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 Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 7:58 pm
Linarite was very bored, and very cranky. Sleep had been less and less lately, and her busy school schedule and work habits were not precisely the least demanding things in the world. So it was with impatience and barely-contained anger that she was floating through a Friday afternoon at the bookstore not far from Crystal, trying with little avail to find a decent selection of Cliffnotes. How the heck was she supposed to place high at DCU without a cursory understanding of the basics?! She certainly didn't remember a damn thing that she'd been handed in English class after sixth grade!
She was tired, she was disgruntled, and this bookstore sucked. What had killed it though, was the fact that everyone around her was talking about Prom. The goddamn Prom that she didn't have a goddamn date for. Snarling, Audrey Collins passed through the stacks, and Captain Linarite walked out - a seamless transition to the Negaverse. Another quick gesture, and the earth trembled lightly as a keening groan echoed through the store, silencing most chatter. Almost out of nowhere, a giant stone behemoth started smashing down shelves while the petite bluenette perched on his shoulder, beaming.
"Congratulations, you've all been selected to join our random lotto! The lucky ones will be coming with me, and the rest of you...will probably be smashed into goo by my darling here." She caressed the giant head lovingly and crossed her legs with a wide grin. "Who wants to be first?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 8:47 pm
Cassia Katsaros had been deep within the romance section of the bookstore, plucking titles off the shelves to balance on a leaning tower in her arms. One shoulder was nearly pressed to her cheek to keep her cell phone steady between as she chattered away. The only time she seemed to stop to breathe was when her magenta eyes alighted on a particularly scandalous title (she always had to get a load of the covers... just in case). Delicately she nudged A Rose In Bloom from the shelf and flipped it over to read the back.
"So Daniel told Sarah he was going to prom with Becca, but Becca's going with Sean, the football player Sean from Meadowview, cross my heart here - hey, I heard it from a very reliable source this time!- and I mean it's not like Sarah's got some kind of social disease, Daniel's not good enough for her if he can't see that she's got a great personality, and did you see the dress she's going to be wearing if-"
But Cassia's friend wasn't going to be hearing the rest of that story. Cassia's mind hadn't registered the silence or noises of any otherworldly presences. There was a rumble and a crash and a cascade of love stories, and the bookshelf just to her left heaved forward. About twenty books and a cell phone were thrown in a cloud of fluttering paper as Cassia dived to the opposite side with a scream. The movement gave her a brief glimpse of a stone monolith lumbering torward its next bookshelf to topple. She'd read about these happenings in the paper sometimes, when they made the front page. But like most of the denizens of Destiny City, she could only shrug and imagine her name would never be listed on one of those articles, like so many others dead or nearly dead in Destiny City Memorial. Even now, even hearing the announcement of certain doom, it hadn't fully occurred to her the end was near for herself and everyone in range of the golem. Heart pounding, she made an adrenaline-fueled scramble for the next aisle of shelves, her mind a blank.
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Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2010 8:37 am
Oh Good God, were you kidding? This was a ******** joke, wasn't it?!
Sue hadn't been looking for a fight. He'd been very specifically not looking for a fight, in fact - he'd gotten to the bookstore by all the main roads, avoided peering down any dark alleyways. He hadn't talked to anyone. He hadn't even made eye contact with a soul beyond that grey cat in the second-story window on Fifth street. He had left no openings for anything to go wrong.
And yet that didn't seem to matter. Because while he'd been innocently browsing through how-to manuals for cell phone repair, the entire goddamned place went to a screaming bloody Hell, and he was stuck along for the ride.
God damned Negaverse.
Hissing under his breath, Sue crouched low behind the bookshelves. It looked like a random rampage - his identity wasn't at risk, then - but there was a problem. He was just a Guardian, and a rather poor one at that. For all that Kirin seemed convinced he must have some sort of headlasering technique, Sue hadn't figured out how to do it yet - and even if he did, he was in his civvies. If he tried anything, he'd be blowing his identity, putting everyone around him at risk. What he needed was for a Zodiac to be around, jump in to give a rescue - but even if there was one nearby, he was in the backmost corner of the store. The front door was a long ways away, and the Negaverse agent was between him and it. No way that he'd get that far without being seen, no way in hell, and if he couldn't get outside, there was no way he could track down one of his Zodiacs for help.
Mackenzie popped into his head. It'd be easier to call a Zodiac to help you, if we had NIFTY CELLPHONES, she said, rolling her eyes with professional scorn. Inwardly, Sue bristled. Son of a b***h, don't I know it....
Sue'd worked out some sort of plan at this point, feeble though it was, to make a break for the men's room. There was enough screaming and activity going on around the store, he figured that he might be able to make it. And if he did, he could transform into his armored Zue form; like that, at least, he'd have some better speed, could take a few hits, and maybe make it out the door in one piece. For sure, the Negaverse officer would have to follow him; it'd keep everyone else in here safe. He'd just maneuvered to the end of the romance aisle, getting ready for the heart-stopping dash across the open center of the store in order to reach the bathrooms, when something caught his attention.
A girl. Bright-haired, running. Probably crazy with terror, like th rest of the girls in the room. There was a glimmer of something to her, though, something he thought he could reach....
Is she a Lunar? All plans were forgotten in that moment. If she was a senshi, she could actually fight. Worlds better than he could do, just trying to lead the Captain off. But then why was she running? Did she just not know where she could transform, or--
Sue's eyes shot wide. Swearing, he lurched to his feet, moving without thought or planning, trying to catch up with her. She didn't know. He'd just found his first unawakened Moon senshi, right at the worst possible time. In this maze of bookshelves, with the chaos of hysteria and the danger of a Captain and her personal youma - how the hell was he supposed to catch up with her?
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Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 8:23 am
Why did they always run? This thought was not exasperated, however, it was gleeful. It was fun to let them think they might get away, before you hopped onto their back and yanked out their life without so much as another word. Of course, such showy tactics were usually frowned on and would get you a severe lecture if not worse. At the moment though, these were pithy concerns to the Captain. She was going to kill some people, and she was going to take out her frustrations as star seeds.
It was easy to start in the cafe, her precious Orgel barreling right through and gathering up two at a time as Linarite busied herself with trying to knock several others unconscious when they tried to run. Something useful that she had noticed was that when people ran, they did not look at their feet. A quick sweep of her staff, and they weren't running anymore! How magical! The couple that had set her off went first, of course, their seeds vanishing like pretty little lights winking off. Orgel provided her with two more, and she was systematically moving through the crowd.
It would only be a matter of time before she went back to the shelves, and the terrified victims there. That would be a fun little hunt, now wouldn't it?
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Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2010 1:11 am
Cassia had vanished behind another row of shelves. Screaming. People were screaming. What if they were dead? What if the woman on the stone monster was killing them like it said in the papers? And if it was, could she do anything to save herself, let alone manage to help anyone else in this bookstore of death? She was scrambling through the science-fiction section now. Every stomp of the creature's feet rattled the shelves and sent hastily-replaced paperbacks thumping to the ground all around, and occasionally on, the running Cassia. What she'd give to disappear into the pages of any book in this place. Every sight and sound was eliciting frightened squeals and and cries, as though any second some other terrible monster was going to come crashing through the imagined safety she was taking in making it to the far side of the room.
The side that didn't have any exits.
It wasn't long before she practically smacked into a dead-end bookshelf at the end of an aisle. She turned her gaze upward, as though religiously. But the self-help volumes that filled her sight were not going to help her now. She was alone, and even before she realized it, her fingers were clawing desperately at the bookshelf, seeking a handhold, a secret lever, an illusory cover over a door that could get her out of here. There were tears streaming down her cheeks. Her heart was pounding in her throat, her stomach was in a knot, it felt like she was on fire on the inside with nothing to put it out.
Someone was running close behind her. Cassia whirled around as quickly as she could, ignoring her lengthy ponytail smacking into yet more books as she pressed her back up against the dead-end. There was a figure at the other end of the aisle, blurred by the tears that welled up anew. Her fingers suddenly alighted on a book, yanked it from its place. Briefly she saw a flash of the title written in cursive font across the cover - Living With Death - and hurled it in the direction of her pursuer with a strangled sob. She was pleading at about a mile a minute, quietly but emotionally, as though perfectly aware it would do her no good.
"Leave me alone! Please! I think you ought to know I have so much to live for! My seventeenth birthday is coming up soon and daddy said he'd take me to see the pyramids I don't know if you've seen the pyramids but they're supposed to be wonderful and oh no I'm never going to see them now and I'll never see my mother or my father or my kitten again and I'm never going to get a pony or a prom dress and I was going to cure cancer if I went to medical school like daddy always says I should and he says it a lot so I probably would have but I wanted to be a movie star and have a famous kiss in a movie ohh Idon'tevengetmyfirstkissandyou'regoingtokillmeohgod-!"
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Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2010 12:14 pm
The book struck Sue with a resounding CLONK. Even as his feet slid out from under him, he appreciated an overwhelming sense of nostalgia; remembered a face through sparking vision, a girl around his age dressed in the Barren High colors, asking him if he was all right. An irrepressible surge of anger. Y... you hit me....
"With a book!" Clearly, Sue just wasn't meant for book-learning. It wasn't safe. Unless blows to the head were a method by which information could be transmitted, in which case, he was well on his way to the Ivy League.
Groaning, pressing his palms against his aching forehead, Sue stumbled to his feet. Funny enough, the girl he'd been following hardly seemed to notice his brief incapacitation. Instead, she was practically sinking to her knees, sobbing some pathetic story about birthdays and pyramids and medical school. And kittens. That part, at least, he could sympathize with, but the rest of it....
"Will you quit -- stop it, I've got something to -- Good God, SHUT UP!" If Sue were within reaching distance of the girl, he would have been very tempted to reach out and slap her. He had no clue whether it would break her out of her hysterics, but it would sure make his aching head feel better. Luckily for the integrity of her face, though, he had an idea that would work just as well to make her shut up - and a glance around promised that no one was looking in their direction anyway. (Not that he expected they would be, what with the marauding Negaverser and her youma in the same room.) Sketchy as Sue had been recently about transformation, there was certainly a time for it - and this was it.
So one moment, there was this boy, angry and shouting and waving his hands in vaguely threatening gestures at the poor, terrified Cassia; and the next there was this cat. This large, incredibly fluffy cat, looking three times as large and fluffy for how pissy he was, lashing his tail around. "Are you listening to me now," the purple cat spat, more than a touch anxious, "Because I can't help you if you're going to scream until my ear drums pop!"
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