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 Posted: Thu Jan 11, 2024 6:45 pm
Every time he got to hear some of what Kaifeng had been up to, before he made it to Earth, it made Helene feel...warm. His Knight was clever and accomplished, took his duties seriously, worked hard--even if others might not see it because of his lgihthearted attitude, might not understand the dedication that lurked behind that beautiful smile, Helene knew.
And he adored it.
"Mn, it sounds as if Airan's reincarnation is doing well, even if he is Chaos," he said, and it seemed an easy judgement to make. "Still difficult to understand...the very concept of Chaos Senshi. It seems a terrible thing, to be cut off from yourself in that way." Because Chaos could not possibly offer what a free, White Moon starseed could, Helene was fairly certain. "But he is trying to do right, it seems, and that is admirable, especially given his circumstances."
Helene wished that he could say that Airan would be proud of his reincarnation, but it was hard to say. Being a Senshi had weighed so heavily on him--been such a hardship....perhaps not, but Helene did not want to say that. So, best to keep any opinions on the matter to himself, at least in that direction.
When they arrived, Helene bent to look at the lock, and gave a nod. "Yes, I know it. The song it is keyed to--a composition he was working on for quite some time. Impossible for an intruder to guess unless they know his work very well." Which Helene did, or at least he knew this piece. This set of notes. Deftly, he moved the lock into place, and then stepped back from the door.
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Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 1:11 am
As Helene moved the lock, an unseen mechanism played different tinny, music box-sounding notes, accompanied by a faint sound of tumblers clicking. The more that clicked together, the more Kaifeng thought he recognized the tune. Finally, when it seemed that Helene made the last necessary turn, something unwound, playing out the full few bars of the song—and then, the door released, sliding open ever so slightly.
Without straying too far from Helene’s side, Kaifeng pushed the door open and led them inside. Although the room clearly needed some dusting, he found the box from the memory quite easily.……mostly because it was sitting on a desk in the middle of the room, very out in the open and immediately accessible. But hey, if Xingyi wanted to have unwittingly made things that much easier for his future reincarnation, then Liánlí-Kaifeng wasn’t going to complain about it.
Large and silver, the box took up most of the desk’s surface, with inlaid amethysts decorating every surface and pauldrons on either side that Huan-ge and Xingyi had used to carry it, in the memory. Of everything in the room, only the box hadn’t collected any dust, which only made it all the more alluring. What kind of magical Saturning whatsit had been hidden in here? Who’d put it in here? How had it wound up on Murikabushi (or at least Liánlí-Kaifeng assumed that Xingyi’s twin cousins had found it there, but he supposed that he didn’t know for sure)? Why didn’t it have a visible lock?
“Considering none of the other survivor senshi like Huan-ge seem to be with Chaos,” Kaifeng said, thinking aloud as he examined the box and looked for how to open it, “makes sense that the twenty-first Chaos senshi don’t make sense for you.… Wish I knew better how to explain them, but?” Kaifeng shrugged, and glanced away from the box to give Huan-ge a soft, sympathetic look. “I don’t know. They’ve been around for as long as I’ve been a Knight—and well before it, really, since Muri and his friend who looked out for me the one time aren’t the only Chaos senshi I ran into before I powered up. So, as far as I know, they’ve just……always been that way?”
He now had rather a lot of questions about that nice girl he’d run into while she’d been working on her parkour, Guinevere? Before, he’d thought she was just rather stylish and good at what she did, but in retrospect, now realizing that she was a Negaverse senshi…… Liánlí couldn’t recall offhand if he’d felt odd or more tired than usual, after running into her? He had been leaving a Grindr hook-up’s place, that night, so like……sure, she could have drained some energy off of him, but also, maybe she didn’t? Impossible to know for sure, he figured, not least since it had been several months since the incident in question, and Negaverse senshi or no, Guinevere had been perfectly nice to Liánlí, so he didn’t like the thought of condemning her or judging her as guilty with no concrete evidence.
“If the Muri who you used to know wasn’t like that, though……” Kaifeng hummed pensively and brushed his hands down the box’s front corners, “then maybe they weren’t always like that, actually? Maybe there could be hope for them to get away from Chaos, if they wanted……”
That would’ve been nice, Kaifeng thought.
Sure, plenty of Chaos people in town seemed mostly decent—Muri and his friend with the eyepatch, Hybris of Eggplants, Guinevere probably—but Kaifeng knew all too well that plenty of others among their ranks were not decent. The loudmouth Mirror-meimei who didn’t know what words meant kept draining way too many people and acting offended when people didn’t like her doing so. Plenty of others seemed to thrive only when they were hurting people. That Negaverse General who’d stabbed Kaifeng at Augusta Bank and the Captain who’d wailed on him with the club had gotten so genuinely upset that Kaifeng had refused to let them see him sweat, or to give them the satisfaction of cracking just because they’d been pointlessly mean and violent.……
Yes, it was sort of funny, in its way, that they’d let him rattle their nerves so badly when he hadn’t been working as a Knight for very long and had objectively been so much less powerful than they’d been? Yet, it also struck Kaifeng as……sad. Such a stressful way to live, puffing yourself up so much that it only took one determinedly optimistic fool with a folding fan and a smile to pop the balloon of your silk thread-fragile ego……lashing out at everybody and unable to take it when you had any kind of light aimed back on you or any place where you hadn’t perfectly succeeded. Made Kaifeng’s heart ache. Made him glad that the Knighthood life hadn’t found him until he’d been in his twenties and over all his teenage edgelord s**t.
Would’ve been far too easy for Huáng Zhìháo to end up acting just like those Negaverse guys, only without the Chaos.
As that thought occurred to him, Kaifeng finally noticed something that could help him with the matter of the box: a little notch in the front, where he would have expected the lock to be, shaped like an oval and with a raised bit that looked like a Saturn symbol. Bemusedly wrinkling his nose, he lifted his right hand, angled it so his signet ring fit into the notch, then pressed it in.
He felt the Saturn symbol slide back. Heard tumblers click into place. The top released, allowing him to open up the box.
For a brief moment, Kaifeng wondered if he wouldn’t find the skull from somebody’s girlfriend’s severed head.
He didn’t, and internally, he thanked the universe for the kindness. He quickly moved on, however, to appreciating what actually lay inside the box: a scroll, of all things. Humming a pleasant little tune—Through a river made of fire to a street that’s paved in bone, I got a dozen zombie skeletons to walk me to my throne! In the land of the dead! Heck, boy, ain’t it grand? I’m the overlord of the underworld ‘cause I hold horror’s hand~!—he lifted the scroll out of the box and unrolled it.
While Kaifeng couldn’t understand what he was reading—the characters were like nothing he’d ever seen, not even like the characters making up Xingyi’s riddle-poem down in the catacombs below the tower—but he did feel something……an urge telling him to call his weapon to hand. With some focus, he did so……and promptly watched as his bamboo club topped with a folding fan seemed to absorb the scroll.
“……Huh,” Kaifeng said, blinking first at the hand that no longer held a scroll, then down at his weapon. “I don’t think that happens every day, does it, Huan-ge?”Noir Songbird Kaifeng unlocked the enhancement, Forgotten Spell!
Forgotten Spell: Hidden on an ancient scroll, either lost in Negaspace or at their wonder, is a spell forgotten to time. This spell is unlike Senshi magic and once read is automatically absorbed into the wielder’s weapon.
Chill of Lost Souls: Kaifeng swings his weapon at a single target within a 20-foot radius. The target is knocked back by a burst of air, cold as death. When hit by the chill, the target is seized by a brief but powerful feeling that they have died and no one cared. This attack has three uses.
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Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 1:21 am
Helene nodded along at Kaifeng's assessment of the situation--it made sense that he had no experience with the way wider things worked, but it still felt to Helene that Chaos Senshi were...unnatural. Wrong.
"Chaos does not happen naturally. Must be introduced. It is a poison, that rots world, and that likely rots the soul of those it is attached to." He shook his head. "I hope you are right. That there is a way to restore these Chaos senshi to what they should be."
But more immediately important--because Helene and Kaifeng certainly did not have the power to make that happen--was the box. He hadn't pressed Xingyi on its contents, too much--merely accepted that it was Saturnian and to Saturn it sohuld return. So, if he was honest, he was just as curious to discover what was inside.
He watched, in curious silence, as Kaifeng withdrew the scroll--as he brought ti together with his weapon, and it seemed to be absorbed within.
"No, certainly not," he said, a lilt of interest in his voice. "Cannot guess what that means--but suspect that it is positive. Likely, the scroll increased your magic power in some way."
Helene had to admit: he was curious to see how. But that would wait until they returned to Earth.
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