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 Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 2:04 pm
Acubens had slipped away by herself. Like wounded animal close to death, she felt better about things if she just dealt with them on her own. She would die or her body would recoup, but she would not burden others with that struggle. Least of all Chione. She had chosen a mirror that she knew was a short walk to a hospital but wasn't close enough that anyone would see her power down. It spat her out rather than letting her walk through it as was her nature, and with her feet on solid ground for the first time in god only knew how long, Acubens let out an audible sigh. This was still beautifully, glitteringly, dazzlingly her world. In the chaos of the past days, Acubens had been worried that perhaps they were too late. Maybe they hadn't stopped the queen in time to save Earth. For one terrifying second, after Acubens stepped out of the mirror, she thought that she might come back to see nothing but an endless expanse of crystals and nothing else. She was so relieved by the scent of the night around her and the feeling of impending autumn on her skin that she lost her grip on her power. It slipped from her fingers, at long last, and the glamour of her fuku melted away to the baggy olive colored overalls and off-white teeshirt that she had been wearing before she powered up. She hadn't even put on shoes. With the power of her star gone, her body gave way. Rhona landed hard on her knees, screaming when pain spider-webbed up her legs and through her body. The sudden expansion of her ribcage shot pain from that epicenter, jacking her scream up an octave. Her brain fog was returning with alarming speed, now that she was a civilian again. Everything hurt. Everything was bleeding. Deep wounds that she hadn't even been aware that she had sustained wept and wept and wept. She wept and wept and wept. As pain overtook her, Rhona discovered that although she was only a short walk away from the hospital, she would not be making it there on time. Her head felt like it was being split open. Her insides felt like they wanted to be on her outside. Her ribs sounded like rice cereal when she breathed. Every single cell in her body was wailing in pain and all she could do was wail with it. Wail until her throat was raw and sore and all she could do after that was let her face contort in inexpressible pain. Dark wings loomed over her and she knew who had come to take her. His face was twisted, distorted from time and the faults of human memory, but it was him. His hands pushed the bloody hair from her face, wicked claws sliced phantom cuts in what untouched skin was left. He laughed, and she greeted him with her tears. So this was the way Rhona Lee ended. Not with a whimper, but an omen.
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Posted: Sat Oct 07, 2017 7:02 am
The mirror exhaled him. Simply sighed him out, like a breath unwanted. Faustite became an expulsion, the smoke from the mirror. The poor choice of coincidence perturbed him.
Exhaustion never left his bones; exiting the mirror took with it all the harrowing, nonsensical experiences recently endured, yet none of their consequences. That fact alone left him jarred, scrambling to make sense out of a vacuum. He merely understood that, an untold time ago, he met a storefront mirror and it beckoned him - engulfed him. He spent a short time in a room with a Castor knight, all nerves and ire and searching eyes, then the floor caved in and they ran at length with a herd of strangers through a magical construct of an obstacle course. The floor continued to crumble, living shadows attacked, and windbursts buffeted them at length; finally Faustite escaped with no explanation in hand. The very experience left him stewing in his own furor; what purpose was there in enduring any of that? What could he possibly learn from a chain reaction of bad and worsening circumstances?
And how could he say, with certainty, that those experiences were real? They occurred in some twilit world, some interstice so foreign to reality that he struggled to comprehend it. That grappling conundrum continued as he crossed the trampled remnants of abandoned landscaping duties. The world grew familiar to him once more, with the dark of night spreading its heavy claim over the night sky and half-finished tasks of the night before lying evident around him. Twig and brush snapped underfoot as he crossed a pile of abandoned landscaping duties. Yet all the while, he distrusted it, expected it to unravel on a whim into the strange structural world that he so recently exited.
It slowly eroded his sense of reality. It maddened him. It left him unfulfilled, grasping for answers, sinking in a frightful, ethereal undertow.
Faustite kept his legs working because their soreness gave him an anchor point. He searched for signs of victims - an outpouring of people from nowhere in particular, strangers with head injuries, inexplicable groups. Instead he found an empty street, silent but for a distant wail. He upped his pace, half-wondering if the sound was truly nothing at all —
— but it was something, it was quite something, he realized in passing another brick-laid corner. She wailed and cried and constricted her breath, her flumes of red curl amess with grasping hands, but he recognized her there. She smelled nothing of whiskey now; she smelled of blood. She trembled and screamed and lamented the world around her.
Faustite strode for her. His motivations entirely unclear even to himself, he swallowed the soreness in his body and stooped to catch one of those bloodied hands. Hers, perhaps, or someone else's. The hospital wasn't far - he'd spend this good deed on her now and move to collect on it when the early hours arrived. For now, she needed medical attention before her popping ribs collapsed on themselves.
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 6:59 pm
The first thing that Rhona felt when someone touched her was blinding agony. Every nerve in her body was alive with searing hot pain and someone had just jostled them. Her voice returned in a broken scream, splitting with the sound into two dissonant chords. She writhed once and only once, jerking back into her initial position when pain rocketed through her. It didn't matter who is was, be it kind Samaritan or paramedic coming to her rescue. She cried to be let go. Begged even. Laying on the cold hard earth was less painful than this crushing misery. She wriggled and writhed and tried to escape the pain, only causing more to envelop her as a result. She could not escape the white hot sensation of pain raging like a wildfire over her. And then, like a fuse shorting, the pain was gone. And with it, Rhona's wailing. Had she... had she died? That was the first question that flickered to life in her mind once thought returned to her. Was this what death felt like? This lightness of self? This weightlessness? Rhona supposed that this was alright. The pain had slipped from her nerves, leaving her blessedly numb in the arms of oblivion. This wasn't so bad, she decided in the new silence of her mind. Death wasn't so bad. Dying was horrible. Dying was bloody and loud and frightening. But death... death was just... absence. After everything Rhona had been through, absence was alright with her. Rhona finally cracked her eyes open, squinting at the harsh light of street lights around her. She registered dark hair and cruel eyes. The scent of smoke. Dark fingers curling around her limbs as he lifted her like she was nothing. Panic crawled along her nerves, dilating her pupils with adrenaline and causing her to quiver with unspent potential energy. "Bischofite," she croaked, her throat screaming in pain as she did so. "Are you taking me to hell?"
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Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2017 3:48 pm
She screamed and wrenched and writhed and crackled and choked and bled and buckled. Faustite feared she would lose the very fibers of herself just by his touch, whether triggered by his touch or her lingering nightmares. Yet she complicated matters so irritatingly further by citing a name half-shrouded, partially-remembered and wholly misunderstood. He knew the name, though not from where; he recognized it thoroughly as a Negaverse mineral. She spoke of an agent - an agent whose ghost he barely recalled and yet never placed a face to name.
Doubt stepped in at the first signs of his understanding. His mouth, half-opened to speak, shut once more in a second guess. Suspicion wired his jaw shut, ceased the ocean of words churning beyond his lips. Where had he met such an agent? Nowhere. So how could he know that name? Certainly it wasn't through skimming the Database.
Faustite shouldered her instead, and the silence hung between them. His continued quietude drove the pair apart; for every second spent mulling over his words, Faustite wondered about the girl on his arm. What did Rhona really mean to him? Was she just a fragment of his whole-human past, and he was looking for a fix outside of his family? Or was it her whiskey breath and stumbling confidence that called him back to her? Was she anything more than her wild curls, freckled skin, and bare toes sinking into dirt? Did her whimsy mean anything against the burdens he now faced?
He wanted to take her starseed. The insidious thought crept on him during the time lapsed in quietude. The gesture was quick, certain - he could have the gem out of her back before she could scream of it further. Her injuries would serve as cause of death —
Faustite tightened his hold on her arm. "No," he struggled to answer. The glaring red neon sign painted the sky above it. It cast its foreboding glow upon the ground, asphalt streaked so stray blood looked black. "I'm taking you to a hospital." Their feet passed over the first lines of the parking lot. There it stretched on for an eternity toward the open doors. He could take her there, but —
A gathering formed at the front of the ER doors. He heard nothing of their conversation. The lot of them remained, however — loitering or guarding or begging entrance. He couldn't know. But Rhona needed help before he helped her himself, and he loathed to take that risk.
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