In the recent weeks of his youmafication, Faustite felt exhausted in a manner that he hadn't felt since his childhood growth spurts. His fingers ached, his eyes ached, and the rest of his body groaned with unwanted empathy for those two isolated areas. Ibuprofen soon became a staple in his severely compromised diet, alongside any cakes and pastries Chrysocolla saw fit to smuggle in for him.
She had her uses, he supposed. Dead-eyed and broken in soul, Chrysocolla wasn't much for conversation herself. She could handle certain topics with relatively stable aplomb - namely Negaverse-sanctioned topics. Energy draining and where to dump the bodies afterward. Starseeding and how those starseeds are stored in Negaspace itself. How to fight off a particularly tenacious senshi. When it's appropriate to dust a youma. But these topics seldom reached Faustite's seemingly endless bandwidth for conversational points, and the subjects he did solicit with her caused her considerable distress. Speaking of her life warranted the clenching and unclenching of fists. College left her panicked. Gossip on the generals met a well-trained, staunch disapproval.
She was, he felt, a dog left half-trained. A dog that, unfortunately for her, proved far too easy and far too entertaining to poke and goard and jostle.
This walking echo of humanity reached an anxious fever-pitch after a few short, deprecating sentences. And that worked out in Faustite's favor - if ever he needed an emotional punching bag, he found one. If he ever wanted to see someone cry in the way that he couldn't, that opportunity lay before him in the form of endless mint-green hair and a partially-memorized rehearsal of strength. And while a certain derision for her brewed, he needed her for her hospitality. He needed her for how she paid him visits like this, for how she took him back to see the city sometimes. To remember what it felt like to be human.
So he had to budget those little pushes, those small jabs. And tonight, as he heard those familiar heels clip-clopping on the dusky floors beyond the room, he supposed he needed to shelve them for a while. She seemed anxious of late, more than usual, and she sometimes grew a spine. She'd stand up to him eventually.
When she remembered her rank, at least.
So Faustite reclined against the tacky Ikea bed, where tacky store-brand sheets shifted under a tacky wool blanket and picked up the nearest magazine for his perusal. Unfortunately for him, Sports Illustrated promised even more of a bore. It wouldn't matter, he supposed. Chrysocolla seldom sat down with him for a long heart-to-heart.
day key
i hope this works for a start but i assumed some things and it's 4am and please let me know if i should edit anything out!
Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2017 7:03 am
Her conversation with Stroud Marinus (or would it be more proper to call her General Schorl, even out of uniform? it was the letter of the thing, if not the meaning) had gone -- differently, than she'd expected. It should have been a good sort of different, even if it felt like creeping spiders under her skin and a ******** hook in her throat, catching and dragging her from her jaw all the way down. It was probably just normal anxiety jitters, Chrysocolla thought, and thought no more of it.
She'd slept well, knowing her decisions no longer had to carry weight.
She brought no goods, no containers, with her tonight; a small orb of energy, lavender-light, that she crunched between her teeth as she stepped into the room served well. "Hi, Elex. I don't remember -- have you ever met General Schorl? Or heard of her, at least?" It was a leading question, but her eyes gave nothing away, as dull-calm as ever they were. Lakewater placid, one foot in front of the other, heel-to-toe.
Hi Elex, she said, like she couldn't see his uniform or his black eyes or his too—long fingernails that never stayed cut. Like he wore that tacky skin that pressed prickly tight against the blacks and the bitterness. The fact that she dreamt at all about that quiet little boy should have flattered him, but he was left feeling incensed. Cheated. He ground his jaw thoughtfully.
Maybe all his petty little goadings weren't so one-sided after all.
She crunched on an energy orb like a bag of chips. He was reminded, then, about how he never cared for how she ate. She never took a proper manners course in her life, he supposed. She knew nothing about how to set a table correctly. She never touched a napkin, let alone folded one - and he needn't watch her to know such mannerisms. They were written into her person, her nervousness, her consistent guilt. They all had to come from somewhere. Faustite supposed they stemmed from an acknowledgement that she was generally a shitty person. Her tastes were at least some indication; anyone who thought it best to smuggle out Ikea furniture when they held the ability to steal anything they wanted knew nothing of desgn.
But that didn't matter so much now. For someone above him, she never acted the part - and he preferred their jaunted friendship in such a way. Faustite hummed thoughtfully, and looked toward the far wall in contemplation. Mineral names became an obnoxious staple of late - a set of codenames so grueling and dull that he almost dreaded meeting his next officer among the halls. The name itself lacked that familiar ending of -ite, however, which led to a quick indexing. "No. Should I know her?" The question came with the same eternal boredom that carried equal parts you're wasting my time and kill me.
The restlessness was getting to him again. He needed to go out. He needed to earn his latter ranks so he could leave of his own accord, without this broken doll staring dully, monotonously ahead while he told her where to teleport him next.
But it sounded, for now, like they would focus on this General Schörl.
daekie
Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2017 5:26 pm
"General Schorl," Chrysocolla said calmly, hands at her sides, "has a long track record in Queen Metallia's service, where she's been extremely strong both tactically and combatively." What she thought of the General herself wasn't readily apparent; she spoke of Schorl the same way she spoke of most Generals, with restrained respect and a slight set-apart -- she would never be what they were, even if she felt comfortable in her rank, in her skin. She would never be able to pull a blade from the air like it was her birthright.
(Maybe she would have been happier then, as one of the rank-and-file, in another life. Where her skin wasn't branded with 'traitor, traitor, traitor' so obviously to every White Moon senshi who looked at her. She could wonder all she wanted, but it'd never come true. A thousand years ago, a little girl had died for no reason in the grand scheme of things; two years ago, an older girl had died for barely any more. It was her blood, it was her birthright.)
"I talked to her a few days ago. You're her subordinate now, as am I. You won't have to deal with my decisions any longer."
"I have to deal with that decision," Faustite quipped mercilessly. "Maybe it doesn't mean much to you. Chrysocolla can slip away into Poppy at any time, isn't that right? Try as you might, you don't spent your entire life as a Negaverse agent - you couldn't know what that's like. I suppose I should forgive you for making the assumption that this decision wouldn't mean much. That it wouldn't affect my entire life." He smiled to himself - a bitter gesture, wrenched away from a life spent sampling earth's delights as only the entitled could. He faced away from her then - thin, black vapor wisped from his nostrils for a single breath.
Faustite retired the stolen magazine with a quick smack against the rest of their ilk. He studied her then, where she stood so cool and poud and relieved of her own shoddy work as a leader-figure. Where she assumed that her duties fell off and no repercussions of those choices could touch her now. Schörl answered for those now, after all. Schörl would pick up her slack and deliver her from the piss-poor life decisions she made for herself. And why not? Schörl could only make inprovements, for Chrysocolla couldn't possibly get worse.
She probably never remembered what it meant to be a functional human being. Faustite did, and that incensed him all the more.
"So tell me about her. I have a right to know now, don't I? Who is the woman behind the record? Don't answer me with petty numbers, Chrys. I'm not interested in number of senshi terminated. It couldn't be more of a bore." She would not kill him as she might a senshi - as one lowly general should have done prior to Chrysocolla's corruption. No, he imagined that he had use where Chrysocolla spoke of so seldom, where she failed to measure into her leadership role that she was given on a General Sovereign's whim. She stood as a false monument to power, to authority, to climbing the rains as was expected of all - agents and senshi alike. But Chrysocolla, when puzzled out and liad down for the world to bring to bear, was nothing more than a fettered piece of propaganda. A good word spread over radio waves to assure that, yes, even you can be a General if you devote yourself to the Negaverse's good graces.
daekie
Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 2:23 pm
Chrysocolla smiled at Faustite, and her teeth were white marble in her dark face; for once, there was something cunning in her eyes, but the smile did not reach them. She laced her fingers together in front of her and stood wonderfully, quietly statue-still. "...Poppy doesn't exist. You know that as well as I do. It's a fake identity, something I put a name on so that I could sleep at night without wondering if a Knight was going to break through my window. It's just skin."
Something had changed. She didn't sound brittle anymore. It was a self-contained sort of calm.
"My first memories are waking up screaming because I kept remembering Umber's hand in my chest. This is my entire life. Everything from my school to where I sleep, who pays for that, who controls that - is all Negaverse. This is my life, Elex; this is, has always been, my entire life. Poppy's just a name I thought sounded pretty when I was fifteen and stupid and scared, and now it's on all my legal documents. You have -" her pretty lips drew back in a snarl, one step forward, tilting her head back to stare at him and size him up with the gall to be disappointed - "fifteen ******** years of memories of a normal life! My life starts in these goddamn halls. They made me. Don't you dare tell me I don't know what giving up my entire life is like, because the only difference is that I don't remember what I've lost except for the shape of the hole! For six months, every day I woke up I didn't know who I was; earlier this year I spent three weeks spending every waking moment hoping I was dead! Don't you dare. You are a child."
Faustite snorted as bitter amusement overtook his boredom. Slipping from the bed meant little on long, narrow legs like his. He looked down on her with all judgment pooled into black eyes. He looked down on her with all her little fragments of spine gathered into both fists, a malformed idea that they might support her now when so far from her back where they belonged. She looked almost alien like this, like someone else slipped into her dress form body and seized the controls to her too-shallow life. At this distance, he could smell the false bravado wafting off of her.
"Who's going to school, Chrys? Who's looking at which colleges to apply to? What majors? Who just took her finals last month? Don't tell me it's all for the Negaverse. They don't need you smart, or capable, or cunning. You're none of these things. They need you for your muscle and your unwavering obedience. They need you for your magic.
"So don't lie to me that Poppy is just a skin. At least you have a skin."
Hands locked behind his back with bone whiteness where they strained against skin. All his ire demanded that he wrench the pretty little starseed from her heart, that he take advantage of its broken showcase over her sternum. He cared little about promised repercussions; what would this Schörl do but pat him on the back for doing away with an overgrown grunt? And if she found fit to punish him, then what worse could come of his predicament? Would she confiscate the lot of his humanity and reduce him to the broken husks that haunted their Rift? Perhaps that would be an improvement. He knew, looking down at Chrysocolla, that seeing her doll eyes as dead as the rest of her meant a great deal more efficiency for the rest of the Negaverse.
The chill in his chest urged him on, but temperance warned him not to. He wanted to, desperately, with long, thin muscle standing from his neck in the strain to see her starseed wrenched from her. Leaving her there, prone, promised a night of silence. Of ease. Of no further upheavals to his wretched life.Yet he felt regret even as he committed, with his hand falling uselessly on the frostbite between bony clavicles.
"My dear Senshi," he spoke quietly, leaned downward a touch so she could better grasp her standing with him, "you overestimate yourself if you think you can talk down to me. I may be younger, but those fifteen years of memories work in my favor, not yours. You don't know anything, do you?"
daekie
Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 3:13 pm
"You're such an idiot," Chrysocolla smiled, bitter; she was unintimidated by his height, by his looming, by any of it - her starseed gleamed bright in her chest, beautiful, shining. "I don't really need to do any of it. I just like to. As long as I show up and pretend to do the work, what I actually do doesn't matter; my grades are all fixed anyways, because almost every single one of my teachers I could look up their Lieutenant name and kill them if I wanted. Who you are as a person doesn't mean anything." She reached up with one gloved hand to stroke the side of his cheek, tender, patronizing.
"They broke me down and rebuilt me, but at least I have a point. You're just a mistake that Umber didn't stick around to finish off, Elex. You could never be what I am, and that's a shame - if you were, maybe you'd actually know how to not be such a little b***h." Her other hand splayed itself over his chest and slipped through with hardly any effort, fingers on his starseed, making no move to move it. No chaos through her fingertips, not yet. "If you'd started out on their side, maybe the wipe would have worked you over so much better."
"Posturing isn't winning you any favors, Chrys." He straightened out of her touch, wanting none of it. She spoke of power and grandeur and petty authority wasted on a child with the brain of someone younger than he. She spoke like she could rule the world and magnanimously chose against it, though Faustite knew the truth - this was just another front. Until this Schörl could iron out her own ineptitude, he faced this misbegotten amalgamation of façades where she mixed and matched to fit every occasion. But in this instance, he would not yield to a girl playing an authoritarian. He was smarter than her, more headstrong than her, he held more cunning —
And she held his starseed. The pain grew keen, unmistakeable. Those splinters of spine she held in her hands now pressed into the gem beyond his heart. Keening pain woke and threatened to chase away his coming thoughts. Never one to endure agony well, Faustite found it difficult to swallow his sympathetic reaction. His lungs wanted to seize, his skin wanted to bead up with cold sweat in the advent of her touch. But he could not relent - not yet.
He set his teeth, slipped his hand from where it rest over a wound he never had. "Do you want to know why you're so afraid of those old memories? Don't try to hide it. I saw the way you picked at your clothes when we talked about the other you. You're afraid that all your worth is locked behind those memories, aren't you? Like the Negaverse gutted all the best parts of you, with all the best intentions, and left behind this false front you call Chrysocolla. And you know, somewhere in that fractured mind of yours, that you can't live up to the expectations placed on you. You can't be a leader. You can't fight as well as the Generals can. So what do you do?
"You avoid all those skin-crawling memories and you hide yourself behind these ruses. You try to trick the people who are smarter than you. The best part is, they let you think you did.
"If you pull my starseed, you're better off leaving it out." Faustite drew his hands together, and with a lighter click, the space about them exploded in smoke.
daekie
Dispersion ;; Range: 3 foot radius with Faustite at the epicenter. Duration: 30 seconds Use Count: 3x Miss Chance: Circumventing magic, stepping beyond radius before execution, stepping out during the attack. Holding breath and closing eyes mitigates some of the effects. Effect: Faustite draws his hands together, and a sound curiously akin to an opening lighter may be heard. With a deafening blast, Faustite then envelops himself in choking smoke. Those caught in the radius of the initial blast endure a residual ringing in the ears and mild disorientation. The blast itself articulates as the billowing black smoke, and those who breathe it will suffer burning lungs, stinging eyes, and may cough frequently depending on their reaction to the smoke. The symptoms of ringing ears and coughing will linger after leaving the smoke, up to a maximum of five seconds. This attack is not intended to produce lasting damage (like lung damage or hearing damage), but may do so at the defending player's behest.
Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 7:26 pm
She looked at him and wanted to bite his throat out, even covered as it was by his collar; Chrysocolla looked up at him and thought, for half-a-second, that her teeth were knives and that the answer to this was so simple; that she would be covered in his blood and they could be done with all this posturing, all this lying. But it wasn't, and it couldn't be like that, no matter how much she wished it would and could be.
Maybe she would have liked his blood on her teeth. Maybe that would have meant he'd stop.
Faustite's words hit a nerve. As she opened her mouth to reply, to spit vitriol right back at him, at how he always wanted better like he thought he deserved it; the world went dark and smoky. It burned, it fled down her mouth and into her throat like it was hiding from outside light; her ears were ringing, eyes watering - she would not give him the satisfaction this time.
Chrysocolla crooked her fingers a certain way and removed his starseed in one movement.
Faustite looked on, victory within his grasp - she would relent, he knew, as all façades did when faced with genuine superiority. He felt the edge of their petty argument looming up out of the smoke. As he started to smile in his certainty, he collapsed as all dolls did when lacking their puppeteer.
daekie
Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2017 1:50 pm
He was heavier than she thought -- but then again, Chrysocolla was stronger than she looked, even discounting the physical boost her rank gave her. Faustite was slender and wan, and the largest problem was how to figure out how to make sure his limbs didn't drag on the floor; then, mostly, she realized she didn't care if he got dusty. He could fix it with a little bit of physical work or a little bit of magic, instead of whining like a child, whining like she knew the answers to all of this and refused to tell him --
Starseed in one hand and body over her shoulders, she moved; eyes watering and throat raw, stopping to cough so hard she felt her lungs would give out, that she'd open her mouth and there'd be blood and blood and blood. There was nothing but spit and noise.
She knew the cells, she knew these walls, labyrinthine - it was so easy. It was so easy. Nobody would care what she did with him, like this; he had no family to worry after, and if she said she'd had to discipline him severely for a breach of etiquette to Schorl, she felt the General might understand - this poor, awkward doll, with his ash-black eyes and his sharp tongue. So lost a lamb.
Would it be petty, to break his fingers, disjoint his shoulders? Would it be cruel if there was no blood, only ink-bruises? Crash his head into the wall until his scalp was raw? But, no, they were bad thoughts; she could never carry through with them, never - but - there was nobody to see, there was nobody to judge, there was nobody to tell her no.
...
In the end, Chrysocolla settled for less; she was graceless as she dropped his limp form into the cell, arms ziptied at the wrist behind his back, a communicator at his feet. His starseed was pushed back into his chest, and before his eyes opened she was gone, a poppy-flower sticker on one of the walls the only thing to mark her passing or that she'd been there.
