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 Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 3:35 pm
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Quote: Recent rainfall has kept temperatures cool but one of the parks can’t handle all the water draining into it. The water has turned it into a strange swamp and, in addition to the terrible smell, people have claimed to see strange floating lights—or, weirder—a strange, hulking figure that seems right at place in the swamp. Some have described it as being seven feet tall, covered in moss and weeds and mud and who knows what else; while no one has been able to confirm this, if you venture too close you might wind up observing something strange, yourself. The park no longer feels safe and if you wander too close you may feel hateful eyes upon you. You may even wind up chased out by a monstrous swamp monster, but if you try to approach him or interact otherwise, he seems to disappear. It’s probably best just to stay away from the park until the water dries up, just in case.
As Chalcanthite patrolled the streets, he noticed something blinking off in the distance that seemed natural but eerie. With the recent events that neared the supernatural, he felt he should get back up if he chose to investigate. With quick but controlled tapping, he sent a message out to Ochre. Hopefully the long haired corrupt was available for assistance.
I apologize if I am disturbing you but, there are some interesting things happening at a nearby park that may need to be investigated. There are weird floating lights but I have a feeling it is not fireflies. I am at a nearby bus terminal voiding the rain.
It was definitely feeling like a spooky season, whether or not he wanted to actually deal with it. He couldn't just leave it be on the off chance that civilians got caught up in it and got hurt. It was one thing if Senshi or Negaverse got involved as they had powers or weapons but, your average day city goer had no idea of the dangers that could lay just around the corner.
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Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 11:24 am
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The long-haired corrupt was both available for assistance and, miraculously, nearby. Ochre noticed the accumulation of water when he wanted to use the park for draining energy, but the standing water and thick mud prevented any quick movement. Ochre waded in as water climbed to his knees and organic detritus pulled at him. Sometimes stray leaves fell on him from above. Sometimes his boots caught on unwelcome, gnarled roots below. But he mostly managed to keep his footing and angle himself toward the weird lights.
Until he got a text message, anyway.
The sudden vibration of the pen at his side startled him so greatly that he tripped a root and fell face-first into the muck-ridden water. Mud found its way into his mouth. He straightened at once, spat as much of the taste as he could, and groaned at the feeling of sodden clothes clinging to his body. Rivulets of mud dribbled down all exposed skin. Something like seaweed clung to his now-messy hair. "Well, ******** me," he muttered to himself.
With a sigh, Ochre fetched the pen and pulled its halves apart. So help the lieutenant or whatever that caused that accident… A few soggy taps of the tablet pulled up the offending message. Chacanthite? Oh, he was looking into the energy draining stuff. Did he find something —
No, not about that. Sounds like he's right here already. Damn, that means I need to wade out of this mess.
The bus stop — he knew of one right up against the park to the east. He used to use it all the time when he'd go down to Porsha's favorite cafe. So, with a few unsteady steps, he started winding through the hateful little pass to reach the edge of the park. Having backup promised a safer time of it, anyway; he shouldn't be wandering around weird swampy happenings alone and without anyone knowing where one of their highest-ranking corrupts was.
Finally Ochre broached the edge of the park, standing in its shadow, and waved a muck-ridden arm toward the familiar captain. He was a litte afraid of speaking and getting more mud in his mouth, so he hoped his silent bid communicated that it was him.
sara draconia ochre makes a great swamp monster ok
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 9:56 am
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Ochre gratefully accepted the kerchief after his friend approached. Chalcanthite always struck him as prepared; Ochre felt a little awkward being the superior in situations like these. How in the hell did he get to be an eternal senshi like this, anyway? So much of his powered life was a blur.
As he wiped his face, Ochre both spoke to Chal and glanced back toward the swamp. "Yeah, I'm fine, I just tripped on a root or something. I was poking around in there, but the water gets pretty deep. And there are these lights that dance around? So I was trying to follow them, cuz why not, and then when my communicator went off… Yeah." He imagined Chalcanthite could fill in the rest. His soaked uniform and mudded hair spoke enough about what he endured in the swamp. Well, park. But it's a swamp now. "The good news is, it seems like it's all just normal mud and… Gross bog water. So there's not like, certain death by falling in it. Unless I start puking up my insides in an hour." Ochre smiled at the attempted joke.
He managed cleaning his face and hands before the handkerchief became too soaked with mud, and then Ochre strugged with whether to return it or hold onto it. Surely Chal didn't want to shove a muddy rag into his pocket and save it for later — unless he was doing some kind of analysis or something — but holding onto something that wasn't his seemed just as bad. <******** it, Ochre sighed to himself as he shoved the small rag into a belt, I'll just wash it and give it back to him. Unless he complains, then I'll give it back to him now. There. Problem solved.
"I dunno, it could be the rain." Ochre scratched the nape of his neck. "It could be some sewer line break too, and then, I dunno, some late-season lightning bugs rolled in to hang out over the standing water. But it's definitely not senshi magic — it just doesn't last long enough or have an effect on this scale. I've been wandering through that mess for ten minutes; senshi magic is lucky to get a minute at best." Unless I'm totally getting ripped off by my magic times and the White Mooners have all the luck.
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Posted: Fri Oct 27, 2017 5:32 pm
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Once Ochre cleaned off, Chal settled down a bit, now that there was proof that is was his superior instead of some sort of supernatural swamp beast. He held back a chuckle at the mention of the poorly timed communicator alert. It had to seriously be weighing him down, since there was still quite a bit of mud in the corrupt's hair. "Oh, I hope you are alright. I also would hope that the mud refrains from such a harsh thing. We can have your insides on the outside." He laughed a bit as he joked back, he was still a bit woozy from the bat bite earlier. "That is useful information for me at least, I have been fortunate to avoid most magic up until just earlier. If you are ready though, let us go into the black lagoon."
With a hesitant step he entered the muck, using his bow as a poking stick to avoid tripping on anything just beneath the goo. "Also if you would like, you can keep the kerchief. It may prove useful in the future since it appears that you have a lack of pockets. I do want to at least find out about those lights, I thought they may have been fireflies but they appear to be too big. I honestly am getting tired of all these odd and potentially harmful going ons as of late." The mud gurgled after each poke released gas from under the soaked grass. It smelled earthy but slightly rotten if there was such a scent.
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Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 9:48 am
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"Wow, you're really lucky. I think I've had a bunch of magic used against me by now. Maybe it's because I'm a senshi. I dunno." He turned to follow the captain back into the swamp, where reedy detritus threatened to swallow his legs once again. He kept his step soft and searching through the silt. Once or twice he kicked a root, but nothing so substantial as before.
The bog stretched for blocks. Always in the distance, he watched the lightning bugs bounce and scatter between the canopy and the soupy floor. They never drew closer, regardless of the distance he covered. "I don't really know what they are. I couldn't find out earlier, either. They never seem to get any closer? But, anyway, a lot of the stuff seems to just be… Hmm." Ochre's mouth formed a crease. "Well, it's been going on for a couple years now. Weird happenings like this, I mean. And I try to investigate it every time, but it just kinda appears and goes away on its own? Like there's, I dunno, weird ambient magic that feeds on people's thoughts of the holiday season and makes s**t up from there. Or maybe it's an actual person that's just laughing at us. Like the Moon Queen or something." He shrugged his shoulders with a sigh.
"That's my best theory, anyway." He watched Chalcanthite poke his stick into a gloppy bubble. Ochre grimaced. "But it doesn't really seem to be super harmful right now. Scary, yeah, but I haven't heard about anyone drowning in the uh… Park swamp." He looked out again toward the lights, ever in the distance, and wondered if they acted as a sort of lure. Was someone…
"Oh ********!" Again his foot caught a root, and he flung a hand out to steady on Chal's arm. "Uh, sorry, just… Annoying roots again." He glanced again toward the looming shadow, deep between the trees, and barely made out its form from the grey backdrop.
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Posted: Sat Oct 28, 2017 2:36 pm
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With Ochre's comment, he realized how little he had gone out in the past few years around this time. Normally he would be moping around the cemetery paying his respects around this time regardless. "Lucky? I think not. I just have the fortunate ability to stay at a distance given my longer ranged weapon. I also do focus on diplomacy first as well which tends to give the element of surprise. I do hope that you are ok after all that though." The endlessness of the bog was unsettling as they ventured farther in. It was slightly frustrating that the lights kept at the same distance no matter how far they went.
"That sounds extreme, but it does sound like a plausible theory. If you have looked into this before and it dissipates, maybe the best thing to do is just keep an eye on it to make sure nobody gets hurt by any weird over-sized creatures." It was this point that Chalcanthite froze momentarily as he made out the shape of a large being farther ahead in the swamp. With a quick reaction, he put his free arm out in from of Ochre to steady him. Once Chalcanthite was sure that Ochre would remain upright, he removed one of his gloves and began probing for something to potentially throw at the silhouette. It wasn't the brightest idea but it would confirm or deny his suspicions.
"Are you alright? I see something in the distance, be ready to run if this goes terribly, ok?"
With a strong throw, he heaved the rock towards the shadow, waiting for a response of any kind.
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Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 9:05 pm
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When Chalcanthite's rock struck a tree, Ochre continued peering into the distance. But the shadow that was there blended out of the world seamlessly — Ochre blinked, twice, and stared hard to find it. Nothing remained. "Yeah, I'm fine, but there was something there and it's kinda gone now. Maybe I was just seeing things…" Ochre dwelled over it momentarily, then shrugged it off for different topics of conversation.
"Uh, doesn't fortunate mean lucky?" Ochre asked timidly. "But uh, yeah, I'm okay. I mean I'd be more okay if I had a ranged weapon like that but they don't really wanna give us weapons in the Negaverse." His own powers had a range, though he often found himself within the enemy senshi's magic range by default. Why did the Negaverse want corrupted senshi again? Officers seemed like they had everything handled.
"Wait, since you have a ranged weapon… Do you think you can shoot at those lights?" Ochre pointed to them — perhaps stupidly as Chalcanthite could clearly see them — and looked to his partner in momentary enthusiasm. "At least that way we'll know if they're real, or if they're big enough to hit or something. Oh, it's not really an order, either — just a question. I don't actually like ordering people around." Especially Negaverse officers. It's a little weird.
"I haven't looked into this a lot, but…" Ochre sucked on his lower lip momentarily. The bogwater drew a chill through his clothes and he was starting to regret his life decisions of wading through ceaseless muck. "Like last year things went weird, like around now and around Christmas time, but they just… I dunno. Went back to normal, I guess? It was like nothing happened after a while and no one really had any explanation for it. Just… Suddenly there's no more weird snow stuff going on and no more weird spooky stuff going on. I don't know that anyone really has an explanation for it, but if they did, I'd like to hear it. At least then we could try to figure out a way to make it stop from happening, cuz uh, it's really distracting."
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Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2017 9:27 pm
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Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2017 1:23 pm
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"Yeah, I totally get that." Ochre stood back at the first knocking of the arrow; his brother suffered enough archery accidents that Ochre knew to stand well away from a firing bow. He wondered, though — did Negaverse weapons ever suffer drawbacks like normal weapons did? Had Chalcanthite ever accidentally exploded an arrow into his own face? Or had his bow unstring itself violently?
"Just saying, my brother would've killed for that bow. He's an archer, um… By trade I guess you could say? It's a little hard to explain cuz of where we're from and how things are a lot different than in a place like Destiny City, but when he found out his Negaverse weapon and that other people had bows, he was totally pissed. I mean, he's not one to be really expressive about it, but I could tell he was pissed." Ochre cleared his throat. Speaking of his brother brought a familiar unease — one he was taught to recognize as exacerbating the dead. And that carried its own ramifications; Ochre faced his brother's disappearance with a resolute unwillingness to believe it as such a tragedy. And certainly not in front of Chalcanthite, or this disgusting swampy, soupy mess. "Um. Yeah. Anyway.
"I don't think the lights are really anything," Ochre finished as Chalcanthite's arrow thocked into a tree. From where the corrupt stood, he saw the arrow pass directly through one of the lights. "There's got to be like… Some weird gas phenomenon or whatever that's causing those lights to appear in the distance. If we're gonna try to make this sciencey, I mean. Otherwise there's probably some like… Weird magical backwash? But that seems unlikely too, since senshi magic of all things is so quick to disappear. So how can it like, leave lingering effects?" The corrupted senshi sighed; trying to analyze the swamp led them in no particular direction except for the one with muddied shoes.
The comment of a coat perked him. "Oh, uh, thanks, but wouldn't that get you cold? Oh wait…" A fleck of concentration refreshed his uniform, though not the muddied swaths of skin beneath it. "I forgot we can do that."
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Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2017 4:26 am
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Ochre sighed loud and exasperated into the muggy swampland. His shoulders heaved with his exasperation, even as he struggled to keep step with the taller captain. "Yeah, I'm definitely over this. You won't believe the number of things I came across this fall that were just… Nothing. Like weird stuff that never did anything. It annoys the s**t out of me sometimes." He stepped from bog to slightly sturdy marshland as the pair slowly dislodged themselves from the muck.
"I know this great place for warming up and chilling out though. It's one of those hole-in-the-wall 24-hour coffee shop things? I know there's a ton of them around the city, and most of them suck, but this one has, like, never burned their coffee somehow? And they have a really great eggs benedict that they'll serve up whether it's 3AM or 3PM. I think they've got ties to Satan or something, cuz their food can't be that good and not… Wait, nevermind, that joke was stupid." The redhead's yammering petered out over the still swamp as the pair shrank from its premises. He continued to run his mouth, however, so long as present company would have it.
As the moon rose high in the sky, the night promised a long stint of conversation — with coffee in hand or otherwise.
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