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 Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2017 2:38 pm
The aura signature had pinged on her internal radar somewhere between 1st and 4th, prompting a change of path for the eternal senshi.
Youma were her usual fair, but any Negaverse agent unattended could be a body found in an alley come morning. Ida couldn't justify walking away from it, so she'd left off her usual route to follow.
The signature took her to a more residential area, on the cusp of commercial where the line blurred. When she finally got close enough, winding her way between an old chevy with a dinged bumper and a minivan parked on the street across from an Aldi's, the corrupt was already inside. This close, she could tell it was a super, which boded well for how this would go.
At least it's not ascended... Even now she could still taste the ash and rot of Alkaid's power signature. She had never met another ascended... and she hoped she never would.
It begged the question, though, what this agent was doing here. After hours, there shouldn't even be anyone inside. So why go in?
jumping to the roof as quietly as possible, Ida set out looking for roof top access that might not be barred like below.
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Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2017 2:29 pm
A way in, by chance or greater design, became quickly inert of purpose: a corrupted appeared with no blinking or poufs of black smoke. Appeared in the parking lot, next to the handicap spaces that were visible some 15 yards from the locked automatic doors in to the grocer. Haüyne's arms were laden, two apiece, with the cloth-type, large, reusable shopping bags stuffed to brim foodstuffs. The bananas were trying to escape and the Village Bakery Cookies were smooshing into the bread from over-hasty tossing into bags. The Super Corrupted paused, letting down all the bags with exasperated nerves to try to salvage the mishaps quickly. There's a Moonie near. There's a Moonie near. They're gonna try and take my groceries. Not today, man. Not to-effing-day. I got these fair and square-"FIT ALREADY." There just wasn't tetrising a good place for the four loaves of different bread in the bag they'd been stuffed to. The bags needed to be re-arranged completely, so that the cookies were on bottom, then the bagels, chips, and last the breads. "I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR YOUR YEASTY BS."
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Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2017 6:57 pm
There! The signature had moved, blink-fast, and there wasn't time to fuss over it. Something had happened inside, and if it was a starseed that had been taken, she only had moments before another blink and it was gone forever.
Never to reach the Cauldron. Never to be born again. Never to go home to their family tonight, or their friends, or their cat.
Steps pounded the roof and then the senshi was flying, a leap from the top arcing a good distance before she came with with surprising lightness for how far she'd fallen. Thank senshi strength for that little stunt. It got her across the parking lot and within easy sight of the corrupt she had been chasing.
Ida straightened, her hands up in front of her and relaxed open. If the aura hadn't clued her in to the sub-faction this one belong to, the long hair and the unsettling cracks in their skin did so now. It was surprising to see their hands full of food stuffs, surrounding by bags of more, and even more surprising that there was a flicker of familiarity.
The hair was too long, but it was the right color. Pale skin and eyes like neon signs. A small mark, just to the side of the left eye... It made the cracks all the more sickening to consider, when they split open the face of someone she'd called a friend.
"Sandrine...? What are you doing? Did you..." She stumbled over the obvious conclusion, still torn that a Negaverse officer would stoop to this... "Are you stealing all of that?"
Did the Negaverse not feed its own people? It was easier to focus on that question than to consider the far larger and more devastating one... how did this happen to you? And where was I?
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Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2017 9:38 pm
OUT OF TIME. ETERNAL. The corrupted looked up, eyes narrowing suspiciously, and crouched over the bags, pulling them nearer under crouched legs. "Don't you touch a single hashbrown, Moonie." Blood and blue hand made a nervous shoo-ing motion at Ida, "Sanidine ain't even here, yo', you got us reeeeal mixed up you think I'm a General." "The word you're lookin' for is 'expropriate'. This is a military confiscation of goods for the Queen's soldier and you can step off. You shop where you wanna, I'm shoppin' Aldi's. " The super was briefly distracted by the food again, from the shifting the bag of sale Christmas chocolate bears fell out onto the black top. " Have you ever tried these? Their REALLY good. And they got the german flag and everything. Real import German chocolate. Who cares if they're bears or it isn't Christmas. "
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Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 9:33 pm
Hashbrown? Ida's face scrunch up in confusion, watching the corrupt hunch over their ill gotten gains and try to... shoo her away.
Sanidine? German chocolate?
The realization was a heavy weight in her chest. If this was Sandrine, they were not a Sandrine that knew her... or apparently their own name. Corruption had taken its toll, as it always did, but the fall out had not been in her favor. It ruined whatever standing she might have had with her fallen comrade, and put her on shakey footing.
Ugh... Hver would know how to handle this. She was better at it than Ida had ever been. It forced her think how Hver would have handled this and as the corrupt stuffed fussed with the bags, she raised her hands and spread her fingers, palm out.
"I don't want the food, I just think that its... kind of unfair, for the people at Aldis. The Negaverse isn't going to compensate them for that, really, and if you do that a lot, they're not going to be able to pay their employees, who don't make much as it is." She said, trying to interject a bit of coaxing into her voice. "My Da runs a little shop... losing merchandise means losing money, and not being able to put food on the table sometimes."
Not that it had ever gotten to that point with their shop... but they didn't have a magical person stealing from them either.
"Doesn't the Negaverse feed you?" She tentatively asked. She never moved from her shop, though she did slowly lower her hands. "For an army that expects you to fight and die for them, they don't take very good care of you... Didn't you used to be on the other side? You look... familiar."
This felt like such a weird way to approach things, but hopefully it got the corrupt to stick around a little bit... maybe shed some light on what had happened.
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Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 12:58 am
'Kind of unfair,' is this eternal for REAL? "You know we kill people, right? That this is a war?" "I think taking some groceries because I want to eat to live myself is the least of my crimes against the greater laws of the sovereign nation of the United States of America. And since I'm not a citizen, unless I feel like getting deported to nowhere, to farm nothing, or getting a illegal alien job, I'm not gonna eat at all. And not eating is terminal. So save the sob story about starvation. They can make do just like I'm doing right here, with their tool-usin' problem solving skills. " The Other Side. Which was a weird way to put it, since what the purple nurple was talking about was the 'Other,' but her saying other made it sound like it should be the Negaverse in the first place. Haüyne stood up in the midst of the circling pile of bags, looking at the eternal with a mix of dubious concern and genuine curiosity. "I don't remember my Awakening. With a Cat. The ones that trained me said it's standard. All senshi have to have a cat to 'awaken' them. I don't know any cats. " It was stupid to say anything, to bother talking, except that this was an eternal. Eternal senshi were dangerous, more powerful, and simultaneous should know s**t. The Corrupted of Execution had worked with enough officer trainers to have the basics, but seemed at a loss for anything specific about 'senshi.' And the list of mentors the super had of the senshi variety for Q&A's was a big, fat zero. Worse, it was uncomfortable to focus much on the wide swath of black and insubstantial glimmers behind waking up in the Barracks with Shale there as the welcome crew.
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Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2017 8:23 am
s**t. Well, that apparently didn’t work. Ida dropped her hands to cross them in front of her instead, loosely cupping the bottoms of her elbows.
Obviously, she was not cut out to do what Hver did… however she did it. Not enough practice. Not enough patience. But that didn’t mean she had to be hostile about it, either. Her dark head tilted a little, studying the corrupt while fighting off the sadness of seeing a friend turned not-friend. All of Sandrine… gone. Life, friendships, relations. Home, hearth and apparently food, if they were stealing to stave off starvation. What kind of an organization was the Negaverse, that it could feed it’s captives, but not its own people? She resisted the urge to say it out loud.
“You lost a lot of memories, I think, so no surprise you don’t remember the cat that woke you.” She said, eyes narrowed in thought. At least the corrupt was talking rather than attacking or running away. She could work with that, maybe? Hopefully.
Step one; find out more. Who had Sandrine become, through corruption? This obviously wasn’t the same person any more, so it was a lot like starting over from scratch. Ugh… it was hard to decide on what track to take, how to approach them. She didn’t want them to leave… not without some attempt, something to reach for the person she had known…
Ida, I really need your help, canyoucome?
Too little, too late, but maybe she could do better.
“I don’t know which cat awakened you, but they would have sensed your power and given you your wand, along with the words to power up, your name, and shown you how to use your magic. You got a phone too, which is how we contact each other. I believe the Negaverse uses something else.” Ida said. Releasing an elbow, she circled a dusky finger at the corrupt, taking in all of them. She tried to keep her tone casual and avoid insisting too hard on what she knew, versus what this stranger believed. “I thought you were someone I knew when I first saw you. But she was a White Moon senshi and you don’t know who I am, so I guess not the same person. I haven’t seen her in months and months… it worried me.”
Part of those months had been on Alkaid. Was that when it had happened? She felt guilt, for not being there… but there wasn’t anything she could have done, at the time. She had had her own survival to fight for then.
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Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 11:53 pm
Haüyne watched the woman's arms close, cross, like a split rail fence at the stable. Keep the horses in and something of a deterrent to keep the coyote out. Or stupid teenagers. Or Drunk drivers unintentionally offroading. Oh what, like I gotta chance with all my bags and no back up of downing you. Or what,I'm a plague and catching? The plastic baggie of chocolate bears in the Corrupted's hand crinkled with tension. 'You. you.' 'She. she.' Pointy pointy. "Your delivery sucks." It was such a nonsequitor, but what else was there. Oh, there was the one bag of bears in hand. The Super of Execution hucked them at the eternal like a dodge-ball. "I meet closed doors all the time, but this has gotta be the first time I met one trying to say It thought It recognized me. " "Save the 'I'm vulnerable!' shiz, and engage me or not, Wallflower. I can't beat an eternal in a fight, I don't have backup, and honestly, these groceries are higher on my priority list than a starseed. " A double finger gun for emphasis right back at Pretty-in-Purple. "I don't remember a lot to just look at, you don't look all that approachable for some scratch and sniff, and I'm not comfortable with someone being Jervis to close my eyes to try to just listen. Capisce?" Shooing motions. Maybe it would work this time.
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Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:00 pm
Ida startled as the corrupted darted down to grab something and threw it at her. She batted it away instinctively and a dark, frustrated frown swept across her face as it clattered across the ground, packaging scuffed and dented from being used as a missile weapon. If it could be called that.
“I don’t have much practice and you aren’t an easy audience. Sue me.” She shot back, her hands clenching. This was, of course, going exactly the way she didn’t want it to go, because that was how these things worked for her. Damned if she understood why, but they did.
Scratch and sniff? Her frown was equal parts confusion and frustration now and there was a tightness in her jaw.
“I’m not going to fight you, if that’s what you’re talking about, not unless you decide you want to take a swing at me. Maybe I do recognize you and I’m afraid shoving it down your throat like ‘oh no, my lost friend, please come back to me’ is going to freak you out too much to actually listen to it. But I guess that’s a moot point now, because you don’t look inclined anyway.” Ida parroted part in a high falsetto before her voice dropped back to its normal range. Her chin lifted at the shooing motions and she shifted from one foot to the other, but made no move to leave, stubbornly standing her ground.
Did she bluster? Try to talk more? What approach was the best one now? None of it seemed to have a clear answer and in the end, all she could really do was follow her own moral compass. Things weren’t going to get magically better in one meeting, she was pretty sure, and not after this. Not like life was so kind that this corrupt would suddenly see the light, come take her hand and happy skip off to be purified.
“I don’t know what happened to you. I wish I did.” She said, blowing out a breath. “And I’m not leaving, fyi. You’re going to have to find a different store to rob, because I’m making this a regular stop on my patrol now, unless you want to come listen to more of my shitty delivery. Sorry, but I don’t believe there is no other way for you to live than by stealing. I’m making an assumption you’re smart enough to figure out how to actually pay for things with the whole of the Negaverse’s resources behind you.”
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Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2017 12:45 pm
But you'll shove a bunch of morality play B.S. at me and act like a gross wounded bird. And then all judgey-judgey some more. Whaaaat a Twaffle. Yeah, admitting ******** all to this one was a total mistake. Haüyne rolled eyes, and crouched down again to finish readjusting the bags. "Sure thing, Moonie, suuuuure thing. Cause a patrol is passing by a place, or waiting for how long? Ten minutes? Fifteen? I'm gonna have to do a load of NOTHING about your Authority. I got a Queen backing me. I can teleport. In to the store, take what I need even if you ARE here. And you know what? Just teleport right on back home. And what are you gonna DO about it? " The corrupted picked up the bags again, great gathers of handles and crinkling packaging. The once-projectile bears were left on the ground as they'd landed near Ida. "You'd have to break and enter to even get at me. So while you're talking about being 'smart enough' to figure stuff out, you figure out THAT math, Ms. Highly-Mighty. " 'I’m not going to fight you,' sure, we'll see. Haüyne set to walking across the lot again, less hurried or worried. "Smell ya later. "
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Posted: Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:17 pm
It was hard to imagine the figure that gathered up their things and walked away was the same Sandrine she'd known. But then, it wasn't the same Sandrine, was it? This was someone darkened by Chaos, who'd gone through... who knows what to arrive where they were, and was obviously struggling to get basic necessities. Like food.
The Negaverse held and tortured captives, killed innocent people, and refused to even provide for it's own soldiers. And that was what they all fought so hard for? She didn't understand it, and her chest ached thinking about lost friends.
"Maybe I can't stop you." She said to the retreating back. "But I think I can endeavor to make your little trips more effort than they're worth. And remind you every time that your queen doesn't even care about you enough to feed you."
It wasn't how she would have wanted this to go, but this was how it was, for now. She wasn't Hver, with her magical touch. It was going to be a pain, putting in extra time here, but when it was all she could do? Then she'd do it.
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