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 Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 12:49 pm
Haven was not expecting to see another monster again.
That wasn’t to say she hadn’t been looking for any. She had, but so far she’d only been able to conduct her covert surveillance of the city when she was out with either of her parents, Grandpa Joe, or her snob older brother, and it was rather hard coming up with believable excuses for why she was riffling through random bushes and peering into rather unsanitary looking trashcans only to be disappointed when neither yielded good results. There were only so many times she could claim to have thought she’d seen a stray kitten or needed to spit out a piece of gum she hadn’t been chewing in the first place before someone started to get suspicious.
As it turned out, the one time she hadn’t been actively looking around for anything out of the ordinary turned out to be the one time she stumbled across it. Without anyone to pick her up from school that afternoon, she’d been forced to either take the school bus or walk down the street a ways to one of the city bus stops where she could hitch a ride home on a bus not overrun by a bunch of unruly kids who liked to pick on her. The choice was pretty simple, really. She’d always enjoyed the company of hard-working adults to brat children who couldn’t contain their dislike jealously long enough to just let her be.
So it was that she found herself in the middle of the sidewalk, face-to-face with a creature that looked sort of like a sphinx, only with a rather bird-like face. Haven’s first instinct was, of course, to freeze in place and stare at it. This was only the second time she’d seen a monster, and the first time had been so brief and at such a distance that she easily could have been seeing things or else mistaking a stray dog for something that wasn’t even real. Her second instinct, when she realized that this one was indeed very real, was to look around for any nearby adults she could report the problem to.
When that didn’t yield any results, there was nothing left for her to do but try and shoo it away. She attempted this by shaking one of her books at it and treating it very much like she would treat a stray animal. “Shoo! Get out of here! Go home! I don’t have any food!”
She was not prepared for it to let out a very mighty sounding roar.Silent Spy Sorry for the delay again! QQ <3
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Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 6:44 pm
Tag loved getting the occasional afternoon off from work. It was a rarity, sure, but from time to time he'd cover emergency late night stories and get the following afternoon off. Normally he would use this time to do things he couldn't do on his normal time off - especially now that he had a girlfriend. So typically, these afternoons would consist of viewings of The Expendables 2 or saddening buffet lunches at a strip club. A few months before, these afternoons would consist of stopping by his son's daycare, but now that Chelsea's new boyfriend Mike was in the picture that wasn't quite the same option. For this particular afternoon, Tag was spending his time under the guise of Captain Osumilite, the most sharply dressed, most handsomest, most debonair of all the Captains, of all the Negaverse, of all the Chaos agents as far as he was concerned. His confident strut was interrupted by the sound of a roar - the monstrous sound of a youma. Osumilite grinned at the thought - oh, what poor Senshi had the youma found? A weak one, definitely. He couldn't even sense its energy signature! He hurried toward the sound of the roar only to find the beast face to face with a young - young - girl! Osumilite's eyes widened. s**t. He couldn't just let this youma attack this poor girl, could he? But he couldn't attack a youma - that would be hurting his own resources. No. He had to have a moral compass somewhere in his life, and that moral compass was always tied closely to his empathy for children. He didn't care that it was war when children were involved - they needed to be protected. He'll face whatever consequences there were for his actions. They couldn't be that severe, right? His superiors would understand he couldn't let an innocent child die. "Stay still and remain calm," Osumilite said with a low, calm voice. "I won't let this creature hurt you."
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Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 12:01 pm
Haven didn’t immediately see who was talking to her, but it sounded like an adult and in her experience adults could generally be trusted as long as they weren’t offering her candy outside of creepy looking vans. She knew better than to go off with someone she didn’t know, of course, but this was a monster and a pretty scary looking one if she were honest with herself, so she figured she didn’t have much other choice. Besides, his voice sounded nice enough, and she figured she could get away from a person better than a strange looking monster if it came down to it.
She froze in place immediately, standing very still after she’d dropped the arm waving the book around back down to her side. For a moment she wondered if this monster was anything like the Tyrannosaurus Rex in Jurassic Park that couldn’t see people so long as they didn’t move.
She’d have to add that to her notes later if it turned out to be true.
Her curiosity, however, could not be quelled, and she ended up turning her head just the slightest bit to get a look at the adult in question. A man, obviously; she’d been able to figure that much out by the sound of his voice. He was wearing a suit, so she assumed he must be a businessman of some sort. He must have a job, at least, or else he just liked dressing nice. Either way, a suit earned more trust than grungy looking clothes, and Haven found herself calming down more from his presence than the fact that he’d told her to.
“I don’t know where it came from,” she said, keeping her voice quiet in case talking loudly would make the monster angry again. “It was just there. I didn’t even know if they were real!”
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Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2012 6:11 pm
"If they were real?" he questioned. How much did she know? He couldn't exactly lie to her and say this was a normal creature and not some kind of monster, could he? It was something he would say to his son if a similar situation were to have happened with him, but his son is only three. This girl is obviously older than three...but was she smarter than a three year old? ... ...Okay, yeah, that was a fair thing to assume he supposed. "I'll explain everything you want to know later, but you should take a few steps back for your safety," he cautioned as he reached out his hand toward the youma, slowly gesturing it calmly, as if asking it to quietly sit down. He hoped that he wouldn't have to fight the beast, that maybe the beast can just roam elsewhere and leave them alone. There was no need to traumatize the girl any further.
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Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2012 2:41 pm
For a girl who didn’t have much of an imagination, Haven liked to pretend she knew more about things than she really did.
Either way, Haven did exactly what she was told and took a few cautious steps back, trying to keep an eye on the monster and the man who’d come to save her at the same time. Despite what some fictional books might say about characters keeping one eye on one thing and one eye on the other, Haven was pretty sure that wasn’t really possible and found her eyes shifting back and forth between the two instead.
“How do you know about them?” she asked.
She wasn’t about to tell him how she knew, except that she thought she’d seen one before and had been trying to figure out if monsters were real or if she was just going crazy ever since. She never told anyone what Peter had said about the subject, because she didn’t know if she could trust it and she really didn’t want people to start making fun of her—more than they already did—if it turned out he’d been feeding her lies.
“I always thought monsters were just make believe. People talk about them all the time like they’re supposed to be scary.”
And this one was, but that was because she was actually face-to-face with it instead of tucked into her bed which monsters didn’t live under.
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Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 4:47 pm
"Uh..." Osumilite started. He was normally a smooth talker, but normally that was talking himself out of trouble or sweet-talking a girl. Lying to a kid about youmas when one is standing right in front of her? Well that all just put him in a tough spot. "A few people know about these things, but we never are allowed to speak about them. You'll find out when you're older. It's, uh, a puberty thing. Or something. I'll explain more in just a second, I..." The youma growled. This youma wasn't backing down. With a frown, Osumilite pulled out his microphone and bopped the youma square on the nose. Apparently, that wasn't enough to dust the thing, instead just making it angrier as it began to bark and howl at him, snapping its furious teeth. "Nope, nope, nope!" Osumilite shouted backing away as he continued to whack the b***h with his microphone as if it were a game of Whack-a-Mole until the creature was destroyed into dust. Certainly none of this would terrify the little girl. He turned around slowly, trying his best to keep a comforting smile. "So. Any questions?"
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Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2012 12:00 pm
A puberty thing, huh?
Somehow she doubted that. She’d never heard about monsters during puberty, in any case, and she was pretty sure she’d heard enough about puberty by this point in her life to know that that was a big fat lie. Unless she was hallucinating, which maybe she could blame on hormones or she felt like finding a lame excuse to explain it all away, but she was pretty sure that was a load of bull. She was eleven, not five. She’d already been warned by her mother and that really awkward but very informative presentation the teachers had shown in class one day about puberty and becoming a woman.
And she happened to have a training bra, which obviously meant she was well on her way to growing up and should already know these things.
She was very proud of it.
Still, she kept her distance and stayed quiet for the time being, watching with both interest and fright as the man took on the monster all by himself. Yeah, adults were cool. Way better than kids her age who didn’t know anything and would rather act dumb instead of doing something worthwhile.
Like saving a little girl from a monster that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
“What… what happened to it?” she wondered once it was gone. Just… poof! And it disappeared into dust. “It’s not going to come back, is it? Where did it come from? How did you know how to make it go away? You shouldn’t lie about it, you know. I know adults like to lie and cheat on each other all the time, but shouldn’t you be more careful with an impressionable kid? What should I do if I run into another one? Are they all that mean?”
And on and on she rambled.
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Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2012 2:21 pm
"Adults don't lie and cheat all the time!" Osumilite insisted, his own guilty conscious eating away at him. "That is so black and white. Sometimes a relationship just isn't working out. Or sometimes a relationship is holding someone back and they need to step out of it. Or sometimes..." .... sometimes you share way too much unprompted personal information with an eleven-year-old stranger. Osumilite shook his head, rubbing his temples with one hand as he tried to get back on subject. He lowered down to her level and spoke calmly with a comforting tone, as if trying to assure her that everything will be all right. "There are these monsters in this city," he started. "And some of them can be dangerous. You may have heard of the terrorists in this city - some call them those fabled Senshi. They are even more dangerous - the true threat, really. You know they even try to get kids involved in this? Kids your age, they just throw them into danger." He shook his head in disgust. He refused to ever fight a child, and it sickened him that the Senshi used them as battling pawns. "But there are people in city like me who are trying to protect the innocent - people like you." "Normally, these creatures only go after each other, they shouldn't be going after citizens," he continued. Especially in broad daylight...and after children! "But if it ever happens again, I want you to run and call for help. Someone will come and help you - maybe there's even a terrorist out there with enough heart to not let a child get hurt - and they will get rid of the creature just like I did. But you can't do it on your own, it is too dangerous. Do you understand all of that? You need to promise you will run and stay safe."
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Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 10:15 am
Haven tried her very, very best to keep her mouth shut and not say anything just yet, as her brain was processing this new information a mile a minute.
Terrorists. Yeah, she’d heard about those. The world was full of terrorists these days, wasn’t it? And there were some in Destiny City. She’d heard about that on the news, but she hadn’t really wanted to believe it. She’d never really seen proof of it, and she knew the news could be biased anyway. Her dad said so. And her grandpa. And a lot of people, really—even news people. Liberal bias, conservative bias, all kinds of bias everywhere.
This was the second time she’d heard about monsters and senshi, but the information had come from two very different people. With Peter it’d been easy to pretend like it was a lie or a joke. He liked to tease her. This sort of stuff was just the thing he’d like to hold over her head, probably. But now here was this adult talking about the very same thing. Well, not the same thing, since he was making the senshi seem bad when Peter had made them seem good, but the basics behind it were pretty similar.
After standing there for a few moments with her mouth clamped shut looking speculative, Haven finally nodded to agree.
“Okay, I’ll run away and find someone to help me,” she promised. She hoped she sounded completely honest. “I understand.”
She didn’t, really. But that was what more research was for.
“Thank you for saving me. I couldn’t have done it by myself,” she said, since that was the polite thing to do and he’d been kind of cool while he was getting rid of the thing. She would just conveniently not mention how she wanted to keep looking into all this, since he seemed like a pretty responsible adult and might try to stop her if she knew.
Haven wondered if it would it be a good idea to find one of those senshi things and talk to them. Probably not, if this guy was telling the truth and they preyed on little kids.
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Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2012 8:10 pm
"Anytime kid," Osumilite nodded as he rose back up from her eye-level. He was worried about the girl, almost as worried as he was about his own son and his son's mother living unprotected in this dangerous city. "I am serious though: I don't want to find out you ran off and got yourself hurt. Be safe." He paused for a moment, reeling in his weak and emotional paternal concerns to return to his awesome, dashing, superior self. Or at least, the version of himself that he viewed as awesome, dashing, and superior. "Now you should probably run off before we call any further attention to us, get back to wherever you were going safely," he nodded to see her off. "You'll take care of yourself?"
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Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 3:41 pm
Haven nodded again, more enthusiastically this time, in the hopes that her earnestness would quell any suspicion.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Mom and Dad’ll be worried if I don’t get home soon.”
Lies, all of it.
Well, not really. They would have been worried, probably, if they’d actually be home themselves, but since the both of them tended to be gone quite a bit, they most likely wouldn’t even know that it had taken her a little more time than usual to get home this afternoon. And she had absolutely no plans to mention it to them, even if there was a part of her that thought she should. She should at least mention the monsters, right? Shouldn’t they know about this stuff? She didn’t want them running into monsters and getting hurt, too.
But she had her research to think of, and the minute she mentioned it—and the minute they believed her—she knew she’d never have the chance again.
“Bye!” she said, rushing off in the direction toward home, turning just long enough to wave and shout another “Thank you!”
She needed to hurry, not only to avoid more monsters, but to continue her quest for more answers.
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Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2012 11:15 pm
Captain Osumilite watched as the little girl ran off, then looked down at where he had dusted the youma. Crap, he probably shouldn't have done that...but what choice did he have? He looked around and waited for a moment - sensing the surroundings to make sure there were no powered figures around of either faction before hurrying off into secrecy to power down and head home, keeping his head low for the rest of the afternoon.
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