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 Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2014 7:39 pm
D4
Zia suddenly found herself in black space, nothing but oblivion jutting out from where she stood. Had she not been fully conscious of being trapped in her own head she would have been a little afraid. Instead she was just annoyed at how bland it was in here. She was sure her internal creative processes had something much better in store than this, visually.
Alas for her ego, there was nothing but darkness. And Zirconia.
“You have got to be kidding me,” She stuffed her hands in her pockets, which apparently her mental perception of herself had, and did her best to look completely inconvenienced.
“We need to address this,” The Mauvian was obnoxiously laconic for once, “Or we are both going to die.”
Zia had always been aware that Zirconia’s body was different from her own. It was older, with a different face, and was encased in crystal in the Moon Palace in another universe far away. She had memories of Zirconia’s youth, and could also vividly recall memories she found unpleasant about how she had aged and changed. Yet, she couldn’t picture the alien cat-woman as anything other than herself adorned in the dress and bangles with the fuzzy ears and fluffy tail. And that was what stood in front of her, her companion in the metaphysical and boring endlessness of her own skull. At least it wasn’t lonely, but it was certainly hostile.
“Or maybe one of us will die and the other one can live happily ever after,” Zia countered with all of the bravado of a toddler who didn’t know better as she started digging her heels in. The Mauvian just raised one eyebrow with her response. “I’d win.”
Zia flashed her a sneer and turned away, making a few angry paces. It wasn’t like distance had meaning in nothingness. Sure enough, when she turned around, Zirconia was still there, not any further away. “How long are you going to keep me here?”
“I’m not,” She said quietly, her fingers knitting and twisting nervously in front of her, although she did her best to maintain some poise. “You’ve been feeling it for some time, haven’t you? We’re weak.”
Their eyes locked for a moment, before Zirconia reiterated with more urgency. “We’re dying, Zia.”
“Is it…” Zia seemed deflated just a bit, but not by much. It wasn’t like she wasn’t expecting it. “Is it because of our continued coexistence or that… that thing in the mirror?”
“I would expect a combination of both. We were not meant to exist as separate entities in one body for so long. That physical vessel is damaged, I don’t know how much longer we can manage to survive on borrowed time. I am not keeping us here, we are stuck because of weakness. You can feel it too. We may not wake up.”
And in a way she could. For reasons beyond the senses she could name, she could feel it. The acrid hospital air and the way sickness and sanitizer clung to her nostrils. The sensation of lying there, the presence of fluorescent lighting and machines monitoring her vitals. She could hear someone speaking, and after some concentration she recognized Noah’s voice. It was angering, in a way, realizing where she was and how she must have gotten there.
She remembered with sudden clarity that came with awareness of the situation. She had been pushing herself as if that would help her injuries heal faster. She was making progress with crystal shards and the last moments she remembered being conscious she remembered being draped over Chester’s shoulder at his desk, prodding him in the head and trying to coax him to bed.
She couldn’t remember his answer, or his reaction, but she did remember she gave up on playing with his hair when another migraine came. The same sort of stabbing head pain she had been having for the last several months. And when she started walking away down the hallway to turn in for the night she had lost her footing and collapsed.
Zia wasn’t sure if she was offended the migraines had been Zirconia being a pest all along or if she felt gloriously stupid for not automatically assuming that was the case all along. “Well, wake us up, we’re almost there.”
“No.”
“Zirconia, now isn’t the time to ******** with me.”
“I have no idea how long we’re going to last if we keep limping along at the pace we’re going. If your pathetic human body gives out, we both die, you twit.”
“So you are keeping us here.”
“I am trying to postpone the inevitable. I’m not suicidal. I want to live, even if it means diluting myself in the name of… Well. I think you know where this is going.”
“If one of us has to go, I am not submitting, don’t even try it,” Zia shot straight ahead to conclusions. Zirconia wanted the body to herself. Less strain to sustain them, more time to get home. “I worked too hard to get you out, I have done so much… for too long… to give up to this now.”
It was weird to realize she was getting worked up to the point of hyperventilating, or at least feeling like it, when she also realized this was sort of just a dream.
A really stupid dream.
“Are we going to reach a decision?”
“No. I’m going… over there… to the other corner of the brain or… something. I don’t know, shut up for a while.”
((Zia/Zirconia has fallen into a comatose state and is currently admitted to the local hospital for treatment and diagnosis. All shard RPs will need to be backdated to before this date. I'd love to hear if anyone visited her, but they'd probably be pretty boring visits on account of her no being conscious even a little bit. Unless you'd want to be boring with Noah. Please let me know!))
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Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2014 11:15 am
D5
“If you don’t stop being stubborn we’ll just rot slowly instead of quickly,” Zirconia said with a long, dramatic groan against a chair. “Come play with me at least so we’re not ready to kill ourselves in this god awful isolation.”
“We’re in my head, how are we going to play a game when we both know what the other one is thinking, a*****e?”
Regardless, she did get up and move to sit opposite Zirconia at the game board, and rested on hand in her chin as she started moving pieces in a huff. Three games ended in a draw in record time. Like time had any meaning in what basically amounted to a lucid dream.
“I told you this was stupid.”
“It would be a nice diversion if you didn’t cheat.”
“So you could cheat?”
Zirconia just cleared off the board and set it up again. After a few more silent matches, Zia finally spoke up from her slumped posture. “So say we do kind of… converge or one wins the other one or whatever and we come out of this with one starseed and one soul. Where do we go?”
“What do you mean?”
“All this has been to get you home to your own body. If there’s only one of us, do we stay here? Or go there?”
“Well obviously my preference is to go to my home universe and I imagine your preference is to remain in yours.”
“That doesn’t really answer my question of where we’d end up.”
There was more silence as the Mauvian avoided answering altogether.
“You think you’re going to win.”
“Well, obviously.”
Zia’s face scrunched up in a childish scowl, and Zirconia responded with an eyeroll for the ages.
“I am older, I am wiser, I am greater than your small twenty years devoid of magic or experience. The sum of myself is greater than yours.”
“That’s not fair. I got us here, me.”
“You have always hidden and left the dirty work to me. And I have always been glad to take up the reigns when you needed me. I bore your pain when Painite opened you up. I made the difficult choices in Operation Rota. I have softened and shielded you from grief and poor memories and carried every cross you decided to martyr yourself on. I have taken the blame for your poor choices and sorry state. I've been glad to do it, because you are my young host and I appreciate the hospitality. But it also means, Zia, that you are weak,” She set the pieces up again. “You need me. But I don’t need you.”
Zia pulled her feet up to her chair and hugged them as she just stared down at the game board with a sour look.
“I don’t need to look at your thoughts to know you agree with me.”
“We were just so close to getting to go our separate ways…”
“The crystal is not nearly complete. Cassandra will put us off until we wither away for good.”
“I worked so hard for this.”
“And it was an admirable effort. But not every story rewards effort with equal reward. Now make your opening move.”
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Posted: Thu Dec 11, 2014 6:09 pm
C4
“I don’t understand the resistance, really,” Zirconia broke the ice this time after silence and time had become unbearable. They were going through the motions of their attempt at entertainment with such boredom and routine that it was starting to get repetitive.
“The resistance toooo… An alien invading my head and consuming my soul and taking over my body before they go back to their own universe and leave me a pretty corpse?”
“Well that’s a little dramatic, obviously you would be part of me. I would not come out of the process unscathed. I don’t think it would be unfair to say this process has changed both of us. For better or worse.”
“There’s changing because I spent a lotta time with you and changing because you literally absorbed my soul.”
“A fair point.” Zirconia continued clearing off and resetting the game. When they were talking, Zia was at least too distracted to fend her off as well. “I don’t understand your desire to remain here in this life anyway. At least there, on the other side, when I return to my rightful place in the Moon Palace, we could be something. Someone important. Someone who means something.”
“I never really wanted to be someone important,” Zia mumbled as she picked up a pawn, and set it down where it was as she rethought her choice and mumbled something to herself. “I just want that normalcy and freedom I almost had. I just want to finish school and get married and all that junk.”
“You liar.”
“Excuse you.”
“Before I came along your entire life was centered around impressing your father—which is a fixation I will never understand no matter how often I dig around in your brain—and you were trying to puff your little self up with as much prestige and education as you possibly could. Shall we switch to cards? This game bores me now.”
“I… okay,” Zia held her hands out as if she were going to try to physically elaborate on the abstract concepts they were discussing. “My relationship with my dad is not even remotely relevant anymore.”
“It used to be.”
“Until he disowned me for dropping out of prep school. Which was your fault, now that I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re ******** you.”
“His approval is meaningless in the grand scheme of things,” Zirconia said, shuffling a deck of cards that had been conjured up out of nowhere. “He’s an old man that set fire to his business and personal relationships in the pursuit of blind hedonism. I don’t find him very admirable except in the excellent feat that as a human he has not yet dropped dead of old age.”
“My dad is a legend in the financial industry,” Zia said, firmly pressing one finger down to the table that wasn’t really there. “I would have killed to be as brilliant as him.”
“Yes, but now you’ve graduated to a role in the universe of far greater importance!”
“Being your meat suit?”
“Yes!”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Who’s to say you wouldn’t have lived out an insignificant and loveless life as a neurotic WASP never even being aware magic existed around you until you died of cirrhosis alone in your tacky and oversized home?”
Zia stared through lidded eyes for the duration of the explanation before looking up, and back to Zirconia. “Well my home would never have been tacky, oh great one who combines red and green and purple in their ensemble. On top of that, my brother is a knight, and if you’re comparing me to previous generations in my family, I‘d probably die of heart disease first. Did you just make a modern culture reference with that wasp bit?”
“Yes! Did I use it right? Sometimes I think I’ve got an idea but then I never know…”
“Yeah. I’m. Actually a little impressed.” She glanced around at the flat and deadpan tones being used wondering how she got so casual with her skull mate that discussions of life and death could be had in unamused monotone.
“Anyway the point I’m making is no one really knows how things would have been before I came along, but you saw your future when you give in to the banality of being human. You called me up from dormancy when you did. You might not have meant to or maybe you regret it, but I make you something more than human. Something better. Power, a court, a system and a place in the universe. And yet you keep acting like your boring human-ness and broken family is better? You're the one who wanted to change your fate.”
“What court? Everything about it you fought for is kind of gone.”
“No, no no no, Ouranos and Hades and Hermes, Zeus… Cronus… Poseidon…. I still have plenty of senshi left in my court. And poor Ouranos was never meant to rule as a regent over the moon, I can’t imagine how much she’s struggling. She needs an adviser. I’m needed there,” Her hand lingered on a face down card she had set in front of Zia. “We’re needed there.”
Zia’s eyes trailed from the hand up to the cat-lady’s face and her eyes narrowed a bit, trying to dispel any sympathy that might have momentarily shown through. “Right, right. That big speech you gave Cassandra,” Zia sat up and started her best, nasally Zirconia impression. “I don’t want to be the king, Cassie, I’m just the kingmakeeeer.”
“Okay, you’re being childish now, I’m not talking to you when you get like this.”
“You’re not talking to me? Finally.”
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Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2014 6:43 pm
dxc4
“So let’s talk about Tyndareus.”
“Let’s not,” Zirconia bristled at having Zia initiate conversation for once.
Zia snorted. “You’re the one looking down your nose at my big motivation in life and he hasn’t been my motivation since like, junior college. In the meantime I am totally aware of all of that time you spend pining.”
“I think that’s an unfair assessment. A lot of people die, and people tend to grieve when they lose people.”
“Yeah, Helen’s in there a lot too. Both of them. But Tyndareus has been dead for like. Forever.”
“Can assure you it hasn’t been that long. Time doesn’t always make things fade. He was my charge, as was Helen.”
Typically during their conversations, Zirconia whittled the time away making swift motions with game pieces or cards as if it wasn’t a very heavy or difficult task to talk about the things they were touching on. But she seemed to have frozen now. Her eyes stayed downcast and her expression was solemn. She didn’t make any motion to grab a game piece and instead just lifted her hand to rest her chin in it.
“Why so grim?”
“We’re talking about my dead family, you disrespectful nitwit.”
“Your stupid ‘family’ is the entire reason you’re trying to devour my soul, sorry for being curio—“
Zirconia’s fist slammed down on the table. “I’m not trying to ‘devour’ your soul, I’m trying to converge with a petulant child in the hopes of survival. A-and… Is it so wrong?” She inhaled with a sharp hiss to bite back tears. “Helen is still preserved in crystal in the Moon Palace’s inner sanctum. I could… If we go back, I could see her face again. You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t. I dedicated everything I had to both of them. You don’t…”
Zirconia trailed off, trying to figure out the words and get her thoughts in order, and Zee seemed to have taken a hard shift away from the smug grin and just sat there looking uncomfortable.
“You get tricked into thinking,” Zirconia continued, “That if you love someone enough, and if you pour all of your being into something, and just try your damndest until you’re wrecked then it’ll be okay. But it never is. People leave, and people die, and everything you did was for nothing and you’re left with this big, empty piece in your soul that’s never going to be fixed.”
Zia just stared, and broke eye contact to look away and linger in uncomfortable silence for a few moments.
“Was he really that important?”
“He was everything. I would’ve done anything for him. And then there was Helen, and for her I would’ve done more,” Zirconia said quietly as she brushed away a few stray tears and tried to at least pretend she was composed. “It was always that way. From the day she was born, I knew that… That I’d dismantle the universe if it made her happy.”
“But she’s dead.”
“And it’s my fault.”
“No!” Although once the outburst made it out, Zia wondered why she cared to defend Zirconia from herself at all. “Helen went off to die on her own.”
“And I let her. I took this last mission knowing that.”
“W-well… why then? If you loved her so much?”
“I would go to hell and back for my Queen, just like I would’ve for her father. But sometimes we have to look at the bigger picture and make hard choices. I can’t say for certain that I would have done thing the same, if I was ever permitted to do it over again. And that is probably for the best, because most people trapped in the coma epidemic got to live and this city skirted disaster. Not all of them lived, but without her sacrifice they would have certainly all died.”
“You’re saying you’d sacrifice all of those lives?”
“I’ve sacrificed much more before. Zia, please. I’m begging you to stop resisting. I’m in hell. My remaining senshi are on the other side of that mirror. The last visage I’ll ever get to see of Helen is on the other side of that mirror. I just want to go home. I just want… I only want to see her face one last time. It’s all I have left I’m living for.”
Zia stared at the gameboard and realized that for once they hadn’t been peeking at the other’s thoughts and cheating. Someone was winning. Her eyes flicked back up to Zirconia who seemed to be more preoccupied with tears. She reached over to grab a game piece. If she was quick enough, she might actually win a match. She lifted it off the board, and then hesitated as a thought occurred to her.
“When you said you wrecked yourself for Tyndareus, what did you mean?”
“I… I don’t know. I met him when I was young. I dedicated my entire life to his dynasty.”
“Yeah but…”
“There’s a blank spot…”
“There’s a lot of those.”
The more Zia tried to dig in to something about Tyndareus, the harder it seemed to be to pierce in to Zirconia’s thoughts. There was plenty of superficial stuff, gushing about this or that about his kingliness, but there was something important about Nehelenia’s father that seemed to be off limits. Something a long, lost time ago. She knew they had met when Zirconia was younger, but outside of that knowledge, the memories to back it up were lacking.
Zirconia stared, down at her hands, brow tensing with dawning realization. “We... did something. But I can't remember. It’s sealed.”
----------
Noah Connolly was growing an impressive 5 o’clock shadow that was bordering on graduating from mere stubble as he sat uncomfortably slumped in a chair by the hospital bed. Zia’s mom had swooped in to pay for a private room, and Noah was willing to tolerate his distaste for his stepmother long enough to take a shift watching her while Caroline went downstairs to find coffee.
He had been pulled out of his doze when the machine fluctuated abnormally enough to draw a nurse in to check her vitals. She stabilized, but the nurse mumbled something about a weakening heart rate and shallow breathing that bothered him.
Noah had been struggling with the fact he could very possibly lose his sister, which came with the extra baggage of them not being on especially good terms over things that would most certainly be temporary, if only she’d pull through.
There was a lot of regret, and a lot of discomfort as he tried to be accommodating and polite to family members he didn’t really get along with.
“I swear to god, kid,” He mumbled as he stood up and gave her shoulder a weak little nudge. He was about to dig in his brain and find something profound or at least sappy with which to bargain with her spirit, but he didn’t really get the chance. With a loud, gasping inhale, she shot upright, making Noah pull back his hand and stare at her with a massive deer in the headlights eye bulge.
“That b***h!” She nearly screeched, slamming tight fists down on the bed, and then she locked eyes with her nearly traumatized sibling. “What?”
“Nothing.” He said instinctively, mouth pressed to a small, scrunched line as he held the wrist of the hand that nudged her. And then he remembered why there were there. “I—wait. Did you just come out of a coma?”
He shook his head and tried again. “You just came out of a ******** coma, Zee, what the hell? I’ll call a nurse, Caroline’s downstai-… You uh… you are Zee, right?”
She looked around her surroundings, efficiently trying to get a handle on where she was without panic. “It’s all clear now. All of the lies. The blank memories. How long has it been? Nevermind, I’m sure I’ll figure it out on the way,” She said, brashly pulling all of the medical tape and tubing loose, grimacing then the IV was pulled.
“Hey, stop! You’re not supposed to do that!” At least it had been enough to preoccupy Noah from realizing his question of who came out of that coma went unanswered.
“I have work to do,” She said bluntly, stepping out of bed and heading to the bathroom.
“Zee!” Noah barked over the sounds of a machine that didn’t like being disconnected improperly. He ran to the bathroom after her, but she’d already mirrorwalked away.
He exhaled, and then looked around and back to the empty hospital bed, unsure of how he was going to explain that. In the heat of the moment, he ducked out. He’d have to think of a lie for Caroline later. The lilac haired man tugged his jacket over his shoulders as he briskly existed the hospital and dialed his cellphone with one hand.
“Hey. You’re probably the least subtle person to be calling right now, but I’m not real sure what to do…”
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