Welcome to Gaia! ::

Azriel had just snuffed out the lights and lied in bed by now. The room was practically pitch black, save for moonlight shining through the window.

"Hrm. Such a simple prank and it seems like it had blown up in his face..." Oscuro remarked with a snicker, sensing as much. She wasn't able to see what exactly had happened, so she wasn't aware of how appropriate her little quip was.

As sleep began to take Azriel, she sensed Schwarz moving toward the forest. "Hmm. Change of plans..." She made a faint smile.

Chiaro glared at her angrily. "OSCURO!"

"I'm not stupid Chiaro, I'm not going to try to give these people a scare no matter how much I would love to. I just wanna ask Schwarz something. He's going deeper into the forest. I'll make sure to pop up where there are no more people around."

"...All right...but keep in mind that there's the chance that something might still go wrong..."

With that, Azriel's body sat up in bed and began its transformation into Oscuro's body. Once fully manifested, she sank into the shadows and re-emerged deeper into the forest, further along Schwarz's path. Folding her arms, she leaned with her back against a tree and waited for him to come across her.

((Meep. Did you just do the timeskip? I had wanted Oscuro to converse with Schwarz, which takes place over the night... sweatdrop ))

Cain entered the lobby a towel to his hair and sat on a chair near Cinkel, "You can be such a jerk sometimes." Cain smiled.

"Hmm." Cinkel felt Oscuro take form and move to the forest where Schwarz was at.

"Something the matter?" Cain stood up.

"It's nothing." He waved his hand as if to brush something away, "Next time, don't go snooping around in my bags."

Oscuro made a sly grin. "It's just that I still wonder if it's any possible at all for someone like me to be trained to sense the souls of those who have already passed on as you are. Because technically, though my victims are the kind who deserve it, what I do commit is murder."

((Crap, Oscuro is of a simpler mindset than Schwarz. xd ))

Oscuro stroked her chin and furrowed her brow in thought as she stared at the crystal. "Well...destroying that crystal is not the same as ending one's breath. Once those souls are released, I can still exercise my senses to sort the good from the evil due to the close proximity.

It's just that...after explaining to someone what I do, I know it's put them at great unease. I seek to alleviate that by resorting to new methods. Instead of mostly killing people to get to evil souls, I could seek them from people already dead."

Oscuro's eyes widened and she sweatdropped, under the impression that Schwarz had initiated training now. She looked around with as much alertness as she could, but she couldn't see anything in the space around her or above her. It made her feel like she was sort of...blind.

"The souls are released, aren't they? I feel like...they could be all around...but they are so faint to my senses! The souls of the living just have a much stronger scent to me..."

Oscuro rubbed her chin again, mulling over what Schwarz was explaining to her at the moment.

Calm my mind...empty out every thought...that means, shut the hell up Chiaro, she mentally told her opposite with a smirk.

Chiaro shot her a dry glare in her mind, grumbled a bit, but quieted down after a few seconds. She decided to go closer beside Azriel's sleeping form in the mindspace and watch over her, to train her own thoughts somewhere else so that they wouldn't interfere with Oscuro's.

With that out of the way, she dropped her arms to her sides, relaxing and closing her eyes in concentration. She began to work on clearing out the things that were swimming around in her head. First, training her senses to ignore what was going on in her surroundings; with her eyes closed, she put away the imprints her eyes had previously seen. Then she focused on ignoring what else was bombarding her senses---the crickets chirping, the rustling of the treetops in the soft wind, the feel of that wind against her body.

Now she put aside the memories of the day's events, and her thoughts surrounding them. She was beginning to reach a realization, but held it off in case it would wreck her train of thought. Her state of mind right now...she felt like she was floating without effort. She opened her mind's eye to find herself surrounded by pitch black. It was peaceful.

'Reach out with that sense of emptiness. Fill it with what you seek.' There is...nothing...around me now. I want to see...

She lifted a hand before herself, which seemed to begin fuming a dark purple "smoke". All around her, the souls she sought were reacting to it, beginning to fade into view as little flickering flames that intensely glowed the color of their sins. Red for an anger so violent, green for a greed so treacherous, violet for a pride so deadly, blue for a lust that led to crimes so heinous, black symbolizing a combination of everything---these were the colors she was mostly seeing.

So many souls had appeared all around her that she had to suppress the utter glee that was rising, or else it might have thrown her out of the zone. In fact there were too many, several others at a great distance from her. For now, she would only have to focus on the ones close by. The souls began to be drawn to her hand like a magnet, an effect of the "smoke". Once she had gathered all the ones within close proximity, she held her hand before her face, grinning, and drew them into her stomach in one deep breath.

Once she was through, she closed her mind's eye and opened her physical ones. Her senses attuned to the world around her again. "Huh. I think that took a while, but how did I do?"