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 Posted: Wed Jan 15, 2014 8:14 pm
Another night, another patrol. Megiddo's mind was still spinning with confusion over her previous night's encounter - disenchanted with chaos? Like, that was a thing? That happened? - but she wasn't going to let it distract her from her purpose. Just because one corrupt senshi had become dissatisfied with her lot in life and practically given up didn't mean they were all going to just stop collecting energy. It was tempting to be optimistic - but she could sense a medium-rank chaos signature up ahead and Megiddo was willing to bet it was up to no good. Turning the corner, she saw the captain and his prey before they saw her. Making her mind up quickly, she vanished her pitcher, planning to quick-draw it in a moment and hope for the element of surprise - maybe she'd get a good hit to his jaw or the top of his head with the solid bottom. Then, it was showtime. "Hey," she called, stepping out from the shadows. "Let the bum go," she instructed the captain, steeling her voice: Come on, Megiddo. You've been to ******** space. Twice. You can do this. "I know he smells kinda gross but he's not hurting anyone and you should definitely take your hand of of his chest, like, yesterday. And leave his Starseed where it's meant to be." Was that firm enough? She tried to evaluate her own performance while the captain reacted to her arrival. "I'm going to count to five," she added. "One..."
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Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:22 pm
Tonight would be one of those nights where one could say Zippy was in a mood, but that was generally all the time now. IT was rarer to have a night when he wasn't in a mood.
In particular, though, he was starting to come out of it. He had found someone just out of their mind and drunk enough a few good whacks to the head made them suitable for energy draining and he'd managed not to kill him.
Until there was interference.
Half holding and half crouched over his victim, his concentration broke, and so did the energy orb he was extracting. He turned to scowl at the page, and in an act of petty defiance shoved his hand through the man's chest and removed his starseed with jerked and rushed force.
Ha ha.
"Who the ******** are you?" He asked, standing up and tossing the glimmering little gem in the air, showing off.
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Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 8:32 pm
He'd taken the star seed, Megiddo noticed, her stomach rolling. But then she'd sort of expected him to do that, and maybe if she hit him enough he'd give it back. She was pretty sure that if you put one back into a body quick enough it'd revive. Like a goldfish. Right? "I'm Megiddo of ******** Saturn and I'm here to wreck your s**t," she boasted. And she was going to take the starseed back and shove it in the bum and be a ******** hero. So that was going to be awesome. As soon as she did it. "I tried to be nice and count, but it looks like we're doing things this way." So, gathering speed by trying, slightly clumsily, to imitate Keanu Reeves in the Matrix by bouncing off a wall, Megiddo called her pitcher to hand, spun it so the blunt bottom was facing her target (that being the top of the negaverser's forehead), and- It could go one of two ways. It could work and she could wreck s**t. Or her s**t could be wrecked.
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Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2014 10:30 pm
Arrogance would always be Zippeite's great downfall as he hadn't expected the prissy little b***h who had dared to count at him like he was a child to attempt a brave lunge until he felt that stupid pitcher knock his jaw back.
It felt like all of his gray matter was reverberating out of his ears.
His hand tightened around the starseed in his frustration and anger until he could feel it crack. It was a minor and small action to him he barely paid any mind to, but was something fairly par for the course for him. He was mad, so no one would get use out of this thing, not it's owner, not him.
The shards just scattered to little filaments and dust in the alleyway.
He jerked his head forward and held it, making no effort to hide how absolutely pissed he was as he summoned his weapon to his free hand and whipped it around to a quick battle ready position. Then, he threw everything he had at the blur of purple he had designated as 'that knight', with no planning or any sort of finesse.
He had no idea what was going to happen when or if they collided, he just wanted to smack her.
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Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2014 1:10 am
Megiddo saw the sparkling dust from the starseed and gritted her teeth. Failure, she thought angrily, but the situation had been delicate from the start and the least she could do was make the captain see that his actions had consequences. Like, in this case, a world of pain. He lunged at her, a move that she anticipated too late to actually avoid, and his staff caught her across the stomach. Megiddo felt the air flee from her lungs, and she staggered backwards, reeling in pain, thinking to herself, Breathe, you ******** idiot. Yeah it ******** hurts but it's gonna ******** hurt more if you don't breathe. So she forced herself to breathe, and it <******** hurt, but she found her footing and adjusted her grip on the pitcher and took (very) quick stock of the situation, namely: She was a page.
He was a captain.
Can I make it any more obvious?
The hobo was dead.
She was outmatched.
What more can I say? Any reasonable person would have run, found a reasonably crowded area, powered down, and disappeared. Megiddo was not a reasonable person. Megiddo was pissed, had just watched this a*****e kill a dude, and she was roaring for payback. "You're in for a world of hurt, shitstain," she called, wheezing just slightly, and pitcher raised, she lunged at him again.
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Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2014 8:29 pm
Zippeite huffed to blow the indigo hair from his eyes, which watched her stumbled and gasp for air with free and obvious satisfaction that diminished the second she seemed to have located her ability to inhale again.
His face seemed to wordlessly communicate how disproportionately invested he was in seeing her choke in such short moments of interaction between the two of them.
But she bounced back, and faced with the resilient page, he petulantly frowned and adjusted his footing. "No," He stated, not nearly meaning to sound like such a brat in the way his tone wrapped around the word. It was a child to an adult 'No, bad, he doesn't want to' and not the defiant statement he had meant for that to be.
Whoops.
To save face he dove into her lunge, meeting her with a full on tackle and his staff at the front of him.
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Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2014 10:01 pm
Megiddo had accounted for pretty much anything - but not the captain charging at her instead of trying to parry her attack. Pull up, she thought urgently to herself. Abort abort abort. But she was already so close and moving so fast- This was going to hurt, this was going to hurt so much, the most she could hope for was to just swing her pitcher and try to hit him as hard as he was going to hit her- And then, suddenly, she collided with something dark and - furry? Well. This was super weird. Babylon grunted as the page collided with his back, tensing his legs to keep his balance. His focus was on the captain before him, shoulders squared to meet the blow. The staff came down on his shoulder - that hurt, but his thick coat absorbed some of the blow. Babylon brought his hands up to grab the end of the staff and hold it steady. The kid in front of him was young, he thought. The kid behind him was young, too. He had an obligation to keep them from murdering each other. Dead homeless man slumped against the wall or not, he realized belatedly. "This fight is over," he snarled to the captain. Megiddo backed up from the wall of fur. Knight, she thought, when she picked up the strong Order signature. She'd let him cover this and head home- "You. Stay," Babylon called over his shoulder. Megiddo heaved a sigh and froze in place. Babylon looked down at the captain and tightened his grip on the staff. "Stand down," he said. Which, granted, was not guaranteed to work. But if it did, he would be amazed with himself over a pretty amazing instance of pulling rank.
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Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 6:24 pm
Zippeite realized his staff was being held in place before he really registered by who or what and gave a it a quick jerk. It was unfortunately not hard enough to dislodge it from the knight's grasp, though, and that served as a bit of a wake up call.
He was around his size or bigger and a stage higher than him.
But more importantly he was the a*****e who punched him at summer camp. Zippy was just a baby lieutenant then, and just as tunnel visioned about destroying a senshi as he was about destroying Meggido. He remembered. Of course he did.
"Let go!" He ended up squawking out in an undignified voice crack.
Well this was going terribly.
"Who the ******** do you think you are?"
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Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 5:59 pm
Zippetite would probably be dismayed to learn that Babylon didn't remember him from summer camp. That had been a long time ago, and he'd done a lot since that had pushed something so long ago out of mind. He didn't tug back. That would have been juvenile, Babylon thought, and he was turning over a new leaf this year. "Nope," he replied, holding steady. It wasn't exactly easy, but a staff in hand was one that couldn't be used to hit you on the head. "I'm Babylon Knight of Mercury," he said, feeling better about this by the second. "And you're going to stand down," because he could still sense the page standing behind him and he was pretty sure she'd back him up if the fight started up again. Which sort of made him have to consider what he was going to do to this kid once he did stand down, because, you know, he had just killed someone. Babylon didn't want to just beat up on someone who had surrendered, and calling the cops seemed like a bad idea - law enforcement generally seemed keen on remaining uninvolved, and he didn't have a cell phone on him when he was in uniform, anyway. A stern talking to, then. "Where the ******** does a kid like you pick up such a total and complete disregard for human life?" Babylon demanded.
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Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2014 9:45 pm
Zippeite opened his mouth to spew something that was probably going to be defiant and vulgar and insulting. That was clearly where he was going with this, as soon as Babylon spoke like an authority figure and gave him an order.
But it didn't quite get out, something else stopped him before a single syllable was uttered and he promptly closed his mouth and knitted his brow. Still defiant, but something new had, just barely, eeked into the mixture.
He spared a sideways glance in the corner of his eye for the corpse.
It was an obvious question, but one he hadn't ever been asked. Which was disturbing when one realized Zippeite never really valued human life much at all. People close enough, sure, but the majority of the world out side of his small sphere of knowledge seemed to be populated by cardboard cut outs and one dimensional stereotypes if his subconscious had anything to say about it.
They weren't lives, they were resources. And he could waste resources, just to show he could.
He was stronger than cardboard.
"He's a nobody," He argued, but the passion and rage seemed to have dampened. He tried to ramp it up a notch for his following statement. "What's he to you?"
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Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2014 11:07 am
So help him, Babylon was sorely tempted to take this stupid hitty stick and crack it over his knee, and then they'd see how much bravado this a*****e kid had left after that. Or, he could sigh in a way that he figured was probably, in terms of literary description, somewhere between long-suffering and exasperated. Given that he and the kid were at a stalemate re: stupid hitty stick, Babylon sighed. "He's not a nobody," he retorted, looking briefly towards the corpse. Not that there was a whole lot that Babylon could glean about the man's life from looking at his dead body, so he was going to have to work with a bunch of generalizations. "So maybe they'll find him out here in the morning, see that he was probably homeless, and conclude he died when the temperature got too low, and you'll be off the hook." The police never did figure out to look for stolen starseeds. "But when you go and you kill to take that ill-gotten energy," he said. Megiddo interjected, because she was still there and watching with close fascination, "He broke the starseed. He's a clumsy a*****e and he wasted it." Babylon nodded. "When you waste someone's entire life," he reiterated. "Civilians are people as much as you and I, and they are born, and they live, and you can't know from looking at them what their worth is. I don't know who he was, but I know he had a life, and a story, and people who he cared about, and you've gone and taken that away for some shitty macho posturing. All I ever hear from the negaverse is about how you're protecting the earth, but I don't see how killing innocents and releasing hellbeasts into the streets is protecting anything." He tightened his grip on the staff, twisting it just slightly under his hands. "So I'm going to tell you one more time to stand down," said the knight.
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Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2014 1:31 pm
There was a weird moment where the thoughts racing through Zippeite's head seemed to go so quickly it felt like his cognitive features had shut down completely.
His hands were glued to his staff, and he seemed dumbfounded on how to escape without it, which meant that when Babylon twisted it beneath both of their hands he felt a weird gulp of panic in his chest rise up to his throat.
He blanked on all logical solutions and felt like a trapped animal.
Until he banished the thing to subspace, which offered a strange sense of relief to himself, and probably the page and the knight in his presence as well. He was no longer physically stuck to Babylon, and in his vulnerability at not having a weapon present, had a weird sense of weight lifted off of his shoulders. For a glimpse of a second he was just the lost and scared teenage boy he'd always been.
The lecture about killing still irked him, though.
He glanced to the corpse and back to the Mercury knight, and looked visibly, painfully confused as he tried to parse out the complicated layers of all that went in to the easy way in which Zippeite took starseeds without guilt and crushed life forces in petty frustration.
It wasn't like he slept soundly at night, but he wouldn't call it guilt. He wasn't sure what he would call it. The entire very complex issue was something that had been scabbed over for years and needed more than one lecture to peel back the layers of hardened and calloused skin and scar tissue.
Ultimately, he narrowed his gold eyes at Babylon and answered him. "I don't protect anybody," He stated with no attempt to hide the bitterness and bile in his tone. And then his line of vision flicked back to Meggido behind him. Contempt, for her and her stupid rescue.
"And no one protects me either. I don't owe anyone anything." This was what he insisted. Nothing. Not dignity or salvation for anyone. He appeared to direct his final sentiments to Megs instead of the knight between the two of them before he teleported away.
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Posted: Sat Feb 01, 2014 6:10 pm
Babylon watched the captain flee. There wasn't anything you could really do when a negaverser had it in their mind to teleport. So, the knight shrugged, turned back to the page behind him, and said, "I hate it when they do that."
Megiddo nodded. "Not really fair," she agreed, sizing Babylon up. He was short. He had a scar and a stupid haircut. She couldn't decide if he was brave or stupid. "What would you have done if he'd stayed?"
Babylon frankly hadn't been sure - maybe talk the kid down, or fight him if he'd kept roaring for a fight. But he'd rather turn the question back on the page than show his indecision. "What would you have done?" he asked her.
Megiddo tossed her pitcher into the air and caught it again, lips pursed. "Killed him," she said. "I'm going home now. It's a school night."
She tossed the knight a lazy half-salute, and leapt away into the dark.
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