Welcome to Gaia! ::

Bored, rooting, and Albite’s expecting an office full of people. Has become accustomed to the low noise and murmur of others coming and going. The fizzle of wisps, Headaches telltale humm; low octaves of perpetual noise that one can feel.

It’s all absent now.

Too much quiet is just as bad as too much loud. It can be worse even, as far as he’s concerned. The loud he can combat with distractions — but the silence that leads to overthinking?

That won't do.

He’s saved from himself by a glint of gold encased in a glass beaker stopped half-full, like a fifth of whisky, and the idea that he’s getting a taste of stolen goods? Immediately catches and holds his attention; especially with the yellow-amber liquid radiating an eerie sheen. It’s mesmerizing where it sits atop Faustites desk.

Delicious looking.

Albite can’t help himself, steals his boy's backless stool like he owns a timeshare on it, and kicks up his heels (he’ll clean the thick glass-top of his heel prints later. As much a promise to himself as it is to his boy whom he’ll thank for the drinks). His curiosity is sated only when he pops the vial open to drain the contents dry, down to the drop, down to empty air…….

And immediately regrets his actions.

*It ******** burns*. It’s anything but delicious. A vile firewater swill, like the worst sort of moonshine — kicked back — and b a c k a n d b a c k a n d

And then he’s falling back. Free of his body, free of time. Like a meteorite flung through the void-spangled stars of space faster than reasoning can catch up to him. Mind an ever-expanding blurr of the cosmos, before he crashes into some distant sea.

*Ananke*

He knows the word without knowing the meaning. Know’s it’s ‘Whole’, old-old-old, ancient, deep - and he’s drowning in an ocean that holds his people. Gargantuan - titanic - colossi of the sea. He fits like a grain of sand in the palm of their hands. Sees nothing but teeth of needled daggers, hair like reefs and seaweed coils. Their forms glow and roil - the markings shift like a phosphorescent song.…

Then everything is struck into shattering.

*Praxidike*

Born a core of a core - a fragmentation that clusters it with the others, off-kilter, circling, but alive, still alive, New.

And in its remaking the ocean gives way to fresh wellsprings filtered by limestone; the sandy brine and bones of the dead become steep ridges, broken shale, and coarse, cracked, seasalt mirages. The coral erodes into fine-bone sand: whites, pinks, pearlescent blacks that bleed blue in the hazeienes beyond the thickly filtered light of the sun — Of Jupiters auric rings, astral dust, and it’s immediate sisters shattered remains which gave moons to a moon of a Godly gas giant -- *he’s buried in it* - sand scoured by winds that once held waves. They leave Albite choking on the red speckled air that runs thick with it; like acid, it strips paint, and skin, and it *burns*.

It buries him. He’s drowning differently now, a whole new experience, drowning dry as an entirely different sort of wave buries him. Leaves him on his knees to dig himself free of it, before the wind shifts again slant’s his view crossways – and suddenly he’s stumbling into view of beings so otherworldly that it hardly matters whether breathing was something he could even do before.

It’s as if time skipped - a blink and he’s watching giants arise from beyond a dune, smaller than the Titans of the sea they descended from. Yet so much larger than himself. They rise like trees with no sky to halt their climb, he cowers, like a footnote hastily scribbled into the margins of their existence.

As the winds die down the scene changes again and he’s looking upon a nomadic caravan, its people piebald, marbled, and stripped in endlessly strange patterns that sprawl over dark skin. A hue of twilight bathed by distant stars. They remind him distinctly of tiger sharks. There’s something in their eyes, he would know it as hunger but they might call it something else. In another tongue - in song - because their smiles don’t look made for speaking in anything other than harsh vowels and sharp clicks. There’s the way he imagines the texture of their skin would be if he could get close enough to – *touch*

The thought dissolves - sugar into a warm pool - Then he’s greeted with different people who are more like how he’d consider people to be - alien, yes - but their eyes are full of more than that primal yawning thing of before. Togetherness? The passing of time he can’t measure and the sorts of changes that brings.

The whole of them crest a pink/red ridge of blazing sand while riding chitinous, glistening, creatures. Nameless to him, but their steps are mesmerizing, stilt-legged, elegant, sand-striders. All multi-limbed quickness with gaping sawblade mandibles. A parade of nightmarish insect-met-reptiles that carry their riders with ease. Traveling at their knees are even more – shovel faced, stout, rumbling werms, and segmented, pock-plated, pill bugs on meth. Beasts clearly shaped to carry the entirety of the clan. A mass of nomads, and the hierarchy is automatically noticeable, especially when the lot of beast and being alike clearly defer to the One. Largest of them all. Like the last of the giants.

A dying breed.

It seems effortless, how she brings the whole of the group into direction, wrangles the creatures into docile reign under Her large auburn hands. Her stripes glow like backlashovs lines under the thin ultraviolet atmosphere. She’s stunning, and in his slack-jawed staring, he becomes noticed. He feels it like the hairs on the back of his neck rising under a sudden chill. How she stares down at him through a slitted visor carved of bone —— eyes the starkest blue.

And everything shifts again – it’s a sickening whiplash of successive scenes that he’s flung through without end. He can’t catch heads or tails of it, only the messiest, most scant details. How the sands fall away to reveal mountains and the winds that shaped the dunes so furiously finally find rest. How cities are built in the gullies of old currents, from the marrow of the planet and the bones of giants from the past. How with every successive generation, the people seem to shrink in size and grow in prominence, expand in culture. From nomadic wandering caravans to sedentary civilizations based in pillared structures.

Mauvians arrive in a crash of technological wonder — a ship striking long gouges into muddy fields. The people of Praxidike build works of glory to them, statues, carvings. They learned to reach the stars and repair the maus' way home. In return? They’re given a Senshi - one of their own plucked to greatness amongst the rest —

They seek the stars - to conquer - to reunite Ananke, to find their lost Sisters and then —

To rope the outer reaches in — with open arms and compassion, with raised spears and retribution. A pattern of circlets run through with lines, because resources were scarce and some distant moons would be better served serving them, better ‘freed’ - if Praxidike was the one doing the freeing.

If it was just? Then it was done.

And their form of Justice was blind - A force that was as kind and loving, as it was full of violence.

Praxidikes were born in succession after; a flashing sea of strong faces set with deep lines. Smiles, frowns, scars. They emerged from all corners of their society. They became family, immediately, tugged into the fold with open arms, open hearts. Bathed in tears for the Senshi that fell before them, but always welcome — for they were to become leaders.

From plump, wild haired, chibis with a gaggle of siblings that spent time on the Queen In Waiting’s knee as she instructed them on the workings of the throne; knowing it’s importance for after she passed her power on. To kneeling at the Interim Kings feet, learning strategies, tugging at beaded braids and begging stories about old star maps and their borders. Praxidikes rules seemed easy to grasp, even at a glance. Transitions made into simple steps to avoid the inevitable power imbalance, and the toppling of a hard won dynasty, because the Senshi was the Planet and the Planet was the Senshi.

Without one? The other could not exist. A reality that was even before they knew what Senshi were. It became something to live and die by, putting Praxidikes on the throne. To wage wars and ride the tides of peace that came with forming coalitions - Courts - until Praxidike took up as a symbol serving under Jupiter herself.

All Snippets of flashes of ideas that flew by —

Until Albite stumbled into his last self - got caught looking *up* - and it wasn’t like gazing up at the stars, or the tallest of trees, but it was unnerving still. To have to crane his neck *up*, even if only by the extra inches that made a foot into two. To find eyes eerily like his own. Knowing that the Eternal before him was as much a *Prince* as he was a King and conqueror.

Praxidikes final ruler - carefree in his early reign - a haughty boy that met his end like his ancestors before him, at the end of a sword, or a dagger, or— surely not asleep and old in his bed.

Praxidike treats him less like a mother looking at a small child - and more like a brother - *a friend*. He knows what Albite is there to see — there’s a grim finality that clings to the edges of his smile, and Waru finds he’s crying for it even though he can’t tell *why*. It isn’t the inevitable loss, the travesty of such a sure defeat — Albite knows those things are coming. That they must in order for him to be there at all.

Albite thinks - Maybe it’s the glint of glory that catches in this Praxidikes gaze? A feral hardness limbed with red. Pride for watching enemies fall under his own hands, and knowing something like a vicious sort of peace will exist at his end.

Because it’s never forever —- Senshi are eternal and this is a thing *known* to him.

Praxidike was happy. Before, after, in that instant. Albite knows that and aches for the differences between them that stretch beyond the span of time and fleet of stars. Yet more things he can’t cross.

The concept of Finality doesn’t exist for this Praxidike.

Because the last true Praxidike died as a King defending his home-world. He was always Senshi, born, raised, and later revered as such. He knew nothing else, and most importantly? He was never alone. Had all the heavens at his beck and call and what wasn’t his - *theirs* - his mothers and brothers and sisters and endless lines of Senshi who’d come before him? His ancestral right.

Well, they damn well took it and brought it into the fold and made it so - they displayed their enemies bones atop the points of spears, and then in writing. They laid claim to their enemies Senshi as kin. Parsed trade arrangements that ensured peace.

Praxidike’s Senshi had ‘Justice’ - and the knowledge of how to wield it on his side. Passed down and down and down and – He had been, Her, Him, had been how many other variations of himself over centuries? Had Wives, husbands, concubines — a menagerie of lovers — gaggles of babies — a legion of armed forces who *he adored!* Because every Senshi that came before set the precedent of being one with their people. Sitting with fat babies on their thrones and feeding even those that were not their own from the breast during dinner parties. Being as interwoven with their public as was possible. Even during political strife, even when outsiders brought upheaval.

It mattered little, not when they fought with their warriors at the front lines, bled and died alongside each other. Raised earth with plows in the fields as often as they sat at high tables and raised ideas. They studied the tactics of better minds by candlelight, they sought outside opinions, and they needn't ever be the best at any one thing. Not when they could simply draw those qualities from others, bind those people to them and make it so.

And Albite — never on Earth would he have that. Couldn’t recreate it, couldn’t — so many paths that felt closed and buried in rubble long before his beginnings. He wasn’t of Praxidike. He was of Earth and too rudimentarily human to even comprehend being anything more than that.

It was too sad.

He could barely protect his friends as he was, let alone *a moon*, *a planet*, *a system of celestial bodies*. He was alone and small by comparison. The sky was far beyond his reach. His moon is dead and empty — and he would’ve rather watched it die from a comfortable distance than risked being alone in an endless fight to make it thrive. Not that. Never that. Aloneness was equitable to death, of soul, if not of home, and he was flesh and body. Not some hunk of rock full of kindly ghosts.

He couldn’t do it alone. There weren’t enough Senshi left in the universe to help. He didn’t have a vast sea of *people* to arm himself with. The darkness at least was a warm comfort, full of fire and light. Even if it held a hellish glow, at least it was alive. He could work within that — *he could survive it.*

He could survive anything, really. Anything, but Nothing at All.

Disappearances (14) : People are missing. Maybe they’re people you know, maybe you’ve just heard about it on the news. They’re just disappearing. In front of you one second, gone the next, sucked into some between-space. Into some hole that flickers out of sight once it’s swallowed them up. Maybe you got sucked in–right into a strange strange black expanse, with no access to anyone else or any exits. The pull would have been magnetic, almost unavoidable. Some might escape, but maybe you didn’t. Electronics don't work and characters cannot power down. There’s no way to reach the outside world. You might feel the sensation of creatures following you, you might run into obstacles or strange environments in the darkness. While you are in this strange location you may feel hungry but will not starve to death; you may feel tired but you will not need to sleep. Maybe you were lucky and got sucked in with someone. Maybe you’re trapped there and run into someone and team up. One thing is for sure, though–once you’re here, you can’t get out on your own. Characters who get sucked into the strange between-space will not be able to participate in the ORP immediately but will have an opportunity to join partway through so if this is something you’re interested in, please keep your eye on that! If you have questions on if something is permissible, you can PM The Space Cauldron to ask!)