The sky cracked open, raw and wasted, and split down into dull, dark black. Destiny City's unfettered night met them, sharply indifferent, pregnant with after-hours parties and third shifts and faceless wastrels chasing their quotas. Embroiled in their own challenges, statued far up atop one of the city's multi-floored buildings, guarded by parapets and privacy, the pair reappeared as if they were ever woven into the city's fabric. Firmly entrenched as if they never left.
Faustite's hand was frozen to Castor's chest with overwhelming force while thunder burst in his ears. The sky still tore itself apart. Stone met ice as apparition, as a pall cast over their mismatched ambience. He sucked in a breath that he never knew left him. Fingers tensed and their daggered tips dug into thin, weary fabric. Heat welled to a blaze and he felt the muggy evening press heavy against his face, weigh down his limbs. His heart pounded under its burden, a rap-rap-rap against its vermeil cage, asking for leave, asking for more time.
But there was none, he knew. Those seconds passed. His fingers gathered together against a foreign chest.
As he wrenched his hand against Castor's grasp, Faustite loosed a tortuous gout of smoke. It clung like contrails as he tried to stagger backward, to create space between himself and the royal's impinging grasp. His bones were small, he knew — brittle like seashells. Broken once before by less powerful men.
"Let go," he hissed. The smoothness of his voice guttered. Pity a poor gamble. She would laugh.
istoleyurvamps
Dispersion ;; Range: 3 foot radius with Faustite at the epicenter. Duration: 30 seconds Use Count: 3x Miss Chance: Circumventing magic, stepping out of range. Effect: Faustite draws his hands together, and a sound like an opening lighter may be heard. Smoke pours from Faustite in a deafening blast. Those caught in the initial blast endure a ringing in the ears and mild disorientation. Breathing smoke causes burning lungs, stinging eyes, and frequent coughing. Ringing ears and coughing symptoms linger after leaving the smoke for 5 seconds. Any lasting damage is defending player's choice.
Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2018 4:23 pm
The hum of energy that was his world was gone now, distant. As the night sky broke above them, wing unfurled, and a cruel smile graced Castor's face as the Agent attempted to pull back. He did not try to reach in. He did not seek his death. Bold, foolish- risking his life for an answer that could not be trusted from a given word. As the hand was rent away, castor laughed as the magic hit him, burning his lungs, his eyes. Pain- that was good. It felt good. It reminded him that there was danger still, a threat under the illusion of decency and truce. His laughed cracked into a cold cackling, and he laughed and choked on it. How far was he gone to his own lust for danger that he would welcome this. How much did he crave his own answers?
"And so I have what I wanted." He said, his smile unending. Perhaps he was a fool to look at a man and see fragments of salvation. Perhaps it was fear or trepidation that spare him the agony of having yet another hand bury itself beyong his flesh. How many had he given such an opportunity? A chance? Twice now to the half youma before him. Twice, he had rejected the chance, fighting perhaps with his own cry to duty, his own need to claim that which no other had. Castor had defied death many times. He had survived grasping hands in his chest; had endured past lover's cruel mockery of her love from another life.
"You seem... shocked. Does it surprise you that much? That I would challenge you? See what you might do?" He summoned his crystal, the delicate jagged thing glowing and radiating power- far more than any staseed "I told you- I enjoy challenges. I thrive for conflict. That is who I am- War Bringer."
The captain's visage shudder-flickered across the roof, backed by Castor's algid laugh. He turned, silhouette bleak against the summer night, and scoffed. "You confront me with instant gratification and call it a challenge. Do better. Your iterative rebirths watered you down." He turned at once and set into a parallel pace.
Back and forth, back and forth. Fingers worked tirelessly at his buttoned cuffs, checking for damages unlaid. His wrists popped nevertheless. He cast his wary, baleful glances back at the prince, half-wounded and half-irritable, ever expectant of a wild beast's protocol to attack senselessly. In all the curvature of great, feathered wings, of a crown bequeathed to all who graduated college, in a centurion's proud gear, Faustite suspected he lingered far closer to youma than the captain did. That raw recklessness hung about him like a stifling cloak. Like an avalanche hanging over its dominion.
"You offered purification twice now, yet you question me over who and what I've lost. You say you can't understand why anyone would remain in the Negaverse's ranking but confess that you might follow Chaos. You extend your assistance as a guide and you chance throwing it away on my action. What do you want, Prince? Have you decided? Because your actions alone preclude my answers." He turned in full toward Castor, now half a rooftop away.
"I lost my humanity before I could turn sixteen. I lost my mother to suicide, the rest to murder. I lost my innocence. I lost friends. I lost my own body's ownership. I nearly lost my life a handful of times. I lost my place in society.
"In short, I lost everything I didn't need. Losses aren't what make me, Prince. They aren't what drive me. I won't build my convictions on the things I've left behind and the people that left me behind. That foundation rots," he finished, smoke wending out from his pipes.
istoleyurvamps
Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2018 6:08 pm
Did he dare voice it? The reason? The idea of his madness and his willingness to risk his own death if he was mistaken. "Tree times I've given you a chance to kill me. Oportunities you didnt take. Once, when I first got near to take you to Castor. Another, when I lost myself to a memory and now?" He motioned to his chest, covered in cold armor and his heart thundering beneath it. "Yet you refused. And it is a challenge- a challenge to see how deep your conviction runs. A challenge of how fast I can react to save myself if I was wrong. A risk- measured only by how well you fight the urge, the need, the lure that is a victory. What greater challenge can be presented than the ones we face from ourselves?" He smiled, less cruel, less mocking. A measure of something was what he wanted. What is what he looked for in those he questioned he couldn't say, nor, could he voice. It was something seen. A conviction in action, in eyes and tone. A hardness of resolution and conclusion.
Faustite was not at his point, yet his paths were not so set in stone. That in itself, was a victory to Castor. War was not just in blood- it was something one could cultivate in dissent, in one's mind and heart from their own selves.
"I question you because- how else might I see where your reasons lie? Would you tell me? Lie? I do not know, but even so it is an insight, an anecdote upon you that shapes you. Chaos is power, and what is it I need to rule an empire as I once did but power. I offer guidance, because none dare voice what cold cruelty lives on the other side. What demands must be met before one can sacrifice all they know to enter a new life of unknowns."
He smiled again but this time warmer, ice and cold gone, the wings fading and leaving behind an eternal senshi in white and blue. "You know the suffering of loss, the fear of death- and that means you know the pain and agony that comes with it. You survived it, and so, you would survive purification Faustite. The answer I wanted wasn't one I can ask. It's one you have to answer in actions, in knowledge. I wanted to know if you are worth risking my life to purify if you'd ask it of me. That, is the answer I wanted to find."
"So you're buying back the sale. You could purify me, but now you have to evaluate me. Too zealous you were to offer without first hiding a hand behind your back." His knuckles found his hip, levied taut against bone. Ire ground at him. "How entitled that you ask me to prove myself."
He swallowed, steeling his jaw. Before him stood a prince scattered, perhaps, by his own grief, and mired in his own mantle. He sounded weary of it — more interested in idealism than in the longstanding tradition presented by his planet. His planet, one bent on crushing itself beneath its own power. His planet, empty of the empire that once occupied it. Whatever diplomacies came of that now ceased to be, by simple virtues of the incongruences between their last life and their next. Pity this busy monster, manunkind.
But what Faustite sought did not distill so easily into words. "Being youmafied — it separates you from the rest of the world. More than you know. More than being a senshi: it isn't just a secret to lock away when you power down. It isn't a well-kept secret among friends. It's a sentencing. You're jailed, sequestered, quarantined from the society that grew you. It forgets you. It moves on. It makes decisions that you can't abide, that you can't change from your spectatorship. You're out of the game and the game is relentless with its cruel optimism, but you're not a player anymore.
"It's like you said. My starseed will fade and Faustite will disappear. Elex Yorke will be gone forever. Just gone — not kidnapped, not dead. Vanished."
His gaze lowered, thick lashes chasing black. What a trial. "I need to know that — beyond the Negaverse — my goals remain the same. That when the crucible comes away, I won't be malformed with all my disenchantments. That my tenacity wasn't just a losing gamble. The Negaverse gives me all the power I could want, but it can't give me perspective. You should know what it means to challenge that, Prince. Haven't you wondered if your perspective would shift if given the power we have? And if it did, which perspective would hold more validity? The world-weary, War-Bringer's, or the newest Negaverse royal's? What a question.
"You have as much to ask of corruption as I do of purification. What of a trade, Prince?" His arms folded, fingers pressed into his taut dress shirt.
istoleyuuurvamps
Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2018 10:00 pm
The smile sharply left, a cut of fury in ice blue eyes and a cold emptiness in his voice."Don't mistake my actions for missteps. The second we began talking I have been evaluating. I can purify you, but you have to want it- crave it. I can offer and you can accept- but I won't die in an unwanted attempt. Or has no one told you?" The scowl was bitter. "If the one with chaos does not truly wish to be purified, they will die, taking the royal along with them. And I refuse to die over a person's lack of conviction. I refuse to mask this in those that seek me out. I will purify if it is asked, but only if I know they are willing, and they know the risk and consequence of hesitation."
The sharp exhale watch match with teeth grit, jaw set, hard lines in his face to match the fury.
"You're right though, I do not know. I will never know what it is like because I will kill myself before I would allow something to live off of me. But I know that you're a dead man on borrowed time Elex." He used the name, a name, eyes fixed on the man who claimed it for himself. The name of a person, a human, mortal, flawed, imperfect. Castor had one name in this life, but the names of his past lingered like phantoms, sometimes bleeding in and making him be more than who he was.
Perhaps that was a freedom chaos could offer.
"I know what I would crave if given power. I would kill. I would do so mercilessly. I would hunt every last enemy down and destroy them. I would unleash my crystal upon this world and raze it until it was made into what I willed it to be. I don't need to wonder because I know; I know because I want it even now. Because that darkness in me screams at me to do such, to throw this world away and to cast aside my attachments and conquer. Your mistake though is thinking that it is Metallia's brand of Chaos that I would take power from. There is more than one path you can take to obtain that which you want most."
"What could you offer me Faustite, what would you give, to be restored and become whole again?"
"What a weak way to pull from our rank. If you need consent to purge chaos from a single lieutenant, then how do you expect to fight Metallia? Why resist her? Why do you fight, Prince?" His head cocked, impatience brimming in his eyes. "It's 'for the challenge', isn't it?" Fine. Die tired.
Faustite paused at his coming words. In them came a brutishness, unharnessed, untempered by agile will He sought raw power from whomever could give it. He wanted for the sake of wanting, conquered out of interest for someone else to stop him. For the challenge. He brought war because it was his past impetus to do so, because he savored blood and death when exposed to chaos's unbridled proclivities. Youma in mind, not body.
"I believe in the sanctity of experiences. In knowing that what I'm experiencing in that moment, however strong, however grueling, is a private, fleeting thing. That no one can capture it. That no one can recreate it. Yet here we are, in the digital age, where people photograph and record and chronicle and compile and keep every scrap of experience they ever acquired. Then those memories are downloaded into databases, kept in hollowed-out skyscrapers hundreds of years old, built for human inhabitants but repurposed for machine. Then there's the algorithms that take those memories and disseminate them to computers the world over, where the young and creative eviscerate those memories and assign them new jobs, new meaning. Then those are cycled back into the system until they become something so meaningless, so unrecognizable from the original. We made a charnel house of human experiences, we chose our master, and GAFA holds our leash.
"So if you found that chaos, Prince, I ask that you start there — then move to the worlds and wonders that demean the experiences of their knights by forcing lifetime upon lifetime of experiences back into their heads.
"But you won't find that kind of power in the Dark Mirror. Search beyond if you choose."
He slipped slowly into another pace, his thoughts twisted into the heat from his core. That Castor made so many demands beyond his offer intimated that he had no intention of purging Faustite's chaos. Perhaps he couldn't if willingness was so required — he imagined no scenario where the youma within him would consent to certain destruction. The thought alone left him dour, a fire seeking fuel kept out of reach.
"I can give you loyalty. Strategy. If you want more, name your price."
istoleyurvamps
Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:46 am
A snorted huff. "I can no more control the way purification works than you can control how corruption functions. We are tools in a machine Kholat." He said the name now, and it felt odd but.. fitting he supposed. To use the name of the knight that would be. "If I could force my will on others? Perhaps I would. But, I have a reputation you know as a ladies man. Ignoring consent is a rather detrimental mark when one is attempting to seduce." He made a joke of it, though it was a poor one.
"But you have voiced the same problem I have with many of the senshi. The idea that we must purify to win. That somehow, we can regain ourselves by non-lethal means. I've lived enough lives, fought in enough wars to know such a thing is impossible. It's a fool idealism. I can offer purification, but if it is rejected then I must act accordingly. Very few others understand such."
He did pause, wondering how to answer. "I fight Metallia... well, I suppose because I want to. I want to see if I will die." It was more than that but under it all, Metallia was a challenge, an unseen shadow that none had survived. It was the ultimate thing to set one up against, to seek to defeat and become the conqueror. "I have other reasons. Revenge, hate, but had they not had a hand in the destruction of my world... I think I would have gone to war with her eventually. I am prone to such."
He listened and in the end Castor gave a half smile. Melencholic, he could only nod. There was little he could do; powerful he might be, Castor was ultimately far more limited than he liked to voice. "Chaos is a thing that exists outside this earth. The Dark Mirror, Metallia- they are facets. Forms of a force that can be called upon by anyone. Just as Order exists and can be called forth from nothing, so can Chaos. The agents of each force exist to conflict and balance. If I were to corrupt... it would not matter ultimately how. Only that I would further topple the balance, and prove detrimental to existence itself. But, please do not ask of me to withhold knowledge. It is not my place to interfere in the order of knights, nor, am I a man who would deny a person knowledge of something they are a part of. If you fear your past Kohlat, that is something I cannot control. Only you can decide what memories you would take, what to give value. Just because we experience something once, and then live another- does it make our new living ones any less real? Does it remove the value they have upon who we are or become. We are not entirely those we once were. I am unique. A royal is bound tighter than others. I chose to take the past and embrace it. Such a thing is not required of others. It would not be required of you."
His gaze was soft, a tiny flicker of hope like a new bud on a tree after the first thaw. Perhaps too early, yet it was there all the same. "Thank you though. You're more insightful than many. But I would not ask for your loyalty, though, a knight trying killing me is something I could do without for the next hundred years or so." He chuckled, memories, bitter as they were of Lacedeamon remained. "But that is not something I would ask of you, nor expect. Appreciated sure, but it's not required. What I want is your free choice Kholat. I want to give you the information so you can make a decision and choose your fate and end. Even if I could force you, I would not. What would it gain me to rip that from you? I did not have a choice to become what I am. So what I want from another is their choice. For them to know what they might lose, what they might gain. Purification means the death of a life in many ways. You lose friends, family- but if all that remains is you, it still is a choice you must make for you."
He sighed. "It is a contradiction I know. Yet I have always wanted others to have a say in their destiny and fate. I did not- and often, I wonder what I would chose if given the chance. I am your enemy, but that does not mean I would wish you to live a life in suffering for a lack of knowledge to the consequences of a choice I would give.
"I am cruel, but needless suffering is an unnecessary thing in life." Not war- but life.
Haven't you lived enough lives to know that murder is just as impotent? No one dies for long — not even youma. Purification only preserves a husk of this life before it dies. What a fool regimen to stand against Metallia.
Faustite shifted, his attention grazing the parapet behind the now-wingless Castor. He listened further as the prince-c**-eternal wagered his guesses about Faustite's intentions, his reasoning behind his distaste. Castor must have found him hesitant to have guessed fear, and worse yet, nervous that his memories would hold less value next to another's. But that perverted his words, ascribed a bitter uselessness to Faustite while assuming he internalized it. Castor's lecture strayed from Faustite's purpose, however — misunderstood it — and left the captain pausing ever more for a speech that was meant for some unseen third entity. Instead, Faustite chose to keep his silence on the matter; the protection he ascribed to memory and experience was not one born of perceived attack and burgeoning fearfulness, but one quiet resolution. Experiences were deeply powerful — telling of one's roots. You misunderstand me yet, Prince.
"Don't mistake me for passive. I always choose, Prince. I play slave to nothing — not Metallia, not the youma inside me." The youma that you would sooner kill yourself than take. You fear, Prince. You fear that you would lose control. "If I choose purification, you'll know."
A last pass of his attention around the rooftop located an HVAC unit, tall and wide, dripping condensation like fat off a roasted hog. It sat on a squat yet accessible framework where workers could reach beneath it. "Keep contact with me. Dead drops work best. Disposable phones drain too quickly where I live. Youma like to suck them dry."
O slave to duty, maybe you can convince me. But those shackles look tight; would you rather them loosened?
"What say you, Prince?" He asked, arms open in invitation for an answer.
iiistoleyurvamps
wanna close us up?
Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2018 10:42 am
Castor looked at him and made his guesses. They stood at an impass, a crossroads where they each had gained something yet left other things lingering. It was strange yet familiar in this, Castor thought. He was no master of purification, yet this was a step of questioning, of finding an answer he alone could not provide.
"I am amicable to that. Here is fine, though another works just as well. There is also a stone bench by the park- Two potted plants, one on each side hold daisies. The bench itself has claw marks on one end and indents on another. Marks of a battle. I visit it on occasion for my own reasons and it would be the easiest place for you to gain my attention."
Cold blue eyes looked at the smock softly leaving the man's body. "I say you must exert caution. It might not have gone unnoticed that you were no longer on earth, and despite it all, I'd rather not like to be a reason they harm you. That being said, if you wish for more answers, Cosmos might provide them, though if she would heed your call is up to chance." He hummed. "If you can find him, Camelot might also be able to offer insight, I've heard he is a good man. Polaris is the only other princess I would trust however. She's a reasonable sort." Castor took a single glance at his chest. "What you do with that advisement is up to you."
So the prince was sentimental. Whatever memoriam the bench held for him, it would do for a meeting location. And while Castor gave no specific times he would be in attendance, it traded convenience for safety. Good relations required a measure of protection offered.
Faustite wondered, however — how long would Castor spare before a decision was broached? A week? A month? A year? Longer?
With his mention was a laundry list of those on par with Castor, presumably capable of purification. Camelot, Castor, Cosmos, Polaris. He'd met none but the one standing before him. What veil hid the rest? If he found them, would they be more or less amenable? Or would they offer more of the same?
Prince Castor, Apollon, War-Bringer, whichever name he chose to carry through time, consigned himself to a peculiar timelessness with all the lives he chose to keep — a timelessness opposite Faustite's, which subsisted primarily off preservation of his current self. But Faustite was fast accumulating names for that body, regardless of owner: Eion Risk, Elex Yorke, Faustite, Kholat Syakhl. Their discussions granted a measure of insight missing from his education on the war. For his present aims, having a name and context for the memories he witnessed moved him closer to Velvet's curious bracelet. That, and the measure he learned, was enough.
"One more thing. If you think you can survive it, corruption places you much closer to Metallia. Far closer than you could get as White Moon." He turned, the answer just passing lips, before his visage unfurled into smoke.
