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 Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 7:13 pm
Scholomance felt it - a deep, visceral darkness that settled over the area like a pall. It felt immense, sprawling, hateful. The aura grew so thick he could taste it on his tongue, feel the animosity on the air. A youma lurked these parts, greater than many of the others he found in alleyways or across bridges. It stalked for prey during every second wasted in search. Scholomance knew this.
And yet he could not find ******** sake," the Saturn knight cursed to himself. "I might've lost an arm, but I certainly didn't lose my sense of direction." Still, he could not deny that the auric energy radiated from beneath his feet. But what business had a youma inside an old arcade building? Decrepit as it was, abandoned with numerous dated electronics, he saw no reason for a youma to inhabit the area. Thieves stole the brunt of the merchandise, leaving only the parts nailed into the floorboards, and the electricity was shut off years ago. Even the boarded windows held a layer of dust. Still, it waited in the area. Still, it pulsed its insidious aura. A beacon, perhaps. A beckon. Or a taunt.
As a knight, he knew he could take it. A quick descent left bone heels impacting the sidewalk, and the knight straightened to face the site. The cold blue and neon green glows burst from between wooden slats, and the muffled cacophony of eight bit action sequences filtered into the dead air. Scholomance shifted nervously; of all the youma battles he endured, none shaped up quite like this. Never once was he unable to find such a large quarry, nor had he encountered one in an imminently-no-longer-abandoned building.
Scholomance breathed his expletives to the night air. The Mortal Kombat announcer answered him with aplomb. He wondered, then - should he wait, or should he approach with the hope that he could take a trap like this?daekie s**t start is s**t, blame ivy
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Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 10:47 pm
Babel had little experience with youma, little experience with being a Knight, little experience with any of the magic that lived under the covers of the city; she had run into youma before, of course, but it was a given for anyone who lived in Destiny City. Sometimes there were gas fires and organ rings and hallucinogens released in the trains. These things happened. She had never known any other city, not for long; it was easy to assume it was something every place had, if she could suspend her disbelief for monsters and magic and second skins.
She remembered Sailor Nea, she remembered the coma epidemic; how could she not? Things had been so horrible, once, and now aside from how many times people turned up comatose - never to wake - it could be normal. It passed for normal, anyways, if she didn't think about her girlfriend pale in a hospital bed and the knowledge of no brain activity.
It passed for normal.
Sunny was more perceptive than some, although she often joked it came with the height; this arcade had been one of her favorites, once, and a man in blacks and indigos with a missing arm and a crown of bones cut a clearly unusual silouette - unusual enough she felt, almost, like this could be a time to find new kin, new family, like it was a story. Sunny Dyer paused on the sidewalk and looked around, but it was Babel Page that walked towards Scholomance, smiling like her blood was sunshine.
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Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 12:01 pm
Heaven or Hell. Duel One. Let's Rock!
The noisy announcer blared his mantra against slatted windows. Scholomance barely heard it himself; with eyes closed and senses spread, he searched for a better auric understanding of this youma's precise location. Beneath him, he felt, spreading its influence outward beneath the ground - but Scholomance stood on the street, and knew of no great sewer tunnels to afford such a large presence. Was there a basement to the establishment, then? Did the youma take up its residence in hopes of luring ghost hunters and opportunists? A highly clever plan in a beleagured city like this, he was certain.
The auric announcement hit first - a page approached. A page, either looking for guidance or looking for trouble. Did she feel the youma first? The knight? A shift of gaze in their direction confirmed the answer - her too-bright weaponized smile focused on him, not the curious emanations from the ground. He tried to smile back, but learned by fabric across lips that such a gesture was invisible.
He hoped it reached his eyes, anyway.
"Fellow Knight," he greeted, and soon pulled down the obscuring half-mask. "Fellow Saturn Knight, I should say." Fellow Victim may be appropriate shortly. Fellow Amputee might be in your future. Who am I kidding? Fellow Corpse is most likely.
He executed a slight bow nonetheless, adjusted so for the subtle ache in his hip. "Call me Scholomance.
"Or confused, if you prefer. There's a youma about, by the feel of it, but unless my sense of auras is terribly wrong, it's somehow beneath us. And in there," he finished, gesturing toward the haunted arcade. "If you'd be so kind to pry the boards off the front door, i was going to take a look."daekie 'i don't have two arms halp'
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Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:26 pm
"I'm Babel." Her smile softened, and she offered a curtsey to mirror Scholomance's bow. "That's no problem - I get stuck prying things open by hand all the time, just give me a minute." If her eyes flickered to his arm, to his remaining fingers, Babel had nothing to say about it; she was kind enough to offer that, at least. Prying the boards off the door was easy enough, even if her fingers managed to obtain splinters she promptly pulled out of her skin.
The door swung open easily enough, too. She looked to Scholomance, guileless, and motioned in. "After you, right? This place was one of my favorites - it's a shame it's been reduced to this nowadays."
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Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:57 pm
Scholomance squinted at her offhand comment. What sort of work are you into that has you prying things open by hand? Breaking and entering? Safecracking? … Do you break ribs?
I have the feeling you're a kneecapper, because you're certainly not referring to the jaws of life here.
"Thank you, Babel." He nodded to her in passing, and found the arcade unduly bright on the inside. Lights of every color splayed over the ceiling, jumping and darting about in endless glee. Racing games provided a rumbling under tone while fighting games, pinball machines, and sports games coated the aural backdrop with their respective signature sounds. Scholomance's nose wrinkled at the layers of dust and the stale mold smell that belied the place's abandonment. He preferred to dust the youma and leave before the smell caught in his hair — a certain doom for anyone looking to get laid.
Not that such an outcome was his present concern, but Babel looked quite fine in her Saturn attire.
"Do you know anything about it? Was there some kind of basement here, perhaps? Or an old storage room? The building itself looks pretty old," he added, as he looked about the room. He skirted clunky machines of all sizes, some close enough together that he wondered about wheelchair accessibility. "Back in the prohibition days, places like these would get cheap basements put in and they'd house their speakeasies there. In some cities, they even had interconnected tunnels for it, so their speakeasy could travel when a whistleblower spotted the cops. Damn am I glad I wasn't alive back then…"
He ducked a cobweb, then beelined for the most accessible wall he could find. Something certainly lurked beneath them; he felt it undeniably, even heard its dull roar from beyond the flooring. The best he found thus far were a broom closet and an employees-only area, though neither offered an obvious route down. "Any luck looking for a door?" He called over his shoulder.daekie i figured there might be a laser tag area below idk feel free to decide!
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Posted: Sun Nov 05, 2017 10:08 am
"Sorry," Babel shrugged, "but I don't know about any basements or storage rooms - by the time I would have been able to take a job they didn't need employees, so. Um." She trotted after Scholomance, heels clicking on the floor, casting her eyes around to glance over the machines that still worked after the arcade's closing, somewhat comforted by the electronic noise.
"They were talking about putting a laser tag arena down below, I think, but it never got finished...there should be a door around for it somewhere?"
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Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 12:29 pm
"A door for laser tag…" Scholomance repeated, looking about the room. He caught sight of a knob behind one of many cardboard cutout characters. A few sweeping steps and he skirted his companion, found the door unlocked, and opened it to descend. A single bulb hung in the stairwell to light the way down and it did a dull job at that. "Right. Well. Down we go." A youma shouldn't be much trouble regardless.
He took steps one at a time until he heard a peculiar buzzing. It wasn't the buzzing of a bee, or any kind of insect he heard — it sounded more like an electronics hum that he'd expect upstairs. And as the room opened out into a fake lunar surface full of cardboard aliens and space rocks, he found no obvious indication of the youma's location.
Something shrieked above him, something foreign and wild, and he looked up at last — the youma hung like a bat from the ceiling with a whole host of electrical wires in its claws. Fat wings protruded from its furry body, wings that looked too small to support it on the air, and its legs had an uncanny musculature to a human's. It looked like a creature out of Lovecraft's original mythos sketches — one that looked far more strange and a little unwieldy than actually horrifying.
The thing released its grip on the wires, tried to fly, and crashed into one of the lunar rocks with a great thud. The lights went out, the arcade games stopped playing their tinny music, and the pair was left to fight the youma in dead darkness.
"Wonderful," Scholomance glowered to himself. He summoned whip to hand and stalked carefully through the dark corridors. "Hope you're good for a fight, Babel." It screeched again, and he cracked his whip toward rustling movement.Daekie sorry, work and school is hard at first as is remembering your character's colors
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Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2017 11:26 am
The sound of the buzzing felt so loud, so loud; she blinked a few times in the relative darkness of the stairwell, trying to adjust from the neon lights of the screens that'd only a few seconds previously taken up the light. What Babel's eyes were adjusted to barely mattered as soon as the youma flung itself into a fake moon rock (and oh, she hoped that was a concrete rock but she was almost sure she was wrong); because everything was dark as dark could be. Scholomance's voice was her anchor-point, and moving towards him lead to a few bruised shins as she walked into faux-rocks.
"I've never punched anything in my life," she complained, "and I can't fight anything with a bracelet - " one hand worriedly mussed through her hair, pulling strands out of position, as the other called her 'weapon' to her wrist - "but if you can get it down, I have heels?" As ways to list your capabilities in a fight went, Babel's weren't awfully impressive, and she sounded suitably embarrassed about it.
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Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:08 pm
"Wear your bracelet as brass knuckles if you can," Scholomance called to her in the dark. His eyes struggled to adjust; only sound and fury indicated where the creature lurked. What he assumed was a hiss of pain rang out when it struck the lunar rock, and Scholomance ventured cautiously toward the noise. He whipcracked into the dark and heard a reciprocal reaction, but felt no suggestion of flesh. Would a whip afford him that?
His impromptu partner mentioned heels, which sounded good enough. I think it brought itself down, but — "Alright." Another pair of whipcracks into the dark and the creature responded by diving about, just as blind in the poor lighting as them. A third crack landed on it, eliciting a screech, and once again the creature dove about until it struck another lunar rock.
Scholomance hurried forth, then tripped on rubble left behind. He struck another rock, and found it made of unyielding concrete. His head throbbed at the impact point, and he felt blood carving its warm path down his temple. Fantastic. The fact that the creature broke them open so easily gave him pause.
The creature lay on the floor in the distance, its hulking form barely identifiable in the dark. It, too, appeared dazed.
Scholomance straightened carefully. "It's down for now, knocked itself out. You can stomp it, or I'll take care of it. I'd advise the practice." Wearily he got to his feet.
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Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2017 8:22 pm
For once, even if she could barely see, Babel was thankful for the darkness they'd been plunged into - it kept Scholomance from seeing her flush and almost start to babble in embarrassment, because she really hadn't ever been in anything that counted as a fight, and right about now it was starting to come back to bite her. Mostly she just appreciated that it was too dark to see her face.
It was - not easy, that'd be a lie - but not too difficult to place the youma's location in relation to her, if she focused on Scholomance's voice compared to the screeches and thuds of the creature throwing itself recklessly around the arena, and moving close enough could have been faster but it wasn't too slow either. It was simple, though, to grind her heel down on almost-flesh (she bit back a shiver, because even if it was a monster it felt alive enough) until she hit the right balance of weight and it let out one last scream before there wasn't anything under her heel -
Babel toppled forwards, a little, but caught herself in a way she thought was relatively admirable. "Well, it's about as dead as it's going to get - you okay?"
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Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2017 9:44 am
Its shriek said enough, even when Babel's footsteps gave him nothing. Scholomance straightened, dismissed his weapon from his hand, brushed his glove against his coat in old habit. The dust wasn't on him, though — not this time. For just a moment, he wished it was.
"Well. That was an experience." The words lilted in their sarcasm. "I'm fine, really; wasn't too terribly much for me to do there. I imagine something that clumsy would've taken itself down long before it becomes a threat to others, but… You can never be too sure." Carefully he felt around in the dark for shoddy shapes of moon rock or extraterrestrial life forms. Nothing glowed in the dark anymore — all the paint wore away or was stripped out by looters — and navigation grew treacherous. "What about you? Did it scratch you, bite you, anything?" Even so far in his knighthood career, he never knew much of youma-based infection or disease.
"Oh, ******** me, what am I doing…" He burst out suddenly. Scholomance's burdensome auric energy dropped in a blink and the less-imposing Ice fumbled about in pockets. A double-click and light shot out in a peering cone, chasing away shadows from the wall and floor. A slim-model mag light sat in his hand and swept across the ground with its blue-white guidance. "I keep forgetting to pop this little one in my pocket when I get out for the night. Too much of a rush, I guess. Not that being a knight is terribly exciting, but…" Well, it gets the blood pumping in ways Viagra couldn't manage.
Not that I'll need it anytime soon, I hope.
"Thanks for your help, by the way." He lingered long enough that Babel could catch up before he started toward the only door not marked fire exit. "It's always a shitshow when I'm trying to figure out if a youma's going to give me a run for my money. Half the time they're like that, the other half the time they're prefacing some angry general." He huffed, and the sound hung stagnant in the air.
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Posted: Sat Dec 09, 2017 12:03 pm
"Ah, um -" Babel paused for a second to feel over her uniform for tears, or any breaks in the skin of her hands she hadn't noticed before - but both of those quests came up without any problems. "No, it didn't bite me. I'm assuming you're okay too? Mostly because you sound fine, but figuring out how to get to the nearest hospital from random places in the city isn't really one of my hobbies." She didn't want it to be one of her hobbies. That would mean her life was far riskier than it'd ever been. Besides that, who could afford those sorts of bills?
She blinked repeatedly in the sudden light, squinting until all the levels of her vision evened out. Huh. Maybe I should start carrying one around. "It's fine. I need more experience in a fight, anyways. ...Not that this really was much of a fight."
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Posted: Sun Dec 17, 2017 3:42 am
"Oh, if I wasn't okay, you wouldn't hear the end of it. I'm absolutely terrible with pain." Once Isaiah determined the path to the door, he powered up again. The collection of bones and cloth that made Scholomance crowned him once more. Really, you'd think one of us tech aficionados would figure out an app interface for these damned signet rings. Maybe we'd even come up with a Google Maps competitor called Sol Maps, then make sure hospitals are one of the first things that come up when you open it. Now there's a dream.
"You're right, it wasn't much of a fight. Youma are usually clumsy and stupid, and yet they somehow still manage to kill civilians. I think that says more about the person than it does about the youma, but…" He brushed the thought aside as he opened the exit door. "Really, it's the agents one should watch out for.
"And the Dark Mirror senshi too, possibly, but most of them seem to prefer hanging around and draining energy to fighting. And I've never seen a Dark Mirror knight, so I figure our chances are pretty good for ignoring those ones." It's like a disease that only affects half the population. But, on the other hand, youmafication is like AIDS. It's there to stay.
Now that's a cheery thought.
"Well!" He stretched as much as he could with the sunlight now bearing down on them. "That was an exciting little sidetrack. If you ever run into trouble, just give me a call and I'll return the favor. Probably with a few other people along." The anxiety was there when he looked to her — needlepoint reminders to not dally too long on conversation, that she may just be bored, that he gave information she already knew — so he felt caught between running out the door on her and prolonging a conversation she probably didn't want. But that was often his conclusion about other knights; their independence was easily mistaken for standoffishness.
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Posted: Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:44 pm
"I haven't met that many, so I can't say," Babel demurred; looking at his injuries, it was easy to assume that saying 'oh, the group that's diametrically opposed to us seems nice' probably wouldn't be the cleverest of ideas, however old Scholomance's wounds might be. "But I'm new." She squinted. "Well. New-ish. I don't go out like this much. If there's some kind of Knight insta-communication device I don't have it, so, uh...could I get your number?" Her smile was sheepish but unfalteringly bright, regardless.
There's probably an insta-communication device and I don't have it because I think saying words being projected into my mind is a stupid idea and shouldn't be done without supervision, isn't there. That'd be just my luck. Great.
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Posted: Tue Dec 26, 2017 9:46 am
"Oho," Scholomance cracked with a wry grin, "it's been such a long time since a pretty girl asked me for my number. Jokes aside…" As much as it pained him to call it a joke instead of pure and simple reality, "Yes you can. We're often s**t out of the cosmos and left to our own devices, so don't hesitate to call if you need something.
"Oh, and you'll want a piece of paper for this. Trust me, you don't want me to scribble it out for you. I'm — well, I was — right-handed." He hadn't spent enough time building up his fine motor skills in his left hand to impress a cute new page, even if she might find the kindergarten-esque script somehow endearing. And she might have a boyfriend, or choose not to cheat, or be asexual, or interested in women only (which he couldn't fault her for that, clam-diving was one of his absolute favorites), or just not be in the mood. Which, he never understood those people.
But he waited only so long as he needed to, then gave his number in full as clearly as he could.
"You should really visit your wonder and pick up that signet ring, too. It'll do you a world of good. I could help you find it, if you like. I've a habit of visiting other Saturn locations — I'm trying to build something of a framework for how all these wonders might've interacted with one another, or if they have much in common or whatnot. It's a long and boring explanation better saved for some other time."
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