousand years ago. I hesitate to use the term ‘space-racist’ because that grotesquely oversimplifies things, but, like………yeah, kinda. He’s not a good guy for being Order; he’s a stubborn, judgmental, unhinged a*****e who’s only barely kept on a leash because my Knight friend has him whipped.”
It probably wasn’t necessary, but just for emphasis, Muri mimed cracking a whip and made a fitting sound effect to go with it. Because sure, there were a lot of different words for romantic and sexual relationships, and most of them were valid……and the one that best described Corvina’s relationship status with Lanting was “whipped.”
A deep breath, and then Murikabushi picked things back up: “I don’t see absolute victory in the terms that most of us are working with as a real victory. I don’t think there is a win-state for any of us. I don’t trust Metallia or Mirrorspace because she sounds like the superpowered incarnation of late-stage capitalism and Mirrorspace is a controlling b***h and a ******** liar. But if Order quote-unquote ‘wins’—”
Objectively, the sarcastic finger-quotes were unnecessary, but Murikabushi made them anyway, “—then like as not, a lot of people are going to die who don’t deserve getting tarred and feathered as ‘evil.’ All the Mirror senshi who are just trying to protect their families.” He thought of Remarque and his kids, thought of Acubens and her wife. “All the people who got brought into the Negaverse as kids and abused by their superior officers. All the youma who didn’t have a choice about becoming youma. And I’m not okay with that. Objecting to Metallia herself doesn’t mean that I think everyone in the Negaverse is like her. I believe that most of you aren’t, and that all of you are worth protecting.
“But I can’t exactly do anything about working to be my kind of magical girl and to help whoever I can if I’m falling apart. Or staring down a near-death experience like ‘Whatever, this is fine, I don’t care,’ which is where I was with Mirrorspace. Leaving the Court without joining the Negaverse isn’t a value judgment or a commentary on the larger war; it’s about me needing to be right with myself. I have that right now, and that’s all I wanted. I’m—”
A shrill, shrieking noise cut Muri off, and he frowned at the void above his and Heliodor’s heads.
“I know a b***h talks too much, but okay, rude,” Muri snapped at the void. Shaking out his ponytail, he sighed and looked back at Heliodor. “Fourth and finally: gurl, are you trying to get me killed?” Despite the seriousness, Muri asked that question with the playful cadence of a joke. “Offering to call Faustite for me as if I wouldn’t completely die in your guys’ ranks? You have a hierarchy, right? You’ve met me, Heliodor. Do you really think I’d make it a single week without sass-mouthing the wrong person? Or telling some higher-up to go ******** themself because I think their plan is garbage?”
Kolina
Kolina rolled 1 6-sided dice:
4Total: 4 (1-6)
Posted: Thu Nov 14, 2024 4:10 pm
Quote:
Space 10: A swampy smell fills the air. You take a step, and you seem to sink into it. Mud creeps over your feet, and you sink rapidly. Ankle deep, knee deep. Whether or not you squirm and fight against it, you are sinking. The mud is crushing and painful, and if you sink too deep it steals the breath from your lungs. There’s nothing to grab onto; you have to roll your dice quickly before that too gets sucked into the muddy quicksand. Gameboard
