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 Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2014 12:54 pm
The air shifted from the slightly cool air of the park at night, and the smell of grass and leaves and cigarette smoke, to dry and warm, and the faint hint of rust, and the ground under Zircon's feet was not grass but broad flagstones dusted with swirls of red earth that eddied in the breeze that came in between the pillars that still, wearily, held up the remains of an red tiled roof over the walk way leading to what might once have been some great paddock and stables, though little remained of that now but an empty shell, and the faded paint above arched doorways that might have been names. In spite of the now parched, dry air, there were even gutters, with carved bull heads that tilted their open mouths out as though they were silently praying for a rain that had not come for generations, their styling not dissimilar to the ones on Kairatos' armor. He let go of her hands gingerly, waiting to see how she reacted before he decided if he should sweep her home or not, trying to not get caught up in the memories that were trying to push their way to his attention. There should be doors on the stables, wooden ones with brightly colored paint. The smell of straw and the deep voices of great bulls and cows, but all those things were gone. He wasn't even sure why they had ended up here. Last time they had ended up in a small office, where he'd rediscovered his ring. But maybe he just didn't want to think about anything to do with the rings right now, and therefore they'd come here. Someplace that had been.... ...Peaceful. "Sorry... bear with me." He waved a hand trying to banish the memories for now. He didn't need to remember Bellona or ... or Asterion. Whoever the hell....whatever the hell Asterion was. He could remember watching calves frolic in the grass when he wasn't trying to show an old friend her dream. "...This. This is Mars. This is Kairatos. What's left of it from the old war."
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Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2014 9:48 pm
Zircon felt a lurch as the world around her changed in pressure, the Earth almost unwilling to let her go. It felt like the tug of being summoned by a General-King, but almost heavier, and had Kairatos not been holding her hand she probably would have stumbled into the clay on arrival. The first moment or so her eyes were tightly shut, trying to account for the massive headache she suddenly had, and when she felt him loose his grip she reached to rub her temples.
Her first sensations of the planet were non-visual: the light brush of a breeze on her hair, the taste of dry air, the metallic tang of rust ringing sharp in her nostrils. Slowly, however, she opened her eyes, and what she saw made them open even wider. She took a few steps forward, staring blankly at the broken ruins and the bleak scenery around her. It all seemed so unreal...that is, until she looked at the ground, the deep red color of the dirt beneath her feet. She knelt down and ran a hand across the surface of a flagstone, looking closely at the red smear across her palm, then dusting it off on a pant leg. It certainly looked and smelled like oxidized iron: if this was a prank, it was an elaborate one, and someone had done at least a little research.
"...It's warmer than I would have thought," she murmured finally, pulling herself to her feet. She began to move for the walkway, inspecting the pillars and the roof with a careful gaze. Looking down, she followed one of the bull-headed gutters with her eyes, tracing it all the way back to Kairatos himself. She blinked, giving him a bewildered stare, then pressed a hand to her face, letting out the breath she hadn't even realized she'd been holding.
"I bet NASA would have never thought to look for this," Zircon breathed. As she slid her hand down one cheek, she left lines of dusty orange on her face, but she didn't seem to notice at the moment. Everything else was just too...everything. She was on Mars. She could tell, by how small the sun looked in the waning afternoon light. This was the real deal.
Zircon began to wipe at one of her eyes. It was the dust, certainly. Captains of the Negaverse didn't cry when they were on recon missions.
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Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2014 5:13 am
"I'm not sure they can..." He admitted, watching her examination with a certain sense of... pride? He wasn't sure what he was proud of exactly. That she liked his dilapidated ruin of a city? Not even the city. A stable. "I kind of wonder if it's glamored..." He walked over and put his hand to one of the arches, running his fingers over the rough plaster, and the strange combination of vivid past and equally vivid present made him feel like he was fighting Vertigo. He wasn't sure this was normal, but this was only his second trip, and he hadn't had to focus on anything else other than himself and his surroundings last time. "...They used to keep bulls and cows here." He offered, trying to get his head around things by sharing. "...Big ones." He pointed out toward the flat expanse tat had once been pasture. "All that used to be a field... and there were... training pastures out behind." He wasn't sure how she'd take to an explanation of how he knew that, so he tried to change the subject a little. "We can walk around and explore if you want. I haven't had a chance to do much looking around myself yet, so..." She looked... he wasn't sure he could call it anything but overwhelmed and he still wasn't sure if that was good or bad. Was she... No way. Not Zircon.
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Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 9:59 pm
"It would make sense," Zircon responded, thinking about empty pictures from Mars rovers that would never stumble across this place. "Everything else about the war is smoke and mirrors to civilians, why not this?"
Letting Kairatos speak about the place gave the Captain room to regain her composure, listening passively with nods in between each of his statements. He seemed distracted by recalling the information, but perhaps he had only recently learned about the place, and found it to be as new and foreign as she did. As she scanned the expanse of the ruins, she tried to imagine the fields, the stables and the pastures. It was difficult, given how worn the ruins were, but eventually she could make out a rough estimate in her mind.
"We're here, so we might as well look around," she said with a nod, walking past him towards the fields with a curious stare out to the pastures. It was hard to restrain herself, to keep from wandering off and overturning every stone in the place, but she knew there was some amount of decorum to be observed. This was his house, and there were sure to be rules, and when she was this far out of her own territory she knew she needed to be on her best behavior.
She looked back to Kairatos, doing her best not to fidget in place. "Where do you want to go first?"
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Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2014 5:21 pm
"We can start... uh... pretty much wherever you feel like." He shrugged. "This is only the second time I've gotten around to coming up here... so... honestly I may not even be the best guide right now until I sort things out. Honestly it's... strange even for me." He wasn't sure if he should tell her why he knew even the parts he did, or if that would upset her. AMItotic crappyshorttag is crappyandshort
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Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2014 6:00 pm
Zircon didn't need to be given permission twice: once she heard the words 'wherever you feel like', she began clambering over the worn-down fence and into what was once pasture, hefting her legs up and over like she couldn't just jump over the thing. Sure, there was a well-paved path to the stables, but her way was more direct, and it gave her room to look around the dusty land as she half-jogged towards the main building.
"Where have you been so far?" she called back to the Knight, peeking inside the doorway with a cautious tilt of her head. "We could set up a perimeter, go about it foot by foot." Already her mind was calculating, trying to decipher the faded words with an added sparkle in her eyes. Something about the thrill of discovery tore away at the bitterness and the anger caused by years of fighting. More than a warrior or a soldier, Zircon was an explorer, and this was like striking gold.
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Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 4:11 am
"That would be...right here... and... this... building over..." He paused to orient himself. "That one I think, but I was inside last time and bailed after I found something I was looking for." He admitted. Spirit of exploration... he had failed you. "Might as well make this the starting point and go from there." Which she kind of already had. He trotted after her obediently, glancing around as the ghosts of memories crowded around at the back of his mind. He'd have to come back here alone again, maybe spend some time sorting this out, because he couldn't spend every trip staring into space and wandering around in a daze... at best it was inconvenient.Also strange, since with his missing memories, fragments of a past long turned to dust crept up and bumped elbow and rib with memories only months or years old, like someone had skipped ahead large chapters in his book and kept flipping back and forth.
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Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 10:00 pm
"Perfect." Zircon looked to the remaining tiles of roofing, unsure if they would stay secure during her inspection, and then entered the ruins itself, stepping inside one of what looked like it might have been a stall. Curious, she lifted up her arms, spreading out her fingertips. No matter how she turned, she couldn't touch from wall to wall, and the realization made her hum something in approval.
"These pens are huge, even for a large animal," she remarked, crossing to one of the corners and counting her steps to try and estimate the square footage, and then glanced up at the relative size of the ceiling. "I've only seen a few youma that wouldn't clear that entrance, do you think those scratches on the posts up there might be gore-marks from their horns? That would mean--"
She paused, looking back at Kairatos, who seemed...distracted, looking past her towards something that wasn't there. "Is something wrong?"Ryuthulhu Kind of took some liberties, let me know if I need to change anything!
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:41 am
"Not... wrong, it's just this place is... It's weird for me." He wasn't sure she was ready to hear why, but it was hard to avoid it. "...I... remember parts of it." She was going to find out eventually. Might as well hear the truth from him. "...From when this place was alive." "Like the calves in the field. Or... this one. This was Skiron. He was a huge black bull with an particularly impressive set of horns. Long as my arms. He belonged to a woman about your size. Black hair, purple eyes like a storm, and the best bull dancer of her time. Better than me. But I was better with net work." He paused, and shook it off. "...That's all I've got for now." Not entirely true, but he thought it was maybe enough. "Well, I mean... he was about yeah big." He gestured in the air at the height he remembered the huge black bulls shoulder. "At the shoulder." he paused and added another fragment from the intense bursts that had been bothering him until he voiced them, like they demanded witnessing. "He used to stretch his neck up higher to make the notches from his horns just little higher, like he was fooling anyone."
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:18 am
Zircon stopped her assessment of the building the moment Kairatos spoke, tilting her head in query as her face scrunched up in confusion. "What do you mean, 'you remember?" She watched him, carefully, as he recounted his story of some great bull that had lived in this stall. Looking at the base evidence before her, it all added up, but at the same time, it didn't.
"I thought you said you'd only been here once before," she added, as if trying to work through an explanation of her own. "And you haven't been a Knight long enough to have experienced this first hand, this place has to have been a ruin for decades, if not centuries." Apprehension pulled across her features, and she began to give him a more discerning eye. Something about his story was missing.
"How could you possibly know all of that, when we can't even uncover the most basic records from the Rift about the war?" Something about this was fishy, something about this seemed utterly unfair.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 6:21 pm
Yeah... yeah he hadn't thought she was going to like it, and he leaned against the wall in a vaguely defensive, but also apologetic stance. "I told you it was weird." He added. "Senshi aren't the only ones who can be reborn apparently, but being tied to Chaos... you don't know it. You don't know where you might be knight of, you don't know if you were reborn, if it runs in your family... none of it. If there's no records, I'm guessing they weren't terribly flattering and are gone. And given when it fell... it's going to be a stretch to pin it on Order. I don't have... I don't have magical instant knowledge of everything. I don't have grand answers to why us. I know that the person that lived and died here before the War was... was me, but not what that means for me now. And I know I used to know Princess Iris back in the day, that I had a horse named Bellona, and trained with a bull named Asterion. If any of that tells you why me, why any of us, or why the war, that's great, but otherwise it's mostly... it's weird. It's a little creepy and it's not terribly useful to me. I don't know what I might remember in the future, but right now it's just... it's not going to change the world that we live in now. If I thought it would I'd try and do more for the place, instead of showing you the weird crap that came with my new title because I thought you'd get a kick. Sorry I don't have better, or at least more... mystical sounding answers, but I don't."
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Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2014 11:47 am
It sounded like a lot of White Moon propaganda, the way he talked about Chaos denying her some magical legacy, and Zircon didn't like it. She tried to keep her face impassive, but there were little clues to be found in the way she crinkled her nose when he said 'Princess Iris', the backwards sway of her hips as she shifted her weight away from him. Even if something in her eyes was curious for more, everything else was screaming no.
"I've seen visions, too," she retorted, turning away from him with crossed arms, "When we tried to take back Elysion. Of Endymion's betrayal, of the utter harm that Order's caused ever since our Prince left us behind. It's a history that never included us as individuals, and that's why we fight in the first place, so that we might have a voice, leave behind a legacy." Something in her voice dropped, and she glanced down at her branded wrist, tracing the mottled flesh with her other hand.
"Is that why you left?" Zircon glanced back to Kairatos, and then upwards to the stall ceilings. Her voice had lost some of its softness, now closer to its usual cold tones. "So you could unlearn one name for another, for a piecemeal history you might have never otherwise missed? To tie yourself to a dying pasture and the ghost of a stable?"
Zircon wanted to pretend that she had never been impressed by the Wonder, but it was too late, and she cursed that her curiosity had allowed her to be so open, so naive. Her eyes wandered over the bones of the rafters, scornful and bitter. "I...I do get a kick. It's just hard to accept, after everything else we've been told."
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Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2014 1:23 pm
"I couldn't give a ******** about whether or not Endymion couldn't see past the end of his... hormones or not." Kairatos snorted. "The reason I left is so I would have a choice. I left so I wouldn't spend the rest of my life wondering how long it would amuse a certain General King that he felt I was useless, barely sentient, and no better than an glorified attack dog. That my efforts, even my promotion were rubber stamped affairs because I would forever be one medal, one star seed, one kneel short of being good enough, and that I could be yanked out of my life at any second to rub that in." He cut himself off, realizing his voice had been rising in volume and fury, huffed loudly and stared at the wall. This was not on her. None of it. She hadn't done any of it. She didn't deserve to be yelled at for not knowing better than the party line. "I don't come here because I think knowing about a long gone past will change my life, I brought you here because it's Mars and that matters to you. everything that matters to me right now is back home on earth and probably waiting to order take out, or to explain her puppy ate my shoe. Again. But figuring out if I can fix my damn shoe is still better than anything Zink gave me. You can make your own choice, but don't assume mine was wrong just because they tell you it is. I don't give a s**t what their opinion is. If it's your, personal opinion? That's a different matter, but even if you hate it I'm not going back alive."
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Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:27 am
As Kairatos began to raise his voice, Zircon took a step back, lowering her stance in the event of a sudden attack. She reached out to her weapon, but did not quite summon it yet, one arm lingering in the air as she felt for it in subspace. This was the moment she'd been afraid for, the moment when things would go sour and she would be stuck to defend herself in a strange place against someone who was irrevocably more powerful. This was the price she paid for her curiosity, time after time, and she had to wonder if the threat was worth the discovery. Could she teleport back to Earth if it came to blows? Would she even survive that massive drain? All of her thoughts mobilized at once, and she stood wary, ready to strike.
However, listening to Kairatos, her brow furrowed, and slowly she unarmed herself. What he'd spouted before was White Moon propaganda, but this felt real and true to the struggles of the Negaverse, and it was a thought that resonated in her heart. She looked at him with eyes that were scared, panicked by the threat of a fight, anxious to be so far from her resources, concerned for her state of being when he spoke and she empathized. Her chest fluttered, breaths shallow like a spooked songbird.
It took her a few moments to breathe, to compose herself and wind down from the impending threat of attack. "...I know that it's hard," she began, forcing her shoulders to relax. "I've been collecting medals and energy and starseeds for years, and for the longest time it was never quite enough, because I was always too weak, because I never deserved it. They sent me away for a year because I was unfit for combat, even as I watched those younger than me climb the ranks. They slated me for youmafication once, and the argument against it was that I would be too easily bested." For once, Zircon looked the way that she felt--tired, and impossibly small in her heavy coat.
"But I--I made it, finally," she stuttered, touching the starseed patch on her arm. "Someone thought I was worthy to have rank, and I earned it, after years and years of fighting for traction. It's not for everyone, and I'm glad you escaped the yoke, but this? This is all I have, Kairatos."
She leaned against the stable wall, biting back angry tears. "I've been told that Knights are chosen for their worthiness, that they're awakened at will whenever they're ready. But the White Moon never came for me, I was never worth it. If I wanted power and a voice, it had to be Chaos. If some grand history awaited me on your side, it obviously found me unacceptable to bear it, like everyone else."
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Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:33 am
"The white moon didn't come and find me either... but it was waiting for me when I decided I was ready." It was there when he had decided for himself that he was worthy of more. He felt horrible now for yelling at her, stepping forward to offer her a hand or an arm, if she'd take it. "You're not worthless, you've never been worthless, but I understand you need to make your own decisions, Zirc. But if you decide that you want to tell Order for yourself that you're worthy, I promise I'd be proud to stand beside you, just like I was then. I wish we'd had more time to stand together then. But I'm glad I could take you here now. Even if I wish I could show you what it used to look like. I'd say I could paint a picture but.... yeah. I'm better at punching things."
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