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 Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2018 8:10 pm
Katie was a child of the digital age, and her drug was information. As long as her phone held a charge, she could take a hit at any time, scrolling through news or social media or TV or movies or anything that made her brainwaves turn into white noise. The wilder the story, the more it held her interest, but at the end of the day it didn't matter what she was consuming, what story she threw herself into, just as long as it wasn't her own. She'd read a thousand tragedies before she faced the portrait she found on Chauvet.
It was too much to be on her wonder, or at home, where she’d be liable to try and make sense of the complicated static that rang in her ears. So she wandered in places where she couldn't be found by her thoughts, trails and parks and streets at night when she wasn’t likely to hear the sound of girls laughing. Sometimes she liked to be Katie, to scroll through her phone and pay no attention to where she meandered and drift through the information highways, but sometimes she liked to be Chauvet, where she didn’t have to pretend to miss the notifications from people trying to hit her up while she was in one of these moods. No one who texted her could understand what she had witnessed and the conclusions she’d come to, even if she could make them believe her, but no one who would contact Chauvet would have any reason to care about her cousin or offer a way to fix it. There was no fixing it, not really, and it created an ugly pit under her sternum that she didn’t know how to fill.
So she wandered, because at least the park trails were as empty as she felt. She started the evening as Katie, eyes down at her phone while she walked in search of Pokémon, but about a mile down one of the less-well-lit trails she lost signal, left in the frustration of a loading spin of Schrodinger’s Pokeball (did she catch that Treecko before her service cut out? She might never know).
Sighing, she pocketed her phone and slipped into Chauvet, because if she was going to be disappointed she might as well be a disappointed superhero. Her starclad heels made a satisfying crunch on the underbrush, even if there was little other consolation. She continued to walk.
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Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2018 3:59 pm
Striving, forcing, pushing, stretching, yearning, honing, surmounting. Each word played its symphonic part in Faustite's slow reconditioning of his time-weary body, of all the all the fat-trimming performed on it by the Rift's ruthless environment. What once remained of spoiled Elex Yorke was cast off as extraneous and abandoned in that desolate wasteland. There he would die, with the other thousand-thousand personae subsumed into the inhuman and inhumane. He would not mourn it.
He had no time to mourn it. More than the Negaverse's strict preferences, Faustite expected himself back in shape in short order. Sometimes he spent those hours in the barracks' bowels with the crystalline weights available, sometimes on the myriad stone stairs that borrowed their way into the hollows of the Citadel, and sometimes he risked danger in Destiny City's well-used and well-loved park systems. Tonight he chose the lattermost, with the need to see the world under the moon's steady gaze and cast off the ubiquitous staleness that permeated the Dark Kingdom.
The clear night air served him well. Starless eyes found tree-veiled paths with relative ease, their cyanotype sights leading him on up steep dirt slopes. Recent rains slicked the ground, necessitating handholds on thick oak branches and whiplike cherry trunks. New growths bloomed at last; he smelled their saccharine perfumes as they tinted the air. Thick roots jutting from the ground formed nature's steps toward the path's zenith, and the occasional influx of clover cloaked those steps from view in their mischief. The hiking trail came alive with its shifting foliage, chirping crickets, busied owls and nighttime explorers, each with their own solitary agenda. Some were more aware, some less aware, and some unaware.
And unaware was the first word that came to mind when he felt the startling spark of a new page on the night air. The sensation charged the area; he paused at once, assessing himself. In all the points of weariness scattered about his body, mimicking the stars in their sorry state, could he chance a fight?
He thought so. And she wasn't a difficult find — the glaring, bombastic brilliance of a phone screen cut through thick foliage easily. It acted as beacon to her presence, as a grandiose billboard to her lack of situational awareness. He approached at perpendicular. Cutting through the thicker forestry, twigs snapped and branches sung their songs against metal piping. He did not fully emerge from their cover when he assailed her, the page adorned in all the ostentatiousness of the 20's cast in interstellar flair.
His words were simple, matter-of-fact. "Your black mirror won't tell you where to go, Page. You don't belong here."
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Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2018 1:38 pm
She should have felt his presence on the horizon of her senses, an inky black creeping in the dead of night, but Chauvet had been so ready, so willing to be anywhere else but home that it registered as only one of the many dulled sensations the night brought to her dulled mind, anesthetized as it was by the loading wheel on her screen. But his voice was harder to ignore, dry as his tone was, and she blinked up from her screen to peer out into the darkness, seeing nothing at first until her eyes adjusted to the lack of light.
"What, are you the park police or something?" Chauvet scoffed, sending her phone back to whatever universe-pocket it went while she was powered up. She was not afraid of this boy or his imposing aura, even if there was a certain wrongness to his eyes that she couldn't quite place between the distance and darkness. Now that she was looking for it, she could feel the Negaverse on him, whatever that meant, like smoke billowing off of his person. Or maybe there was actual smoke around him. She'd seen weirder things.
In the absence of anything to do with her hands, she grasped for fistfuls of skirt, lifting the train of her dress away from the brambled and the snags when she turned to face the captain. "You gonna, like, mark me down for park detention? I don't see your badge." Chauvet rolled her eyes--maybe she should have recognized the danger she was in, after what she'd seen what a youma could do, but maybe she didn't care. Maybe she liked the idea of being in a little danger.
Maybe she deserved to be in danger.
"What happened to your eyes?" she called out, feeling a little lost in the darkness.
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Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2018 9:20 pm
Faustite approached steadily, his hands laced at the fore, his fingers working studiously on the ghosts of rings past. She spoke, lashed out in anger, and he cocked his head to the side just so. Conversational. Appropriate. Polite.
She could talk as much as she wanted. She could talk about anything. She could lecture him on how he looked like a monster that crawled out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. She could lament her evening's mishaps to him. She could talk about all the ways the Cosmos had wronged her in her choice of dress, cut unflatteringly on a football star's figure such as hers. Or she could go on at length with her park ranger retort, affronted as she was that something such as him, something that belonged nowhere on this earth, was telling her where she should or shouldn't be. That someone younger than her had the audacity to speak out against her ambulatory choices.
He'd nod along nonetheless. Act casual. Close the distance. She'd spoken of his eyes, so he'd answer her coyly. "That's the question of the year."
Soon the careful woodland branches no longer covered his peculiarities, and the moonlight formed its blue-white daggers on a set of pipes. Glitters of moonlight caught in his eyes drew her attention, a perversion of the manner by which her dress drew attestations. All its glitter, all its gold, catching and brilliant against the stark white of her dress. The white of purity, of pristine uniformity that bespoke no fleck of dirt. His mother would have liked it for her couches, especially if she finally won that fight for a second maid. That same pull was echoed in his eyes, embedded as it was in hypnotic revulsion. He hoped it held her for these last few steps.
These last few steps, and he could reach out and touch her chest. A motion casual, even natural, as if picking a leaf off the shoulder of a close friend. Casual murder coated in social expectation. And when he could count the freckles on her face with little trouble, he reached out with all his mustered darkness toward the basin of her u-neck dress.
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Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2018 10:54 pm
Oh.
He wasn't human.
It was such a simple declaration, a turn in the step, a new possibility, but it sent her mind to horrible places. Youma could be like people? But he felt stronger than a youma, he felt like a Negaverse, wore their clothes and their smug expressions. Perhaps the inverse was true--people could be like youma. But these were all questions for a time when Chauvet had higher brain function to think about the distinctions between magical classes in the war to which she'd been drafted. What her brain did when he stepped onto the path was scream wrong.
Boys weren't supposed to be made of smoke and darkness. Eyes weren't meant to be all black. She thought about running, about putting her hands up and swinging, but what she did was watch, dumbfounded, as he approached, memorizing the cruel way the moonlight cut across his features. Monsters were real. She should have been delighted, cryptid hunter that she was in the daylight hours. But monsters were real, and she had stumbled somewhere far from home, the only beacon of light in a field of darkness choking in around her. Now he was smiling. Now he was reaching for her chest.
Gross.
"Dude, no," Chauvet frowned, brought back from her reverie by the threat of a casual grope. She waded backwards and away from him, awash in her starlight fabric, and gave him a look that was less more abject horror and more mundane disgust. "Just...no. Don't. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. No mas." He needed to rethink his approach or he was about to catch two gloved fists that came up, demon eyes or otherwise.
"Not looking to get drained tonight," she warned, trying to feel as brave as the gown she wore. "Go suck on someone else, Smokestack."
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Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:12 am
Out came meme after meme, peppered with cliché. Like the pretty-suited piece of stardust before him warred for Instagram and WhatsApp and Tumblr instead of that vast, empty source in the cosmos. Like this was all a sophomoric joke where a boy drunk on Halloween tried to get fresh at the fall formal with a girl he barely knew.
Anticipating a fist to the face was a soldier's business, but Faustite wore the hat of a boy then, wistful for all the vapid pranks and fast loves and fiery experiences of a high school social life terminated between the second and third year. When knuckles pressed to narrowly concealed bone, he was thinking of sitting with boys. Sneaking notes in class. Slipping off into bathrooms to flirt with boys who blew their cigarette smoke into the ventilation shafts. That bleary throb over jaw and cheek was the pain of lives never lived, of experiences never had.
The creature stumbled back with a hand smartly pressed to jaw. He looked to her bitterly in her ballgown attire, in her fall formal flair with no chance at winning crowns. She looked like one of the fresh-faced student teachers who came to learn how to teach the teenaged nation.
She was a Page, he was a Captain. He could eat her. Swallow her down like so many nameless people with undreamt lives. She would heal back her own damage on him. But she didn't punch Faustite, she punched the boy who called himself Faustite, who cried when he lost the ability to go home, who looks at couples with sharp, egregious jealousy. That boy couldn't take a punch. He couldn't take reminders of all the things he wanted in a life he couldn't have.
So that boy vanished, and with him, the monster.
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