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 Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2015 1:28 am
Before Scholomance even noticed the fist curling in his peripheral vision, he simply felt the volatile energy sloughing off of his friend. He felt it like he felt the way his hairs raised on end, or how his skin prickled just before someone reached to touch him. He felt it like he felt an impending disaster approaching through the pit of his stomach.
And for the first time, he realized that a career in customer service wasn't entirely at odds with these situations. Scholomance remained in a neutral friendly disposition while his friend's rage grew palpable. "Tall, dark, handsome, tattooed, has a little brother." He repeated in checklist order. The words stuck somehow, and he licked his teeth to pick them out one by one. "I remember someone like that. Last I saw, he was still out there looking at tonic waters. I imagine he's stepped up to the counter to pay by now, or he's walking out the door empty-handed. Have you checked?" The page gave a nod toward the receiving doors. He knew, then, that drawing her attention toward the doors was a mistake. Once her gaze left the pair, Kam would bolt toward her and shatter her immediately. Skin like glass would litter the floor.
And, he realized, he could cut his lips on her hand. Even an eyelash could draw blood.
He knew not whether he would ask the question too late, but he felt the need to try. He licked his lips, dry as they were, and drew in the breath to ask. For a second, the words clung to his tongue. He wrenched them out regardless. "What happened to you?" The question sounded too personal for their circumstances - a worried friend to a victim, or a boyfriend to his beleaguered lover. The question exhibited a residue of care that he saved, scraped and cobbled together from years of misspent words, withheld words from his last lover.
And it felt, he realized, so fatally out of place. Like he may have issued his entire life's story to a creature that he didn't fully understand. Like she knew him as Isaiah Zähne now, the partier, the college graduate, the pen collector, the neurotic follower of Ana.
But then, he realized, it was all in his head.
And he wasted too much time.
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2015 5:39 pm
The paler one was good at distraction, she noted - or at least he would have been if there hadn't been a tall, dark Mars knight oozing with rage at his side. The sight of them was enough to make her smile, almost enough to pull a laugh from her throat. Hatred and curiosity were like oil and water. "I did actually," she chimed, "all I found was a scared little clerk." Gehenna didn't need to hear the admission to know that the scared little clerk had been sacrificed. He could tell by the way energy pulsed through her skin - it hadn't been so bright when she'd been lounging on the hood of his Jeep. That was one more soul weighing down his conscience, yet another starseed lost under his watch. His teeth grit so hard that his jaw was beginning to ache and even with Isaiah at his side, trying his best to defuse a situation he didn't understand, his anger wouldn't be stopped this time. The balled up fist on his right side shifted and an almost inaudible ' click' and as the world bled to red around him, he let go of his last inhibitions. She only noticed because she saw his foot shift, turning to propel himself forward in a lunge that seemed impractical and almost foolish. But she'd been too preoccupied with the smaller one, too distracted by his banter, and she had no time to dodge. Instead her hands rose to chest level and her voice rang out, echoing off the walls around them. "Ascendant's Barrage!" Everything happened in seconds - a burning ball of light burst to life over her hands and portions of it began pealing away, slamming down at his feet, into his legs, into his torso. Each hit slowed him more and more, giving her better aim, but it didn't quite stop him. The distance between them was closing and it was a hard bet - would he be downed before he reached her, or would she have to drop her attack and back away?
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Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2015 11:54 pm
'All I found was a scared little clerk.' That confirmed the deduction. That scared little clerk that tipped them off to their presence was somewhere in that broken body, trying to mend it together from the inside out. Trying against her will, because it was the only purpose she had left to capitalize on. He wondered, then, how Kam felt about it. He wondered if the taller man felt himself responsible, or if he was able to divest his own responsibility from this woman's life. So many with similar powers as them often intertwined fates needlessly, or so he felt.
But, he found a whole different challenge in accepting the unnerving fact that someone's soul was gone, and he met her only five minutes prior.
But Scholomance had no time to consider it. The click immediately drew his attention to his squire friend, though the man was halfway gone toward the blonde before he could begin to react to it. s**t, he thought, and yet worse news heralded from her fingertips. The creature proved faster than either of them for how she cast her magic - she did so smoothly, effortlessly, effectively.
And yet Kam powered through it. He fought and drove and forced himself to take the brilliant lights that propelled themselves into his body. He looked somewhat slowed from his charge; Scholomance imagined that the impacts must be forceful if they were able to stymie his wrath, but even so, the squire was closing the distance. Soon they would both witness what cobbled her together like sticky glue. Soon they would realize that her skin was simply a broken porcelain disguise used a few too many times. He told himself any lie he could keep about her, if it lessened the impact at the end.
But he needed to act. Scholomance moved to speak, but he realized he had no name for the knight beyond the one that would confirm her suspicions. "Stop!" he tried, but he didn't expect it to work.
He knew that businesses like this stopped carrying guns behind the counter years ago - what was he supposed to do? Thought carried him back to the police call button behind the counter, and he wondered if armed forces could even begin to stop the pair.
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Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:32 pm
There was no reaching the Squire through the rage that blinded him. The pain and light were dimmed behind the magic that numbed his mind as thoroughly as his body until there was only her face as the centerpiece of his focus. It stood out like a beacon in the fire storm that swelled over him and even his concern for Isaiah had been forgotten. There was only the all consuming hatred, the rage, and the need to break everything about her. There was an air of superiority about her as she stood there behind the wall of crashing lights with her eyes narrowed on the bullet train of fury surging toward her. She seemed convinced he would be felled before he reached her, taken down by the crippling pain or injury, whichever crushed him first. Yet there was also a purse of her lips behind the concentration that said that each step he took was in defiance of her expectations, as if she was only guessing at what he was capable of. By the time he closed the distance, it was too late. A guttural roar of triumph rose beneath the sound of crashing missiles as he took the last step out of her range and into his own. The light in her hands fizzled as she lost her focus and in the space between one breath and the next, he'd pulled back his strong arm and slammed it forward - into her torso, and through it. The sound was like a cabinet of china crashing all at once, as plates shattered and pieces fell to the alley floor at their feet. The magic in Gehenna's veins fizzled and he came to the surface of the red sea to find himself with his arm plunged through her stomach. His eyes stared into her own, unsettling and human with only inches between them. A trail of thick, black ooze started at the corner of her lips and dripped down as she opened them. "Well, aren't you unexpected?" There was a flash of fury in him at the sound of her voice, still so amused and taunting despite the energy that he could feel pouring out like a river around him, that he could see rising up in the form of acrid, black smoke. It made him want to wretch as it filled his lungs, clinging to the lobes like a parasite, like nothing living ever could. He couldn't even find the motivation to open his mouth to speak back, lest he ingest more of the filth. That was when she laughed, though it sounded forced. "You might want to help him up." Her eyes shifted from Gehenna, to the Saturn Knight that stood behind him, the helpless prop that had tried in vain to stop it all before he started. There was a crackle as she disappeared and, true to her word, the Mars knight collapsed the moment her body wasn't there to hold him upright.
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Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2015 6:15 pm
The lapse of seconds escaped in him the whirlwind. He thought, briefly, that no time at all had passed between his declaration to stop and his current self, staring, gaping really, much like the hole in the very center of her. Not even a full breadth of a heartbeat transpired before his ire and her assault concluded in a devastating draw. Scholomance had not even the time to consider alternatives. He hadn't even finished lighting his bony, unbroken hand on a cardboard box to push himself forward. He hadn't the time to intervene even mentally.
For those seconds washed away like watercolors.
The sludge wrought by Kam's tactics rendered the girl-creature as a peculiar backdrop - a lurid, alluring, relatable visage for the blackened smoke and detritus that her frail, broken skin concealed. He didn't consider it possible, but she looked more attractive now than she ever did before. No real, tangible emotion crossed her features, but there existed something less put-together about her with a hole in her torso and unlikely blood paving her lower lip. She looked easier to comprehend, then, if he qualified it correctly - like she let her hair down.
And then she was gone. He felt, again, that lapse of seconds in a wave he never noticed, and there was nothing left to taunt his friend or stare with soulless eyes toward Scholomance, The squire's fist hovered in the air for a gap phase and then fell, like the rest of him, toward the unyielding concrete. Scholomance started toward his friend, hesitated to look for some of the black muck left behind by the girl-creature, found nothing, and resumed his forward motion. Her words lingered in his ears, an irreparable stain.
'Well aren't you unexpected?'
He wondered what she meant - if she referred to his sudden assault only, or how he managed to overpower her strange magic, or the defiance in his eyes, or the fact of the act itself, or any number of permutations that Scholomance's working mind could come up with. He found it pointless to think on it now, for Kam needed a visit to the doctor to confirm or deny broken bones, internal bleeding, or some other curious type of damage incurred by that brilliant orb. Slowly, carefully, he wrapped Kam's arm around his own shoulders. He doubted himself, but he managed to haul their combined bodyweight upright.
It would be a long walk from the liquor store, he knew, but those minutes, too, would sink into the waves. He had too much to think about.
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