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 Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:06 am
She was still trying to wrap her head around captured. It had been hours, and still her brain racked itself for ideas on how it could all be a sham. Sailor Vulcan had sided with the Negaverse once before, clearly this could all be a ruse, or a cleverly disguised youma designed to imitate people she'd seen before. To be captured was to fail, and the Negaverse had no room for failures.
Zircon wiggled against her restraints again, but to no avail. She would have to think of something else to escape, some other way to finish this training exercise. Perhaps if she managed to get free, the General-Sovereigns might have mercy on her in spite of her ineptitude. Perhaps if she managed to get free, Schörl might even forgive her this transgression.
Eyes well-adjusted to the darkness of her cell, she scanned the room once more, hoping to find something of use to aid her departure.
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Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 5:24 pm
There was a sharp click as the door to the cell swung open and someone stepped in, the hem of his cape rustling softly across the cold cement of the jail floor. Celsus stood there for a moment, eyeing the young woman kneeling on the ground with a distant, impassioned expression on his pale face before walking towards her.
He stopped a foot or so away, the dim light reflecting off of his glasses, and for several seconds he said nothing at all, merely regarded her in a cold silence.
"Name," he said, and the voice that came out was hoarse, barely level.
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Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 7:18 pm
It was easy to feel small when bound and forced on her knees, and it didn't help that this silhouette, backlit by the door beyond, seemed even taller and more imposing in his shadows. Still, Zircon kept to her silence, watching him with careful eyes. Every visitor was an opportunity to break free, if she had but the wits to look for it. Her senses still felt dampened by presumably whatever force was keeping her from teleporting, but even through the mental fog this captor felt strong. He seemed tired, though, perhaps easy to manipulate--and maybe with some conversation she could get a bit more information on where precisely she was. If she truly was taken by the White Moon, she was far safer than she'd ever expect to be in a Negaverse training exercise.
"I figured you would know something like that, considering we're both here," she responded plainly, trying to adjust how she sat to get a better look of him under those glasses. "Or do you make it a habit to kidnap and restrain strangers?"
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Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 10:48 pm
His eyebrows rose in an expression of incredulity before it shifted back into the one he'd been wearing before, quiet and flat. Celsus walked further into the room, boots clicking on the cold, hard floor, pacing back and forth.
"Do you always ask ridiculous questions?" he asked, with a slightly mocking tone, wavering up at the end. "Name, please, I don't particularly want to ask again."
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Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 2:31 pm
"Only when I've been restrained against my will," Zircon quipped back, giving the knight a pointed look. Her instinct was to shrink away when he drew close, but she kept her posture as tall as possible considering the way she was bound. You are a captain of the Negaverse. Start acting like it.
"I am Captain Zircon," she finally responded, her mouth drawn in a thin line. She would not show him the way uncertainty began to knot in her stomach. There was no room for worry and fear here. "Why are you keeping me here?" She wanted it to sound like a demand, the way Cinnabar sounded when she growled, but there was a quiver to her voice that betrayed her twisting gut.
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Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2016 3:45 pm
"How ironic," Celsus murmured, giving a slight shake of his head, almost as though he was flicking something out of his mind, discarding a useless thought. His head felt as though it was going through a fog, all of his musings hazy and twisted. "Considering your kind did the same thing to me just last year."
The name was filed away, kept inside of his memory. Celsus kept pacing, his hands jerking, his fingers shaking.
"What part of the Negaverse are you in, Captain Zircon?"
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Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2016 6:30 pm
Zircon's eyes widened, though she leaned forward to watch as the man paced. "Is that why you're so antsy? Does all of this hit a little close to home? Or perhaps you're just eager to hold the reins instead?" Zircon had been there at the carnival funhouse, tended to a number of the captured there, but she hadn't actually seen this man before. How differently this encounter might have gone if only she'd found his cell--she'd been at least fair to the Knights under her wing.
She thought to herself, trying to remember the roster of names. Ganymede, Amphitrite, Valhalla, Kairatos, Hvergelmir...there were others, but they were lost to time.
"You know, I've always said that the Negaverse had common cause with the knights," she continued, tilting her head. "I just never expected you would want to imitate us so badly. It's flattering, if poorly executed." The longer she sat in his presence, the easier it was to think of things that might goad him on. No wonder Hvergelmir had said such awful things to her the year before--this was starting to get fun.
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Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2016 5:54 pm
Celsus' pacing stuttered; he turned towards the captain, his eyebrows raising as he considered her words. After a moment, he held out a hand and from the space around him, summoned the short handled whip, the streaming tails of it cascading onto the floor.
"I believe I do hold the reins, actually."
His head pounded a consistent beat of mistake mistake mistake, followed by useless useless useless. Celsus swallowed back the bile rising in his throat and began pacing again, idly twisting the tails of the whip around and around in his fingers.
"I don't," he said tonelessly. "And don't be flattered. I could care less about what you think we have in common. I just want to learn more about you."
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Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2016 9:11 pm
She glanced at his weapon and laughed, the chuckle tinged with the slightest color of raw desperation. If she could only manage to keep laughing, she could almost convince herself that she was not afraid. "Is that meant to scare me? I'll tell you one thing about the Negaverse, that we train our officers to fight much more terrifying fates."
She thought she could see it now, the edges of his convictions crumbling, just like what Schörl would do. "Intention or not, what you've accomplished is imitation," Zircon remarked, tilting her head. If this capture was meant to break her spirit, then it had failed--she found herself only emboldened in her efforts. Sometimes it felt good to be the one without scruples, without a code to fall behind or niceties to observe.
"You could have asked me questions without the bars or the chains," she mocked, rattling her binds behind her. "Ask any of your friends. My fight has never been with the knights, I only seek to defend the earth from senshi."
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Posted: Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:58 pm
He shook his head slowly, almost as though he was trying to get something out of it, rather than express a negative answer. "I'm sure you have," said Celsus quietly. "You Chaos are steeped in terror, aren't you? Trained to fight because of fear, not encouragement."
He twisted the ends of the whip around his fingers a little tighter, trying to stop the shaking of them.
"Fine, then," said Celsus, in the same flat, toneless voice as before. "It's imitating. Call it what you will. The fact remains that I hold the reins here, and you do not. I'm the one that's asking the questions, you're the one that's answering them."
His eyes cut sideways towards her, Celsus still pacing.
"And yet as a Knight, I stand with the senshi, not the Negaverse. Why do you think that is?"
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Posted: Thu Feb 04, 2016 1:53 pm
"Anyone can be misled," Zircon shrugged, ignoring the stiff ache in her shoulders from doing so. "I can try to show you the truth of the matter, but if you simply want to be subjugated by the senshi, then there's only so much I can do for you."
The captain squinted as she looked up at him, taking note of the softly glowing lines on his face. Like Camlann, then, or Babylon. "It looks like you've gone and ruined yourself anyways, you wouldn't be a good host for Chaos. Tell me, how did you get those strange markings?" For one of the knights, it had been a strange mishap with Order magic. For the other, it was a mystery. Zircon was curious to know what manner of strange disease this was, and how it seemed to be spreading so rapidly.
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Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:03 pm
Something vibrated down his spine at her words; something like frustration, or perhaps bitterness, though Celsus could not determine the actual emotion. His own were too twisted up with one another, too convoluted, and he felt caught off balance in the mess of his thoughts.
He had not expected to be caught off guard by Zircon's question. Celsus stopped abruptly, his heart hammering in his chest, and he was suddenly, starkly aware of his own appearance; of the swirling, curling marks that took over half of his face.
For the first time since he'd walked into the cell, there was fear in Celsus's eyes.
It looks like you've gone and ruined yourself anyways.
A breath shuddered out of him, pained.
"A mistake," Celsus whispered, and it almost seemed like he was talking to himself, rather than the captain, his chest rising and falling too quickly, his pulse quick beneath his skin.
"It was a mistake."
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Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 11:10 am
Zircon knew the look in his eyes. She'd worn it before herself, hundreds of times. Something had struck a nerve, and she'd caught scent of one of his weaknesses.
She'd actually won.
"Mistakes can be remedied," she crooned with a tilt her head, unable to hide the immense satisfaction she took in watching him squirm under her thumb. "It seems to me that what you've done is far, far worse."
For years, White Moon sympathizers had tried to make her feel like garbage for her choice of affiliation, like she was some sort of monster or villain. There was something cathartic about being able to turn this logic on its head and make someone else feel so low.
"You should tell me what happened," she reaffirmed, nodding her head. "Maybe if we talk things through, I can think of some way to have you redeemed. Metallia's taken on more difficult cases, I'm sure." Of course, she had no intention of actually saving this man, but if she could wiggle out some information about the strange markings, then maybe she could figure out a way to destroy Camlann.
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