Backdated to early February probably because I’m slow and this has been half written for at least that long.
Word Count: 1135
If there was one thing Lovely hated most about his life since moving in with Ilian, it was having to clean.
He hated a lot of things, of course, being a relatively hateful person by nature, but cleaning tended to keep its spot at the top of the list. He barely cared to pick up after himself; the fact that he also had to pick up after another person could often be aggravating, especially when Ilian couldn’t seem to get his socks and underwear into the hamper, and his thick, curly hair frequently clogged the drain in the bathroom. (Lovely conveniently overlooked the fact that he was almost the exact same in that regard. It was much easier to be annoyed with someone else than it was to accept that half of his frustrations stemmed from his own bad habits.) When they finally moved into their new house, Lovely had every intention of hiring someone to come around to do the cleaning for them.
This bitterness and disgust for the clutter and messes of other people was beginning to extend to his duties within the Negaverse. As Aquamarine, he thought cleaning would be the last thing on his mind between combat training, energy draining, and the filing of boring report after boring report, but as he and Jet made their first (potentially futile) attempts as restructuring and reorganization, Aquamarine discovered that he could not even escape the bane of his existence while in the depths of Negaspace.
The Dark Kingdom was filthy, to put it mildly. This probably shouldn’t be surprising, considering how many people came through on a daily basis, but Aquamarine found himself noticing it more and more these days. Out of the few habitable structures that remained, the castle was arguably in the best condition. That didn’t mean there weren’t areas of it that experienced an appalling amount of neglect.
People were revolting, Aquamarine decided. Being infused with chaos didn’t change that. If anything, the chaos made it worse.
He was in the middle of cleaning the room that was to be his and Jet’s shared office. They’d had their own smaller offices as Captains, and during Jet’s first few years as a General, but now that they were both Generals and tended to work together most of the time anyway, there didn’t seem to be much of a point in having separate offices. The room they’d commandeered now was larger, definitely sizeable enough for two desks and a few filing cabinets, maybe a bookcase and a few other options for storage, not to mention the bed Aquamarine had every intention of setting up in the corner so neither of them had to head to the barracks if they wanted to pass out here for a while instead of heading home. (Not that Aquamarine enjoyed the thought of sleeping there, but if it stopped Jet from falling asleep at his desk when he lost track of time, Aquamarine was willing to make the concession.)
The problem was that the room was obscenely unkempt, to an almost offensive degree, covered in dust and other gunk, scattered with discarded papers and old files and junk filled boxes of arguable importance. Aquamarine would not be surprised if it was previously used as an oversized storage closet, though the old, rickety desk and chair seemed to indicate that someone had once tried to use it as an office of some sort. Whoever that person had been, they weren’t the cleanest individual, and the room had not been maintained at all while it remained empty. While Jet was busy elsewhere, Aquamarine took it upon himself to start ******** son of a b***h…”
Which naturally resulted in much grumbling and a variety of colorful ******** slobs. Who let this place get like this?”
If it wasn’t for the room’s size and prime location within the castle, Aquamarine would insist upon finding some other space.
In the defense of whatever random, nameless individuals Aquamarine could choose to place the blame on, the Negaverse had been dealing with an incredibly high turnover rate in recent years. It seemed to him that they could barely keep agents around long enough to promote them and beef up the higher ranks; keeping every room in the castle from falling into disrepair hadn’t exactly been a priority.
Hopefully, that would soon be changing.
Out of curiosity, and because he needed a break from dusting and the disposing of questionable piles of garbage, Aquamarine sat himself on the floor in front of one of the old, tattered boxes and dug around inside to see what he might find. What could possibly have been deemed so important that it needed to be stored in an abandoned office for who knew how many years?
As it turned out, there was very little. He found some old, stained files signed by agents he did not know, whose names he couldn’t even recall hearing, about Senshi whose names were equally unfamiliar to him. There were bits of rubble scattered about inside, which might have been the result of the White Moon attack five years ago, but could have just as easily been from some other event that took place long before Aquamarine was corrupted. He found a dried out pen with a bitten end, which he tossed aside with a scoff of disgust, and a dingy, discarded medal he considered cleaning up and keeping for himself, but ultimately decided to relegate to the trash heap as something he had not adequately earned.
At the very bottom, tucked along the side beneath a small, empty wooden box littered with small scratches, Aquamarine found an old scroll. Unraveling it, he deemed the material to be something other than paper. Parchment, perhaps? The edges were tattered, the face of it stained and faded with age, discolored after years of abuse and neglect. It was short in length, and covered in almost indistinguishable writing — a neat, loopy sort of script that was once written with care and spoke of a time long ago.
Ancient and forgotten, the scroll was in delicate shape, but surprisingly not unreadable.
Aquamarine scanned the words, noting that the language was as dead as whomever might have written it.
Fortunately, Aquamarine had the sort of affluent education that included the pointless learning of dead languages.
It read like some sort of magic — a spell for fire, to be exact.
“Hey, Jet!” Aquamarine called, climbing back onto his feet.
Not that he expected Jet would hear him, being elsewhere.
Excited in a way he never really was when it came to his duties, Aquamarine left the dust covered office in disarray and went in search of his partner.
He suddenly had the desire to make use of the training grounds.
