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 Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:00 pm
He hadn't seen himself in months.
Since his departure into the full and inescapable breadth of the Negaverse, Faustite knew no more the banalities of youthful routine. No longer could he spend Saturday mornings on a sun-warmed deck, whittling away the hours in conversation with his father. Nor could he get choosy with the maid when she brought crisp, supple flowers into the kitchen and invited his opinion on their placement. He couldn't share with his brother the difficulties of having to shave. Each of these creature comforta evaporated in an instant, leaving only the grueling cycle of waking every day to aching joints amidst a growth spurt, or spending hours at an uncomfortable desk over assignments of a very different sort. There weren't light touches dispensed by family to ground him in reality - only the occasional errant youma claw or shoulder check from a bellicose peer.
In short, life changed drastically. And he adjusted to it. Wants and needs of the old life faded with use of his intellect. He learned to shave by touch. He made use of the freedom given instead of resigning himself to hostaged familial interactions. He remembered that he often felt deprived of precious morning hours on Saturdays when indulging his father's endless, bombastic speeches. He realized in due time that the maid was subtly mocking him for his privileged upbringing. That she was smart, cunning, and more situationally aware than the rest of his family.
But he would occasionally stumble headfirst into nostalgic reminders. In passing a boutique store that night, he caught sight of movement in his periphery. He turned on its presence, half-expecting a tired shop owner to be departing into the violent night, but found looking back at him a visage both familiar and unfamiliar. He knew the black eyes, yet deep wells now surrounded him. Hair once well-kept in present style grew overly long, threatening to claim his face. Pipes joined his silhouette as a perpetual reminder that he couldn't medically survive on his own.
Whim took him then, and Faustite approached the display mirror. The changes struck him, left him grasping for coherent emotion in the churning sea of reactions. His black gaze scanned frantically from one feature to the next, thought snowballing from quiet pride in growth to demonstrable fear of the monster seizing every aspect of his youth. He looked dead tired now. He looked
gone. In
a disjointed turn
of events, he found himself
amidst a proper setting, lined in
dripping, undulating ink,
never settling,
never waiting,
and there, in the far side of
the room, just as lost, just as
disconcerted, just as
disaffected,
stood an artifact of Sparta.
He almost wanted to laugh, if only to search for something slightly brighter than the bleakness of a doorless room.
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Posted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 6:59 pm
Anakeion smiled with gritted teeth, no mercy in her eyes, hands tight around her staff. Even if Faustite had just arrived, her entrance hadn't been quite so recent - an hour or two, maybe; and although in the grand scheme of even so short as a day it wasn't long, for someone so intimately used to distractions available if she had only to look, it felt like an eternity in this room so deprived of outside comforts. She had nothing to occupy herself but her thoughts and the sputtering cold of her magic, waiting to be called on for the short time she could manage it; but she had no wish to go mad.
Unfortunately, Anakeion had little patience for most things if they didn't come easily. Boredom from sheer lack of stimulation was one of her least favorite things.
It just wasn't really up to her, here.
One of her eyelids twitched, a little, as she raised a hand in absent-minded greeting. "Great to see you, if you try to drain me I'm gonna break your ribs, try to find a way out of here or I'm gonna lose my ********' mind."
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Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:18 pm
The room settled and his comprehension caught up with him. The afterimage of street lights and glass fronts faded from his sensory memory. The space gave no insight back into the realm he inadvertently left. No abstract windows back into the street, no fractured kaleidoscope view of their surrounding area. Only white walls met him, and a smoke of uncertain origin.
And a grating voice belonging to the Spartan.
First, he simply looked at her. A knight by feel, her outfit suggested a symbol unknown to him. He knew the leather strops of ancient Greece from textbooks past. Her countenance, charged and twitchy, warned him of pressing her. The room gave no chance of escape should he have to fight her; he shelved the antagonizing questions that came to mind.
Schörl would reprimand him, of course. No information gleaned meant a failed venture. A waste of time. no excuse mattered in the face of expendability - no mirror poachings explained away ineptitude. But he may not ever have to face her again if this room held fast to its quarry.
"Fine," he answered succinctly. You already lost it. No doors, no windows, no ventilation shafts. How did she expect to escape? Shutting eyes, an image spooled out over the breadth of his imagination. The great, rock-hewn walls bursting with crystals, bleeding with impure light. The once-proud corridors, the decadent rooms, each whittled by chasing caverns. Perpetually the sound of skittering and chittering formed an aural backdrop. And he could feel the stagnation in the air —
He opened eyes to white and smoke, to impassive blankness. To Sparta, ever furious in her impotence. "Teleportation doesn't work. There aren't doors or windows. No ventilation. No portals. Nothing.
"I got here from a storefront, but there's no sign of it now. What about you?"
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Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:37 pm
Anakeion sighed, quietly, and attempted to reframe the situation in her mind a little bit - she had been, maybe, unjustly harsh. Looking at Faustite closer, she took her estimation of his age down a few notches, previously assuming based only on aura and the silouette of the pipes in the side of her vision; but no. Fifteen, maybe, or sixteen, seventeen with a baby face at highest. He was a kid, pulled into all this s**t and not entirely happy about it from the way the slight angles of his frown betrayed him, but she kept her own brand of poker face up.
If people thought she was a stupid girl, it worked better, sometimes. If they stereotyped her, it was easier, and she could slide along that way like a breeze. She didn't have to like it.
"I fell in through a dressing room at Kohl's," Anakeion scowled, "and now I have seventy bucks of merchandise that's been sitting there for two hours and at some point someone's gonna ask where the Sparta chick went." She sighed again, deeper this time. "Sorry. It's been a long two hours. Let me introduce myself better, though."
"Hi, I'm Anakeion of Castor, I've been stuck here for probably going on two hours, and I have crippling ADHD that usually isn't too much of a problem except in this precise situation? You know how it is."
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Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2017 4:42 pm
Castor? While familiar from a mythology perspective, Faustite was led to believe that knights arose from planetary systems rather than myth. Venus, Earth, Mercury and Neptune each confirmed a pattern, but Castor? Did they actually take after roman mythology?
Faustite stayed the internal question; the girl spoke at length about her inability to focus before assuming he could somehow relate. The rhetoric and flippancy fired his blood. How could she presume that he was afflicted with her same inadequacy at sitting still? Beyond that, she spoke to him like a peer. Like he was some casual acquaintance recently met — like she hadn't threatened to break his ribs only moments ago at the first sight of doing his job. Faustite worked to keep his bristling answers at bay. A clenched jaw lacked the mature musculature to belie his frustration.
You have crippling ADHD. Does that mean you haven't focused on finding a way out?
Fingers steepled before him, and Faustite opened his mouth to speak. The floor opened as well, interrupting him before the first breath of word could leave his mouth, and it drew him in with all the permission he never granted. What he wanted to say was left unsaid; the only sign of his disappearing existance were the unfurling smoke trails left behind.
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