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 Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2013 2:24 pm
Palatine had not yet developed a steady schedule of patrol.
She doubted she ever would. Scheduled the rest of her life might be, full of meetings, phone calls, legalities, knighthood was unanticipated and in some ways unwanted. It disrupted the peaceful harmony she’d only just begun to find between her career and the shambles of the family she’d sacrificed for it, leaving her stumbling along, trying to find some way to fit it in, to set aside time to do what she knew was right whether or not she had any fondness for what she’d become.
Some nights passed with hardly a thought for it; she could leave work and head home like she might have before awakening. Other nights weren’t quite as simple, and something would invariably arise to remind her that she was more than her career and her kids—a news story, a rumor, a brief passing mention of the terrorists within the city—leading her out on a fool’s errand, searching for monsters or evil in a city that no longer seemed familiar to her.
Tonight, she wandered along the streets some distance from work but not quite close to home, getting used to the new senses that came along with the useless teapot and the hideous pink ruffles. She felt no youma nearby, which should have pleased her but almost made her feel bored with her adventureless night-time gallivanting. She did, however, begin to sense another presence that felt like Camelot had, though not nearly as strong.
Palatine endeavored to follow it not from any desire for company, but in the interest of testing the limits of that sixth sense that tipped her off to it in the first place.
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Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:47 pm
Alfheim had been doing his best to be good and get out and about. But the recent hullabaloo hadn't exactly been encouraging, especially since he'd only had weirder experiences with the Order side of things than ever before. Tense sparring and a random assault.
He had been just sitting on a low ledge, feet swaying in the open air. He had way too many people just 'drop' in from these stupid perches and his sister was rarely on the ground and he was trying to figure out the appeal of all the altitude.
Nope.
He jumped down and reveled in his feet being in contact with the solid earth again and was so engrossed in this thought he saw the approaching page before he even noticed her aura.
"Whoa!" He made an instinctively defensive stance when he did finally notice her. After his little tumble with Nysa, he was a little skittish about other knights. Probably not healthy considering he was one himself.
He tried to calm down and stop flailing all over the place as he looked the bright knight over. He smirked. "You come here often or were you just attracted by the overall ******** of monsters, mayhem, and angry teenagers?"
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Posted: Tue Feb 26, 2013 1:45 pm
Coming to a stop once she had found the page whose aura she’d tracked, Palatine stared for a few long moments with an expression that looked decidedly unimpressed.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Nothing, really; just another hapless page like her—maybe a teenager, maybe another adult, though she’d been warned the latter were rare and it therefore left her questioning her information sources now that the first two knights she’d run into after Sessrumnir had been closer to her in age. Mostly she was just confused by the flailing, and perhaps due to her utter lack of interpersonal relationships outside of work, she couldn’t tell if the “come here often?” was meant in genuine curiosity, in jest, or in a pathetic excuse to flirt.
She preferred the former two if only because she insisted she had no time and absolutely no desire for the latter.
“Jumpy much?” she said, scrutinizing this page the same way she’d scrutinized Camelot.
Brown, light green, a little gray, and the circles with the crosses through them.
Earth then.
“Yeah, you know, I was getting bored with life,” she uttered a sarcastic reply. “Too much work, not enough play. So I thought to myself, ‘hey, why don’t I become a knight?’ because that seems like the thing to do these days. Felt like reliving my youth or whatever. Came back to Destiny City to see what all the fuss is about, but so far there’s only been a Norseman, King Arthur’s castle, and… you… whoever you’re supposed to be. Wait, wait, let me guess. Atlantis? Vulcan? Rivendell? Not Never Never Land?”
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Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 9:38 pm
Palatine's scrutiny was met with a contrastingly mellow apathy and a shrug. He would've thought the absurdity was enough to communicate he had meant everything as a joke, but then the lady just seemed to have a serious stick up his a** and he couldn't be bothered into caring why.
"Hey, hey hey," He said, clasping a hand over his chest in mock distress, "I have had people literally falling out of the sky and gettin' in my face for days now, and one bitchy little man slapped me with a glove. s**t's weird around here, I can be jumpy."
She started rambling off possible wonders and suddenly he had lost the urge to introduce himself, indicated by his cartoonish frown. "Possibly. I might be a bit too old to play Peter Pan, though," He snarked, instantly regretting the jab at his own age. Clinging to youth for forever and a day.
"You first, Queen Elizabeth."
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Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:47 am
“Queen Elizabeth?”
Palatine cocked her head and wore an expression as if to say “is that the best you can do?”, but then her guesses hadn’t been particularly clever, and though she had a sudden impulse to correct him with a needless lecture on proper Elizabethan attire (as she could only assume he meant the First rather than the Second given that both of their outfits appeared quite dated), she deemed it pointless and squashed it down.
“Fair enough,” she said, and shrugged, accepting the remark whether or not it was correct.
She sincerely hoped she didn’t end up with a ruff if or when she reached Sessrumnir’s level and became a Squire.
“Palatine, Page of Venus,” she continued, lowering herself into an exaggerated bow. Once she had risen, she made no move to draw closer just yet and instead remained in her spot a few yards away, not quite as companionable and she probably should have been if she ever intended to make friends of her allies. But then she didn’t really have any idea of what the hell she was doing, and she hadn’t ever been very good at making friends in the first place.
“Sorry for sneaking up on you,” she figured she may as well apologize. Even if she didn’t know how to make friends, it still seemed appropriate to be friendly, though she wouldn’t have called it “sneaking” since she hadn’t made it a point to hide from him. “I haven’t even been back in town for a year and now everything’s blown up in my face. Knights, magic, monsters. It’d be amusing if it wasn’t so… actually, it’s still amusing because it’s so… trite... I mean, there’s a guy running around who looks like a crusader calling himself Camelot. Next thing I know someone’ll be trying to tell me the Holy Grail is real and hidden somewhere in the city.”
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Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:14 am
The lecture would've indeed been pointless and probably tuned out with a lot of polite 'uh-huhs' and questioning whether or not you could use Elizabeth as an adjective. Noah Connolly was brilliant with numbers, marginally above average in some sciences and wholly dense and dull in most ever other academic subject, including historical accuracy.
He just thought she looked frilly.
He could do introductions, though! "Alfheim of Earth." Any amusement to be had in that Rivendell had been one of her guesses since his wonder did have a Tolkien canon incarnation was lost entirely on him.
"Oh, it's fine," He waved off her apology. "S'not like you were really sneaking anyway. I'm just jumpy because, like I said, bitches be dropping out of the sky lately," There was a mildly over dramatic arm encompassing gesture to emphasize that they literally dropped. "Camelot isn't that bad, I think. I mean, relatively speaking," He laughed. "Teenage girls popping out of mirrors, bugs the size of dalmatians, estranged family members being were-cats," He rubbed his cheek and frowned a bit, "Little boys with way too much hair running around attacking people for no reason. s**t's crazy."
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Posted: Mon Mar 18, 2013 2:55 pm
“I can imagine,” Palatine said dully.
She didn’t really want to imagine it, though, if only because she was sure her imagination would take her down a mental road she really wasn’t in the mood to travel. She hadn’t met any kids so far, not the teenagers or the much younger ones she’d been told had been swept into it all, but the knowledge that they were out there somewhere, getting into trouble and causing trouble in turn, did not sit well with her. It made her distinctly uncomfortable, and riled her admittedly stunted maternal instincts.
“Crazy” was perhaps a bit of an understatement—she wasn’t sure yet, but everything she’d heard so far seemed to veer away from “crazy” and straight towards “******** up.”
“You don’t seem too… fond… of this,” she observed, fairly certain “fond” wasn’t really the word she was looking for (who could really be fond of any of this?), but as she currently lacked the proper vocabulary necessary to place any sort of description on this—and she was still getting a feel for what “this” was—she figured it was the best she could do.
Not that she really blamed him. Nothing of what he’d mentioned sounded terribly amusing, and she couldn’t say she was all that fond of it herself, though it had less to do with the experiences she’d had and more to do with it disrupting her efforts to fix a life that had already seen enough drama without adding the monsters and magic on top of it.
“Can’t say I’ve really seen much of the crazy s**t. Just a youma or two,” Palatine admitted, making a mental note that he seemed to know Camelot, “although to a normal person I guess that would be crazy enough, but then we’re not quite normal. Lucky us.”
Except she didn’t feel very lucky at the moment. “******** my life” would probably be far more appropriate.
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Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 7:14 pm
"No, not really," Alfheim said with a casual shrug and stretch and not much solid focus given to the conversation. "But given the options I guess it's preferable to being ignorant youma bait or a terrorist labeled teenager in a miniskirt. Destiny City, land of possibilities," He said in a light, joking laughter that trailed off into a serious and deadpan, "Never shoulda left California."
"I mean I try to help this lady, right? Just some lady, wandering around the park, and whe starts chewin' my a** out about what's this, what's that, why would you attack Chaos folks, don't you know how hard it is to get healthcare when you have a preexisting condition?' I mean... what?! And then there's the chibi senshi, I don't even, I just... I... I can't deal with that," He held up his hands defensively. And he couldn't, really, being the perpetrator of many a ruined sparring session because he'd rather distract Hypnos away from the war with cookies than train for battles or something equally useless.
"But I guess I gotta or this other lady chews my a** out. Oh yeah, a dead lady! Just hangs around at my wonder being all ghostly and critiquing my lifestyle."
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Posted: Sun Apr 07, 2013 2:00 pm
Palatine raised an eyebrow but decided she wasn’t interested enough to question what his lifestyle might pertain to, or what parts of it anyone, living or dead, would feel the need to critique. In the end, it wasn’t any of her business, nor was she the sort to make it her business.
“That’s sounds…”
She trailed off when she realized she had no idea what she’d meant to say. A part of her wanted to offer sympathy because she thought that was the polite thing to do, and while she was entirely capable of actually being sympathetic, particularly toward people who actually had been through some tough experiences, for one reason or another she couldn’t seem to call that emotion forth from all the conflicting feelings this war, so newly introduced to her, and brought into being.
Or perhaps it was empathy she lacked. She couldn’t empathize because she had so few experiences with which to compare in regards to the war. Everything she knew of drama and hardship came from being a normal woman. Nothing about this war seemed quite as difficult.
Yet.
“So you weren’t involved in this until you came here,” she observed, rather than offering her own unwanted critique of his behavior. Whether or not she could understand where he was coming from she was still paying attention, and she caught enough to find a similarity between them and what experiences they’d had in becoming knights.
“Does that mean it’s all confined here to Destiny City?” she wondered. “What the hell for? It was a hell hole when I was younger. Not much better now.”
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Posted: Sun Apr 07, 2013 7:03 pm
"Oh, no, I mean..." Alfheim shrugged. "I was born here and all. Went to high school here and stuff. Left, though, and I've been back for like, three years."
And then he paused as something occurred to him. "Wait, has this s**t been goin' on for three years? Or more?" That would be horrifying. He knew something was going on the first time he almost got youma'd to death and some teenybopper in chaps came to his rescue but the thought of something going on for years while he remained oblivious was unpleasant.
He also hadn't been astute enough to realize that all of the terrorist things, every single instance, was related to the war. He could see them getting mixed up, though, it was just no one really explained it to him.
No one ******** explained anything to him.
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Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 7:14 am
“Hell if I know,” Palatine replied with a shrug.
Alfheim’s response, however, was met with growing interest, not for his apparent ignorance (which she couldn’t blame since she still felt fairly ignorant herself) but for a couple of similarities she managed to pick up regarding their respective experiences.
Born here, schooled here, left, returned, knighted.
That seemed to imply that Destiny City itself was somehow important, though Palatine could still see absolutely no reason for it, and without the proper information she could easily be jumping to conclusions. The City didn’t differ much from her memories of it, except that it had gotten more dangerous. She didn’t think any of this had been an issue when she’d left eight years ago, but then she hadn’t exactly been paying much attention to things like magic and monsters back then. It could very well have been going on for a long time without her noticing at all.
“I have no idea how long this has been going on,” she admitted. Except that Michael had told her he’d awakened shortly after returning home from overseas, so she at least knew something of his timeframe.
“At least a year and a half,” she added. “That’s the best guess I can make. I didn’t know about it until this past November, though. I don’t remember hearing much of anything before then, just the usual terrorist crap you hear around town. Thought it was an overreaction. Doesn’t really answer why here and why now, but maybe that’s one of those annoying little questions that doesn’t really have an answer. I’m sure running around trying to figure it out is going to be so much fun,” she concluded, just the slightest bit bitter.
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Posted: Sun Apr 28, 2013 8:11 pm
"Ah," Alfheim sighed with a little bit of a frown on his features. He wasn't sure if he should find comfort in the fact she didn't seem to know much more than him or just dread whatever the future had in store.
Everyone seemed to like superimposing the idea that death was right around the corner for the ignorant.
"Well it's been about two years since a youma first tried t'take a bite out of my a**. And then the confusion later," He laughed, "You know, considering a snake monster busted through the way and got blasted by a teenager in some kind of awkward slutty-sailor-cowboy outfit thing. So," He glanced down and played with the string on his bracers. "Things like that make me grateful I just look like I fell out of a nerd convention or something."
He tried not to take too much to heart about the fact she was all bitterness and annoyance while he laughed and joked and fiddled with all the annoying little laces of his uniform between over the top exclamations.
"So..." He always did need to debate a bit before getting what seemed too personal. "If you have such a distaste for it, why are you out here? I mean, if you don't mind me asking."
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 8:27 am
“I…” Palatine began, held a long, almost reluctant pause, and then hesitantly finished, “have kids…”
Which sounded sort of forced and weak to her own ears, particularly as an excuse as to why she went out looking for monsters at night considering she didn’t really make it a point to be the mom sort of mom. She was crap at it. She’d learned that years ago, though she ignored it for as long as she could, at least until she couldn’t anymore, what with the newest one staring her right in the face reminding her why it’d been so long since she’d bothered.
But there was some truth to it. It wasn’t her only reason, but it was the simplest one she had, and perhaps the easiest to explain at the moment.
The rest she was still figuring out.
“It just seems like the right thing to do,” she added and shrugged, glancing down at the pavement since that seemed easier than actually meeting someone’s eye when the personal stuff she didn’t really want to talk about came up.
It was probably really rude to say “none of your damned business,” but the sentiment was there in the tone of her voice when she returned the question, “So why are you out here then? Just tired of being youma bait and getting your a** chewed out?”
That seemed, to her, about as weak of a reason as her own.
It was almost reassuring.
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Posted: Sat May 11, 2013 8:12 pm
Her answer, offset by her tone, garnered a sudden, raising of his hands, palms out as if in surrender. He was having flashbacks to a karate class with another single mother who was prepared to kick his a** for something as simple as a joke because kids were for some reason a big deal and not to be joked about.
He didn't want to know or need to know, especially since he was picking up way more hostility in her tone than he was comfortable with. "Hey, that's cool," He said, trying to sound amiable. He liked kids! But touchy single moms were starting to become a 'type' in his head.
And then he made a weird little frown at his own reasons. "No, it's not that." So what was it? The more he thought of it, the more distasteful it seemed.
"I've always been the family ******** up," He said after an awkward pause that was only long enough to show that there had been a hitch in the flow of conversation. "I guess it was just the opportunity to be something more. Well that and when I awakened this punk threw a tantrum about how it should've been my baby sister, so I guess I got somethin' to prove."
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Posted: Mon May 20, 2013 2:40 pm
Realizing perhaps a bit too late that her voice had grown more hostile than she’d intended, Palatine took a breath to settle her nerves and released it on a heavy sigh followed by a mumbled, “Sorry.”
It certainly wasn’t her intention to isolate herself or push her allies away by being so guarded, but it was a method of self-preservation she’d become a bit too familiar with over the years. It was the easy way out of any awkward conversation, and her usual approach to temporarily escaping the guilt that kept piling on.
“Something more, huh?” she wondered. After a moment she made herself look up again, her expression still a bit distant even as she tried to keep her voice conversational. “Sounds sort of selfish, doesn’t it?”
Not that she couldn’t understand. It was a familiar enough feeling, though she hadn’t yet considered it as a reason of her own.
“I guess my reasons are kind of selfish, too, when it comes down to it,” she admitted, difficult as it was for her to do so. “I use my kids as an excuse, but the truth is I’m probably doing it more for myself. Not to protect them, but… probably running away from them. Can’t say I’m too much of a stranger to ******** up.”
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Palatine cleared her throat awkwardly and broke eye contact. “I should… go,” she hesitated, unsure which would be more polite under the circumstances—to stay and attempt more conversation, or to leave him be.
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