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 Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2017 6:37 pm
A certain trepidation came with powering up now. Scholomance couldn't explain it; according to him, it lacked a rational explanation. He knew that stopping there in his quest for its reason was a cop-out, a hard science-based route in which he could abandon the subject altogether, but his preference for fewer mysteries in life pushed him for better reasoning. Was this hesitance due to Blaine's machinations? Perhaps. Was it due to the missed meeting with his Negaverse contact? That sounded more likely. Was he worried about the consequences of his missed meeting? Most certainly.
While he was somewhat more satisfied with that answer, he still proceeded through his trek across the city with significantly more care to avoid foreign signatures than he did before the Wonder trip. Not only did he prefer avoiding any bastions of Chaos on the horizon, but he also stuck to shadows, seldom-tread streets, and the cover of industrial noise pollution to get by most areas. The trek committed in fear was bound to be an exhausting one; by the time Scholomance reached the vicinity of one of the residential neighborhoods, he felt tired and stricken with old soreness. Climbing rooftops and prowling streets proved taxing on his recovering body.
Wednesdays were the rare days that he could suss out Hvergelmir from her bench duties, and he needed her with expedience now. As the hoster of Knight Nights and a knight herself past his own achievement of the rank, she stood as a promising contact for the question of his ancestor's starseed. Perhaps Babylon would have been an even greater choice for his experiences with ancestors, but Scholomance lacked the signet ring to contact him by and knew very little of the Mercury Knight's patrol habits. Hvergelmir, at least, made a point of remaining approachable for further inquiries. And while she was not there to heed the return of that collection of starseeds to Cosmos, she was a Knight of the Cosmos herself, and would hopefully have the connections required to make a similar delivery with his ancestor's starseed.
Paranoia concerning his circumstances failed to subside by the time he felt the keen signature of a star lit upon the cold ground. Scholomance thought nothing of it and instead pushed it from his mind as he started through the sparse trees, across the wide, empty expanse of the dead playgrounds attached to the vacant soccer field. Instant gratification urged him back into the darkness with the starseed, but he forced himself to continue. If nothing else, he would seek counsel from Hvergelmir on the matter.
"Hver?" He chanced, hoping that the nearing signature was indeed hers.shazari please lmk if anything needs changing; i wanted to get this down while i had time and energy to write it
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Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2017 8:50 pm
If Hvergelmir was one thing, it was certainly accessible. Dangerously, defiantly regular with her schedule (barring illness or emergency), she made something of a point of telling people where she'd be at a given time, and then being there. It was useful for times like this -- when people needed to find her. But if she was a second thing -- and she certainly tried to be -- then that thing was observant. Hvergelmir was pleased to see Scholomance as he came closer into view, especially with it having been so long. He'd managed to stay the course after all this time, then, after he'd been wavering. He was still holding on. Only -- his silhouette was not quite right. Something looked off. Hvergelmir got to her feet and crossed at a hurried clip toward where Scholomance was approaching. On closer approach, the discrepancy was obvious. One of his sleeves was tucked into his pocket, but it hung too-empty most of the way up. Oh, no. "It's me," she confirmed, stepping into the light and closing into conversational proximity. "Scholomance -- what happened?"
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Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 7:22 am
Irritation pricked when she questioned him. He knew it was normal to inquire about the condition of others, especially when one day they had all their fingers and the next they lost most of them, but Scholomance spent several days crafting shame and anxiety around his disfigurement. Lately, he found such harbored secrets grew into burgeoning rage, and he continually stopped himself from snapping at others for their inquiries.
While he bit back as much anger as he could swallow, some resentment still stained his tone of voice. "A lot," he answered haltingly at first. He approached the figure at a slower clip. "Two generals attacked me after that death trap with Caedus. I'm surprised there aren't others," he added in a lean lie.
The days counted down with efficiency. He felt like he met Schörl but twenty minutes ago, and already they ventured deep into Friday night. Soon he would find himself on the cusp of another Thursday, and he would either meet with Schörl another time or find some other inane task waiting for him. Was it a viable choice to explain these positions to Hvergelmir? Was there some usefulness to be gleaned out of spilling secrets? No - he hadn't the mental wherewithal for this yet.
"I need your help." His words sounded trite as he spoke to the Knight of the Cosmos, walled into her ancient architecture of stars. The street lamp formed her clandestine spotlight when the moon hid beyond the clouds. "When we were pulled from the inner sanctums of the Negaverse, we faced Cosmos in her moon kingdom. While there, someone stepped forward to give her the sack of stolen starseeds. She said something about taking them home - about imparting them back into the reincarnation process." He paused, breathed.
Part of him wanted to smile for misbegotten reasons. "Will you send one to her for me?" He opened his palm outward, and in it formed a delicate phylactery replete with blue velveds and pristine golds. "It's in here."
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Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2017 8:34 am
Hvergelmir reminded herself that someone who'd been mutilated as Scholomance had been mutilated would have a right to some anger and bitterness -- but the frostiness that edged his tone stung her a little, all the same. Moreso than most knights Hvergelmir had ever met, Scholomance had wavered about his place in the war and struggled with the temptation to capitulate and let the Negaverse convert him. After all of that, after as long as he'd been hanging on to his freedom by his fingernails,what had it gotten him? He'd been tortured, mauled. He'd lost an arm. Scholomance was not a fighter. He'd never asked for any of this -- and he'd never felt capable of it, either. What little she knew of him had been enough to know he'd seen himself as constantly needing to hold his more selfish impulses in check. This was far from the right time to point it out, so she didn't: but the amazing thing, the astounding thing was -- he was still here. They had taken a piece of him, and what he had left was still enough for him to maintain sovereignty over his own soul, not to give it over to Metallia. Hvergelmir had always suspected he might be a stronger person than he realized -- but now, more than ever, it seemed clear that he was capable of an incredible resilience beyond his own awareness of it. It was not something to say. This was the wrong moment for it. But it was also the wrong moment to let the entire conversation go. Scholomance, it seemed, was eager to complete this interaction and be done with it -- a departure from any other time they'd spoken or written to each other -- and that made her concerned that it was more than just modesty about his injury. The last thing he needed, if he was still freshly reeling from the injury, was to be left to isolation. So she did something she'd learned very carefully how to do through all her time spent trying to get Negaverse agents to stay and talk to her despite their misgivings: she stalled for time. "Well," Hvergelmir said quietly, reaching out to try and take the elaborate phylactery gently between her two hands, "let me take a look." The way his hand shifted when he'd opened his hand toward her to show her the object was, somehow -- it was -- it was unusual, off. One of his fingers didn't uncurl with the others, not in the same way. She kept her eyes on the phylactery, peering at it a little before returning Scholomance's gaze. "It was our task once, knights of the Cosmos -- to protect starseeds on their journey back to the Galaxy Cauldron, to hurry them safely along. But most starseeds are strong enough to return on their own, even without us." She raised her eyebrows, curious. "Is there something unusual about this one?"
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Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 10:43 am
She claimed the phylactery from him, and Scholomance was grateful in two ways. Her acceptance of it showed a consideration for what he asked, and the removal of weight from an already tired and sore arm left him more time to recover. If better circumstances surrounded their meet, Scholomance would have danced about the purpose of his soliciting her freely - and perhaps, in all of his stalling, never reached the purpose behind the visit. He found an ease in getting wrapped up in others, and Hvergelmir was cut of different cloth than his standoffish allies. She seemed, somehow, unattached to all the dozens of problems that bred from these double lives. If she found them as trials, she chose to never speak of them to him.
Her question stoked his perpetual ire, and as he swallowed to buy himself time, he wondered if any response at all led to the same result. "I can tell you that this starseed is defective, then." He met her gaze as politely as he could.
"It stuck around too long." He wondered, then, why the starseeds of old needed protecting. What could pursue these souls through space, and when immersed in the midst of a war, was it therefore safe to let these Cosmos knights go about neglecting that duty? Perhaps all the deaths on Earth had their starseeds picked off from somewhere in the sky, and all the lauded rebirth cycle only rerouted to Metallia's blackened domain. He couldn't know. Mostly he didn't want to know.
And was there purpose in being secretive with Hvergelmir? She proved clever, attentive. He sighed through his nose, thrust his hand into pocket. He expected that washing his hands of Blaine would take longer than initially intended. "You're holding the ancestor of Scholomance. He's been after the Space Cauldron for some time, but went about it in all the wrong ways." The temptation was great for turning him over to a youma as a light snack. "So if you can't help, then I don't know of any other way to do this. Cosmos didn't quite let us in on her secret of getting starseeds into the Cauldron." His heel bounced with burgeoning nervous energy.
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 9:35 am
I can tell you that this starseed is defective, then. It stuck around too long."Ah," Hvergelmir answered quietly, the deep indigo of the phylactery reflecting off of her eyes. "So that's it, then. This happened to Babylon's ancestor, too." She was fortunate that at least Scholomance hadn't had the bright idea to put the second starseed into his own chest for safekeeping. This would be much easier -- and much less dangerous to Scholomance's health. "Blaine, right? So he's finally on his way to end this long night and start over." Scholomance and his ancestor, from what she knew, had had a difficult relationship, and Scholomance had struggled to get valuable guidance from him. "Perhaps that's for the best." Scholomance used to flirt with Hvergelmir, once. He'd had a gliding, smooth way of speaking, like he'd always known that carnality was the least of all things he could consider being ashamed of -- and he'd spoken and listened to her like she was someone whose insights and opinions he'd valued. Maybe he'd simply been lacking in informed company back then, and now he had an embarrassment of riches as far as friends and resources went -- but the way the comparitive silence snaked between them, it didn't feel like that was what made the difference between then and now. It felt like some of the energy had simply gone out of him. The space between them contained a mute funeral for all the things he'd recently lost. She could understand that. Hvergelmir rotated the phylactery between her hands, watching it for a moment before her gaze fell back to the Saturn knight speaking to her, resplendent in uniform but lacking in physical and psychological substance. His remaining hand was tucked back in his pocket -- but she remembered the way the fingers of his glove hadn't curled quite right, the one lagging digit. Hvergelmir's dreams of their lost future frequently floated to the fore of her mind, challenging her to defy them. They were full of small details just as much as they were large events, and that was often what had made them feel so real, so personal: she knew she was seeing not just a future, but a future self. And in this moment, she remembered a detail in particular -- a habit she'd picked up some time after she'd lost her tongue, after they'd all begun living as hunted beings. The first thing she'd always done after powering up was to transfer her summons ring to her opposite hand, alongside her signet ring. Eikthyrnir had been her precaution, her last desperate failsafe: the Negaverse had not been above taking fingers, taking hands, taking whole limbs to disarm and depower their enemies. Signet rings existed outside of transformations, so there was nothing she could do about hers, if she'd lost it to an injury like that -- but her summons ring had been different. Wearing it on her off hand meant that even with the loss of a limb, depowering and powering back up would recall her summons ring to its proper place and let her escape. She'd been fortunate never to lose a hand to the Negaverse -- but she'd always been careful to take the precaution. She looked back and Scholomance's eyes and nodded slowly, her gaze steady and calm. He hadn't just been injured in the heat of battle -- he'd been tortured. That left scars on the mind and the soul just as much as on the body. "I can help your ancestor," Hvergelmir whispered her assent. "But can I help you?"
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2017 10:52 am
"Yes." How easy it was to confirm Hvergelmir's inferences - that what lay in her hands was simply the last acting duty of a knight for his ancestor. Like that confirmation somehow obscured the ill-wishes behind the action. While merely another human being, Hvergelmir possessed remarkable insight and a liberal spread of lives touched by her presence. She may not currently see that he wished a poor life for his predecessor, but what point was there in elaborating on that? He performed the right action for reasons wrong in the public eye, and any further repercussions from that would resolve in time.
But, he also hated eventualities.
Scholomance began a slow pace before she asked her question. Exercise often fostered a distraction to rushing thoughts, to runaway reactions - and more recently, simple movement of the joint eased the stiffness in his left leg. Winter grew unkind in its rule, and he could do nothing for its ravagings, but careful exercise over the past year relieved much of the strain. Since Halloween, he could forget about it now, but the price for doing so far exceeded his budget. Now, the limitless mental complaints waged over the knit scar tissue in his hip felt insubstantial, entitled, dull. So perhaps he took to pacing not only due to its assistance with pain management, but also because he could still walk to soothe this injury. He could no longer flex his arm, stretch it or rotate it when phantom pains settled in. There wasn't a simple, easy way to forget parts of himself.
When her question came, he fostered a certain level of bracing for it. He somewhat expected the question, even if he detested it, and the potential for that question weighed into his choice of this Cosmos Knight over the rest. He knew of a few - not many, but Hvergelmir's own Knight Nights and his woefully underattended release of a ring piece pulled more Cosmos Knights into his perview. Hyperborea herself was transcended. But he knew little of them, and strangers provided predictably polite and placid conversations for one another. He could just as easily solicit them for the same closure on his ancestor's part as he could with Hvergelmir. Granted, he would need to pinch a signet ring to arrange for that, but he noted a few willing targets for such affairs.
He would be lying to himself if he assumed that Hvergelmir came as his choice due to her ease of access. No, he knew she could challenge him. He even expected she might. But that small fleck of doubt that she would raise the question was what ensured his coming to visit - that he may be challenged for his rut in life, but that decision strayed far from his own hands. There remained enough security in that doubt to spur him onward. The chance existed, but it was slight enough that he could gamble with his blinders on.
He also knew the ease of which he could say no. He could take Hvergelmir in the most literal version of her question, and answer that she could not furnish his arm or his teeth or his finger back, and that ended her usefulness for him. He could deflect with thinly-veiled jokes about taking her home (and perhaps the hopeful kernel of possibility there tempted him too much). He could say yes, even, and offer inane tasks with which to waste both of their time. 'I don't know' provided a similarly escapist means of riding the fence.
Scholomance sighed at last, almost laughing into the gesture. He looked past the dull sodium glare to the canopy, the nearby light source having blackened it. But that was all a play on perspective, wasn't it? "Allow me to shoot myself in the foot for a minute." He closed his eyes and shut out some of the pervasive external stimuli. It was easier to speak with a modicum of eloquence, he found, when Hvergelmir's tits were not in his purview. "When I came here, I thought you might ask me that. I visited because of the chance you might not. That… Sounds pretty awful, and it is, but mostly because I remember how immensely difficult it is to crawl out of a hole. No, not so much a hole as a pit. I hope you understand.
"It's simpler, more straightforward, less energy to just self-destruct. After all, you only know you're in a pit if you look up. And, it's far easier to make passive choices about anything. Accepting help is an active choice, though. Accepting help means you can't self-destruct." He clicked his tongue against false teeth. Opening his eyes again, he looked to the strange phylactery.
"He left me with something that shouldn't be in me. An insidious, rotten little thing. I don't know what to call it, so I can't describe it for you. But, it's changing me in ways I don't like. I never used to be this angry." He admitted with a modicum of regret.
"So I don't know if you can help me, but I'd like for you to try."
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Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2017 8:05 am
It was difficult to say, in that moment, whether Scholomance was being literal or figurative. Whatever had happened with his ancestor, some after-effect was still lingering with him. Something to do with that . . . or with had taken his arm and his finger. This was not a task compassion could manage on its own. But it was also not a task that could be undertaken in the absence of it. 'I never used to be this angry.'Hvergelmir agreed with that. The Scholomance she had known, despite his circumstances, had managed the circumstances of his rise to knighthood with surprisingly little bitterness. Oh, certainly he'd seemed frustrated with the dangerousness of circumstanced he hadn't asked for or wanted, and he'd made no secret of that -- but there had been an undercurrent of something different: something more weary than angry. He had been witty and pragmatic and a little devil-may-care, in the way of what she could only assume was someone who'd already traveled through some fire of his own. ( Hadn't he always been unusually thin, she thought, and didn't he known an intimate amount about what sounded like the steps to recovery -- and didn't those things add up, after all?) "Then I'll try," she agreed, briefly threading the fingers of one hand around the long pendulum chain that dangled downward from the front of her dress. "I'd hate to see you destroy yourself -- I don't have so many friends that I can afford to lose one." She stepped in closer, then drew to a halt -- careful not to broach the sanctity of the other knight's personal space bubble. "Scholomance," Hvergelmir said quietly, clasping both hands in front of herself, studying the Saturn knight's eyes for signs of panic or distress, prepared to quickly reestablish distance if he felt unsafe. "May I touch you?"
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Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2017 8:41 am
'I don't have so many friends that I can afford to lose one.
He remembered phrases like that. He remembered them as hopeful little trifles. There were, he knew, certain expectations impressed upon everyone that demanded a cherishing of every friendship, every life that brushed contact with their own. But reality sank in after a time - that any given person values one friend over another, that some lives lose their value after a time. Friendships coast on benign indifference. Friendships sputter and die when someone decides that, perhaps, they could lose this one. They could lose that one, too.
Hvergelmir considered him a friend, despite their lean number of encounters. Perhaps he should have taken her for drinks, or kept her company on her bench visits. Shown her delectable little card games, maybe even played strip poker. Perhaps he would have hoped for her to prove uniquely bad at lying, so he might call her every bluff. Maybe she would let him win. His ideas of fun seldom crossed into these realms of otherworlds and power. Anger simmered away the guilt about his menial contributions to any friendship.
Initially he reacted with mild confusion about her inquiry. Why ask to touch him, when he often proved his openness at any occasion? Realization chased away his doubts, however, and left him cold to the insinuations.
You're supposed to be a victim, it warned. You're supposed to cower at the thought of touch. You're supposed to be traumatized, caged from your own autonomy. You're supposed to wilt at any thought of Schörl or Cinnabar, and you so often do. They took your arm, your teeth, your finger and signet ring. You're supposed to be broken now. You're supposed to be defeated now, dependent on everyone in your crippled state and with your wonder dogging you with grievous rejections. Can't you play by the rules to stay in the game? Your role's already written for you.
He knew the ease of lashing out right now - and wanted to before. Its burden had not grown so great that he found swallowing such rage to be impossible. But he couldn't simply look her in the eye and comply without a sharpness to his voice; Scholomance was not completely unaffected. He opted for a third option.
"Should I unzip first?" He hoped, at least, she would laugh.shazari sorry for suck, lots of things happening
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Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 6:24 pm
Hvergelmir didn't laugh. It wasn't anything outside of Scholomance's usual humor -- but there was a crispness to it, something just a bit too snappy, too sharp. She did smile, lashes lowered, and shook her head. "In this cold weather?" Hvergelmir clucked her tongue. "How risky." She set the phylactery carefully to one side. When she touched him it was, first, with her bare hands, and fleeting. She lifted one hand to sift her fingers through his hair, to push it back from his face and tuck a few strands behind his ear. Her thumb smoothed over his eyebrow, and she dusted her knuckles gently over his cheekbone as she lowered her hand. She studied his eyes carefully -- not for some flinch or fear, but in fruitless hope of finding some inkling of the source of the anger Blaine had left him with. Magical? Or just conventionally psychological? Did anyone really know how blurry or distinct the line was between those two things? When did anger end and Chaos begin? Masked, gloved, he was barely visible at all -- a contrast to all her bare skin. "This may not help at all," she said. "We don't fully understand how our Aspects work, and I don't have much to go on. But sometimes, it's just . . . " Hvergelmir smiled and shrugged helplessly. Sometimes even simple human comfort helped some things. Maybe here. She slid her finger over her summons ring, triggering the glimmering Aspect of the Cosmos, in all its quiet radiance. Light bled through her, sparkling -- she could feel the slow soak of energy through her pores, beginning the long drawn down of her magic as it externalized itself in pale starlight. Hvergelmir lifted luminous hands back up to the Saturn knight's face. One hand smoothed across his temple; the other, she carded through his hair till she could smooth her fingers around the back of Scholomance's skull, easing his head down onto her shoulder in a full-bodied hug. "Try to relax," she whispered. "Seriously." How often, she wondered, did Scholomance just let himself hug someone without deflecting the intimacy into off-color humor? Strickenized ASPECT OF THE COSMOS: The silvery sheen of starlight covers the Knights of the Cosmos, and their touch is just as heavenly. It's warm and pleasant to most, but acidic and painful to corrupted beings. For the followers of Chaos, physical contact with one of these Knights feels like a mild chemical burn: although it does little in the way of damage, it's hard to tolerate it.
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Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:08 pm
So it goes, came the dull thought. Of course his advances came at the improper time. Here he just handed off his ancestor's starseed in a poorly-understood pot, expecting that the conniving b*****d be returned to the Space Cauldron for a second chance he never deserved. He played the Nice Guy game, the Do The Right Thing game, the Well-Behaved game. He played a thousand games to dodge the reality of it. But Hvergelmir proved well-attuned to what was and was not appropriate. Were she someone else — Aegir perhaps, or Mont Blonc or Gehenna — he could get away with what he wanted.
Get away with — like he thefted from reality's destitute dominion.
Scholomance tried to stay still, though touch was so oft a reciprocal thing — the way Hvergelmir touched his hair would be so easy to return with a cup of fingers about her shoulder, her waist. Temptation suggested the ease at which he could pull her close, and his ire nearly demanded it.
He thought of all the phrases he wanted to say while Hvergelmir's delicate touch roamed his bare skin, sparse as it was. Hvergelmir, I'm terribly sorry, but every time you touch me I want to break your lovely face.
My dear, i don't want to snap your fingers right now, but the temptation is there.
Normally I'd be happy to reciprocate, but there's this unconventional burning desire in me to murder everything. Literally everything. Including you, my fair Cosmos knight.
"Hver," he tried, as he caught her elbow in his shallow palm, "I don't think —"
And he couldn't, really, not when she lit herself like a star. Not when her touch burned through rage unearned. It was relaxing, in its own preposterous magical way. Soothing, even. The way she could assuage an anger so fierce; Hvergelmir kept her strengths well-hidden behind her oath. He gave a plaintive huff at her insistence — seriously — and folded his arm to the tuck of her back in an unfortunately chaste embrace. She felt warm, soft, terribly tempting.
But that temptation eased to tolerable, domitable levels beneath her starlight touch. A small boon.
He considered prefacing his gratitude. He considered a surfeit of witty phrases constantly rolling through his mind, each less serious than the first. But her command — her seriously — gave each of them pause. As his chin found the tuck of her shoulder, he decided on a better phrase. Perhaps a most appropriate phrase: "Thank you."
A breath. "I've been wanting to break his starseed since he poisoned me. Doing the 'right thing' feels like wilfully being cheated, you see."
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