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 Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:32 pm
Aree couldn't quite pinpoint it, but something beneath the bleachers of the Hillworth gym smelled vaguely like the illegitimate lovechild of urine and an old sock. Or perhaps if a wet dog somehow had a baby with a molded BLT, and then that baby had a baby with the peesock, the resulting offspring would smell similar to what currently filled Aree's nostrils. With a low groan she covered her nose with a corner of her sleeping bag and sprayed another half-can of Febreeze into the air.
It had been a week since the unfortunate incident that had left Aree Cadence homeless. With her scholarship covering only her tuition expenses and no time to get a job – between school and being an agent of the Negaverse, who had time for a job? – the seventeen year old had been forced to get creative when it came to finding new living arrangements. And what safer place than the daytime haven of their very own General-King. Granted, having to get the hell out by 6AM was a bit of a pain, but it was better than sleeping on the street.
She had a swank little setup beneath the bleachers, after all. Amidst empty soda bottles and the metal bars which supported them bleachers, a set of sleeping bags were spread out over the dirty hardwood. A small stack of junkfood – something she ate only when in dire need of such consolation – stood beside a small, portable TV, it's extension cord running along the wall and into Charonite's office.
In ur office, General-King, stealin ur powerz.
Surely it wouldn't be long before her little roost was uncovered and the lilac-haired monstrosity tossed her a** out. For the moment, however, it was a nice little bachelorette pad.
Aree was sprawled out along the length of her sleeping bag, eyes locked on the episode of True Blood that currently held her attention. Try as she might, she failed to understand the appeal of the show. Nevertheless, it gave her something to do that wasn't going out and killing people. And while she would have preferred the latter activity, the necessity for laying low was at its peak while she healed up from a rather brutal senshi encounter... and a significantly worse encounter with Obsidian.
The rustle that caught her attention was far more interesting than whatever happened to be going on on screen, and Aree leapt to her feet like a startled feline. Silently (only p***y senshi required catchphrases to transform), she slipped out of the human skin of Aree Cadence and into that of her preferred identity. When she spoke, it was the cold, calm voice of Lieutenant Tanzanite which echoed through the empty room.
“Whoever you are,” she spoke just loudly enough to be audible, “You've got about ten seconds to get out before I put my fist through your chest.”
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Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 1:43 pm
Hematite hardly needed to be asked to lie low the past two weeks. It was his specialty. It was his true calling in life, that avoidance of responsibility, and perhaps the first time in all his memory he'd been given the order not to work, not to attend Hillworth, not to bother hauling dead bodies to the graveyard to bury. He was loving every god-damn minute of it. When he wasn't busy running personal errands (there was a lot he had to put off to save his skin, so it was only lately he'd settled back into a routine), he kept thinking back to the corruption of Sailor Tisiphone. The odds had been astronomical, but he defeated her. And her fate was more interesting than a simple death, for sure, which served the b***h right for threatening him. The idea of that much power, wielded however he liked, was definitely sparking Hematite's interest. If it was so simple to turn enemies into obedient allies... but, well, he'd need the power first, and Charonite wasn't big on free handouts. It was something to think about, a puzzle to fret over another time. He pulled open the gym door, knowing full well that Charonite never locked them. It was a shortcut to the dorms, and the less time he spent outside, the less chance he'd run into anyone who knew him.
No one, least of all his godawful roommate, would bother to ask where he'd been all day. And even if they had, he wasn't going to tell. Hematite was on a long road to recovery from a bout of injuries that started with his face and ended everywhere else besides. His nose had a bright white piece of gauze taped over it now, but this was twice in three months it had been broken - the signs of it would never really go away any more than his scars. But the bruises were ever so slowly healing, albeit none but the ones on his face and hands could be seen.
His boots were ticking, each clock slightly out of sync, but, well, they always did unless he did something about it. Hematite only bothered to turn them off for meetings. He was too elated to care tonight. No one was up at god knows when in the morning standing sentry in the middle of a high school gymnasium, or any other part of the school that he'd had to walk through. Either way, he could simply revert back to human if someone came by, get caught as Khaldun Cilentani, and -
And he wasn't alone!?
It was a girl's voice, but it wasn't Nealite, or Linarite, or Audrey, or any girl he could claim to recognize (it was a lengthy if one-sided list). Did that mean it was a sailor senshi? Here, in ******** Hillworth? Hematite froze on the spot, mid-step. Son of a b***h! He was not fighting anyone else right now, especially not without a weapon, ******** no. He'd done god damn ******** enough ill-equipped fighting lately, and he'd earned this break from it fair and square, for once. Whoever was lurking in the gymnasium was going to be Charonite's problem, or Obsidian's, and if Hematite bolted fast enough they'd never know he knew a girl had been around in the first place. He figured he was going to be safe once he could make a mad dash for the opposite door, until his brain stopped registering the ticking as background noise and more as 'HEY, HEY, HERE I AM, RIGHT OVER HERE' noise. After the girl's voice had subsided its echoes, he was the one making noise in the quiet gymnasium. And going by the number of ticks, eight seconds had passed out of the senshi's allotted ten.
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Posted: Fri Nov 13, 2009 8:50 pm
The ticking sound had drawn Tanzanite's attention just as soon as her voice faded into the darkness, and she crossed the gym with a steady click, click, click of heels upon the floor, timed out to match every other tick of those clocks. There was no reason for a student to be wandering at this time of night, or to be carrying whatever happened to be making the strangely soothing ticking noise. It could be a senshi with one of their ridiculous medallions, but it made no sense for one to be wandering around at Hillworth. That was like finding a Rabbi taking a casual stroll through the Nazi base camp; nobody was that stupid.
“Tick tock, tick tock,” Tanzanite said in a sing song voice, her stroll more of a casual gait than anything else. Even having taken a beating, with her neck wrapped in a thin white bandage from just below the chin down to her collar bone, she was the image of confidence. Stupid, arrogant, completely misplaced confidence. If it was a senshi, it was either an incredibly powerful or an incredibly stupid one, and Tanzanite was fairly certain that even the latter could probably wipe the floor with her at this point. Still, it wouldn't do to let the growing feeling in the pit of her stomach show on her features.
It wouldn't take long for her to find the source of the noise, a mix of disappointment and relief just barely touching her face once she had. Tanzanite looped her cables around the back of her neck and regarded him for a moment. Hell, he looked just as bad off as she did.
“Well, at least it you're not a pipe bomb.”
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Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 12:11 am
She didn't look familiar, but then, it wasn't surprising. Hematite was not big on getting together with his fellow Negaverse lieutenants. He knew there were quite a few new ones now, but even Linarite and Torbernite were faces he only saw in the setting of meetings. The times he did have to work with other lieutenants were forced - gravedigging duty or training with Obsidian, or having to back up Nealite in fights. And as soon as the job was done, he had no reason to hang around and didn't look for any. Hell, the only reason he knew Nealite as well as he did was because of how many times he was in the same room as her at Hillworth, both as civilians, while he waited for a 'stern talking-to' from the principal.
Hematite shifted on his feet, taking one or two steps backward to re-steady himself, and crossed his arms over his chest. Act casual. Be prepared to stop, drop, and roll toward the nearest exit if it was a senshi, because in this state he'd be more likely than not to get peppered with magical attacks before he could make it out of here. His expression was apprehensive - he wasn't feeling confident about fighting like this. But what ended up approaching him wasn't a very conventional senshi, if he wanted to call her that. One hell of an exposed chest though. After ogling for several seconds too long to call it accidental, his eyes moved up to her neck, which was bandaged, and finally her face. No tiara. Excellent. Her expression didn't seem to get through to him - women always looked disappointed around him. He would play this safe. He'd just do a little flirting first, and then maybe he'd consider finding out just what the hell a girl was doing in the gym of an all-boys' school. No guarantees on it if the flirting succeeded, though.
"That's the problem with uniforms. Sometimes you'd rather take some things off." He glanced down for a second at the little clocks attached to his boots, which he really had never been able to rid himself of. When his gaze returned to eye level, Hematite flashed the girl a grin, which was offset by the scars and bruises that all but mangled his face. It was hard to tell from his voice whether he was joking when he added, "Speaking of which, nice corset, by the way... maybe I can I talk you out of it?"
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Posted: Mon Nov 16, 2009 1:00 am
Somewhere along the lines, Tanzanite had stopped getting pissed off about people staring at her chest. That would be like a clinically obese woman wearing a skirt several sizes too small and then getting pissed at the people crashing jokes. It just didn't make logical sense. If you felt like flaunting what you had, be prepared to get attention. Even if you felt the Negaverse had done you an incredible injustice by not giving you a god damn coat. Thus, she simply gave a slightly amused smile and waited for his gaze to move past the rack that seemed to draw eyes like moths to a flame.
“Cute,” she said flatly, far more interested in the bruises that covered his face than she was in whatever he was saying. What she would give to have someone with the common sense to hit on a woman without alluding to sex in the first five minutes. If Tanzanite wanted sex, there was a long line of people willing. If she wanted someone to watch crappy movies and eat junk food with? Well, that was another story.
She took a few steps towards him, stopping only once she was within a foot or so of the other Lieutenant. One pale hand lifted, the backs of her fingers reaching up in an attempt to very gently graze his bruised cheek. Her expression was one of intrigue, brows lifted slightly in curiosity. She wouldn't ask how he got that scar, because the last thing she'd want to hear for the rest of her life was how she got hers.
“And sometimes you'd rather put things on. If only the Negaverse could find the power to endow me with a damn parka.” Tanzanite shrugged, allowing her hand to drop from his face, “I'm going to go out on a limb and hope Obsidian didn't send you to finish the job?”
While Tanzanite might have thrown herself head first into life as a Negaverse agent - really, she had done so to the point where the Negaverse was all she had left at this point - she had been battered and broken enough that past week to wear down her cold, emotionless exterior. She was frazzled beyond her ability to simply shove it all down into some little black box in the back of her mind, and the last thing she needed was another person trying to kick her a**.
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