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 Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2012 8:35 am
Zia was not big on explaining things herself. Half of her gibberish was for her own benefit, trying to fully get a grip and pick apart the situation and she certainly didn't think she needed any one else in on her thought process to do that.
"Oh! Nice," That was about the spaghetti, something she'd rather focus on than getting on the same page as Chris while her brain slid the scale of severity back and forth.
And then there was poor Paris. Her brow raised and she just kind of stared at his list of questions before turning her yes up to the ceiling. What cat? How did she know about this? Her answer was another "Meow," That was less deadpan this time and full of more laughter. Now she was just teasing him, but she was evading having to explain she was a stupid cat in depth. It was creepy, and weird, and not something she liked to admit unless she was in a particularly self depreciating mood.
"Oh, god no, not normal," She did flash a reprimanding look at Chris at that one, "You told him about our epic knightly adventures of fail and he thinks I'm normal? And no one saw the flaw in that scenario?"
She flopped her elbows on the table and played with the mostly empty cider bottle next to her. "Okay, kiddo. Summary. I've known Chris for... how old are you? So like... six years? Roughly?" She was off by a few years, but Zia's grip on her own past was tenuous at best and faked at the worst. If Chris asked her what happened at the Little League playoffs of '06 he'd be met with the confused question of when he started playing baseball.
"So anyway. I'm a bona fide mirror b***h. Mirror walking, talking that whole deal, I do that. But Chris remembered some knight lady and figured he could awaken me and cure me of the whole possessed by alien parasites obsessed with reflections deal. And now my brother's running around in girl's armor," She finished with a cackle before finishing off her cider. "Oh, and also I am the physical host to the soul of the information hub of Ares' universe, whatever." And then she smirked and looked at Paris with one raised eyebrow. "So what are you? Mutant-Cavalier or White Moon hilarity?" Paris was more than aware of what was going on, even if he was confused, and Zia suffered from the overwhelming hypocrisy of someone trying to be only human not believing for a second that someone that involved could be only human.
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Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 5:16 pm
Chris looked awkwardly between Paris and Zia, not wanting to be the one to admit to hiding things from Paris, but also wanting to give Zia the privacy and secrecy she deserved. It wasn't it would be very fair of him to tell Paris Zia's other identity, just as it wouldn't be fair for him to reveal that Paris was Ganymede.
He felt guilty for not saying anything earlier, of course, but he would have felt even worse if he had spilled the beans when they weren't supposed to be spilled.
"Ten..." he mumbled as Zia responded to Paris, correcting her estimation of how long they've known each other. "I've known you since I was ten..." and since he was twenty now... But he couldn't really blame her, knowing that time was kind of ******** up for her at the moment. Why else would he try and force her back to normalcy?
"Zee has a Parallel soul in her body," he explained, eyeing Paris cautiously. He figured it was okay now that Zia had basically given all the details except for explaining just what she was talking about. "Before Ares turned into Queen crazy b***h, before the DMC mess, there were people with Parallel souls on Earth... A lot of them died, but Ares, Zirconia, and a couple others were left," he said, glancing over to Zia to make sure he was getting the information right. She and Lily had explained many things to him, but he'd also gotten information from other places as well and sometimes it all fused together.
"I... took her to Valhalla a while ago and had a memory of a woman who looked like Zee... That's why I thought she could be awoken into a knight... I was hoping it would push out Zirconia..." he grumbled to himself, shifting slightly as he leaned against the counter. He quickly shook his head as if to rid himself of such thoughts before continuing. "It ended up being her brother who awoke as a knight..."
Hey, he had to translate at least a little bit of Zia's ramblings for Paris. Otherwise he'd have absolutely no idea what was going on!
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Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 5:51 pm
Paris was still pretty sure he had absolutely no idea what was going on, but at least he was getting a liiiiiittle closer to finding out.
He was beginning to realize how woefully out of the loop he was. Not that he hadn’t suspected that before—he did a very good job keeping himself removed from these sorts of things, after all—but being fed a bunch of words he’d never heard before in all of his two-year-long senshi life, and by Chris (who he’d thought had already told him everything) and Zia (who he’d thought was entirely normal until… well… right now) really made his ignorance on these subjects more apparent to him that it’d ever been before.
“I… have no idea what a Cavalier is…” he admitted. For a moment he wondered if he should actually advertise his ignorance since it left him open to ridicule, but then he figured someone somewhere would likely find something to ridicule him about anyway, so it didn’t even matter.
“White Moon hilarity, I guess,” Paris said, lifting his shoulders in a quick shrug. He watched Zia cautiously, not sure he wanted to reveal too much if she was as connected to Ares as she seemed to be… or seemed to have been. “Not that I’m all that fond of it. I’d rather just be known as a moon of Jupiter. None of this Black-White, Dark-Light bullshit. I don’t really care to go giving out my name to just anyone, so let’s just say I tend to be a pain in everyone’s a** and leave it at that.”
Paris was no less confused than he’d been five minutes ago, but when he put aside histrionics and contained himself enough to suppress the stress and the fear and the terrible anxiety—at least for the time being—and made himself focus, the pieces slowly began to fall together between Zia’s flippant remarks and Chris’s follow-up explanations.
“So… wait… push Zirconia out?”
He paused briefly, looking back and forth between the two, giving himself the time to let the information sink in. There was the cat talk… and the meowing… and then the mirrorwalking thing… and all the Parallel stuff… and now…
“Oh…” he said, turning to Zia again to scrutinize her closely “Wait, but… I don’t… how can you be…? You don’t even have cat ears and a tail!”
And that seemed like a completely inane observation once it was out of his mouth, and he was pretty sure he was just making himself look like an idiot again, but he was also pretty sure he’d never met a cat in humanoid form who didn’t have its ears and tail still firmly attached to its body.
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Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 6:23 pm
"You're all White-Universe-Whatever to me, baby," Zia said with a snort at Paris' attempt to identify himself. He was a White Moon, in her head, whether he wanted to be or not. Just like this was White Earth and this whole stupid universe was infected, white purity by comparison to her knowledge of what senshidom was.
Just just kind of have a lazy twitch of a shrug at Chris' explanation. It was accurate enough she didn't feel like jumping in. She did feel a bit of a stab at how off her estimate of how long she'd known him had been. Ow. But she tried her best to ignore it away.
"Ding ding ding!" She fell into a fit of laughter when Paris at least seemed to pick up on the fact she was a cat. Yes it was funny, even though all logic and nicer people standards would be quick to highlight the fact it wasn't his fault in the least. What other mauvian turned fully human? Well, besides this mysterious Zue everyone kept bringing up and she hadn't been able to find and interrogate.
"Mm, well, I could bring out the ears and the whole shebang if you want, but I don't think you want a giant a** energy flare in your apartment," She said when she calmed down, but there was still an airy laugh in her voice. It had to be funny. It had to be funny so it wasn't soul crushingly terrible.
"Starseed transplant. That's how all the mirror people are made. They need a body host to get to this universe and I am the lucky duck who has the stupid royal cat." There was a weird emphasis on 'all' and she let it hang there. She would leave her theories on the Dark Mirror Court to be rambled out another day.
"Do you have anything else?" She asked with a childishly disappointed scrunched face at her empty cider bottle she'd been absentmindedly moving between her hands.
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Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2012 7:24 pm
"Careful," Chris warned half-heartedly, not with any intention of intimidation, but more in dark irony, "At this rate, being called White Moon may as well be a death sentence... The White Moon isn't too popular with the Negaverse, nor with the DMC." He was pointing out the obvious, but no one seemed to listen... or care. "That narrow-minded attitude could get someone killed."
He couldn't say he was all that pleased being lumped together with something he didn't even sign up for. Actually, he was rather offended. He knew himself as a knight of Jupiter, and even if he had been loyal to the White Moon in the past, there was nothing to bring back that desire to defend someone who wasn't even there, and who was the key reason for the war in the first place. Chris kept his own a** out of trouble by proving he had little to nothing to do with the White Moon and its missing Queen... and he intended to keep others he cared for out of trouble as well. For him, 'White Moon' was a tainted name. Not beyond redemption, of course... but there had to be more to it than its reputation, or lack thereof.
"It's not funny," he snapped, unable to keep gritting his teeth with nothing to say the entire time Zia had her little giggle fit. It made him sick to his stomach. "Don't joke about things like that." Not when there wasn't a way to save her... not any more. Not that he could see... "It won't matter if there's an energy flare if Ares already knows my identity. Please, go ahead and power up. It's only a matter of time before she comes and kills us all, anyway! It's not like anyone is trying to negotiate some kind of truce! This war is going to see us all killed and you're going to be the one to live through it and watch everyone die, not aging, because you have that damn cat taking over your life. How much longer will you have control, anyway? Or will you just let her do away with you and have her go back to Ares's side when everyone else is gone?"
Chris stopped himself then and lowered his eyes to he floor, unable to look at either Zia or Paris. It broke his heart not knowing what to do to help her, especially when she didn't act like she wanted, or needed, help. If she was going to be so flippant about everything, pretend not to care (or really not care), then what was the point of being cautious? Why sugar coat anything? That's why she wanted to warn him, right? To prepare him for the likelihood of being killed in the middle of the night? Seems legit.
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Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 7:22 pm
“Um, yeah, no giant energy flares in my apartment, please. Jesus, Chris, don’t go encouraging her. What the hell. You’re supposed to be the calm, rational half of our freak show.”
Between freaking out over Ares and being inundated with information and meeting Chris’s elusive best friend in a span of ten minutes, Paris was having a hard enough time keeping it together without Chris completely losing it, too. If he had any less dignity he would have let himself fall apart whether they had company or not, because this was too much and he couldn’t deal with this right now. This was one of the big reasons he tried so hard to keep both parts of his life separate—to protect himself and others from the danger of being found out, and to keep what he had left of his life as normal as it was possible for it to be, otherwise he was sure his sanity would suffer for it.
Rather than standing there feeling awkward any longer, or trying to process any more than he already had, or stressing about what Zia thought of him, Paris turned his attention to Chris’s little meltdown, leaving his own bottle of cider on the counter bar to slip both hands under Chris’s shirt for the contact with bare skin that usually managed to pull Chris out of his random hissy fits quickly enough.
“God, you’re both so mean to each other,” he observed, somewhat startled by Chris’s ranting even as he remembered Zirconia’s personal dig at Valhalla during the last senshi meeting. (And this sure explained how she’d even known all that about him.) At the same time, Paris conveniently forgot (or ignored) the fact that he was entirely capable of saying some pretty mean things to his best friend, too, and vice-versa—probably the consequence of actually being someone’s best friend; they could say mean things to each other and it was somehow okay.
“It’s late,” he pointed out. “She’s hurt. You’re stressed out. She’s stressed out. I’m stressed out. We’re all tired. Ares is insane and the world is ******** up, but if we could maybe not start sniping at one another,” (Ironic, he supposed, coming from him.) “… that’d be really great. Let’s cut this lover’s quarrel off before it starts, yeah?”
He did, however, lean in for a quick snuggle, since that seemed like an appropriate thing to do without going overboard with the PDA Chris didn’t always like.
“You’ve known each other ten years and you’ve never slept together?” Paris suddenly asked, because it seemed easier and less emotionally draining to poke some light-hearted fun than to keep fighting for seriousness.
He pulled away from Chris quickly, returning to his cider for another long drink. “This’s all Chris’ll let me keep in the apartment,” he said with a wave of the bottle. “I’ve got some Xanax, though. It’s about as good. Better, actually. But if I gave you some you seriously could not up and leave until it wears off, ‘cause I’d rather not be responsible for you getting lost and stumbling into a ditch somewhere and maybe breaking your neck. Chris would kill me, and Momma Gallo would cry, and it would all just be really messy.”
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Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2012 8:30 pm
Zia's laughing demeanor came to an abrupt end when Chris ranted. She could brush off most of it, but not all of it. The accusations of not being in control, watching everyone else die, the implication that she'd ever end up back at Ares' right hand, were all stabs that genuinely bothered her.
And it pissed her off.
Her eyes narrowed slightly and she looked like she was liable to start spitting venom any second, but she stayed quiet, and then Paris tried to mediate, and she didn't even bother. She took the route of glancing in another direction to avoid the temptation, but there was a snort and the hint of an unhappy smirk when Paris made his comment about them being mean to each other.
And there was that awkward question and she suddenly snapped to attention again, and after a quick second of 'what the ********' burst out into laughter again.
"No. No, no God no," She flopped back in her chair, kicking off her shoes in the process, and then rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. "Yeah, no. If I was going to get in a Gallo man's pants, I'd go for Michael." It wasn't like there had never been a time when she hadn't thought of Chris in some way where she probably would've slept with him. It was just that was a tiny window among many, many other things Chris had been to her over the last decade, and it had opened and closed with no acting on. Plus, Michael Gallo may have been the subject of the occasional sixteen year old girl fantasy.
"Of course right now I owe him a beer and a punch in the face," She added, suddenly reminded, and mental notes were made for the future.
She scrunched her nose at the offer of Xanax. And then tilted her head in consideration. "Eh, fine, come at me, bro." It wasn't on her list of go-tos for chemical relief, but she'd try it, since Chris' apartment was as boring as expected in this department.
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Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:41 am
He would have continued to be pissy had Paris not stuck his hands under his shirt, to which he responded with a “********, your hands are cold,” although he made no movement to push him away. It certainly was distracting, but it also wasn’t like he could help the pent up anger towards the whole situation.
Of course, he wasn’t entirely sure if Zia knew his anger wasn’t towards her, but at the events they could not control. They were just a handful of kids on which the universe decided to play a sick, cosmic joke.
“W-what??” he sputtered as Zia laughed, thrown off by Paris’s question, pink rushing to his cheeks. “N-no, of course not! She’s my best friend! Like a sister! I mean, obviously I wouldn’t have minded, but while I was crushing in her, she was ogling my brother!” he rambled, clearly uncomfortable by the conversation, especially when he was usually rather good with keeping his private life, well... private. But with Zia there, the queen of spilling secrets in the most awkward way possible, he figured it might be better coming from his side, too. Just so there weren’t any awkward, unexplained details left lying around.
His nose wrinkled in disapproval as the topic switched once again. “I don’t think that’s a good idea... and drinking isn’t either. You’re not even legal, Paris,” he fussed, as though Zia cared that they were underage and drinking. Well, Paris did... he didn’t. He was allowed to hold his goody two-shoes status for as long as he wanted.
"I'll... get the couch ready," he grumbled and moved away from the counter, leaving Paris with a light touch at his elbow to let him know he was no longer grumpy, and stopping as he reached where Zia stood.
He stared at her for a few moments and took a small, steadying breath. "I'm sorry..." And he was. Despite meaning everything he'd said, he realized he was taking his agression out on the wrong person. He should be pissed at Ares, but instead he was directing his anger at Zia.
"This isn't your fault... and thank you for the warning. I'll keep on the lookout for anything suspicious... You'll be the first to know if Ares shows up," he said with an ironic grin as he reached up to pick bits of debris from her hair, probably from the earlier scuffle she had. He wanted to hug her, as if that would make things any better, but resisted the compulsion. A lot of things had changed between them, and the last time he'd hugged her, well... she went off with some douche in a convertible.
"Things will get better," he promised as he stepped around her to push the coffee table out of the way, throw the couch pillows to the side, and hoist the bed out from the frame.
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