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 Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 1:15 pm
Chauvet was beginning to note an interesting phenomenon that she observed any time she became the Cosmos Page instead of Katie the student athlete. Any time she met one of the other monster-fighters, they had this...thing around them, a shimmer or a change in air pressure or something that indicated that the space around them was somehow less real than everything else. It didn't seem to affect their movement or change anything about them, even though it was so powerful and brilliant and warm, but it had to be doing something, or else why would she feel it so strongly? She would have asked the Mars Knight or Hvergelmir, but there had been more pressing concerns at the time.
Still, it nagged at Katie, to have a problem that couldn't be solved with a couple of quick google searches--she'd found a couple of new-age sites going on about auras, but this felt like something different and more grand than anything she could discover on an outdated hippie blog. School was in full swing, volleyball season was just getting started, and there were always bills to pay and pizzas to deliver, so she only got the time to investigate in the little in-between-times, moments before she'd driven all the way home where she could stop at a park and call to Chauvet, even if just for a minute.
She'd been on her way home from a long shift and smelled like flour and cheese, but after meeting other Cosmos knights that were just like her, the curiosities in her mind burned as brilliantly as Hvergelmir had, the first time she'd looked at her with fresh eyes. She pulled off of the highway an exit early and stopped at a local park, one with rails and halfpipes for gangly teens to practice their kick-flips in peace when the sun was out. In the deep darkness of 7 PM after daylight savings time, the place felt long deserted, and Katie couldn't help but shiver as she locked up her car and felt for Chauvet, eager for the rush of power she felt whenever she changed.
It didn't last--somewhere in the distance, she felt something...ashen, smoky, oily slick, and it made her chest ache like there was a dryness in her lungs. It was something like what she'd felt around Hvergelmir or Gravina, but different all the same, more subtle and tilted just enough on its axis to feel off-putting. Or maybe it was just the parking lot nerves getting to her. She couldn't be sure.
Was there another Code piece nearby? It seemed too mundane a place for something so powerful, but then again, that could be said of anywhere in Destiny City. Such starry beings felt more at home in a space opera, somewhere more beautiful and far away like what Gwen imagined. Despite her better judgement, Chauvet began to jog into the park, seeking out the source of the darkness. _ p a o cx Let me know if you need me to change anything!
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Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 1:43 pm
Whatever happenings or goings on in the city, being the goal-oriented agent that he was, Carminite still went about his business. He had a quota to meet, after all, and he had his sights set on meeting that quota regardless of whatever else was going on in his life. Which, curiously enough, hadn't been a whole lot as of late. It was basically work, after-hours work, the occasional massage, and then more work--he liked his job, and he liked keeping busy, which meant he liked his after-hours job, too. Which was a very good thing since it required a lot of extra energy to "change," as he so lamely referred to the process, and drain energy, after all.
Tonight was no different. The lieutenant was prowling the park for any stragglers who weren't scared off by the early onset of darkness. He'd already found one, a hapless man who seemed completely calm but still somehow completely out of his mind. He pegged it off to recreational something-or-others and drained him until he was out like a light. He grumbled about it being a service to society as he dragged the body into the bushes, out of sight until daybreak. Now for his second target...he still had go searching.
So he searched, walked quietly along the paved pathways of the quaint little park. He was happy for the silence, for the darkness. It was a familiar presence now, and one he started to take solace in even when he wasn't Carminite. He was comfortable and relaxed as he went along, that is until he felt a pinprick of a different kind of presence. He narrowed his eyes in its direction--he could only assume it was one of them--but went about his way until he noticed it was approaching. With a curl of his lip he changed his trajectory, heading straight for it.
In the distance the white garb was stark against the night. Carminite didn't even bother to get closer once he saw it, deciding that he could just stand his ground...by sitting on a bench, idly fiddling with an energy crystal he had on him.
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Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2017 9:32 pm
It wasn't hard to follow her senses towards the park bench further in, where it almost started to feel like the air was growing colder by the second, the lights dimmer, shadows longer. Chauvet shivered under the crinoline of her gown, but she did not slow her approach, starting to make out the silhouette of a man reclined in shadow. As Hvergelmir had attracted a starry shimmer around her, this man appeared to be the source of the cumulative darkness in the area, a sickly ache that made Chauvet think of the Code piece she'd encountered the first night she'd been a Page. Had he been poisoned by the Chaos, too? Chauvet had only taken the tiniest piece to help heal the Code, and it had made her sick for weeks, and even now she could feel the phantom throb of its spines deep in her chest. How could he be so steeped in it and not feel uncomfortable? Had he just gotten used to the pain?
She paused about ten feet away from the far end of the bench, her hands reaching for pockets that weren't there and instead grabbing handfuls of dress for comfort. He was holding something in one hand that flashed and glowed, even in the dim light, and her eyes followed it curiously in spite of her own hesitation. "So, uhh," she began, rocking back on her heels as she tried to avoid the chill running down her spine, "What's up, guy? You, uhh...doing alright there, buddy?" Chauvet didn't know how to broach the topic of him appearing to be swimming in magical spirit toxins or whatever it was, so she settled for awkwardly rubbing her arms to stave off the cold.
For all that the wheels in her head were turning, she hadn't even bothered to stop and think about whether or not this stranger would be friendly. After all, everyone else had been at least moderately nice, and there weren't any of the monsters around to put pressure on them to act.
Maybe he just had a magic flu. That made sense, right?
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Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2017 12:53 am
The light and bright aura making its way toward him made Carminite's stomach churn, as it always did when someone of the Order persuasion approached. He curled his lip but still tried to focus on the crystal in his hand, tossing it up and down to pass the few more seconds it took until they were finally in earshot and he glanced up. As usual, he found the uniform...not exactly a "uniform" and therefore just a bit strange. The lack of functionality would probably bother him if he had been unlucky enough to have been awakened as a Knight as opposed to a Lieutenant, not to mention how it would have inconvenienced him in a fight.
The way she reached for pockets that weren't there got a huff of amusement out of him, and then her question he straight up snorted at.
An innocent, how cute.
"I'm fine," he said, flipping the crystal as he continued to toss it lightly, still lounging in his seat. "You, on the other hand," he finally caught the crystal and looked up at her properly, observing for now. Given she didn't seem to be aware of the fact that he was an agent he wondered if there was a chance she'd turn hostile before he got some information out of her.
"You look a little lost. I'm more than willing to help, just gonna need a name in exchange."
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Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2017 8:47 am
"Oh, okay," Chauvet shrugged, even if she didn't feel thoroughly convinced. She couldn't get past the feeling of wrongness that surrounded him, an uncomfortable itchy sensation in her fingertips that threatened to spread, and something instinctually defensive kicked in when he looked up at her with level eyes, casting some kind of unknown judgement on her. Something about him was giving her bad vibes, but she couldn't place it, and she wasn't going to play victim to her monkey mind just because a man in the park gave her heebie-jeebies. She was a Cosmos Page on a mission, and she would get the answers she sought.
"I--I'm not lost, we're in a public park," she snorted out a laugh, brushing her bangs out of her face. "Like, a really public park. I drove here, dude." Maybe it was part of his shtick, to be mysterious to go with all the dark suaveness he got out of that black outfit, none of the muss or fuss like the formalwear she'd been given. She kind of felt bad for him in that moment--getting to dress up with no effort was rad as ********, especially given that she never had to worry about finding clothes that fit.
"Oh, I'm Chauvet, Page of Cosmos," she rattled off with a wave and another shrug, like it wasn't much of a big deal. She could play it cool, too, if she tried not to try too hard. Maybe she was just being too judgemental--she'd mostly talked to other Cosmos Knights, so maybe some of them just felt different, like smoke or ash or sickness. These things weren't inherently bad--well, the sickness was bad, kind of--but it was 2017 and people were allowed to make their own decisions about what was best for themselves.
"I've never seen a Knight like you before. Is that how you get your power?" She nodded to the crystal in his hand, far too genuine to keep up the facade. Ever curious, she took a few steps closer to inspect the object in his hands, but was mindful enough to stay out of arm's reach, because it just seemed polite, and she still wasn't eager to get too close even if she was going out of her way not to judge.
"Mine is a ball," she offered, and as a show of good faith she held up her gloved hands, where a white tennis ball popped into existence between her fingers. "It's s**t tier for fighting monsters, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right?"
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Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2017 6:54 pm
He sensed at bit of her hesitation and couldn't help but smirk, a little more amused by it than he probably should have been. They were on even ground, power-wise, or at least he didn't feel too threatened by her presence as compared to some others he'd come across. He was smart about which fights he picked, and typically if he was flying solo he didn't seek out conversations like these. Mostly because they never turned out to be just simple conversations.
"I meant lost in a general sense," his smile widened some, showing off some of his pearly whites in the process, "dude. I drove here, too. Down the block." He willingly dropped a bit of his agent facade and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "That way, by a street light 'cause people are crazy and you really just never know." Come to think of it he wasn't sure there were cameras set up...but if someone stole his car--it wasn't even his, he was car-sittting for a buddy--they would more than have hell to pay. And he was an agent and could deal with a much heavier hand than if he were just a normal person.
Because how tedious would it be to go through the police for that kind of thing?
Despite these somewhat rambling thoughts he heard everything she said, from her introduction to her question what kind of "knight" he was. He tried really, really hard not to sneer at the idea, and instead just covered it up by fake-coughing.
"You're..." he started, eyeing her a bit more carefully now that she was closer. He opened up his palm and let her inspect the crystal though, but should she make a move to touch he could quickly and easily pull it out of her reach. "Not totally wrong, but so far from right." And he paused there to examine the ball she showed him, tucking away his mental notes about the Cosmos Page as he did.
"s**t tier's pretty accurate," he eventually snorted at it, wondering but not quite asking how useful a tennis ball would actually be in a fight. "But this isn't my weapon. My power comes from something else entirely, this is kinda more like a extra energy source type thing,. Think...battery," and he held up the crystal to support his example, "versus electrical grid."
Another pause. "Which makes me not a Knight."
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Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2017 7:18 am
Chauvet took the time to look over the crystal with eager eyes, taking in its soft incandescent glow. "A battery, huh?" She wanted to touch it, she really wanted to touch it, but showed admirable restraint in straightening her posture and looking away before she lost control of her impulses. She'd never really thought of her ball as a weapon, because it wasn't one, and when he snorted she dismissed her little token, perhaps defensive in her sidelong glance. But whatever retort she might have prepared about having biceps for weapons fizzled the moment he said he wasn't a knight, causing her expression to go blank.
"Okay, but..." Chauvet paused, trying to think from this sudden shift in perspective. There were knight and there were the creatures they fought, and that was it, wasn't it? But he was a person, not a beast, but he didn't feel right, but something in her gut seemed to resonate with what she said. So it wasn't a strict dichotomy, then, of heroes and monsters. Chauvet frowned. She didn't like being so thoroughly out of the know, and she didn't like the smug look on his face as he realized how out of it she really was.
Maybe she was lost after all.
"What does that make you, then?" Chauvet asked, smoothing out the folds of her skirts to give her hands something to do that wasn't fidget. "Where do you get your power from, and how can you store it as a battery gem thing? What do you mean, 'electrical grid'?" The man had made the mistake of seeming willing to talk and only vaguely off-putting, and in the challenge of this new information Chauvet had so many questions that demanded satisfaction. "Are you around to fight the monsters too? Are we, like, supposed to be rival monster hunters?"
She hadn't even considered that this whole superhero business might be a competitive sport, that there might be teams and points and winners and losers. It made everything just a little more interesting.
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Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2017 1:15 pm
It was surprising to him how much Chauvet really seemed to not know; if she was pretending, she was doing a great job since he was so convinced she had no idea at all what he was holding, never mind what he even was. Her expression when he said he wasn't a knight was bordering on priceless, and he couldn't help but grin. He tucked the crystal away as she tried to work through things on her own, finally moving to stand. Not at attention, but he still stood taller than the Cosmos page. It was a small, very trivial comfort of his to know that he still had a height advantage here.
He blinked for a moment, wondering not for the first time why that matter to him at all. Maybe it was an ego thing?
When she finally asked what he was, and perhaps even by extension what his role in this war was supposed to be (though he wondered if she was aware there was even a war going on), he snapped back into the present conversation and considered the different approaches to answering her questions. In the end he favored the side of sportsmanship and sighed, taking a seat again and patting a spot next to him so she could relax.
It was a lot of information, and he was at least willing to answer the more basic of questions.
"I am an agent of the Negaverse," he started, "and as best as I figure my power comes from Metallia. There were...pamphlets...that I didn't read all the way through." He waved a dismissive hand at the memory. "******** of information I wasn't gonna remember anyway. A lot of the 'how it works' isn't something I question because it'd probably all just confuse me. Thinking's a lot harder than physical work." The lieutenant gestured to his body, not in a suggestive way but more in a way "you can probably see why" kind of way. "I was 'the jock' in high school."
Because that stereotype was supposed to explain everything.
"So...where was I? Electrical grid? The crystal's a battery, Metallia would be the electrical grid powering the lot of us agents. And we have our own causes that we fight for. I wouldn't call our opposition 'monsters' though," he was, of course, referring to the senshi, as well as knights by association, "I think of them as...pests, more like? They get in the way of a lot of what we need to do for the organization. So what 'monsters' are you talking about?"AMItotic *looks up Negaverse info to refresh memory* :U
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Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2017 8:17 am
Chauvet couldn't help it--she crinkled her nose a little at the name 'Negaverse', a laugh that she couldn't quite stifle. The Negaverse? Really? It sounded like what you'd call a 90s biker gang, a point not really refuted by the man she spoke to. When he drew up to his full height, she shuffled her weight from one heel to the other, putting her hands on her hips and straightening her posture. Was she intimidated? Nah. It was more comfortable to stand this way, really. It had nothing to do with the unsettling feeling in her gut, the distilled essence of blindly shuffling around a dark room in search of a light switch. Chauvet hated the feeling of being left in the dark, and she was equal parts grateful and irked that she was learning about all this from someone who apparently wasn't even a knight.
"You got pamphlets??" Chauvet blustered, trying to imagine what any kind of paperwork on all this would look like. How could the topics of superpowers and monsters get distilled to something as simple as a tri-folded piece of paper? This implied that there was some kind of magical office with a long-suffering magical secretary, who stamped papers and handed out new hire pamphlets and wasn't paid enough to do their job. Was the source of all this whimsy really something so mundane?
She continued to think, her brain chewing through the information like taffy. She took a break only to give a knowing nod at the lieutenant's fit body, a concession that his gains were sufficient, even if she disagreed that his biceps gave him a free pass from reading something he had apparently readily been given. Still, it was 2017, and not her place to judge, except with raised eyebrows and a 'you do you' sort of shrug.
"So, Metallia is like...your Cosmos," she postulated, touching one of the stars on her dress. "But the gem thing also give you power, if you need it on the quick? That's interesting." There had been some touch and go in learning to access Chauvet's power, but she'd never felt like she needed an outside influence to reach it. All the same, props to this guy for looking at trash eating monsters and thinking of them as pests--unless, as she began to suspect, they weren't talking about the same thing. Her eyebrows fell.
"The monsters, like, literal creatures that wreck parks and try to eat people," she clarified, scrunching her hands to mime at having claws. "They're like animals, kind of--one of them was a tree?--but whatever they're called. Chimeras. Youma. Monsters. They get in the way of a lot of what people need to do to live?" Chauvet had only lived in Destiny City a few years, and even she had seen multiple instances of the strange creatures. She found it hard to believe that anyone could miss their presence for long.
It was becoming increasingly clear that what this man said was true. Organization, agents, goals, none of these things had even been a part of Chauvet's lexicon to describe herself or the cause that she'd been summoned to fight. "That's...what you were thinking about, right? The monsters, getting in the way of whatever you guys are doing?" She didn't want to consider the alternative. She didn't want the monsters to be people.
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Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2018 11:33 am
He snorted. "Yeah, the higher-ups are pretty organized. I didn't expect it either, when I first joined, but hell." That experience as a whole, meeting with new leadership and all, had been more or less traumatizing for him at the worst. Intimidating, at the least. He had no problems staying in line knowing one or all three of them could easily squash him for some reason or another he doubted they'd need to justify beyond "he was colluding with the enemy." And for all the effort they had put in to organize the various departments, so to speak, he still felt like he was floating in Negaverse limbo. No real goal beyond collecting his energy quota and supposedly trying to stop out the opposition.
And yet here sat the opposition and he was having a perfectly fine time explaining the whole war to her.
He nodded for confirmation as she went over the details in a way that made sense to her. Everyone processed the information differently, he got that, so he absently rolled a crystal between his fingers as he listened to. When the question of youma came up, he glanced over at her. The surprise came back first, and then amusement, and then he found himself chuckling at the miscommunication.
"No," he started clarify, "youma, to us, are pretty useful. By pests I was referring to the little shits aligned with Order that have given me trouble so far. There haven't been many so I personally don't have too much reason to complain about them just yet, but they get in the way of what we try to do as a whole." It was at that point that he tucked his energy crystal away and started getting ready to make his exit, hoping his last point drove it home that the two of them really should have been trading punches, not engaging in civilized conversation.
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