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 Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2021 6:49 pm
"Vending machines don't care who they get money from." Faustite sneered at the deriding comment; he crossed his arms and started to pace off the building heat. Smoky thing wasn't audacious, but practical.
Then his eyes rolled with the weight of Sassrumnir's comments. "Of course I exploit everyone. I'm an Agent." It was the burden with which they were charged — drain the world of its energy lest they be drained dry themselves. Why wouldn't he delegate that unsavory fate to someone else, particularly someone he never met before? Did the Knight with his lightning air think Faustite so guileless and insipid? What sort of impression was he giving to his allies, then?
Another pair of unsuppressed coughs did nothing to counter the Knight's argument, though Faustite felt a margin better. He hoped he was nearly done with his poisoning from Jovian bilge water.
Those coughs peppered their way through the Knight's next cautions, to which Faustite said nothing. The flameborne General slowed his pace, his eyes ever on Sessrumnir, even as the rest of him shifted with an inescapable need to move. Active as the flame bound to him. Active as the thundercrack Knight's threats. Active as his hormones when an atrociously hot Knight threatened him with lethal force while standing so tantalizingly close
He waited, and though it felt like an eternity had passed with the Knight's tirade, his opportunity to speak arose. He pounced with a decision already made before Sessrumnir finished his question.
"Onion rings. And save the threats; they weaken your argument." Faustite's hands dropped to his sides, though a thumb always found one of his belt loops. "Assuming you want me to purify."
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Posted: Mon May 03, 2021 6:17 pm
For a kid who didn’t want to be called a child, this half-youma teenager really knew how to behave like, well, all of the above.
“Not all agents are smart enough to exploit others,” he countered. He supposed this kid did well for himself to become a General, in terms of Negaverse standards. It must mean that he wasn’t as mindless as some of the others. But he was just as frustrating.
“I don’t care if you purify,” Sessrumnir grunted in response, reaching down to take hold of the fang hanging from his belt just in case this kid decided to do something shady. “I can’t just want you to purify. I’m playing devil’s advocate here. If you don’t want to have a furnace in your gut and maybe have a chance at a normal life, then there’s options other than the Negaverse.”
And if he didn’t purify, well, it was easier to kill “enemies” than “allies”.
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Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 9:26 am
Sessrumnir received little more than a glower when he departed in acquiescence, and it left Faustite to pace and think and pace and think and pace and think and pace and think and pace and think
and the more he paced
the more he thought he realized
that there were no other options. His life was a smoldering wreck for years, now. He couldn't remember his last moment of naked happiness — only a long, ongoing weariness that laid over everything like a tacky veneer. He thought he must've been happy as Elex, back when he could smile and date boys, but it was too long ago to remember with any credence. Happiness wasn't for everyone.
When Sessrumnir returned, a vague oval shape was swept over the floor. Born of the many cinders that fell from the pacing General and died with nothing to light, it was evidence of their conversation's perplexities. Faustite slowed when he took notice of the fulgurite Knight, and his hand found his hip again as he continued to walk.
"The only 'option' I heard about was purification. Worked for a couple of youmafied officers. But most officers, youmafication adds to them. Wings or more arms or horns," he added, piking his fingers out near his forehead. "But it took away from me. And I can't say if purification would give back.
"Not much of a life if I purify and die in seconds because I don't have a liver and kidneys, is it." He stared at Sessrumnir, daring him to have considered that angle.
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Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 7:30 am
Sessrumnir placed the bag of obtained food on the pointless decorative ledge along the side of the brick building, giving both himself and the General enough room to avoid each other. He left the bag of onion rings and burgers to be retrieved whenever the General was ready for it, and made to settle himself against the wall opposite.
“No, that wouldn’t be much of a life,” Sessrumnir agreed, crossing his arms over his chest as he observed. He’d noted the ash on the ground and was really somewhat surprised the General even waited. Part of him expected to come back to find the teenager gone.
“How old are you, anyway?” he figured he’d asked since he wasn’t being given a name. He would have to check with others later to see if they ever ran into a General on fire before. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked before he realized how condescending it sounded. As a high school teacher of course his thoughts were geared towards not just making sure students got an education, but it was several hours of the day they could be protected from the rest of their life.
“I guess the youma part of you wouldn’t make admission easy,” he countered himself. Still, this General seemed both immature and far too experienced at the same time. Someone had to teach him enough that he was useful to not be Negaverse fodder. At least to make it as a General.
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Posted: Thu May 13, 2021 2:23 pm
Like a starved crow, he watched Sessrumnir expectantly until the Knight backed away from the onion rings and left Faustite to his demand. Then he stepped in, gathered a fat handful of delicious crispy rings, and stepped back far enough that he could keep an eye on the Knight while he consumed a disgusting amount of calories.
Though he hadn't tried anything sudden, Faustite found him easy to look at. His questions sucked, though.
"20," he answered around an onion ring. He supposed there was a question behind that question, too. "Was youmafied at 15. Guess it changed how I aged." The way he understood it, once someone became an adult, there were no more shoulds. No more friends and family and teachers standing over their shoulders, directing them here or there. Though, in some ways, he missed it.
"Hard to sit in on school when you're a fire hazard, anyway." He bit through another onion ring and tried to swallow it before it burned. Success tasted… overcooked.
Leaning against the short wall at roof's edge, he cocked his head in question. "What makes you think a human life is worth living?"
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Posted: Fri May 14, 2021 6:40 pm
What did he think made a human life worth living? What did he think about living at all? He was still around, despite… opportunities. He fought to stay alive, even with everything he’d gone through, and was going through. He still had his family. He wanted to be around for Peter after being absent from the early years of his life while he was in the military. He wanted to be around for Chris, in case he did something stupid and needed help. His parents were motivation, even if he avoided their calls and didn’t visit unless threatened with tears.
Sessrumnir shrugged. He never claimed to be a motivational speaker, nor did he want to make an attempt at being one. And he definitely wasn’t going to tell a Negaverse General that he had a family he wanted to live for. There was a prickly feeling that this General didn’t really have a family to fall back on.
So much for the Negaverse being a support system and whatever bullshit people tried to make up about it.
“They’ve got virtual school. Homeschool. It’s not impossible, it’s just a matter of motivation. What kind of magical organization can turn people into monsters, no offense, and not know how to turn them back? Seems like a flaw in the system. But what do you get out of killing and stealing energy and whatever else you do?”
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Posted: Sat May 15, 2021 4:05 am
A shrug. That's what made a human life worth living. Family? Shrug. Friends? Shrug. A career? Shrug. Worldly possessions? Shrug. Good ******** tea? Shrug.
Faustite's lip twitched. He ate another onion ring to distract himself.
Virtual school, he said. Like Faustite hadn't gotten his diploma that way, but Sessrumnir might track his sham of an identity that way. Another onion ring was dispatched.
"I've watched the patterns. Everyone in the Negaverse becomes youma eventually — it's evinced in everything we do. Why would they want to reverse a natural process? No soldier is so individually valuable that they can't be replaced with another, for as long as they need human hands to carry their burdens." He couldn't decide how he felt about that, so he paced, and continued to pace until he ran out of onion rings, then returned for a burger, then continued pacing.
Everyone becomes youma eventually. It was his only lasting hope for a Negaverse he could coexist with, where he wasn't antagonized or belittled at every meeting, where he wasn't one General's footstool. Youma were better company than humans. And after setting fire to his dreams, well — this talk was more exacerbating than anything.
But what was there to go back to? More endless, monotonous tasks? Feeding a war machine that will eat him in the end? Better to slack off and see this conversation finish.
"What do I get out of it? Revenge. People made me this way, and people get what's coming to them. In exchange, I get to survive a little longer."
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Posted: Sat May 15, 2021 6:30 pm
“Revenge against whom?” Sessrumnir frowned, because the irritable, fiery General’s pacing was starting to agitate him for reasons he couldn’t explain. Maybe because cinders fell as he walked? Maybe because he was standing there, listening to a General frozen as a teenager talk about how the Negaverse all led to youmafication or death or both.
No matter what this General said, the concept of the Negaverse was more and more dismal. How anyone could tolerate it, he didn’t know. Unless the power was really that addictive. He suspected there might be more to it than just a bunch of naive fools being lured into having to fight for… what? Revenge and survival apparently.
“The Negaverse made you that way. Why go after civilians? Why go after anyone else? How could fighting those who did you no harm be satisfying revenge?”
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Posted: Sun May 16, 2021 2:20 am
Oh.
Oh.
Faustite strode to the parapet, crouched, rewrapped the burger in a now-singed overwrap, and set it reverently on the edge. He gave it a few steps' worth of space, hesitated, added a couple more for good measure.
Then he turned, rage trembling in his hands and burning in his core, on this thundercrack Knight. "You think this is just the Negaverse's fault?" He asked, hands laid over he metal grate where his waist used to be. "You think this is just the fault of the General who <******** me over and turned me into a social experiment? You think this is just because of my second General, who forced me to eat Mau vomit on pain of death because I refused a starseed? Oh, blame spreads like a ******** wildfire for this."
He paced faster, and the frenetic cinders streaming off of him grew more plentiful. "The Mirror Court compromised my identity, threw my life away and did nothing about it. The Prince protects the perpetrator, because Court cohesion matters more than doing what's right.
"And the Knighthood? Always sneering down at me because humanity is all that matters. Telling me to purify because humanity is all that matters. So full of people who are guilty of hunting me down like a dog because I'm less human than them. The main reason I had to eat Mau vomit was courtesy of your kind — some Earth Knight who saw me as filth because my eyes were black."
It was all he could do, he told himself. It was all he could do.
"And senshi — more of the same. Bleeding hearts pleading for me to purify or diehards wanting my skull for a trophy. Chase me down, break my wrists, tell me I'm dead next time I drain. Act like draining is a choice. Like being part youma is a choice and not something handed to me — something I was tricked into by a General who wanted to invent a better ******** war machine."
It was all he could do to pace. Closer and closer to this Knight, it was all he could do to pace.
"What's the common denominator? People. Give them power and they show you how s**t they are."
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Posted: Mon May 17, 2021 8:19 am
Generally speaking, Sessrumnir was not impressed by the show of rage. He supposed the General wanted him to look remorseful or scared perhaps, but after the violence and death Sessrumnir had witnessed over the years, this melted down to a teenage temper tantrum. Which he was used to as well.
He was strangely irritated by the fire child’s retelling of his life, if only because it was proof that Chaos was still a common denominator in the terrorizing of so many, and not the General himself. Sessrumnir knew the chance of him telling the truth was about the same as him lying, although it seemed specific enough that there was at least some truth involved. Or he was very good at luring concerned souls into traps.
“What you’ve gone through was obviously cruel and unfair,” Sessrumnir said once it seemed as though the embers had burnt out some. “But I’m not my kind.”
There were very, very few other Knights and Senshi that he could even claim were his allies, those he agreed with, those he would fight alongside. Many were cruel, just as he was sure the Negaverse had some decent people pulled into their ranks.
Until the Chaos overtook them and they might as well be turned into monsters.
“Why is draining not a choice? Why not use your own energy? Why not devise a way to, I don’t know, not terrorize the city? You’re part youma, aren’t you? Do youma not have energy? Do you not have endless access to youma that you can take their energy instead of civilians??”
He could understand the ire, but as the General drew closer, Sessrumnir casually took hold of the charm attached to his belt just in case.
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Posted: Mon May 17, 2021 7:00 pm
"Fine," he spat with cinder, "I'm not mine, either."
The Negaverse was fractious, caustic, and seldom better than the enemy it so loved to demonize. In a world that wasn't worth saving, that didn't matter to Faustite; he only wanted the assurances that Metallia steadfastly provided. He wanted the implications dripping from every fingertip touch. Scathing, then, that he had to weather so many trash humans to reach them.
The gall of his questions, however. Faustite covered his face so hard that the slap of his hands against skin was audible. "Do you hear yourself? If we could drain an infinite resource like youma, do you think we would go jeopardize ourselves and our operations by draining people? There would be no reason to drain people, unless some ******** agent decided he wanted to be edgy and completely bad at his job simultaneously…"
Slowly his hands slid down his face, then cupped around his neck. He looked at the nothing beyond their building, and he wondered how much of this was proprietary information, and he wondered if he cared if it was, and he wondered if it mattered that he shared it, and he wondered if it affected anything at all.
"Metallia needs energy. Youma need energy. They're not autotrophs. The debt's there, and we pay it in exchange for power. I'd never have enough energy to pay it on my own.
"City deserves all the terror it gets."
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Posted: Tue May 18, 2021 7:45 am
“I don’t ******** know what the Negaverse works,” Sessrumnir growled back, a warning. “For all I know, the Negaverse drains and steals from people because everyone is so consumed by Chaos that you didn’t even think to use other sources. I haven’t run into a lot of agents who are capable of thought.”
Moreso now than before, it seemed. There were a few that seemed intelligent, but the others were just those who would apparently end up as youma.
“From what I understand of youma, which is very little, they’ve been around for hundreds of years without being aided by the Negaverse. So they don’t need the energy. I assume it just makes them more powerful. Metallia needs energy? What, as in the life force humans? And you have an organization that preys on anyone they can? Aren’t you at all concerned that friends or family will end up victims to your own little cult?”
He’d experienced first hand what it was like to see someone he cared about almost die because of the Negaverse, despite any understanding of involvement in the war.
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Posted: Fri May 21, 2021 6:08 am
"No," he returned with a slight warble. No reason now to worry about friends or family.
"Can't say anything about the older youma. Doubt anyone knows. They're all — hibernating." Or it seemed; Faustite had spotted them in the great distance during his time in the Rift, and some looked inert for so long that they slowly became a part of the landscape. Who could say how these youma survived? Who could say what they needed? They would sleep, Faustite guessed, and sleep and sleep and sleep, until Metallia felt the need to rouse them.
Or until Metallia had enough energy to rouse them. In truth, he knew little about what the dark epitome of the Negaverse needed. Perhaps only Laurelite was privy to that information. But, knowing their energy and starseed stores, it didn't take much to extrapolate.
Faustite returned to his ill-gotten burger, took to it while he considered how to deal with Sessrumnnir's probing inquiries. He wasn't sure how to deal with Sessrumnir himself.
'Have you considered purifying' turned into a damning analysis of the Negaverse. Faustite knew the Negaverse was an abysmal organization, but there was nothing better. There had never been anything better, he thought, as he chewed through half the burger.
"Energy has to come from people, yes. Better others than our own, else we cannibalize our forces. Basic strat," he added as he wiped away a spot of ketchup from the corner of his mouth. "I know your moral argument. I know you probably have, or had, people who could be or were affected by the Negaverse's draining practices. It's simple probability.
"But I can't leave. And if I do, life will just get worse."
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Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2021 7:37 pm
Hibernating youma was concerning, and something he would have to mention to Ganymede at some point. He wasn’t sure what her magic could do about it, but if they got ahead of things, they might be able to prevent something horrible from happening to the city. Or the world itself.
“Forces for what? Taking over the world? I can’t let you or anyone else in the Negaverse continue to steal energy from people,” Sessrumnir warned, even though he made no movement towards the young looking General. “Yes, I have had people affected by the Negaverse’s draining practices. If you decide to stay in the Negaverse, that’s your business. But I’m going to protect the people of this city however I can.”
If that meant this was the only armistice they had, then so be it. He played nice, but it was clear that this boy wasn’t going to stop hurting others.
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Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2021 4:57 am
So much for an alternative. He was had; this parley was a ruse for information, and he fell for it because — what? He thought he could deserve to be human again? No, that wasn't quite it. Humanity wasn't part of his concerns anymore.
Purification was always preached to him as more than becoming human, or being free of chaos. It was being trusted, having friends, having people he could rely on. Being able to touch people without burning them alive. Having something to laugh about. Going back to school. Looking at people as possibilities instead of resources. They were no longer having that conversation — rather than alternatives, Sessrumnir gave threats, and Faustite didn't know where he went wrong.
Yes, he had to drain. That wasn't optional in the Negaverse, regardless of what the Knight thought. Was that where he went wrong?
Yes, they were a military bent on goals that weren't well publicized to their ranks, and he supported that army. That army would not drain itself to feed Metallia energy she already had. Was that where he went wrong?
Faustite swallowed to keep his throat open. Purification was nothing but a gamble, he told himself. Sessrumnir never mentioned the word. Even if he had, even if he said we can purge the chaos from you right now, even if Faustite accepted, even if he survived it and had every organ he needed to live the rest of his life, he had no guarantees but one: he would lose his only friend. Then he would have nothing. The firespoke General forced himself to exhale, but tears fell anyway.
"It's Chrysocolla," he mumbled, as his nails dug into his palm. "And if you're so ******** concerned about people," he began to snarl, "then kill me next time!" He ducked into an abrupt turn and started for the opposite edge of the building.
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