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 Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 7:44 pm
Their flashlight beams roved in haphazard, organic shapes over the grass and between the trees -- or bounced off each other playfully ever so often when they got distracted. Corinna had a habit of holding her flashlight up over her shoulder in a fisted hand, like a police officer; though that made her arm tire fairly quickly, she kept to it doggedly. Finally, Dylan stepped sideways, brushed his fingers soothingly through her hair, and told her he couldn't see her face with her flashlight glaring in his eyes. That was a better reason to adjust her stance.
Destiny City Park showed the wear of thousands of footprints across much of the landscape. Crackled brown blades of grass poked up from the packed remains of a recent snowfall, both on the footpath and off it, everything washed in the blue lights of the occasional Emergency Call beacons.
"Are you too cold?" she asked, winging her flashlight off to the east. "You can have my scarf." Dylan hadn't wanted to come out in the middle of the night, but Corinna had been impatient -- it had been sixteen years, sixteen -- and would've gone to investigate with or without him.
A scarlet ribbon in the night is her flag and her herald -- a scarlet flame that cuts the sky, signalling her return to Earth. Her sign is all the gold and the blush of dawn. And when you see the sign -- you will know:
She has come.
Watch the night sky.
There had been a meteor, hadn't there? Was this their sign, finally?
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Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 8:49 pm
Her boyfriend accepted the scarf like it was paid tribute, and in response threaded his fingers through hers briefly to give her hand a reassuring squeeze; then he broke away and shone his light further across the grass. Tonight Dylan Rasmussen was not dressed like the Hillworth boy that he was. He sported a Threadless t-shirt, a pair of worn-out Levis and a hoodie. This was less ascribable to some Dylanish rebellious impulse and more so to the fact that it was past the Hillworth curfew: it was not a good time and place to be a Hillworth boy.
He'd already been out, of course. He was always out at night. There didn't seem to be a lock or a key that could keep Dylan in a place past the time it lost his interest.
He shone his flashlight up, briefly, into the trees and further along the ground there. It picked up piles of leaves, roots, and nothing else; the light of a flashlight beam at night in a forest was a sinister sight from innumerable criminal procedural TV dramas. It looked like it ought to illuminate a corpse. It didn't. Even so, Dylan narrowed his eyes before he set off further into the wood.
He looked unusually serious altogether. "If it is her there'll be a fight," he mused aloud. "And things would be over in an ideally short span of time, wouldn't they? But not necessarily in our favor."
Dylan knelt and uncovered the ground beneath them with one of his hands, but what he sought turned out to be some old plastic packaging, discarded on the ground; he stood a moment later. "Pity," he said.
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Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 8:05 am
He was right, of course -- Dylan was rarely ever wrong, that Corinna could remember. Still, it stung in the way that only an old, unhealed wound could: a wound she'd been carrying her whole life, though the memories had only returned within the past year.
"It's not fair," she muttered, "It's her fault. I hate feeling weak, I hate dragging you into this."
The eye of her flashlight fell on a tree trunk with strange markings -- she stepped in closer for a better look, pressing her fingers against the marks. "If we were to -- split up -- it would be safer for you." The tree looked burnt around the base, like something had coiled around it and then scorched its top layers off. Strange.
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Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 10:15 pm
In response Dylan wrapped his arm around her shoulder for a moment and squeezed that, too. "If we were to split up it would be more dangerous for both of us," he said mildly, though with an air that indicated that this, rather than being his opinion, was the truth and he was correcting her. "But I appreciate the noble sentiment, love." And that was that, apparently, according to Dylan Rasmussen. He dropped to one knee and inspected the marks at the base of the tree.
It was peculiar to see him doing this alone. She rarely remembered him alone as it was, except when he was alone with her, and they were together, and circumstances were distinctly different in that case. It was even a little peculiar to see him pick up a little grime on his fingertips as he touched the edge of the burn -- but he brushed it off a moment later and stood again. His full height was a good half-foot taller than her, always had been.
"If it is her," he remarked to the trees, "I would've liked more time to plan." From the sound of his voice, I would've liked indicated not a desperate regret but a faint oh, well. But then again, it was Dylan.
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 7:54 am
"I would've liked Jack Bauer," Corinna sighed in return. She circled the based of the tree, her flashlight along the ground. "I guess it could be some kind of a message she left for someone, but why she'd choose a tree, I don't know. Obscure at best. Do these look like high-heel marks to you?" She indicated some odd, pyramidal divots in the ground around the tree with her flashlight. The average person didn't wear their two-inch pumps out frolicking in the woods, in the snow, in the park. "What on earth is she up to? What's her plan?"
In a different time and place, investigating wasn't the sort of thing either of them would've done, scrounging about in the dirt with flashlights like burglars looking for where they'd buried their loot after the heist -- but desperate times always did call for desperate measures.
"Well, if she is here, I don't think we should wait any longer -- maybe we can't afford to be so choosy after all. You're at an all boys' school -- have you found anyone you think is a likely candidate? I know you haven't always gotten along, but I thought of Ronnie, for my part. Other than that, well." She smiled at Dylan, a look of grim amusement. "You know how talented I am at making new friends wherever I go. They're not exactly lining up around the block."
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 1:13 pm
"I was thinking Jesse," said Dylan, and in response to her quizzical look he stepped around to the other side of the tree trunk and continued his inspection of all the marks. "That shouldn't come as a surprise. Aside from that, I'm afraid I haven't turned up anyone promising. My school's full of thugs and milquetoasts. Remind me not to get caught," he decided, "the next time I decide to do E during school hours."
He didn't seem like he'd need the reminder. Or heed it, for that matter. There were some things he expected people to take for granted about him.
"It was only boring classes," he added as an afterthought, and prodded at one of the divots with the heel of his shoe. "What do you think about Jesse, though? They have things in common."
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 6:12 pm
Corinna thought this over. She wasn't often a person who sat around and pondered the nature of her own opinions -- they were what they were, she knew them pretty well, and she was ready to defend them at a moment's notice. She was a decisive sort of person, so -- when he was interested in paying attention to it -- Dylan might've been able to tell when they disagreed on something, because usually that was when she stopped to think it over for a spell.
In this case, the lines of her face drew themselves downward into a grave, frowny look. She stepped away to lean against a tree, one that wasn't potential evidence of the arrival of the thieving witch, and pressed the side of her fist against her lips.
"Well, they have gender in common," she said quietly. Whether or not this was meant as sarcasm was difficult to tell. "Darling, you know I like Jesse, but you're talking about a huge responsibility here. You know him better than I do -- can you trust him?"
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 6:34 pm
Tilting his head back, Dylan cast a glance up to the cold array of stars scattered across the dark sky. For a moment it looked as though he were looking for something among the pinpoints of white -- and for another moment, it looked as though he were looking for something else. But he gave it up, and for a while longer stood merely contemplating the clear night sky. His scarf had come loose on his shoulders and it took him a while longer to notice, tighten it again with a tug and then look back down at the ground.
"Jesse?" he said, sounding a trifle faraway. "Yes, I can trust him."
He paced around the tree for any signs of tracks, footprints, anything, and then left it and circled the next one like an aimless cat. The Jesse discussion appeared to be over. That was unsurprising. Dylan had his reasons for some things, and while he'd often be happy to discuss them, there were some where he'd shut down all discussion on the matter -- not with any particular rancor, it would just be over. His attention had transferred back to the task at hand.
"Love," he kicked some dirt over a root on an impulse, "wherever she is, I'm afraid it's probably not buried under this tree."
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Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 8:21 pm
Another dead end. Another damn dead end, everything was dead ends, and waiting, and knowing, knowing that what was rightly hers had been taken from her, that she couldn't just take it back. She kicked the tree with the heel of her shoe. "She's toying with me, I know it. What we need is a cat, a cat would be able to sense if she'd been here. Why didn't we think . . . " Corinna huffed, picking at a knot the wind had blown into her hair. She wasn't very patient with knots, and this one was likely to be headed down a short road that ended in being torn off the end of a strand of her hair.
"We need help," she said with very obvious disgust.
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Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 10:08 pm
"We do need help," observed Dylan, with much less urgency and an air of reflection. Nothing gave Dylan urgency. At best it gave him seriousness, and he had that in spades at the moment -- but tension was as absent from his well-formed shoulders as it always was. He shined his flashlight up, into the treetops, for a moment; then remembered to look up, as horror movie characters never did. As horror movie characters sometimes did, he found nothing, but then entirely unlike a horror movie character, failed to be pounced on and slaughtered by anything whatsoever in the next few moments. He had drawn himself up to his full, nondescript height now, and he was pacing in the opposite direction around the tree, and he was talking while he did, lavender eyes fixed on the tree again. "We need help," he said; "We need time"; his sneakers were getting dirty from all the walking; "We need a cat. We need my brother." He looked up at the pale moon, and said, "We need a lot of things." Abruptly Dylan turned his back on Corinna and flicked off the torch with a faint click. In the dark what he was doing was unclear, though not to her; he spread out his hands like he was accepting something, and something dark seemed to rain down over him in soft particles, covering him, and then he shed it again in the next moment. The torch was gone; so were the sneakers, actually, and the scarf. It was hard to see him now. He himself certainly didn't offer any light. In fact, it took him stepping out into the small patch of clearing under the moon to do so. He smiled at her and, almost as an afterthought, swept a bow, and took her hand like a knight to his lady. Though this, of course, was something of an ironical thing to do.  "At least we can get one of them," said the archer, cheerful. "Shall we?"
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Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2010 1:34 am
His presence was comforting -- not many things came as a comfort to her these days, but he, at least, was the brightest object that stayed fixed in her sky. It had been unthinkable to make the journey without him, as she'd had to leave so many of her other friends behind and do, even if she'd had the power left to make the crossing alone with any chance of success. Corinna didn't make it through a single day without his emotional support. She folded into an answering curtsy, into a fond smile, and then stepped back. With her right hand, she fished into the pocket of her warm red peacoat until her palm closed over the compact she was carrying -- it was warm and alive with energy, even if it was . . . incomplete. " Cosmic Moon Power, Make Up!" she called, quietly as she could, opening the compact to a beam of moonlight that shone down through the bare branches and pine boughs around them. She was a whirl of shadow, energy spinning off her like she was shedding a fine mist of water, of sparkling light that was somehow lightless. Familiar ribbons snapped close around her where her winter clothes had been; they hugged close to her silhouette, then changed. They transformed, she transformed. She became. The mute, inconstant moonlight held her in its eye, and she stepped forward again, bathing in its familiar presence like being held in the arms of an old friend.  "God forbid you should have to walk home," she teased. That was about the limit of her interest in teasing, before she grew tired with things that resembled humor: one line, and then such brief flights of fancy dropped back to Earth from a safely unambitious height. "There's nothing for us here," she agreed. "Come." She held the crescent wand out before her, then drew it high up over her head, tracing out an unseen arch in the air. She brought the wand back down to her side and stood by to observe her handiwork. The great mirror appeared before her where she'd drawn it, framed in lavender and gold, showing their reflections back to them -- senshi and cavalier. She held out her hand. He took it. Together they stepped through the mirror, and were gone, just as if they had never been there at all.
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