|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 2:09 pm
After a quick breakfast of toaster waffles and the cheapest peanut-butter known to man, Tallulah slipped out of Xaviers apartment and started down the stairs. Between nearly falling off a roof (or, actually falling and being caught?) and sleeping on the sofa she was sore, and she was wearing what basically amounted to the clothes she'd worn yesterday, although now they looked far worse for the wear.
Vaguely, she thought that it would be awkward to run into any of Xavier's neighbors right now, and then she wondered why there was anything awkward about that. No shame in sleeping on your best friend's couch for the night. Or in taking out his trash in the morning.
No. No shame. Chin high, Tallulah Cowden. It wasn't like this was a walk of shame or anything like that.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Mar 18, 2011 9:21 pm
Saturday morning. No classes, no nothin'. Tate would have been up in her apartment, sleeping off a week of four-hours-of-sleep-a-night, but she'd seen Dani and Parker head to bed. So she'd decided to go make nice with her uncle, and was only just getting home. The apartment building was quiet--normal, of course, for a place largely populated by teens and twenty-somethings on a weekend morning--and she didn't expect to encounter anyone. That was why she was surprised to see Tallulah Cowden, looking rather rumpled, coming down the stairs.
"Hey, Tallulah," said Tate, propping one hand up on her hip. "Is this a walk of shame?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Mar 24, 2011 4:11 pm
Just her luck that she would run into the one person who would give her a hard time about this. Any other classmate would just ignore her (with perhaps the exception of Janice), but the look on Tate's face said this was just getting started.
"Good morning to you, too, Tate," said Tallulah, drumming her fingers on the banister.
She sort of assumed Tate lived in this building. It would make enough sense, it seemed exclusively inhabited by college students. "I'll have you know it definitely is not."
That would just be an embarrassing rumor to spread.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:22 am
"So it was just an overnight stay that was previously unpredicted, so you're walking out wearing the same clothes," obvious enough, because while she hadn't seen Tallulah come in, these clothes showed clear signs of being slept in. Rumpled and a bit abused looking, she would say. Also, the buttons on the front weren't quite done right, and in a rare display of motherly feeling Tate reached over to straighten the two on the top. "Fine. Sure it's not." Who was Tate going to tell anyway, Parker? Parker was currently in an emo funk, and she wasn't going to have a big fuss over a high-school rival of Giselle's when Giselle wouldn't even talk to her anymore. Hell, Tate didn't even know if her former best friend was alive and sometimes she had to wonder if she cared.
She crossed her arms, considering the teal-haired girl. Her expression was implacable, and then just disinterested, and she started to walk around the high schooler to head upstairs.
...Wait a second.
"Cowden, do you still have those videos of the senshi you took," she asked, one hand resting lighting on the banister as she turned to face Tallulah. "From like, ages ago?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:44 am
Tallulah tensed for a moment as Tate reached towards her, then reached up to fuss with the buttons as soon as the other girl withdrew her hand. She could have done that herself - should have done that herself! If she'd looked in a mirror for any length of time this morning, which she hadn't.
She ran a hand through her hair and started down the stairs again as Tate passed, then froze at the new question.
Tallulah looked slowly up at the other girl, eyes slightly narrowed. "Yes," she said. "Why?"
Tate wasn't a negaverser - she had proven that often enough by showing up in dreamspaces. But neither was Tate a senshi. No, as far as Tallulah was aware, Tate was as civilian as they came.
She searched her pockets briefly, coming up with two cell phones, a crumpled ten dollar bill, a set of house keys, and a flash drive. She stuck everything but the flash drive into her pockets. "I haven't taken any in a long time, though. Not since last year."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 7:03 pm
She shrugged a little bit, tucked her hands into her pockets. What was she supposed to say? That Tate wanted to find out why all this bullshit was happening. That was a fairly reasonable excuse, but she really didn't want to hear any morality speeches about it. Like "The senshi are right! Here's why!" That wasn't exactly useful information, that was just... extremely biased information.
Still, she did want the video, just to frame-by-frame it to see if she could see anything. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder when Tallulah produced the flash drive. "Might as well come up and put it on the computer with me. To make sure I don't see anything you don't want me to, right?" Still no reason as to why, but Tate was proceeding up the stairs as if she expected Tallulah to just follow her. "I'll tell you when we aren't somewhere that stupid frat boys can listen in on," she added, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 7:38 pm
"Oh... all right," replied Tallulah. It still seemed odd that Tate was being even remotely nice to her - they were fine when she was safely disguised as Sailor Europa, but Tate didn't know they were the same person, right? And then... all their meetings had been in dreams. It was debatable if Tate even knew Europa was real, she supposed, and not just some particularly persistant illusion that just happened to look a lot like Tallulah Cowden.
She spun the flash drive on its lanyard and followed her up the stairs.
"Why do you want the videos?" she asked. Best to play innocent - if Tate wanted her to know that she knew, Tate could tell her so. "I mean, they're all pretty old."
Maybe, she thought, it wouldn't be so bad to make nice with Tate. It would certainly make life less complicated.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 8:41 pm
Tate stalked down the hallway on the second floor, threw open the door on the end of the hallway. Her bedroom was a nice pale green, sea-green, with sunlight streaming in from the west-facing window. Tiny, too; the desk was wedged catty-corner at the foot of her bed, the nightstand appeared to be doubling as her bookshelf, and the closet as a coathanger. A few posters on the wall--one for Audition and another for The Bird People in China right over the desk--and a few pairs of jeans thrown over the footboard of her bed completed it. Tate threw her coat on the corner of the closet door, and dropped into the kitchen chair that was currently serving her as a desk chair.
"Because I want them." On the desk were stacks of notebooks; next to it, half-wedged under the bed, a pile of newspapers. Cut pieces of newsprint poked out of her notebooks. "I'm trying to find out why all this senshi s**t is happening here," she elucidated, booting up her laptop. "I want to know why it's my city, and how it's happening. These notebooks? They're all notes and records of deaths that I think fit the... The Negaverse modus operandi." She looked unusually intense as she held out a hand for the flash drive. "And if you take any more, I'd like to see them."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:19 pm
"Oh, wow," breathed Tallulah with audible admiration as she looked over the pile of notebooks. Tate had been busy, and her records were probably way more complete from sheer determination. Tallulah had been trying to focus on a lot of different things, but hadn't been keeping a clear record of Negaverse deaths.
"Um," she asked, handing the flash drive to Tate. "How... many deaths have there been?"
Sheer curiosity. How high had the public death toll of this little war climbed? And also - how many times had the Senshi failed?
"I haven't really had time to do any more recently," she sighed. "But school's winding down... I've been thinking of trying to get out more often."
Tallulah had to pause and wonder at this - she had?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:48 pm
She looked pleased by this tone of admiration, and shuffled her notebooks around to make room for the flash drive to be plugged into a USB port. Not only had she managed to impress someone--Parker treated her project like it was the act of a precocious three-year-old most days--but that someone shared her same morbid curiosity. She was shifting around through the files on her desktop, a quick organizational effort before creating a new folder titled Videos. She opened the flash drive on her desktop and then stilled at Tallulah's question.
Tate shifted, a little uncomfortably. "A lot," she said. "Even including a margin for error... Someone should have noticed this before now, someone bigger than this, this--the summer coma dreamworld thing? Was nothing. Compared to this. But we're a big city... maybe they think fifty deaths, give or take ten or fifteen, was... normal? I mean, how many people are murdered in New York City, anyway?"
She shook her head. "But a lot of them seem to think it's like, a weird flu. That's something I noticed, too." But Tallulah had asked for a number, and Tate... Tate, who if the posters on her wall were to be believed--one with a winged boy on the ground, covered in blood, one with a woman with her head covered in bandages, one of a woman in autopsy gear--gloried in blood and guts, was hesitant to tell her. "It's gone down a lot since November, too. I don't know why, but it's only... you know... three or four a night, anymore. If the police beat and obituaries are to be believed. And it's not happening anywhere else!"
Tate gnawed on her lip, black eyes sliding back to the computer. "If you could... I'd really like that. I want this to stop. Sure, everyone has a list of people they'd kill if they couldn't get caught, but this... is sickening." Still no number. Not even a round one. Just Tate, more vulnerable than she'd ever dared to be in front of Tallulah Cowden.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:26 pm
Tallulah nodded. She'd expected some numbers kind of like that, but the math escaped her. "So... instead of a murder spree they think they've got a pandemic?" she asked, leaning gingerly against the footboard. "I did know that it's just here," she added in her defense. Even if Tate was being vulnerable, you couldn't risk looking uninformed in front of Tate. Especially when you actually knew more about the situation than you were allowed to let on.
"Three or four murders a night is still really bad," she said, leaning forward to look at the screen. She pointed at a folder in the flash drive. "They're all in there, some of them are edited, some of them are raw. The ones I got around to posting on youtube, I had to cut some of them..."
She was floundering, looking for a reason to excuse the egregious cuts in the first Europa and Pyxis video, with the elephant. "I didn't want to accidentally expose anyone's civilian identity, you know? That could be really dangerous."
"And then there was a lot of stuff where it was just me running away, I took it out when I was cutting. But... I'll try to get back to it. I want this to stop, too."
She ruminated on this thought for a while, trying to mess with the numbers in her head. This had been going on for almost a year and a half, that was almost five hundred days, just to be round - and, how many a night? "If the police aren't calling this what it is - murders - then, what's the best estimate on the death toll?" she asked solemnly.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 10:59 pm
She shook her head, a barely-there tick-tock that didn't even stir the hair from its brightly colored barrette. "No. It seems to have just slipped under the radar. There were a few articles about censure on the police chief in August, around when we woke up, since he still hadn't found the source of that coma..." Tate shrugged, clicking and dragging the files from the flash drive to her video file. It really was a nice laptop; it'd been a Christmas present from her uncle, custom-built for speed and power. It was probably the only nice thing Tate owned, besides the video game consoles that Tallulah had seen coming in. Those were dusty, but the computer showed signs of use and no one could ever say it was only four months old. Except for the fact that, well, they were.
"Thanks," she said, handing back the flash drive. After that she leaned back in her chair, tracing circles on the carpeted floor with the tips of her toes. "It's... between five thousand and seven thousand," she said, "as best as I can figure. There's five a page in those give or take, and each has five hundred pages." There were ten notebooks stacked on the beat-up desk. "I mean. I could be way off, it could be hugely higher or hugely lower... That's my assumption, though."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 7:17 am
"Five thousand and seven thousand?" asked Tallulah, taken aback. "How do they ignore that?" If private citizens doing their own research could find out this much - why were the Destiny City Police turning a blind eye? Was there a cover-up going on? She patted her pockets and exhaled through pursed lips. "I've got some newspaper clippings at home, I don't know how much of it is the same stuff you've got, but I'll bring it by next week."
Did Tallulah feel a pang of jealousy over Tate's souped-up new laptop? Oh, probably. She was still lugging around an ancient, second-hand Dell and praying through crossed fingers for a new computer. Being a senshi didn't pay well - it wasn't like Batman, whose super powers were basically unlimited funding.
She stuck the flash drive back in her pocket. "You know, no one outside of Destiny City's even talking about this? And even - even in the city, no one cares. If they really believed it was a flu, they'd all be wearing face masks. Someone would have a fake inoculation. And outside... just that we've got gang violence. Nothing about the death rate."
Not to mention that, if this were happening in any way remotely close to how crime dramas promised reality worked, Scully and Mulder would have cracked this case long ago.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 1:48 am
Tate shrugged, kicking her heels against the hardwood floor and probably irritating the hungover downstairs neighbors. She did not care about that overly much at the moment, preferring instead to concern herself with Tallulah. "I don't think it's a cover-up, I think it's the... look, muggings and beatings happened every day anyway. They already see the senshi and the negaversers as gangs, so why wouldn't increased gang activity lead to more deaths? The fact that all enter comas doesn't mean anything to them. That's almost normal, I guess? With head trauma?"
She shrugged. She'd had a few concussions, and all of them had ended with her being excused from class or work for a day or two while they were making sure she didn't... explode, or something.
It was easy to forget the animosity she'd borne for Tallulah for most of her life, when they were discussing something she cared about. The teal-haired girl was paying attention to her, which was something Tate rarely got nowadays. "But it can't be just Destiny City. People have starseeds the world over, don't they?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 5:43 am
"Sure," shrugged Tallulah. "Global cosmic pseudo-biological phenomenon. I just made that phrase up so don't quote me on it. Or do." She thought it was a pretty good phrase, at any rate. Although Tate knowing about Starseeds meant she was already further into this than any civilian really ought to be. And, because Tate had no way of knowing that Europa and Tallulah were the same person, it meant that she herself was also in far over her head.
"But they're only fighting here, in Destiny City. Before, in the late eighties, early nineties, all the fighting was in Tokyo - do you have anything about that?" she asked, tilting her head to one side. "I can get that for you, if you like, I've already done some of the legwork on it."
"Anyways, there's no reports of it anywhere else. It stops in Tokyo right around the time the current senshi start to be born here, or at least I'm guessing, the dates seem like they're about right." You could not exactly walk up to teammates and ask them for their birthdays. But the oldest senshi couldn't have been born much before 1990. She was pretty sure she was one of the oldest, and her birthday was in 1993.
"And if it's anywhere else, then it's been covered up really well. Have you found any other cities with a crime rate like ours? Same symptoms?"
She leaned back and twirled a few strands of hair around her fingers, waiting for a reply and hoping she hadn't said too much. Tate should be grateful to know the Tokyo connection - as far as Tallulah was aware, no one would have made it without the cats.
It seemed only briefly strange that she was being so open with a girl who she had so much past animosity with. It was almost like the Grail Seekers in Indiana Jones or the DaVinci Code or whichever movie it was where they treated it like some secret brotherhood. Actually, that was just before they all stabbed each other in the back, so maybe it was a bad metaphor.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
