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 Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:36 pm
The event of Pandora's box and what it wrought from mirrorscape into the real world was still fresh on Mintaka's mind. Perhaps it was because she still required to be purged of the deep dark madness that had covered her....engulfed her. Spread from blood to bone to muscle to soul. Somedays, she felt totally normal, as if she never had been in the labyrinth in the first place. Somedays, she was out late at night, fulfilling needs of chaos, draining and draining until the growling beast was quiet again.
The box that, in her mind, caused it all was attached to her hip, small and almost barely noticeable in its new form. She had yet to open it again after the event, but she felt too attached to it to leave it at home.
Tonight, the chaos felt like it called for her in the warehouse where one of the giant wraiths had taken as a home. Small goo, barely noticeable in the shadows of the crumbling rocks and metal, were why she was here truly.
Cleaning up the last of the messes that Pandora's box had left. It would do nothing for those that had suffered, but she could make sure no others did. Two wraiths were summoned from her compact, as she stood in the middle of the building. They would gather what was left.
And soon, there would be no trace of the event at all. So focused on the task, she did not even acknowledge the aura that was approaching it.
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Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 1:04 pm
Mirror. He thought the word with contempt. He thought the word with all its associate frustrations — lost bruises on his neck, his back; conversations led to no resolution, a prince proud and mighty with no army to serve him. He remembered, with pursed lips, the count of losses: name, family, innocence, empathy, patience. They sat like charms on a sill — untouched by all but time and the dust of dead skins.
The industrial district liked to wear those dead skins. Many of its warehouses sat abandoned, unused, underused, condemned, forgotten. Some were bought up by intrepid businessmen or converted into homesteads like Lauri's. Others sat perpetually waiting for industry to seep like dirty oil back into the city, to liven it, to give those warehouses purpose again. Others earned their new use by the city's forgotten denizens, who kept their dirtied mattresses and mottled clothing warm around burning barrels. Sometimes their dusky fires peered out at the youma captain from behind glazed windows. He never paused for them, not while the Mirror lurked ahead.
It could've been Remarque, he knew. It could've been Sinope at a new stage of power and savagery and whinging wretchedness. It could've been someone else altogether, though their number ceaselessly waned.
Faustite pushed open the old, rotting doors with black hands, and listened to their creaking announcement of his entry. With mulishness and simmering persistence in his gut, he moved forward. As dusty footfalls preceded him, the motes whorling playfully in tired moonlight, they layered into an austere ambience. Before him stood the Mirror Senshi in question, who waited amongst black blood and wraiths.
But the chill through his heart knew that the coagulated flecks were bile more than blood. They promised a mess of memory and madness with a single touch. His hands wove behind his back, fisted grievously tight.
"You can't gather energy from ghosts."pixie nyxie ugh i'm sorry, i have a scenery chewing addiction
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Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 4:16 pm
She almost didn't comprehend the words, as each time the wraiths brought back the dark goo, it soaked painfully into the compact. Some of it wanted to shift and reach out to her, a carrier of the original chaos that birthed it.
The infection that never left, no matter how she thought it would. Buried deep in her soul now, it was something that would never fade.
So his words almost didn't register, but her head slowly turned, pupils wide at first and then smaller as she came back to reality. She was no longer in the maze. No longer in the labyrinth room. No longer looking at images of herself bathed in black. Begging for mercy.
"Depends on who's the ghost. You, Me or It." She didn't stop the wraiths from working, because she knew they would complete it even while she was distracted. "Did you come for a Ghost, Half-Youma Captain?" She didn't need to fully understand the man's looks to be able to tell what he was. She had met them, heard stories of them. Aurostibite shared information of ranks and species with her, should she ever arise to meet them.
"Or perhaps you are just wandering by?" She gave him a soft smile, now that she was not deeply focused within herself. The small box on her hip glowed just slightly, with the madness chaos it was collecting from the wraiths.
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Posted: Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:27 pm
"This warehouse. The memories in it." The captain strode no further; hands froze at his sides for only a moment. Then he turned, his attention casting uselessly to the walls, as he began to pace perpendicular to her.
"I came for a memory. Maybe one of a ghost." Booted feet kicked up thin rivulets of dust when he strode to a halt. There, in the deep grooves of the floor, were footprints lasting from their first visit to the warehouse. Scuffles chased their way up the stairs, through countless floors. Around them, leftover coagulations clung vehemently to the sweeping wraiths. Did they consider their burdens? Or were they more mindless than the dullest youma? Were they themselves anything but constructs?
Did wraiths carry memories not belonging to their bodies? Faustite pressed a black hand over his asymmetrical collar, low and near to his heart.
He refocused on the senshi stilled in the warehouse's center, dwarfed by its size, dwarfed even by her own stature, as she faced him then. Lily-white hair belied a purity that wasn't hers. A smile found him, but her words weren't spoken with smiles. She wasn't clothed in a naïve innocence. Half-hidden beyond the sheer of her uniform was a single box, beckoning attention. Was it collecting memories?
Faustite chewed his tongue before speaking. "Why are you here?" Why haunt this place?
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Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2018 11:23 am
She didn't have the ghostly memories that Faustite did, and unlike the nega's who had been trapped here with wraiths, she had only seen from one side of the mirror. Like watching a show on a fuzzy screen. She didn't recognize him as one that had been there before, but she barely recognized herself after the time in the maze.
She did not know his thoughts, and while he paced the room, she watched him only with carefully red-moon eyes. Her wraiths, on the bigger side of wraiths in general, didn't pay him any mind either, though one would pause over the chaos it emitted just to understand before sweeping back over to her.
"To remove the ghosts lingering here." She didn't snap her compact close, no. There was too much left of Pandora's madness here to not continue the purging of it. "I'm afraid that as it was my fault they were released, I am self appointed to cleaning them up as well."
She waited.
"Whatever ghost you are looking for, captain, will soon be locked away again where it belongs." The box dully continued its glow, and she pretended to not notice the chaos black tippened fingers gathering around her compact. She knew they were an illusion, knew that it was a reminder of her time and only in her mind. "Do you wish to know something else, in place of the ghost I am taking away?"
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Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2018 9:53 am
"I don't want that ghost locked away." Faustite stepped forward again. His gaze swapped to the wraiths, measuring their distance in their slow, loping floats, before he paid his heed to Mintaka again. "I want to know that ghost.
"I want to know what happened." His hands clasped together, knuckles boning out from once-pale skin. "All of it. I want to know what those memories were before you lock them away. I want to know what you're cleaning up here." He remembered well the black sludge that clung so imperiously to its targets. Like a damning bloodstain, it marked the few who imminently went mad, lashing out at allies, or left them to stew in a torpor that no one else could know. "I want to know what that darkness was doing to my peers."
So much bloomed in his own life due to that singular point in time, owing in large part to the memory forced on him. Would he have responded to Umber so without it? Did he owe it to this ghost that his life took its turns? What a ruthless query.
"And there's more to know than that — how you unlocked those creatures, why they attacked, who ordered them to attack. Was it you?" pixie nyxie sorry about the wait, got discouraged
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Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 10:55 am
There was a lot of things people wanted in the world. Healthcare, love, beauty, money. All things Mintaka thought frivolous but nesscary. What she didn't think was nesscary, was the lingering remains of a unknown chaos that she had unleashed.
His wants, she thought as her brow furrowed, seem to be many. He wanted a lot of things, and that was understandable. A lot of things had happened with the dark mirrors and the leak of pandora's box into the real world.
She didn't break concentration as more and more of the ghost disappeared and faded away. It was a complex balance of his wants vs the needs of good here and she debated the line of where to cross. How much information did she give? Did she owe them?
"I had been exploring Mirrorspace." She began, her gaze cutting away from him and towards broken remains in the warehouse, similar but not to the maze she had been captive. "As I do, because Mirrorspace is deep and unknown. One day, the walls went away and it was open." She didn't think him to understand how one's adventures could go from carpeted fog filled halls to stone, open, skies of thunder and rolling clouds. "So I kept exploring."
One of the wraiths returned to her, a large glob of the remaining ooze and dropped it at her feet before moving away. Unlike the ones who were attacked here, she would not experience the memories. Just being consumed.
"I found this." She held the box up, "And released the two wraiths. One you fought." She smiled, almost serenely. "Ancients, Old. You have youma's, older then time itself. Thats what they were. That's what they felt like." Her fingers darkened as they spoke, all the way to the root of the knuckles and she brought them up in almost curious fashion. It was funny how they came back.
"You were affected with Madness." She tilted her head, "Nasty, contagious. It gets in the blood, the veins, roots, stays." She took a breath, "I was a captive for longer then 5 months."
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Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2018 2:45 pm
Mirrorspace again. So strange the obsession that the Mirror had with its otherwhere. All that he found in those blank halls and blank walls was more replicated nonsense, hashed and rehashed into objects vaguely familiar. A slightly off Victorian chair with fittings from the fifteenth century, or the flash of a modern table that almost looked upcycled, or a blank wall overloaded with wiry smoke. There was no boon to that place like with the Rift — no reliable encounters with mirrorwraiths that they could tame. Why venture there? What, beyond the lure of the unknown, called them?
Found and released. Correlated, not necessarily causal. The answers she gave were as thin and filmy and reliable as any static appearance in Mirrorspace itself. So she found an ancient wraith and released it. "Did you order it to attack us?" He waited, expectant. Did she threaten her court's relationship with the Negaverse on purpose, or was she so dilute of reason from her own madness that she couldn't see portent from her own answer?
'You were affected with Madness. Nasty, contagious. It gets in the blood, the veins, roots, stays.'
So that memory is mine now. As is anything this did to me — to the youma in me. Faustite breathed a sigh as knuckles tucked tight against his hip. "And in five months, you have that box to show for it. For all the damage done by your two wraiths." Where, then, did the other go? What did you do with it? "A box and a self-appointed duty to clean up the Madness left behind. Oddly anticlimactic, isn't it?
"Two wraiths, but we fought one. I must be looking at the other." Why else would she launder the evidence? Why else would she seem so disaffected by finally finding freedom? Why else would there be no call to the Negaverse for assistance with their Mirrorspace problem?
Soundlessly, at his side, his communicator pen formed from nothing.
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Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 3:05 pm
The laugh was almost pathetic and weak. "Attack you?" She looked at him, "I gave myself up to keep the rest locked away. Only two got out, the rest could've just as easily wrecked havoc. Count yourself lucky, captain." She looked at him now with anger and resentment, "That you walked away with just a figment of a memory of someone who once upon a time might've been here. Be lucky-" She didn't want her breath to come raggedly out, "That you weren't trapped in a maze with mirrors that showed you everything going on but you couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't scream."
She looked at the box, "They are both gone. One for order, one for Chaos. That's what happened. One here, and one in the park. The park is clean, so now the warehouse will have to be." She could feel the madness, still deep inside of her. It was a curse, she thought bitterly, and Hydrus and Aurostibite were not here to drain her of it. Drain her to the point where she was relaxed and less aggressive.
"You asked questions, and I'm answering them." She looked at him and the wraiths came to a stop, returning to her side. They didn't venture far from her shadow but the intent was there. Their master was threatened.
"Do you think I would purposely attack the coworkers and faction of my husband to be? After corrupting into the dark mirrors for him and working with members?" She shook her head, anger rising again. "Are you so selfish that you don't realize your implications could cause the very fabric of the very finely twined string that keeps DMC and Nega's together?"
She tried to take a deep breath, but it was caught in her throat. Pandora's box glowing faintly and the wraiths circling her.
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Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 4:53 pm
Strange how much history comes out when you threaten someone. A brow cocked at her sudden anger, rasping and peaking in a self-admitted impotence. She released the two wraiths, yet two got out — responsibility redacted. She drew her lines red red red in the gulfs of sand between them. Victim, it read once she slashed out the rest of her anger. A double-walled shield that painted Faustite just as much the aggressor, the predator.
Stranger still for their respective rank differences. Her, an eternal of the Dark Mirror, blessed with potent power nearest the pinnacle of their beings. Wings at her back marked the freedom with which she could navigate Destiny City now, with no one but peers to fear. Two wraiths flanked her in solidarity, too. He smiled mirthlessly.
His fingers steepled together, arrow down, with thin bones pressured outward. He listened and waited while she spat, hissed, and blustered her repugnance for him. One for Order, one for Chaos. One here, and one in the park. You asked questions, and I'm answering them.
Cause and effect. Yes and no, Yin and Yang. How clean.
His smile faded. "I don't threaten that alliance," he said at last. What a charge to levy, isn't it? So much power in one person's hands. "Your two ancient wraiths do. Your Courtmate, Persephone, does. Your other Courtmate, Sinope, does." The basic difference between accusation and interrogative was learned, by his vaguest estimate, in early grade school. Had it been too long for her? Or did madness reap as much common sense when one was locked away in a five-month quarantine?
And what fed her in all that time spent beyond the mirror? What quenched her thirst? 'Captive', she said — some entity took care of her.
"My business is knowing what happened. Better that the Negaverse knows your wraiths weren't a tactical strike, isn't it?" He remained fixed where he was, neither advancing nor retreating, neither raising his voice nor lowering it past his calm near-disinterest. "Don't mistake me for an enemy."
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Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2018 10:26 am
Everyone was an enemy when Madness spread. She could feel it choking her. It was like the first night all over again, when she had crawled and scratched and hurt Aurostibite, trying to return to the mirrorspace that kept her captive. She had wanted nothing more to be held captive again and never feel again. The thoughts clashed with her need to be here though. She was here for Aurostibite...Hydrus. Dark Mirrors that would be foolish enough to travel to the depths like she had.
"Everyone threatens the alliance." She breathed through gritted teeth, the flash of red narrowing at him. "Nega's who take the DMC captive, torture them, steal their starseeds. There is plenty on your side who wished we disappear. Order who...." Flashes of Castor, the prince in her room, smashing bone without breaking it. Torturing her. Pain and more pain. She had thought Dark mirrors would be safe but they always walked the fine line of both sides. Existing without truly being allowed to exist. "Order who do the same, for nothing more then us being chaos instead of their bright white lights and serve a dead queen."
"Funny how you speak of alliances but you aren't tied to any of my courtmates, Captain." She snapped her compact closed and the wraiths disappeared, back into the mirrorspace. If he didn't want her to finish the cleaning here, she wouldn't. Instead she tried to grip the chaos that brew inside her. The warehouse could keep the sickening globs of chaos that clung to the corners.
"Perhaps you should seek guidance from those who actually work with our court instead of instigating false claims. General Umber. General Aurostibite." She tilted her head, "If you think your superiors aren't aware of what happened, you mistake my husband to be." The razor sharp smile mottled the almost serene face of the origami senshi.
"I have never hid anything from Aurostibite, nor those that he answer too. As I am sure, he has never hid anything from them." She waited, "If what I unleashed truly threatened the sanctity of a teetering alliance, then where are your others? To follow you?" She stepped closer instead. "It could've been a lot worst, had I not done what I did."
"What do you truly want, Captain. You asked about a ghost. A memory." She tilted her head, "What did you see? What was burned into you?" She reached out and held hand over where she assumed some sort of heart was. "What damage did Pandora's Wraith cause to you, for you to return to here? Is this truly about the Dark Mirrors, or do you wish to cast blame to something thrusted upon you?"
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Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2018 2:04 pm
What a telling pause. Faustite did not interrupt her diatribe, nor did he make mention of her falter. He waited, however, and listened for all the ways her voice may have cracked and watched for all the ways her movements may have stuttered. Quick cues in the twitch of a finger, in a syllabic slur. He watched vermillion for a time, studying her competency for eye contact. And all the while, he listened to her story. Her hates. Her hurts.
She charged him with a slurry of claims. He waited further. She spoke the names of two generals — Umber, who he knew, and Aurostibite, who he didn't — and their claims to proper support. That Umber supported anyone beyond himself was a surprise with how little he paid to his subordinate. Umber must have seen something worthwhile in the Court to endorse it so, by whatever means this eternal senshi deemed appropriate. And Aurostibite? She already admitted to a husband-to-be. Who better to divulge all to but her significant other? 'Never hid anything' told that, and more, about their relations to one another.
Still she subverted his point. Tied up she was in this filmy accusation, caught like a dove in power lines, where she paid so little heed to his words. She already decided he was the enemy, the iniquitous that wanted their Court subsumed and dissolved. He waited further. The glimmer of her words and bite of her teeth spelled her threat, her vehement interest in protecting this Court, and specifically this alliance. It was written into the very way her teeth set against each other, narrow and deliberate. Seeking.
But nothing stood in the Database for what happened, for what stemmed from her. If Aurostibite reported it, that report never found its way to the masses. Need-to-know was its own folly.
But her folly lay in how she defined subservience to that alliance. "So I should open my legs for your Court as you do for Aurostibite. The only way to honor this alliance is to tie one another like dogs." He smiled, mirthless. Better that you deal with the Wolf Pack.
Faustite leaned inward, hands folded behind his back, and his words sought the intimate interstice between lips and ear. "Tell me — is it a greater honor if I didn't have a choice?"
He stepped back, his ire a palpable heat. His words were razorwire. "If Aurostibite submitted his report, then we have no further business." A half-turn on heel, a guiding step, and the captain dispersed into smoke.pixie nyxie i can edit his leaving if you want mintaka to get a last word / action in!
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Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2018 10:44 pm
The blatant call to what she did for her husband, made a furious red bloom on the cheeks. Nails practically dug into her own skin in bright red crescents. For one who assumed something about the court, and could not handle the fallback of such claims nor answer her own question, she tried not to take too much stock into what he said.
Perhaps some negas would view her as such a demeaning thing, but it didn't matter as long as her court was safe and Aurostibite was the way he was. He assumptions were wrong, and she didn't know how to tell him so when she was constantly plauged by the chaos and madness insider her. Her reaction was to be responsive, not thoughtful.
"Yes." She looked over at him, "Perhaps you'd learn something in this war. Nobody truly has choices." She watched as he stepped away, almost angerily reaching into the disappearing smoke before letting a hand fall.
She had many thoughts to say, but none that would better serve the fire that burned inside her. She summoned the wraiths once more and finished what she came here to do. Whether Faustite came back here or not, there would be nothing left of Pandora but the memory he harbored. Strickenized Thats a good wrap to me! Thank you for rping with meeee <3
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