Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Imagine, if you will, taking in fire, light, darkness, or even magic straight from its source. Drinking the supposed nectar of the gods, the purest form of the forces that be, and are, and govern this world." As if to illustrate the point Maximos, grinning wide, held out his arms and gestured to either side of himself indicating everything around him. The world, as a whole, and everything in it.

"You know, how to form a fireball, or a empower a slash with razor sharp energies. Now think of the effort and will required to focus that un-tempered power into a razor thin pure line." He said, and as he spoke held out and up his right, curling his fingers in as if clenching them into a tight ball. No shadows stirred, no glowing overtook him or his arm, but the meaning in the gesture was hopefully still there. He refrained from using actual supernal powers from obvious reasons. His eyes moved from his hand to Ryugi.

"Its stronger, fiercer power, is it not? Higher proof, high concentration?" Thats when his smile truly stretched, like a slash of silver in the moonlight. "Now, picture if that concentrated energy was what fed directly into you in much the same way normal energy flows."

Maximos held out both hands to either side, like the ends of a scale.

"Where one is nullification", He said, lifting one hand and then in tandem with his words the next. "The reverse is saturation."

At which point he sort of shrugged then gestured around them at the forest and their predicament and said, "I would show you but, well...you understand."

What perhaps made the moment worse, was that as Ryugi attempted to wrap his mind around the depth and width of the phenomenon being presented to him, coming to grips with its terrible force...Maximos was nodding and grinning. A simple motion of his head confirming Ryugi's imaginings, cementing them in the world of the possible, plausible, and terrible. The look on Maximos' face could be likened to the smile on the face of any number of scientist when the realized their years of labor towards creating the atom bomb was a success. The look on Ryugi's face however could likely be likened to the expression worn by some of those very same men when they first saw the bomb used. Which of course likely added some level of confusion when Maximos said;

"It's not that bad, actually." And chuckled lightheartedly. He held out his hand, and after a moment called up a ball of dark-light. The unnatural violet glow of the thing spreading up his arm and making his pale face look an almost sickly hue.

"You know what this is." He said, looking from the ball to Ryugi and back. And then with a flick of his wrist, he was holding a paintbrush in his right hand and began drawing on the open air around the ball. It seemed, the way the black ink seemed to hang and then slightly drip before drying that it was being drawn on the light coming from the sphere of essence itself.

"This is a basic array, it's used for adding permanence to an enchantment. As the raw arcane has a way of bypassing natural laws, this momentarily tells the universe that the aberration it is witnessing is acceptable." He gestured with his writing hand to the completed array, passing the back of the brush through the empty space between the text and the ball itself. "Note how the symbols themselves do not touch the ball, instead of marking it as acceptable they mark its byproduct as such."

"This is the fun part." He said as he grinned, a wide toothy grin and looked at Ryugi's mirror then back at the spell inscribed dark-light ball.

"Placing this in the mirror now causes a contained and yet unexpected reaction. The universe backlashes as might be expected, in an effort to counteract the opposing essences. But the permanency enchantment causes its effect, not its source to be preserved." Max spoke while making a motion similar to the one Ryugi made earlier when placing his light-dark sphere into the Shadow Mirror. "This puts the forces that be in a loop. They are stuck constantly attempting to destroy and preserve the effect of the conflict of elements. The energy built up in that effort spills from the mirror at the point of conflict..."

Max paused, and gestured around himself. "And saturates the area around it, and the ball itself with raw, untamed, and yet specifically focused force."

The dark-light ball, now mostly inert save for its eerie light, was then suddenly thrust forward. "The focus required to keep the enchantment going is...intense, thankfully it's rather simple, but the effect is intoxicating. It feeds itself and really can only be aimed like a hose as opposed to harnessed like a natural element."

With a clenching of his fist the ball and the runes were gone. "I suggest keeping it away from your personage, and keeping its usage short, or else..."

Maximos was, however still holding his paintbrush and held it up to Ryugi with a grin. "I can teach you the enchantment array, if you like."

Another day, another dollar...
No, not quite...

Hono thought as she closed the door of the condo behind her and kicked her shoes off negligently before she slowly pulled herself up the stairs towards her bedroom, not bothering to turn any of the lights on.

Another day, another disappointment!
It was getting harder to fight off the waves of depression that tugged at her every waking moment... she had searched through another hospital, offering what bits of healing she could in her weakened state while she secretly checked for a response from the pearl that she placed on the chest of every brain dead patient that she came across.

She laughed a soft bark of derision remembering one conversation that she could almost pin her current lack of power on... John had offered himself as food so that she might not need to return to her hunting of the rats of Durem... now she was loath to feed on the unknowing or the unwilling and this strange bit of mortality was another bit of fuel for the melancholy that had a firm grip on her these days.

Raven very gently pulled a small velvet box out of her sweater pocket and carefully placed it on the bedside table. So, not only was she refusing to feed... but she had decided that the only way she could live with a reborn John, would be if the new body he inhabited did not belong to another sentient soul already! Stupid morality....

As Raven crawled into the pile of pillows and blankets on the floor between the wall and the bed, a very nest-like concoction of bedding, she scowled at her own thoughts and snarled slightly at her apparent turn to moral stupidity before she pulled the shadows in around her and forced herself to sleep so that she might find the strength to continue the search again in the morning...

...alone but for the shadows... the only ones I can trust not to break my heart again...

Save for Hono'o's nest, the rest of the condo was completely empty.

The kitchen sat stark clean, pristine and white, muted without light. Once home to laughter and fun and feasting, this had been a place where self-made food was a task of enjoyment and play, not to satiate hunger.

The living room was empty, the couch left unsat for gods-knows how long. No warmth remained in this place, a place where you could relax and unwind after a busy day, sit and discuss life and all it's turmoils with measure or emotion, or simply fall asleep in your lover's arms basked in the glow of the television or soothed by the music from the sound system.

The gym beneath the building was cold within the inky black. The punching bag in the corner hung motionless, it's seams stretched and splitting, sand creeping from within. It ached to be put out of it's misery...but there was no mercy to come.

Darkness reigned in this place. Shadows swaddled every item of furniture, every wall, every surface, like a security blanket tucked firmly around a sleeping child.

Everything was still. Sublime. Silent.

The silence was so heavy, so course, so violently loud, that the sound of your own blood pumping through your veins at the beat of your own heart seemed deafened by it.

So when the telephone down in the kitchen rang, the piercing shrill bleat of it's trill seemed to echo around the place like the shockwave of an explosion. Every surface seemed to quiver with the soundwaves emanating from the appliance, until eventually the rings stopped.

For what would seem like hours, the only thing remaining in ears was the tolling echo of the telephone's rings, seeming to come from every angle as they bounced off the walls of the emptyness with a show of life - before a voice, measured and polite, rang from the phone.

"Hello. We're not available to take your call. Please leave a message after the beep."

It was a pre-recorded message, the man utterly foreign to anybody in the household. Someone could have made their own recording...but who in this household ever had the time? Or the inkling to do so?

The mystery man's voice was tinny and quiet compared to the shrill tines of the telephone's rings, barely making their way though the ground to the bedroom where Hono'o lay in her nest...but then another voice, this one louder then the first, came ringing out over the telephone's speaker.

"Raven, its Michelle." A woman's voice spoke, her tones measured and sure, much like a doctor's voice. "You said to call if there was an emergency, and we've got a doozey - bus took out a car and rolled over into a ditch. Nobody in the bus was wearing seatbelts, of course, so we've got trauma patients heading in by the ambulance load. Family in the car was pronounced at the scene. I know John is sick and you're exhausted, but we really need your help with this one - he can wait another day. See you soon."

There was a click. Then a dial-tone.

Then silence filled the condo once more, as the memory of noise faded like the setting sun's rays...

The hospital was pandemonium, as usual.

A rock elemental was lying on a gurney, groaning as lava flowed from an open wound in his shoulder, a steel spike piercing him straight through his rocky hide. His co-worker stood beside him, looking down to him with worried eyes as the doctor put on thick, heavy mitts. "I need some steel plating rated for 1200 centigrade and a rivet gun!" He roared to anybody as he expanded his psychic shielding over the bright orange dripping from the man's stone hide, burning holes into the floor as it splattered around his nimble feet.

Besides them was a small team of doctors, a man inspecting a wound on a woman's side with a flashlight as the other tried to talk to her. "Cindy, Cindy, you need to stay awake, you need to tell me your insurance details..." But Cindy's head kept lolling forward, and the doctor inspecting her wound decided that they could find out her details after they'd sealed the wound and rolled her off to the OR.

Down the ways, a man with reptilian skin stood jiggling his feet at the drugstore window, blood trickling down his face. His yellow eyes darted more then others, his tounge lolling half out of his serpentine mouth, with was filled with rows of dull little teeth. He was staring at the drugstore woman, a neko-jin with a twitching wiry tail who kept returning his stare with her own nervous glances. She knew that look anywhere - the look of a junkie in desperate need of a fix.

The two cops standing either side of the reptile man also knew the look. They also knew he'd broken his arm fighting against them and didn't know it due to the fact he'd been high, and now his nod was over he was looking for his next fix, broken bones or not. "Careful Randy...remember your kids." The man said to the reptile, the female police officer looking behind him to make sure the cuffs around his wrists were still firmly fastened.

He muttered in reply, the beat of his heart evident in the scaled on his gaunt neck, his yellow eyes affixed on the neko-jin.

"No they don't, Randy, and you know it." The female cop said quietly. "Thats the smack talking. Dont make it any harder on yourself now..."

Randy did not reply. He had tunnel vision, blinkers to the world, and the pigs would never understand. The itching pain had enveloped his mind now, his skin having succumbed to nothing but numbing pain for the last half hour now, yet it felt like years to the scaly man.

As Hono'o approached the gurney, the first of the bus crash victims began to pour in. Cries of units of blood and assistance rang over the emergency ward as people strapped onto gurneys were wheeled into the already overcrowded ward. The cries and moans were amplified four-fold as people clutching bleeding head-wounds, twisted arms and shattered ribs lay writhing in the halls, exasperated doctors trying desperately to figure out which ones were more important then the next.

As Hono'o approached the gurney, she would see that it contained a little girl tucked in tightly, her face as pale as death as her wide brown eyes looked up to Hono'o. Her voice was barely audible in the din of the ruckus around them, but she spoke all the same, her eyes fixed on Hono'o like a spotlight shone through pitch darkness.

"I want my mommy."

Bleeding internally from the trauma put to her from her drunken father, however 'trauma around lower abdomen' was the only thing written on her chart. Her mother had wandered off, desperately trying to find a doctor to look her little girl over again, for she knew, as all mothers did, that her baby was dying, and unlike the rest of the overprotective mothers in this world, she was right.

Admist all the chaos churning around them, three gurney were wheeled down the halls to the OR without doctors screaming for assistance. These were the beds containing the family that had been hit by the bus, but as two were wheeled quietly down towards the morgue, the other was being led quietly, yet urgently, down towards the OR. This was done because announcing you had two stiffs for the morgue in the middle of a panicked emergency ward was tantamount to chaos erupting. News of death spread like wildfire, and like wildfire, it could kill even the strongest of wills quickly.

It was also done because as the paramedic had unloaded the husband, already zipped up in a bodybag, he'd slipped as the gurney unfolded unceremoniously from the back of the ambulance, and he's stumbled forward and placed his hand on the dead man's chest to steady himself, and found that the man announced dead not fifteen minutes ago had a heartbeat and his lungs were still filling with air rhythmically.

Barely noticeably.

But rhythmically.

The gurney would move past Hono'o after she'd approached the little girl, as her quiet plea for her mother reached Hono'o's tired ears...and at that exact instance, with those words still echoing in her ears, she would feel a small tug.

But it wouldn't be coming from her heart...only from the box laid within her pocket. Like something alive had rolled over within the box, something with form and shape, for the briefest of moments, almost like a magnet drawn to it's attractor by the a scant pass...

The little girl drifted off, the pain melting away into nothing, and all of a sudden her mother reappeared. "Oh - oh my god! You...you've healed her! You healed my baby, oh thank you, thank you!" She cried, her tears of panic now changing to tears of joy as she threw her arms around Hono'o, grasping her tightly as she wept into the red and black haired woman, her words spilling forth like a torrent. "I was looking for a doctor everywhere and nobody was listening to me and i kept telling them that there is something wrong with her but they wouldn't listen to me and i could see her getting more and more pale and i just knew, oh god, i just knew - oh my baby! My precious girl!"

The mother released Hono'o and threw herself down upon the sleeping girl, gingerly brushing the soft downy hair from her face as she dreamed good dreams. The mother was wearing a dirty singlet and a pair of trackpants that had more cigerette burns in it then moth holes. She had the gaunt, harrowed look of a waitress who worked too much for too little for no credit, and had to face hell when she went home. Her hair was thin, her face creased with wrinkles brought on too soon, she smelled like cigerettes, and the one tiny, defenceless, pure thing in her life that kept her alive was going to be okay.

The gurney was rolling away from Hono'o...if she could even see it in the sea of hospital beds lining the corridor.

It was about this time that Randy decided that his need for the hit outweighed such things as cops and restraints, and a hollow hackling hiss rankled up from the back of his throat as he began to fight his restraints, his useless left arm flopping in the male cop's grip as the female gripped the cuffs by the chain, trying to keep her arms out of reach of the razor sharp talons on his fingers. "Taze him Roger, for gods' sakes!" She screamed, a harrowed shriek coming from the neko-jin in the drugstore window, the hair on her body bristling in fear as she saw the reptilian man's neck furl open with a snap, the webbed skin between the scales quivering tautly as he hissed again, fighting to reach the window for his fix...

A typical night in Latent General. Pandemonium in the making.

The woman's eyes were wide as Hono'o pulled her away from her baby with force, and there was a subtle change within the eyes - distress from her baby, fear of the woman's aggressive action, and the start of a dull spot that would soon blossom as her mind wrapped itself in a warm blanket of protection whilst her body was beaten and abused...

But all that was blown away as not a fist came to her but a card, a present, a gift from an angel. The woman recognized the name of the shelter - she had read about it in the paper many times, and wished for the courage to do what needed to be done - but this was a sign. The woman before her was what she needed to drag her baby and her out of hell, and into the light again.

The myriad of sights faded from the woman's eyes as tears filled them to the brim to splash over, and she gripped the card tightly in bony, gaunt hands, weeping on it as she sat by her sleeping girl's bed and cried the relief that was blooming in her.



"Pigsss! ******** pigsss!" Randy squealed, his neck fan bristling with unrepentant fury as he fought the cops, Roger trying to pull his Tazer out of his belt, the female howling in pain as Randy's talons finally dug deep into her forearms and gouged channels into the flesh, dripping red blood welling out from around his fingers as he tried to find the cop's tendons so he could sever them and be free.

He was slavering, green spittle coming out from his maw, sea foam growing in the corners as he squealed and howled and shook his body, trying to break free...