A girl deserved a night off every once in a while, right?
People collected like a thick smoke in his mind. They clung to the walls of his thoughts, choked his throat, stained his eyes with their smothering scents of every deed done, undone, redone. His life drew apart and rewound into a shape he didn’t recognize anymore. Scholomance, Sidney James, Methone, Aegir, Mont Blonc, Juno, Enrique, Isaiah. But none of these people formed threads of a tapestry, easily interwoven for different picturesque examples of the same tried stories.
No, they suffocated with the cloying stench they wrote together.
Isaiah wasn’t in a rush when he fled his condo, but Scholomance was. The transition happened seamlessly within the dead halls of his building before he descended the surfeit of flights. Cracked walls were passed when he transitioned to sidewalks, to broken roads, to the derelict stretches of Destiny City where only gravel remained for tire traction. And the scenery grew more familiar with each broken pipe and glaring, depthless hole from a blind windowpane.
The smoke began to ebb from his thoughts when he reached the outskirts of a small park he commonly passed through on his way to work. He didn’t care much for it beyond a convenient thoroughfare, but the looming darkness and arching boughs provided their own comfort against the unblinking eye of the moon, and Scholomance’s prying judgments. It meant something to find darkness.
To be lost.
He sighed, and with the smoke a whisper of his breath was lost on the wind. He could cease here, just for a moment, and forget.
Sherwood was the exact opposite of that. She was a generally sunny person that believed that hugs could, and would, save the world. She was almost always a happy person, if not a little naive, that gave everyone the benefit of her pleasantries. This earned her a lot of friends, but also the ire of less optimistic people.
She felt the aura before she saw who it was attached to.
She was daydreaming in a tree, per usual, listening to the sound of the stream and imagining a hundred things she could be doing but, as it happened, was not motivated to do. Her homework still sat on the table to be done but she was ignoring it to patrol and she was ignoring patrol to daydream about art projects.
“Hello down there!”
She smiled and waved from her tree limb, beaming a smile between them both. That is, until she saw the strict military garb and missed the symbols of his planet.
“Oh, you’re a bad guy!”
She slipped from the tree and fell to the ground lightly, pulling her bow out in front of her.
“You really shouldn’t be here.”
She liked her solace place and did not want anyone, especially the negaverse, to infiltrate it. So she attacked, swinging at him with her slim wooden bow and hoping to drive him away from her woods forever.
The pause left him time enough to decompress, to whisk away the conglomeration of thoughts anchoring him toward drowning. It felt easy to close his eyes now. Bony fingers reached for pockets misaligned, for cigarettes not yet distributed to his standard. He found nothing.
A voice chimed from overhead. Initially chipper she sounded, though Scholomance’s forehead creased from exasperation. There’s always someone around. This isn’t Chicago.
Scholomance peered up through the mottled shadows and starlights to find the source of the lilting mezzo-soprano. The half-mask betrayed no grimace of his when he heard the words taken aback caustically and a rebuttal spat with vitriol. This sounded much too familiar - and he started to wonder if that habit he feared before was starting to become a truth. For now, he considered it coincidence.
Albeit a disastrous one. “Yes, I’m a horrific villain routinely breaking the law by trespassing. How dare I.” He returned the venom with a dry wit and sighed against the uncomfortable mask. “Are you going to try to hand my a** to me now so we can make nice after? Or are you going down a different path? Reading the same story gets so trite, you know.” And sometimes, he reminded himself, everything evaporates when you tell a different tale.
Or the stories you seek know nothing more than iniquity.
“I wasn’t planning on making nice. Bad guys are scary and they try to hurt people.”
Painite was especially scary. And so was Merlinite before she got to know him, but he was a big monster thing. Now she really liked Puffy. She still didn’t like Painite. But she guessed she could understand how someone would be nice to an enemy after a fight. She’d ended her night with Merlinite with a hug, so…
She frowned.
“Didn’t anyone tell you we’re in a war?”
That had been impressed upon her at the outset and reinforced by nearly being killed by, what she assumed, was his kind.
“You Negas always have to come in and ruin things that were just fine! People walking around minding their own business and you just come in and take over.”
Ok, maybe she was still a little traumatized from her run in with death. She whacked him with her bow for good measure, tears welling up in her eyes at the memory of it. He wasn’t Painite, clearly, but she hardly could be bothered with that at the moment. He was there and a representation of the bad side of the war and of the side that created someone like Painite so it was close enough in her mind.
”Holy basket of ballsacks, you have the diction of a five-year-old.” Scholomance grimaced when he looked to her, though the mask obscured the brunt of his countenance. His posture spoke much the same as he visibly retreated from her, disgust evident. “Tell me you don’t expect others to take you seriously, honey.”
But as she progressed in her explanations, Scholomance detected the very same misconception that brought Juno’s wrath down upon him. He remembered the ache quite keenly as it still ate away at his side upon waking. His spine protested ever since. And he was in no position to assume a harmlessness about this one because of her apparent reticence toward striking him. She possessed a bow in hand, after all, which proved a lethal weapon by law.
“Yes, well, ruination is what we’re good at. Hasn’t anyone told you to play to your strengths?” He pressed further and approached her with intent to goad, to prod, to castigate. “Besides, people never mind their own business, they mind everyone else’s. See the trash mags in your local convenience store, or your hairdresser’s gossip, or the surfeit of heads lodged in every politician’s a**. People are inherently s**t, and if we can ******** up their lives, what reason have we to refuse? We are all chimney sweeps - and as we wipe away the soot from this earth, we ourselves become blackened with it.”
He considered it somewhat overblown, but lacking any understanding for what the Negaverse specifically did, he offered the most believable roleplay in his repertoire. “Besides, anyone who calls this tussle a ‘war’ is a ******** joke. This is a petulant gang discrepancy that expects sorting out with magic and ridiculous, gaudy outfits.” He scoffed, his irritation apparent.
Afterward she struck him - not terribly hard, but enough to cause a yelp and a stumble while he caught a white glove through his hair. “******** sake,” he hissed beneath his breath as the familiar throbbing bloomed anew.
He sought to grasp her bow, hoping to catch the riser before she drew it out of her reach. If he could only return the favor and strike her with her own damn weapon…
“Well at least I’m not trying to win a gold medal in anorexia!” She huffed in response, offended.
And plenty of others took her very seriously, she hoped. He wasn’t winning any points with her at the moment and his comment both made her want to dust off some of those rarely used words in her lexicon but also to be a bit more lazy, just to piss him off. She wasn’t sure what was going to win out. What she did know was that she was very annoyed that he was in her woods and wanted him to leave as expediently as possible.
“And I’m not your honey. My name is Sherwood and I’m a page of Earth.”
And Sherwood wasn’t the type to read tabloids or listen to gossip. She listened to her friend’s problems and helped them out as best she could. She read roleplaying books and books about art. She was really more educated than she usually presented but most people hadn’t ever made an issue of it.
She yelped when he grabbed onto her bow, yanking it hard to keep him from taking it and struggling against his efforts. She eventually lost the battle, falling to the ground and landing on her backside with a frustrated whine.
What can I say, my olympian training is terribly important to me. Scholomance pressed tongue to teeth to stymie the comment successfully. He added no further to the line of simple insults.
He paused when she mentioned her status as a page. Bow in hand, he looked it over quickly before reverting his attention back to her. A page of earth... How curious. “A pleasure, Sherwood, but might I point out that a bow is fairly useless without arrows.” He spied no quiver about her, no sack or satchel or clever hiding hole for ammunition to her weapon. Was she serious in brandishing this? Then again, a bow proved significantly more threatening than a simple ring.
“Secondly, you might want to better acquaint yourself with the Negaverse before you start accusing a page of Saturn as one of their officers.” And surely he’d made the same mistake. In fact, he still would - he met all of one agent, and learned no differentiating factors beyond their ‘aura’ that tipped off their allegiance. It felt much like a gang tag sprayed across one of the sliding billboards near his workplace.
Their minor confrontation left him somewhat drained and feeling like a complete a*****e for taking his frustrations out on a girl who was plainly as post as he was in this purported ‘war’. Stooping, he offered hand with bow handle draped over palm. “Scholomance.”
Sherwood. Is that a forest, or just a bad joke? ‘Wanna bang? Sherwood.’ No, there’s got to be a place attributed to it. I wonder if she can road trip to her wonder. Beats this space travel garbage.
“I’m aware, thank you,” she responded blandly.
She was actually rather good at archery since she attended summer camp each year. The cosmic beings had decided not to give her arrows with her bow, though she had no idea why. It certainly seemed like they didn’t intend to giv her anything she could actually use. The bow was good for flailing and smacking people but was not really an effective weapon without arrows to go along with it.
She was well aware of this and lamented it often.
“Oh!” She looked at him seriously again, taking a second to actually pay attention to his power signature. “Oh, you’re…”
The aura had no tinge of chaos to it. In fact, it was not very unlike her own. She eeped, immediately feeling terrible about her reaction, even to his acerbic words.
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I had no idea. I just saw the costume and I thought…” It was pretty clear what she thought. “This is my thinking place and I didn’t want anyone to really discover it and fall in love with it like I had and…”
She looked genuinely contrite. In an effort to absolve herself of some of her guilt the guileless page wrapped her arms around him and hugged him as the second part of her apology. Hugs could save the world...
Something about her reaction reminded him very much of Lorne, or Mont Blonce, who shrunk and apologized in a manner not unlike groveling at first glance. Heartfelt it was, he later learned, and sincere it was meant to be. Lorne did not apologize to reassert an unspoken pecking order, and neither did she.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been mistaken for a Negaverse agent. Something about the black on the uniform, or something…” Tugging on the jacket, he looked over the swaths of black and marked dearths of prominent saturn symbols. “The first person did a lot more than slap me with the riser of her bow.” The stiffness from those injuries hadn’t ceased; he imagined that was in part due to his caloric throttling impacting nutrition.
“I cut through the edge of this place on my way back from work, where it’s still a park that borders the woods. It’s not…” Scholomance sighed, then smiled wanly. “Nevermind. If it’s your place, I’ll leave you to it.”
Except she hugged him, which produced a dichotomous reaction - on one part a deep discomfort reared, urging him to draw away from her before she discovered the full extent of his scrawniness; on the opposite somewhat thrilled that their confrontation did not end in the same vacuous contempt that both parties held when Juno struck him down first. Awkwardly he returned the hug, clearly surprised by it, and drew away upon release.
“I need to be alone for a while, regardless.” He turned from the girl and started through the winding path that led back to the park portion, over a block toward the city lights. He offered no goodbyes while he rubbed the sore remnants of the page’s strike on him. It was easy to grow superstitious of the sentience in locations, but Scholomance was truly starting to wonder if the stony swamp held ulterior motives for him.
This was coincidence, and he refused to think it habit yet.
ZaiaFantasy
for your logging purposes~
