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 Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 5:54 am
Sorry<
Travel plans got moved around, did you get a new email address?<
I'm sure you didn't ******** up as bad as you say you ******** up is usually not as bad as it seems<
Let's grab coffee this week and you can tell me about it<
Would love to see you<
It was the first thing on top of her screen when she woke up and tried to stretch out all of the stiffness that came from sleeping flat on your back on the living room floor.
She found she could scroll through the notifications, but just past Finn's messages was a swear word laden message from Caroline that prompted her to move the string of messages right back up. Finn's messages were nicer, even if she had trouble believing the encouragement was going to withstand the actual truth.
>Coffee
She sent it back and slowly started rereading the rambling spam she'd sent him. It was written correspondence, embarrassingly stilted and obvious she was either just typing whatever words came to mind or what the automated system offered up.
She tapped around at various things in Finn's window before everything changed and it started ringing over the speaker phone with the outgoing call noise, which at first made her drop it with a yelp.
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Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2015 9:17 am
The ringing phone jostled Finn out of sleep, and he fumbled around in the half-light for a few moments before even finding the damn thing. Zia, the screen said, which was not entirely unexpected, as he'd been texting with her the night before. However, the screen also said 6:30 AM, which was less expected, and an hour he wasn't sure he'd ever known Zia to be up at. (But then, he assumed most people didn't like to be up before seven.) "Hello?" he said groggily, and rolled out of bed. Zia was probably not calling him on a lark, if professions of having ******** up really badly were any indication. (He did have to admit that it pleased him that she thought of someone who would have had a better idea.) (Not that he had any idea what this was about.) "Zee?" Finn asked, turning on the lights and rubbing sleep from his eyes. "What's going on?"
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Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 3:45 pm
"I'm sorry!" She blurted at the phone groggily saying her name while it sat on the floor. After a quick second of getting her bearings and feeling stupid once she recognized a few symbols on the screen, she gathered it up in her hands.
"I--... um..." Actually speaking her thoughts was a little more difficult than frantic stream-of-consciousness writing, and she wasn't really sure what she was going to say to him anyway. And none of her anxieties accounted for the fact it was 6:30 am.
"Hello. Is this Finn? How are you?"
That was how phone speech went, obviously.
"U-uh. I mean. Um... Sorry, this is hard, my head is still kind of... jumbled. I got your... I mean the... the messages. Hi. Sorry. Hi."
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Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2015 9:01 pm
"No, this is dog," said Finn, because why shouldn't he expect Zia to get that joke? He'd had the same phone number since freshman year of high school. Even at 6:30 AM (especially at 6:30 AM), Zia's question just struck him as... kind of odd. Maybe his voice sounded off? God. Now he was going to be paranoid about this! Maybe it had changed while he was away! Was it at least better now than it had been before? He'd always hated how he sounded in recordings... "I mean, yeah, speaking," he said, doubling back. "I'm okay, besides that it's, like, really early?" Man, he hadn't even been planning to get up for another half hour, but that was ruined now. He reached over and turned on the lamp, to see if electric light might spur him from sleep. "Why's your head jumbled?" he asked, squinting - the lamp had been a bad idea. "Is this - oh no, you didn't get mixed up in that New Years Kidnapping bullshit, too, did you?" How many of his friends had been dragged into that and who did he need to punch to get revenge?
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Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:14 am
"Oh. Sorry..." She said, managing to multitask enough to hold the phone and peek out of the blinds to see the tinges of sunrise. "I guess I didn't know what time it was. Sometimes it's hard to tell if it's morning or night."
There was some fluctuation in the way the sound came across as she hit the speaker phone setting off and on and off again and held it to her ear. "Do you want to go back to sleep, then-- wait, what kidnappings?"
She wasn't oblivious to the fact something had happened. It was the news reports of the terrorist attack that had given Caroline the bright idea to drag Zia out of Destiny City in the first place. But kidnappings were a rare occurrence that never ended well. Every one of her nerves seems to spark with anxiety as memories of Operation Rota flooded in, and she almost dropped the phone.
"What happened? Who was kidnapped?"
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Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2015 9:19 pm
Didn't know if it was morning or night? Well, that was concerning and probably had something to do with what she'd said about her head getting jumbled, but Finn was going to deal with one thing at a time and right now he was dealing with kidnappings. "Um," he said, "The Negaverse attacked the big city-sponsored New Years party and took a bunch of people hostage? I wasn't there, I didn't get back until it was already over. They had Hvergelmir... some others. It was big. A few people are still missing." You could only assume the worse when s**t like that happened. He sighed. "Pretty much everyone is either out of the hospital or about to be now," he said, and then frowned. His eyes had adjusted now, and he was feeling a bit more awake and ready to deal with this. "What's going on with you?" he asked. "What do you mean, your head's all jumbled and you don't know what time of day it is?" A darker impulse crossed his mind, one he couldn't bite back. "Am I speaking to Zia? Or Zirconia?" he asked.
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Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2015 9:45 pm
"Oh... I wasn't around. I mean I saw the news coverage. But..." But I was stuck under the whim of my mom who thinks I just fried my brain with too much partying had kind of a pathetic ring to it.
"Do they know who's missing?" She asked, trying to swallow down the lump in her throat.
The subject back to what was up with her was just as difficult, but at least she was the one with the answers instead of questions. "I was wrong, it went bad," She started, recalling their last conversation about collecting Pyrite shards to send Zirconia home. "It went so bad, Finn, I ******** it all up."
His question was met with a long silence, except for occasional sniffling and attempts to breathe.
"Mostly Zia. I think. Maybe a little of both. I'm not sure anymore. Is that... okay?" Part of her wanted to beg him to come over, to ease the lurch in her gut from being alone and to just have someone there, but whatever his reaction was to the state of her identity had her worrying about even continuing the phone call.
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Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:20 pm
s**t, thought Finn, as her comment about it going bad jogged his memory. He'd been so caught up in his own personal life and his own bullshit (The Galapagos! Arkady! Friends getting kidnapped! Laney! Elke!) that he'd forgotten what she'd been up to. Namely, trying to send Zirconia back through the mirror, and how he'd told her he was rooting for her and he hoped it worked out for her. Well, crap, he was an a*****e, and a forgetful one at that. "Aww, Zee," he said, pressing his hand to his forehead before letting it slowly slide down his face. Well, now he knew what she thought he could have helped with - and he was beyond sure that he probably couldn't have, though her confidence in him was flattering. "Okay," he said, gathering his wits - if she was counting on him to make her feel better about turning herself into a cosmic abomination, or something (he still didn't know the full extent of how much she had, quote unquote, ******** up?), then he was going to try his hardest to actually do that. "You're alive? So that's a start." s**t. She sounded like she was crying. "Look, um, where are you right now? I can come over? Or you can come here? No one's home. You can still mirrorwalk?"
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Posted: Fri Jan 30, 2015 10:41 pm
"Yeah, alive," She repeated, almost like she had to remind herself too. Even that was an achievement she almost didn't accomplish by a very narrow margin, so that was a victory in itself.
"I'm at my da--... I uh... I can mirrorwalk," She said, rethinking the whole thing when she remembered her surroundings. It was a new location, and an old one at the same time. With a lot of baggage. Finn's place was probably a combination of safer and easier.
"D-don't freak out, okay?" She hung up the phone and went upstairs to the full length mirror by the vanity, trying to remember which mirrors Finn had around that were big enough to climb through, and trying to picture where they were.
It only took a moment after dropping the human glamour. Mirrorwalking was easier than she remembered and the most hindering thing about it was the way she stumbled and turned to gather all of her skirts and pull them through after her with a huff. She was still holding the outer overlay skirts in her arms when she called out for Finn to make sure she had invaded the right place.
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Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:21 am
He could hear her fumbling around in the bathroom, although her warning of "don't freak out, okay?" had him a bit concerned. Had she incurred some kind of terrible injury? Mutated herself beyond recognition? Something else? Something worse? "Zee?" he asked, pushing the door open - and there she was in all her silks and tulle and finery, looking glam as ever, and definitely not the weird catgirl he remembered her powered form being before. Which - oh, s**t, house rules! "You can't be powered up in here!" he hissed. "Please tell me you still have a civilian glamour. Please." Was it possible to break your glamour permanently? He knew he'd damaged his irreparably by messing around with Menachem's starseed, but if Zia no longer had hers at all... At least Kaatje wasn't around to enforce the rules and walk in on them like this, and Arkady was away at her wonder. (Did he have a harem in the Anime sense? Questionably.) "I mean, s**t, you look good," he said. "Kind of... dark, though? You're still Order? Please tell me that I ******** up is not code for Finn I did mad science and accidentally corrupted myself." Because if not, s**t????? He'd ******** up??????
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Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:47 am
Her brow shot up and she looked around like someone who had just gotten their hand caught somewhere it wasn't supposed to be. It took a second of getting her bearings to process 'glamour' and 'powered up' and 'Missy you are radiating a massive power signature in someone's home.'
In the blink of an eye she assumed human form, and as habit dictated, grabbed her ears to make sure it took.
"It's deceptive magic, but it hides the aura. I can't mirrorwalk with my powers turned off though, sorry."
She glanced at her hands and then back up to him, with a shrug. "I think same as always? Not Chaos? It might be dark because I kind of..." And in stead of stilted slow searches for words she descended into rapid babble, complete with large hand gestures, "Merged my soul with Zirconia's who turns out is not a cat which probably explains why she could never do anything useful that cats do and instead is like this freaky dark cosmic witch person sealed up in a tiny, harmless cat body and the whole soul merging thing unlocked all of her sealed memories including the little bit about hey you're kind of imprisoned and all of your powers are locked and Cassandra has totes been playing you the whole time so I tried some freaky mad science on the pyrite crystal which I kind of irreparably ******** up with some other freaky mad science at an earlier point in time but it was just to make it look pretty until I could kind of corner the slimy b***h but it didn't work, and oh by the way your soul is permanently a singular oneness with this scary creepy witch lady who is bound by some weird spells and promises she stupidly made to a really, really super dead Moon King and now you're supposed to kind of look after the Black Moon which is a ******** moon in another universe until a legitimate Moon Queen feels like being reborn and showing her face sometime."
Huff.
She tried to catch her breath and stood up straight, adjusting the loose sweater she'd thrown on before she left.
"But I'm not dead though, which is admittedly better than I was expecting around the time I started poking things and soul devouring abominations of untold Chaos were pouring out of the mirrors."
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Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 7:48 pm
From how she described it, it sounded like her glamour was functioning oddly - but at least it was working at all. Finn was under the impression that the further you delved into magic and the more you exposed yourself to, the weirder things got, and freaky dark cosmic witch sounded a hell of a lot more powerful than cat, even if cat was qualified with alien. "Well," he said measuredly, "We've all messed with potentially world-ending magic we probably shouldn't have ******** with."
And so far, the world hadn't ended, so he just had to assume that the both of them were doing okay... even if the results of their meddling seemed to range from congratulations, your eyes glow in the dark! to your memory is all jumbled up and you have magical powers beyond your wildest dreams but they're from an alternate dimension. So yeah, he shrugged at her. "Not dead is a really good start," he said, "And I'm assuming that soul devouring abominations are no longer pouring out of the mirrors?"
He certainly didn't see any right now, if that was any indication.
"Look, let's not hang out in my bathroom longer than we have to?" The counter was covered in Arkady's cosmetics. The tub was circled liberally with her shampoo bottles. There was nowhere to sit.
"The couch is a lot more comfortable, I promise," Finn continued, shooing her out into the living room and following her. "Anyway, reincarnations run on a thousand-year cycle as far as anyone's been able to tell me, so if we're waiting for a specific moon queen, we might be waiting a long time?"
Honestly, it wasn't something he knew a ton about. Finn didn't even know why they needed a moon queen. "So you're stuck with Zirconia, and magical powers beyond most of our wildest dreams. You're not dead. Might as well make the most of it, see what kind of hijinks you can get up to? I don't think you've ******** up at all. You had the best intentions, other people screwed you over, and here we are."
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Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 8:57 pm
"Yeah, basically," Zia shrugged. "I am also not Cassandra's b***h, which was the intention, I think, when she unsealed all this nonsense, so there is another pro."
This was much easier than expected. Finn made things easy. There was no struggle here like when she was trying to justify 'being different' to someone who was offended by it or worrying about how Iris or Kairatos would handle that whole 'almost dying in Tartaros' thing. But, Finn had also indicated he was a lot more understanding. Sometimes there are no good choices, and to get anywhere sometimes you've got to stick your hand in a cosmic beehive.
She flopped back on the sofa, feeling more relaxed and speaking with noticeably more ease than she did on the phone.
"Even longer, maybe, considering I can't be certain where her starseed is and if it made it back to the Black Moon's cauldron. The whole 'black magic because Zirconia was infatuated with a crazy paranoid megalomaniac' is a bit off putting too since I think it's like..." She held up her hands, trying to puzzle it out. "I guess it's sort of like a vigil? I'm just kind of keeping it until someone from a certain bloodline comes to take it. It was a failsafe, because Tyndareus, ye olde Moon King before Nehelenia, was a paranoid freak about people taking his giant space rock away in wars or what not."
She tapped on her lower lip, looking up at the ceiling. "It went back in the mirror -- The weird monster-- And I haven't seen it since. It left scars on my hands, but those are gone since I like... imploded in Tartaros or some s**t."
Along with the brand on her collar that had been a remnant of the Blood Moon days, all of her tattoos, and about three dress sizes worth of mass that she hadn't eaten enough cake and pizza to get back just yet.
"Some s**t went down when I confronted Cassandra, I guess I built it up in my head I wasn't going to be totally welcome after that... Well that and some things... are kind of messy, still. There's all of these memories across centuries and trying to find relevant ones are like a drop in a lake. I haven't really ******** around with my powers yet, except for running away to Tartaros to be a chicken."
There was a little bit of a pause and she looked like she was thinking about something very serious, but she only ended up elaborating, "Not that I'm dreaming about being a chicken like that unfortunate wording sounded like. Hey, can we turn off the lights and close the curtains and make your eyes glow?"
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Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 9:41 pm
All of this business with the Black Moon had started long before Finn had even dreamed to imagine magic even existed, so there was a lot of basic history around it that he'd never learned and, frankly, at this point he was scared to ask. Parallel universes? Sure! Parallel moon queens? Okay! Parallel cauldrons and starseeds maybe or maybe not ever making it back there? Awesome. But he wasn't about to pretend he knew anything about it. Not that it wasn't, like, super flattering that she valued his opinion about stuff and thought that he could help! He liked that part of this conversation a lot! "There's nothing wrong with running away and hanging out in outer space, or Alaska, or Tartaros, or wherever, when you need to chill," he said firmly, and then followed her change of subject. "Yes," said Finn, getting up to mess with the blinds. "Yes, we can definitely do that." He turned off the lamp. "So," he said expectantly, "Is it everything you dreamed of and more?"
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 8:37 pm
"A-ah, right," Zia said with fast nodding when he drew a comparison to his time in Alaska, although she remembered her panic that he might not ever come back the entire time he was gone.
"No matter what, I'm going to to come back," She concluded in a way that made sense in her mental roundabout. Hell, at this point the more she thought about surviving the end of the Black Moon Court and the beginning of the Dark Mirror and then all of the s**t leading to Tartaros collapsing, at least in these few seconds with Finn she was starting to feel invincible. It didn't take a ton of development for a massive pendulum swing in the other direction with Zia.
"Yeah!"
And she was instantly pulled out of an accidental mental psych up and froze when she caught sight of glowing eyes. And that led to staring at him with a dumb, open mouthed look on her face for a long moment until she got up and approached with a slightly hunched and cautious posture, carefully weaving her head to both sides like an animal inspecting the various angles of something before she reached over to poke his temple.
"Holy. s**t. You look like a cartoon that just swallowed radioactive waste. That's ******** awesome."
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