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 Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:13 am
"I do not care," said Melanite with careful enunciation. "You may move. Stop when you're in a comfortable position." He shifted his stance, crouching down to add a second sheet to an evidently-growing pile.
The information about the young senshi served only to disgust Melanite further with the opposite side. "These cats are then incapable of exercising the smallest amount of self-restraint, then," he said, as he straightened and started toning his paper a light gray. "Then your side of the conflict is innately morally corrupt. If children have always been your kind's tools of war, then I really do wish to know how it is my kind became so utterly reviled by yours. At least we allow the children to have their childhood." The bitterness in his voice made it all too clear to Melanite what he was broadcasting: how deeply he resented his own loss of childhood, over twelve years ago. It was easy to transpose his own hurt onto these young senshi. Easy to believe they might agree with him. After all, they weren't warriors. They were just children.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:13 am
Babylon changed positions, hitching his thumbs into his belt under his coat. “Is this okay?” he asked, biting his tongue against replying to quickly to Melanite’s criticism. Propaganda was strong, and it honestly didn’t seem productive to sit here and argue it. Melanite would not listen to criticism from a member of a side he’d deemed morally bankrupt - all Babylon could hope for was repeated meetings and a chance to work him down.
And besides, it sounded like there was something deeper going on.
“So, I’m curious,” he said, holding still and resting his weight on his heels. “How do you think this war started, if you can’t fathom how your side came to be so despised by mine?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:13 am
Melanite nodded shortly, and turned his attention away from Babylon’s face for a moment to check the tone of his paper. Once satisfied, he picked up the eraser and started in on this drawing. Only then did he turn his attention to Babylon’s question.
“I do not know,” he said. “Nor do I care. It is irrelevant to the greater moral standing of the situation, Babylon Knight. Does it matter if my side once ate the children of the sailor soldiers, or whatever crime I am sure you feel my side committed? We no longer do. You, however, still throw primary school children into battle, and say tradition. As if tradition is simply… a monolith, incapable of transformation, never to be thrown aside.” The smile that ghosted over his face was small and wicked and sharp, the very essence of l’esprit d’escalier--but the biting comment came to him in the then and now, as it often did.
He cocked his head to the side, erased a chunk of gray to highlight the edge of Babylon’s pauldron in slightly stained white. “I wonder what other traditions you uphold,” he said, tone light, floaty, polite. “Do you stone adulterers? Perhaps you sacrifice cats to pagan gods to earn their favor? Do you support the child soldiers of Sudan, because that is how things have always been done? What is your opinion on sodomites?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
Babylon bit his tongue and bit it hard. It was clear enough that Melanite was trying to get a rise out of him, even though he couldn’t tell what good that would serve. Was there a point in provoking someone who outranked you by two orders of magnitude? What was more alarming was that Melanite simply didn’t seem to care about anything - at least most of the Negaverse held conviction, some kind of misguided belief that Chaos would make them whole or whatever.
He couldn’t quite articulate what was so alarming about Melanite’s lack of ******** to give. Perhaps it was that he still committed the same atrocities as the rest of the Negaverse without even caring to understand why. There was no conscious thought there, only some bullshit about moral higher ground…
He was not a senshi, however, and it was not his place to defend the actions of guardian cats who could, in fact, simply not. Plenty of Senshi had awoken in their teens as opposed to as kids.
Perhaps, he decided, loosening his clench on his tongue, just this once it was best to let Melanite have the last word.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
Apparently the knight had no answers for him. That was well enough. Melanite finished his drawing, and set the pad aside. “You can take a break to stretch, if you like,” said Melanite, stretching out his hand. (Like his long-disappeared cousin, he was left handed. Once it had been a topic of bonding between the two of them. Now it was just what it was, an interesting fact and not a subject on which to build a friendship at all.)
“I had a cousin who lived here,” he said, into the silence, as he dug the fixative out of his art box. He crouched over his sheets of paper and sprayed them carefully, locking the charcoal where he’d left it. (The most recent drawing was a portrait, close up on Babylon Knight’s face--the glowing lines were delineated most carefully, his features mostly a staccato blur.) “Tanyushka, we called her. She disappeared.” And some small part of him felt sure that the Negaverse had had no part in it. Either way, she was gone: and he didn’t care, either way. There was no point in being attached to a memory.
He surveyed his work--not bad for twenty minutes, though the early drawings lacked delicacy. They always did. “Since you want to tell me how this started so badly, why don’t you,” he asked. “It would pass the time.”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
Babylon stretched his legs, striding carefully over to where the Melanite crouched over the sheets of paper. “Do you mind if I look?” Since the answer was yes, he crouched beside the general and studied the pictures. The rendering was balanced carefully between rough and refined, the lines on Babylon’s face standing starkly out from everything out.
But in short, it was beautiful. “That’s way more flattering than any photograph’s ever been,” said Babylon, straightening back up. The comment about his cousin didn’t set off any particular alarm bells - people went missing in Destiny City every day. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, taking a few steps back. “It’s likely she was eaten by a Youma. Or turned into one. Or had her starseed harvested. The Negaverse did that more often a few years ago, but it still happens.”
As if he was going to let Melanite forget who he thought the bad guys were.
He didn’t miss the flippancy in Melanite’s request, but it was an opening that he doubted he’d get again. Babylon had been doing his best to hold back on so-called propaganda, but if he could set the story straight to the lieutenant before anyone else got in his ear then that would be a win. “So like a thousand years ago, there’s this interstellar civilization called the Silver Millenium. Practically every planet, moon, and asteroid in the universe is inhabited and s**t’s good. Every planet asteroid moon whatever has a senshi to protect it, and the senshi are served by knights, and they all get their power from a galactic force called Order. It’s basically the light side of the force, if you know Star Wars at all. Are you following?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
“Photography is a poor man’s painting,” said Melanite stiffly, propping up his drawing board on his thighs. “Of course it’s more flattering. Photographs are inherently inferior, because they can’t capture the real look of things…” He trailed off and started toning paper, because--if Tanyushka was dead, at the hands of the negaverse, that was terrible. But it was sometimes how life went, sometimes bad things happened and you couldn’t change anything, and that was just how things were meant to go--
He wasn’t following Babylon very well at all. “A millennium is a thousand years,” said Melanite, flatly. “I do not know what the force is. How is this relevant to the start of this war?” Not that he was impatient. He wasn’t, not really, but he figured it would be important later to know exactly where this bit of information would fit into Babylon Knight’s story.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
Babylon shook his head slightly. “No, it doesn’t matter if you know or not. It’s just a bit of a pop-culture comparison. It makes it easier but it’s not essential.” Maybe it would just be more confusing to someone completely ignorant of basic concepts like Order and Chaos. (Of course, Melanite’s ignorance begged the question: who had trained him?)
“So there’s this underlying energy in the universe,” he explained. “Call it magic or whatever, it’s just inherent. And it’s got opposing sides, like electricity has positive and negative charges, and those sides are supposed to be in balance. The side I serve is called Order. Yours is Chaos, but I assume you already know that.” Although he wasn’t confident that he was right in assuming.
“Anyway,” said Babylon, doing his best to hold still in case Melanite had begun to draw again. “That’s all background information. Living things are naturally neutral, except for Knights and Senshi, who naturally serve Order. It’s not natural for living things to serve Chaos. Following?” Whether Melanite was or not, he continued. “So, a thousand years ago, Earth’s closest ally is the Moon Kingdom. The Princess of the Moon and the Prince of Earth are googly-eyes head-over-heels in love with each other. And there’s this sorceress on Earth, Beryl. She loves the Prince of Earth, too, even though he’s only got eyes for Serenity, the Moon princess. So Beryl goes off and throws a fit and makes a deal with Chaos and gets a bunch of other knights corrupted and starts a war that basically wipes out every single ******** planet besides Earth and now here we are, a thousand years later, squabbling over her sloppy seconds because the universe is out of whack and Chaos has conquered pretty much everything? Is any of this ringing any bells for you?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:14 am
Well, the name of this ancient space city-state had gone unclarified. Melanite frowned, but listened attentively (mostly) to Babylon Knight’s speech. It seemed like nonsense to him, personally, but if this was what amused Babylon Knight, then Melanite would live through it. Presumably. It made for a good story, anyway, and Melanite was always a fan of a good story. “That seems nonsensical,” he commented, blocking out Babylon’s shapes with a darker pastel black. “Your side seems far more chaotic and disorganized than mine.”
Of course… Melanite, uh… didn’t really care.
“None of it,” he said. “I suppose my superiors did not think it relevant.” He shrugged, which pretty much encompassed his feelings on the subject entirely.
The whole story seemed… fake. “If the sides are always meant to be balanced,” he asked skeptically, “Then how is it not natural for living things to serve Chaos? It seems, if senshi and knights are intrinsically meant to serve Order, then purpose-made Chaos servitors would be a natural thing as well.” Otherwise it didn’t make sense. Where did the Chaos come from? Melanite leaned away from his board for a moment and then turned it upside down to correct a line width. He should’ve brought a mirror, but, well. So it goes.
“I did know Chaos rules most of this world,” he said. “I have never had reason to care about senshi or knights, though. I still do not, as far as I am concerned.”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:15 am
Well, he wasn’t going to push the issue. Babylon gave Melanite a blank look. It didn’t make sense to him that someone could encounter a world far beyond human imagination (well, not so far beyond, given his own order’s similarity to the Jedi. Wait. Actually…) and simply not want to question it. “Chaos comes into the world from other places,” he said, but Melanite’s disinterest had effectively killed his interest in talking about the subject. There was no point in exhausting himself explaining all this to someone who didn’t give a s**t, and his throat was getting kind of scratchy, anyway.
He fell silent, waiting for Melanite to give him permission to move once more, but felt a growing itch at the small of his back. God, this was turning into torture. “I don’t want to rush perfection,” Babylon joked, “But are you about finished? And do you want to do this again sometime?”
Maybe Melanite needed some time to process things. Or maybe he was just hopeless. He’d leave it up to the lieutenant’s discretion.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:15 am
Melanite didn’t really see any point in answering that. Babylon Knight would believe what he wanted to believe, but--Melanite was Russian. They tended to not fall into any specific religion too quickly, and that was what all this sounded like, strange mysticism. When there was some sort of logic behind it, he’d reconsider his stance, but for now he’d just continue drawing his portraits and not worrying about it. If he wanted to stay as far out of this war as he could, getting involved with its insane mythology wouldn’t be helpful.
“Of course,” he said. “Do you see paints here? I do not do charcoal portraits, Babylon Knight. When are you free again?”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 12:15 am
Well, maybe he could hope for Melanite to have a crisis of faith in the meanwhile. He’d only been in town for a few weeks by the sound of it - perhaps less. Maybe this disorder that reigned in the Destiny City branch would… Babylon wasn’t sure what he was expecting to happen. Melanite wouldn’t leave a failing branch for a doomed resistance, not when it was clear that he only cared for saving his own skin.
The comment about paints made him feel very silly indeed. Finally scratching his back, Babylon said, “Same time, same place, next week? I’ll send you a message if something comes up. I have my ways.”
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