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 Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 2:11 pm
It wasn't very often that she stalked the streets of Destiny City at night as just a civilian. Adira figured that since she had managed to patrol just about every night this week, it was time to take some time off for herself. Besides, she needed to find something to wear to Thanksgiving Dinner with her family. Well, that and it was an excuse to shop which was something she'd hadn't had a chance to do in a great long while.
The petite girl, laden with a modest amount of baggage stopped in an alleyway rummaging around for her keys. She'd stowed them away in one of her bags and didn't want to cause a fuss at the door. For most women, stopping off to the side of a deserted street to rifle through bags, but Adira had all of the brazen confidence that only someone who regularly stalked the streets at night. It was a confidence that she shared with who knew how many pawns in a greater war than any of them understood.
But that was not on the young girls mind at the moment. All that was on her mind was finding the small set of keys jingling annoyingly somewhere she couldn't find. At least it was an uncharacteristically warm fall night, probably one of the last of the season. Winter was coming, and it would be upon Destiny City again soon.
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 2:29 pm
“Did you need a hand?” The voice was familiar, in or out of uniform. Though he didn’t realize that she was the same person as Sailor Perseus, whom had had something of a disagreement with him the last time they spoke.
Adira though, she’d been left a Christmas gift by the familiar voice, which of course belonged to the young man who stepped out of the shadows to greet her from a safe distance. He was taller than when they last met, some small part of it owing to the well-heeled boots he now wore, but more than that he’d simply grown taller.
The jagged Smokey curls on his uniform had changed, if slightly. Now they were elegant sweeps that reached just below his hips. Much of his outfit was familiar, but that was quite distinctly changed.
Chains still clinked about his waist, and on the longest you could just see a key peeking out though it still tapped against some other unknown length hidden behind the long fall of his greatcoat.
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:46 pm
The voice startled her from her key searching revelries. "Oh- I..." Adira left her bags on the ground and snapped up. The face she was looking at was all together familiar, and yet all together different as well. She had a feeling that if she was powered up, she would feel the same overwhelming power signature that washed over her every time she had the unfortunate horror of being in Tanzanite's presence.
Adira was profoundly sad. But she was sad because of Perseus's perspective, so she did her best to put on her mask. "I was just looking for my keys." She paused to look over his new uniform. "Zinkenite."
It was interesting to see how the other sides uniforms upgraded, but she was less excited knowing that he was a near irreversible agent of chaos now. "Long time no see." In truth, they'd only met in this manner once or twice, but Adira didn't have the benefit of knowing that Zac and Zink were one and the same, meaning their meetings were somewhat connected. "How...how are you?"
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 4:37 pm
“I’m well enough.” He nodded with an owlish blink and held out an arm to take the bags from her. “Just making rounds, checking on the interesting people of Destiny City.” He murmured.
He wondered if she might ever join them, smart and confident. What an asset she would be. There was a feeling deep in his chest, an odd reminder that he –could do it, it was a strange sensation for someone who had never been truly devoted to recruiting even as a General. “I’m making you uncomfortable.” He said as much a question as an observation.
It almost amused him, almost but he didn’t even smile behind the dark fabric of his mask. “ I can leave you for now if you prefer.”
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Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:31 pm
If Zinkenite ever deigned to reach his hand in her chest to grab at her starseed, he would certainly be shocked at what he would find lying awake in her heart. "No... it's not that." It was that. "I just am getting used to looking up at you." She smiled in a joking way, as composed as she could manage, letting him take some of the burden of her bags away. It was true that he was at a same height with her now, even in her modest heels.
"It's not often someone runs into their rescuer twice in the same lifetime." Truth be told they seemed to be more like Sherlock and Moriarty. Always dancing around one another when it was convenient. Now though... if he had truly ascended past general which is what she had seen him at last... she had no hope of standing against him alone.
For once in her life, Adira actually felt safer as a civilian. "How have you been?" The old habits of polite conversation slipped out of her unbidden. Old habits die hard, she guessed.
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Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:56 am
“Well enough” He said, though there was something to the way he said it that leaned heavily on the idea that he was very much not ‘well enough’ in many ways. “It’s been eventful to say the least.” The latter part at least sounded honest if a little dreary.
“Did you find your Christmas gift…I never asked?” He sounded slightly amused by the idea that he had done such a thing. It must then have been he who left the mysterious chess gift on your doorknob. “Did you even like it?” He added.
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Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 4:40 pm
"Eventful? How so?" Adira pried a bit cautiously. She was just trying to keep the information going. It wasn't like she was trying to sneakily garner information at all... nope! Innocent questions were completely innocent. She was just a civilian after all.
"I did find my gift. Though it took me a while to find someone who could correctly identify the mineral. I had a suspicion that it was you, I just wanted to know if I had some other mineral-named stalker. I would hope that there weren't a lot of them though." She laughed at her joke like it was absurd, even though they both knew it wasn't. Not like she would tell him that though. "I did like it, quite a bit. Though I must admit, I'm not much of a chess player. My father abhored the game, so I haven't played much." Adira never understood why her father hated chess so much. It didn't make sense to her, though she knew that he used to play.
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 7:28 pm
“Curious.” He murmured at the idea of abhorring chess so. “It’s history alone is fascinating, the ability to move pieces without truly sacrificing anyone to a war, demonstrating superior tactical ability…” He shook his head and stopped himself. Surely she of all people would have read a great deal about it. More perhaps than even he had… it was one of the things he admired about her.
“Associates of mine were captured and tortured… “ he let the information hang between them, shocking perhaps. Defiantly more open than he was normally want to be but earnest enough. It lacked even the normal velvety tone in his voice that sometimes marked an attempt to sway someone’s opinion, most notably her own.
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Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 8:54 pm
"I was never quite sure why he didn't like it. He never did say, though my father is not necessarily a man of many words." Her father was ever an enigma to her, aloof in all of the warm ways that he was. But one thing was for sure, he never quite had time for his daughter or family more than for formalities. At least she had Christmas, and this was one of the rare occasions she had Thanksgiving too. She walked next to her ninja escort for the night, wondering vaguely what his smoke could do to people now.
"I..." His next words stole the words right off of her tongue. By now, rumors of the BMC kidnappings had circulated in whispers. She wasn't sure if she believed them...but his manner of speaking meant it was probably recent. Real concern and fear crossed her face as she stopped walking to face him. "Are you serious? Are they okay?" She paused and looked at him, noticing the change in his voice. "Are you okay?"
It was war, but that didn't mean that Perseus or Adira condoned torture or excessive violence. She would defend her home and innocent civilians if they were attacked, but to actually plan to torture someone... it sent shivers up her spine.
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Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2011 4:58 am
“Personally, as well as I can be.” He replied with a small roll of his shoulders, not quite a shrug but neither was it a dismissal. “I have survived after all.” His tone said more than he had, the simple fact that many others had not. “I will never be certain if my companions might have been safer, or less abused had they given up my identity out of uniform, or anyone else’s though. I will always know we arrived too late to save the many and constantly frustrated by the …justification that somehow they were just in their behaviors. It’s a dark day we live in indeed if feeding your enemy’s to rats and burning out their tongues is the path to ‘order’.”
His shoulders trembled with emotion that he was struggling to keep in check till he took a deep breath and let it slide out slowly carrying away the tension from his shoulders, though it lingered perhaps in his eyes.
“Thank you for asking.”
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Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 10:10 pm
Adira bit her tongue, almost literally to keep herself from responding. It was hard not to let on that she knew more about war than the young General King would peg her for, being a 'normal civilian' and all. She figured out that she didn't have to say much of anything at all. His emotions came to surface, visible even though masked by thick fabric and his face mask.
Tentatively she put her hand out, moving to touch his should lightly. Not much of an intrusion, but enough of one to maybe lend some semblance of support. "It's nothing you have to thank me for. I'm curious about a great deal of things, but particularly about you. You are very hard to read Zink, and I'm normally fairly good at that."
It made her wonder what Zink was like out of uniform. Did he have his same calculating ease? Or was he different entirely? Anonymity did strange things to people, and it made Adira wonder what effect it had on him.
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Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 8:32 am
Amusement flickered in his eyes. “I rather like being ‘enigmatic’, when people can read you, that’s when they can find ways to hurt you.” It was a bitter sentiment, perhaps not a surprising one given he was of Chaos, god only knew that might have exacerbated that in him. “What do you make of the war?” He asked tilting his head.
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Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 11:05 pm
Oh god. It was hard to talk about something you were supposed to know less about than you did. Play dumb, play dumb, play dumb. "I guess I hadn't really known it was a war. Is it really that bad?" The less he knew she was involved in the matter, the better.
They were getting rather close to her apartment, drawing around familiar street corners for the both of them. It was still a little unsettling that a Negaverse General-King knew where her apartment was, particularly one so keen on energy gathering. On the other hand, she'd never run into Negaverse agents around her place. Perhaps they had areas they deemed off-limits because of families? She wasn't really sure of anything.
"I mean, I know a lot of things are happening. You'd have to be blind and deaf to miss all of the news about it. I guess I just don't know much about it." Lalalalala she was not even going to think about being Perseus. Normal civilian, normal civilian. It was a hard game of cat and mouse, and unfortunately for her this time she was the mouse.
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Posted: Sat Oct 08, 2011 10:24 am
“It’s a war, costumed lunatics fighting each night with powers that are not natural to this world. Ruined worlds left behind, the ruins of this world left out of reach to most, but the marks of the terrible past this world rebuilt from. I wonder if we aren’t the last place left standing in the universe… strange to say that. I’m quite sure it sounds like something a lunatic would ponder. But I’ve seen what they left behind, and I’ve yet to hear a reason for it.”
“I’m sure they feel quite the same way though, if they didn’t perhaps we would see something like a peace, they could keep their worlds…rebuild them perhaps. I hardly think they could be utterly beyond hope.”
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Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2011 4:18 pm
"I take it from your description you are one of the 'costumed lunatics' then? I suppose it would explain your mineral cover-name. Unless your actual name is Zinkenite, and then I apologize." She intentionally left her thoughts about the other portions out of the conversation. There was no way she could even make casual comments about the topic without letting on that she knew more than she should.
It was a dangerous line to be walking, and as the topic turned darker the path got even thinner. Thankfully enough, they were nearing her apartment building, moving into the higher incomed regions around the nearby colleges. "I can't say I know much of anything about the topic at hand, so you have me at a bit of a loss."
She turned to Zink, locking eyes with him in a rather unnerving manner, as intense of a look as she could manage, trying to read his thoughts on what she would say. "Though I do know one thing. Nothing is ever beyond hope." And one day, maybe she could save his starseed from the cracked shell it was now. Then she could see what kind of man Zink really was.
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