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 Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:20 am
"Monsters come in all shapes and sizes," Zia said flippantly, and frowned. "She's not suicidal."
Though she seemed to be paying attention to everything except him, her own way of avoiding eye contact. He was pushing her buttons, and it was hard to keep up her usual defense mechanisms.
Hard but not impossible. Since his hands were full and she was barely helping at all, she shifted the place in her hand to on so she could take advantage of his bogged down state to violate his personal space, get close and pat his cheek. "It'll be okay, baby, she'll talk to you when she's ready."
She rolled her eyes and knocked, and opened the door anyway. "She said she was setting up a table, not undressing," She snorted, letting herself in and holding the door.
"Right?"
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Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:44 am
"That they do," Kent said agreeably, and then frowned himself. "I certainly hope she's not." He wasn't convinced though. Tara had done some incredibly stupid, dangerous things, and he wasn't sure if they were just stupid and dangerous, or signs of some further instability that he couldn't recognize.
He'd gotten everything he would get, though. If his hands were free, he would have patted Zia on the shoulder. Instead, he settled for smiling and nodding at her. "I know that. And thank you, for being there to listen when I can't. I hope she returns that favor- let me know if I need to give her a talking to."
As Zia made to open the door, Kent tried to stop her. He never walked in without permission, unless he was afraid for Tara's safety. Loaded down as he was, there wasn't a whole lot he could do to stop it, so he sighed and followed Zia in. He supposed it would do Tara good to have a more forceful friend. Laney and Yvette were wonderful girls, but he suspected they both let Tara get away with more than she should. Hopefully Zia wouldn't do that too.
The room was probably what was expected: navy blue walls with sciency posters on the walls, and glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. The desk was covered with papers and books. There was a collection of shoeboxes next to the desk, and a small telescope by the window. The bed was a double, which was the main reason she didn't fall out of it on a nightly basis, when she woke up in a panic from some nightmare or another. There was a cheap wooden folding table next to the bed, and Tara herself was busy trying to shut the door to her closet. With one final shove, she managed to get it to latch and grinned. Then her face fell. "Damn, I forgot the air mattress again!"
Kent rolled his eyes and set the food and drinks on the table. "You'll figure something out. Or maybe a miracle will happen and you'll actually organize that closet."
"Dream on. Oooh, that looks good." Tara licked her lips as she came to crash on the bed, kicking her legs up in the air. She patted the spot next to her. "C'mon, Zia, we have food to eat and movies to watch!"
"I'll leave you to it," Kent said, one hand on the doorknob as he prepared to leave. "I'll be here if either of you needs anything."
Tara rolled her eyes. "We know, we know. C'mon, it's girl time now, Kent. Out."
"Yes ma'am. Have fun, you two!" With one last wink- at Zia, which Tara found rather odd- Kent left, closing the door behind him. He paused outside of the door, wondering if he should stay to listen. Maybe he would learn something new. But...
"It'll be okay, baby, she'll talk to you when she's ready."
Sighing, Kent let go of the doorknob and went back to the kitchen. He could only hope that Zia was right. If Tara didn't tell him something, he would have to find out, by whatever means necessary. In the meantime, he decided to give her just a little more time. Maybe Zia would help move things along.
Then he thought of what they might really be doing in that room, and almost did a faceplant into the rest of the lasagna. Curiosity aside, there were some things that he just really didn't want to know!
~*~
"Ooookay, that was weird." Tara sat up again and shrugged. Why stress it when there was food to eat and intergalactic mysteries to unravel? "So, where were we, before we were so rudely interrupted? Earth Knights and random Aquarian stone carvings, right?"
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Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 6:17 pm
"Oo, what movies?" Zia squealed, opting to ignore poor Kent and his pitiful dilemma. Once the door was shut she was already digging in to the lasagna on her plate, trying to balance her over eagerness to share with the fact she hadn't eaten since lunch. At that was terrible.
"You're sure they're Aquarian?" She ask, mouth full as she pulled out her tablet instead of her phone for the bigger screen, and then rooted around in her back until she found the knife and set it down on the table.
Silver age design and worn at the hilt, the most interesting factor was the worn, belted leather of it's scabbard, which had a very distinct Jupiter symbol branded into it. "It's really hard when they're all intermingling. They could just keep to themselves and not cross contaminate so much.
"But yeah, Earth has knights. Holy hell they have a lot of them. I've found three, including my brother, and there's another one I haven't talked to yet. That's the most out of anyone. So far I haven't found more than two for the other planets. And Cosmos, that one's confusing, because, I mean, she's not exactly a planet."
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Posted: Sat May 25, 2013 8:31 pm
Tara moved for her plate, but when Zia mentioned the movies she crawled off the bed and pulled a shoebox out of a stack of them on the opposite wall. She removed the lid, tossing it aside, and dumped the contents onto the floor. "Okay, so we have Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Clone Wars- the movies and the series- and, uh, that new Star Trek movie." She shrugged. "Iunno, my dad likes Star Trek better for some nonsensical reason."
Well aware that her selection was not exactly diverse, she motioned to the laptop on the desk. "Or we can stream something. As long as it's not a horror film or a cheesy rom-com, I'm down with whatever you want." Horror movies tended to strike eerie parallels with her real life, and romantic comedies were just stupid.
"I'm pretty sure the ones I gave you are all Aquarian. The majority of the books I've found are written in that language, anyway, and I doubt there would be a surplus of literature from a totally random culture. Right?" Granted, she had no proof that she was right, but her deduction did make sense. "I mean, yeah, it would be nice if they didn't mingle, but not really likely. All languages have loanwords and stuff. But- oh, wait! There were other symbols I gave you too, right? Do you still have the paper?" Maybe Zia hadn't found Aquarian at that wonder- maybe the wonder's language was up at the outpost for some reason.
Knights were still weird to Tara, but she now had a reason to be interested in them. "Earth has a lot, huh? I wonder why. And..." The mention of Cosmos made her shoulders droop. "I'm trying to learn more about Cosmos knights, actually. My... my best friend was just awakened as one." Which was something that Tara still regarded as a personal failure on her part. "Hold up a sec- she? Isn't Cosmos just... you know." She waved her arms around vaguely. "Space?"
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Posted: Tue May 28, 2013 8:11 pm
"We can watch Star War," Zia said flippantly, not sounding like she had especially cared. "I don't think I've ever actually watch it but..."
Freedom make choices in what she ate and what she watched came late to Zia, and by then she had been a little too distracted to care that she had missed out on movies that pop culture was still obsessed with decades later. Her scifi fix had been sated with unrecognizable, pulpy books that she kept stashed under her bed, the Star Wars movies never made it to the docket.
Se had to shut up for a moment because she'd gone and over stuffed her face. "No, she's a senshi, I think. She can purify, or something I dunno," She had been told Castor's story secondhand, and hadn't really cared all that much. Now she was kind of regretting that.
"I wasn't really listening, I told you, I didn't... care that much about your willy little negaverse war. But yeah, she's a person and... stuff."
But a new Cosmos knight to round out her collection had her interest and she half stood up, leaning on the table and grinning at Tara, probably more greedily than she meant to. "Do I get to meet this friend?"
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:48 pm
"Star Wars," Tara corrected automatically, her eyes widening. "You haven't? Oh, we have to fix this immediately."
Without waiting for approval, she popped a disc into her computer, and waited as it loaded. On second thought, Star Wars probably wasn't the best choice for someone who hadn't seen it. Not if they were doing serious talking. Then again, Tara had seen it enough times that she wouldn't be seriously distracted by it. And if Zia didn't pay full attention, they could always watch it again. Problem solved!
The familiar music started up, accompanied by the usual scrolling text. Tara flopped back onto the bed and tried to sort out all of the information. "So Cosmos is a senshi. Is she a princess? I thought the only princesses were Chronos, and the two at the meeting." She would probably have to get their names sometime, not that she expected to ever remember them. "But if she can purify, she's gotta be, right?"
Some of Zia's comments stung, and she pulled away. "It's not my war. It's theirs. They're the aggressors here. I just want to be left alone. I've tried everything, and nothing works. But I will not take ownership of this fight, not when I've done my best to remove myself from it." Which was what the Negaverse wanted too, but she couldn't claim to be a fan of their methods. Dying sucked.
"If you're going to snipe at me for something that's not my fault, I don't know if I want you to meet her." Tara pouted, but she did know that the comment probably wasn't meant in a hurtful way. It wasn't Zia's fault that she had fifty million sensitive areas. "Let me get her used to things first, okay? I don't want her to be totally overwhelmed. I may not have been able to keep her from awakening, but the least I can do is help her not make the same sorts of mistakes I've made over the years."
So many mistakes then. So many that she hadn't learned lessons from yet.
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Posted: Fri Sep 13, 2013 7:37 pm
"Okay!" Zia had no objections or preference for their movie choice, but she was also more interested in solving the mysteries of the universe.
"I suppose. I haven't heard of any non-royal senshi purifying before. But stranger things have happened. Crystals can be stolen. I'd hope your Cosmos isn't a thief, though."
She stopped her flippant rambles when she managed to pick up on the fact she seemed to have offended Tara, and made a little bit of a sympathetic 'mom' face. "Oh, Tara, I didn't mean it like that," She said in a low volume and reached over to lightly touch her shoulder.
"I meant, you know, yours as in this is your universe, and your Earth and your planet. I know it's not your personal war, baby."
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Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2013 1:24 am
Tara did know that Zia hadn’t meant to hurt her with that comment. It didn’t stop her from feeling hurt. Not by the thought that Zia blamed her for the war, but by the possibility that others might. And were they really wrong? Could she have ended this sooner, if she hadn’t tried to hard to run away?
That was not something she felt comfortable thinking about now, or ever, so she tucked it into the overflowing closet in her mind, where she tried to hide all the things she didn’t want to deal with. “Anyway,” she said lightly, “I sure hope Cosmos isn’t a thief. I may not be on speaking terms with most of the Zodiacs, but I’m pretty sure that if Chronos’ crystal went missing again, I’d know about it. And it looked like those princesses at the meeting had theirs, or they wouldn’t be able to be all princessy, right? So either she’s a princess, or there’s some other one we’ve never heard of who’s missing their crystal.”
Neither of those sounded terribly likely. Maybe this was something she needed to look into, for Laney’s sake.
“That’s not the real reason you’re here, though.” Suddenly eager again, Tara leaned in closer and pawed at Zia’s bag. “I want to see what you’ve found! All of it!”
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Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:14 pm
Zia sighed and rested her chin in her hands, propping herself up on the table as she stared Tara down, but decided that she would much rather show off her things than prod at her friend's mental health.
"Oh, yes!" She pushed her plate back and pulled up her bag to her lap. She pulled out a binder first, which contained a few pieces of parchment in protective plastic covers. Which was probably terrible but the best someone who was not well versed in archaeology or preservation could do. It at least stopped the fragile paper from getting crushed in her back.
"I found a girl's bedroom, I think, it looked like. There was a jewelry box and these letters were hidden under a panel. But they're all written in... this." Se tapped at a line of strange characters. "It's on Earth so I'm not sure it's a space language, but it's not anything I've seen before. I assumed it was a cipher. And then I matched it up to this. See, this one matches this one."
She dug around and pulled out the knife with Jupiter markings on it.
"And then there's this. Which is definitely not from Earth. Which makes me wonder how much cultures intersected."
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Posted: Tue Sep 17, 2013 9:02 pm
Finally, the good stuff! Tara could barely sit still as she waited for Zia to bring the things out. First, a binder. Sure, why not? Most of the documents that she'd handled at the Outpost had been books- actually, all of them had- so she hadn't thought about how to deal with loose papers. This seemed as good a way as any.
Reaching under her pillow, she took her now-familiar character notebook and settled it on her lap. It was a strange place for it, but she didn't trust Kent not to look for clues about her in her things, and she didn't want him to stumble onto this. "Let's see what we have here. This was at your brother's outpost, you said? Or whatever knights have instead, I forget." Already she was looking through her notebook for characters that matched the letter. "I guess it's not his bedroom, then." Then again, that wasn't necessarily the case, was it? Gender didn't necessarily translate between lifetimes, she knew.
Then she remembered that this brother didn't even have a past life, lucky b*****d, so she dropped the issue, opting to focus on comparisons. There weren't many. A few that were sort of close, but nothing exact enough that she thought they were matches. Except for one, in the section of her notebook dedicated to incomplete alphabets, which matched the one on the letter and the knife almost perfectly.
Tara looked up, then back at the knife. "Jupiter, huh? I admit, I don't know anyone from there. Well, one of the Zodiacs lived there for a while, but I couldn't ask him even if I wanted to." Because Sagittarius was dead, and this time he wasn't coming back. "Did you find this in the bedroom, or was this from when that jerk kidnapped you to space?" Which was still, as far as she was concerned, an awful thing to do.
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Posted: Sat Sep 21, 2013 8:47 pm
"Wonders," Zia corrected quickly and did a lot of nodding as she leafed through things. "I think it was another Alfheim's. There was a lot of genealogy stuff mapped out there, I'm going to go back and see if I can get pictures. If we get a good basis for translation, it'll be interesting to see what can be traced."
Personal investment was as good a motivator as any.
She gingerly poked at the leather on the knife. "Oh, no, I didn't take any souvenirs during my brief kidnapping. This was in the room. But the letters were in a false panel in the jewelry box, so they might be important. This might've been a gift or an import. Maybe, there are carts and stalls and stuff in the city plaza, I think it may have been a market?"
She fiddled with the signet ring on her finger, "So was this-- in the false bottom-- but it might've just slipped in there."
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Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2013 1:26 am
“Cool,” Tara mumbled, still focused on the papers. She was listening- comparisons didn’t take up all of her attention- but she wasn’t listening all that closely. This was treading dangerously close to being a history lesson, and if there was one thing she hated, it was history lessons. All she wanted to do was read her science books. Unfortunately, it seemed like she was going to have to learn a lot more background before she could access what she was looking for. Assuming she didn’t die of boredom first.
The mention of the ring made her look up again, frowning slightly. “If it was hidden in a secret compartment, it was probably important. Maybe it was a wedding ring or something?” That might explain why it had an ornate band and a blank face. “I mean, the last Alfheim must’ve been married, if you’re one of her descendants, right?”
It was hard to draw conclusions with so little to go on. “Can I come with you next time? I’d like to see this place myself.” If only to see if there was a point to her continuing this line of research. Zia was nice, but if there wasn’t any research at her brother’s wonder, did she really care what they uncovered?
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Posted: Sat Oct 05, 2013 10:42 pm
"Right," Zia said with a nod in regards to the whole 'descendents' thing. Only to realize the significance of one of Past Alfheim and Current Alfheim's arguments.
"A-actually, maybe it's not that simple." Crap. Why was nothing ever simple? "Noah says she's pretty young looking, and I think at one point she said it was likely she was a great aunt but she wasn't entirely sure."
After a little bit of a pause, she just shrugged it off. "Who knows how the cauldron plays it's little game of starseed roulette?"
But when Tara asked if she could come she seemed to spark up some excitement again, at least enough to make her legs kick under her chair. "Yes! Anytime you want, I think I can drag his lazy butt into action on command." She liked showing off her his wonder.
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Posted: Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:04 am
Just when she thought she had this whole knight thing figured out, something else went loopy. Tara sighed and drummed her fingers on her notebook as she tried to process this latest bit of information. "Okay, so yoou're not her direct decendants, in that case. Doesn't mean she wasn't married. And even if she wasn't, the ring probably had some kind of sentimental value to her, or it wouldn't have been in that box." She shrugged. "You could always get your brother to ask her, if you're that curious. I'm sure it's got a story- everything does- but I've got no idea if it's an interesting one."
Interesting, she supposed, was in the eye of the beholder. She could stare at microbe slides for hours, but history just didn't do it for her. Not everyone would feel the same way, which was something she was slowly coming to accept.
"Roulette is a great way of putting it," Tara added, snorting. "Except in this case, when your number comes up, you lose." Or was she the only one who rolled a loser? No, definitely not. She though of Aries, then Eon, and then shook her head. "Yeah, I'd like that! I want to do a little more compilation first, so I have a bigger frame of reference, but sometime soon for sure- watch that plate!"
Her warning almost came too late, as she lunged forward to catch the plate she'd been inadvertently pushing off the table. She managed to get it by the edge, so that only the corn on the cob rolled out. After setting the plate back down, she picked it up, blew on it, and took a bite. "Better eat before it gets cold," she said with her mouth full. "Food first, chat later. Oh look, this is one of my favorite parts!"
Now her attention was on dinner and the movie. Galactic alphabets had waited a thousand years to be cracked. They could wait a little longer.
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