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 Posted: Tue Apr 06, 2021 4:10 pm
There were some people in the Negaverse that only seemed to care about power and authority and rising through the ranks. Sylvite didn't think she was one of them. She'd been a Captain for years and had found she could do pretty much anything she needed to do. She'd done her projects and trained people and even led her mission, and it had all been fine. Still, now that she was here, at General, she understood why people wanted this so much. When she jumped from rooftop to rooftop, she felt like she was past the point of just being strong and she'd moved on to being completely weightless. She was faster, too, and her knives had real, actual, magic now, and the best part of all was that she could teleport without feeling like she'd just sprinted a couple hundred meters. She was keeping up with her paperwork, and with the whole having a subordinate thing, but her time in the city was mostly going towards testing out her new strength. She didn't wanna end up toe to toe with an Eternal or something only to end up miscalculating a jump. Although, yes, as she made her way across the tops of buildings downtown, she was throwing in some cartwheels and flips. It was fun, for one thing, and anyway, she also needed to see if she had more stamina. Strickenized Let me know if this works!
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Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:41 pm
With each flip, her feet touched the stars. Blotted them out for all their fraudulence. Contrails of chaos followed her, bloomed around her, as she traveled the city's uneven rooftops.
The fire at the edge of a long stretch of shop-filled rowhouses could feel it — the balm of her presence. Beset by the contentious stars, the pyrebound boy was ever keen on the company of his own kind, if only to discourage the paragons of light that liked to hunt at this hour. It was easier among friends, he knew, even if their small gatherings spread chaos over top of everything. Even if that chaos attracted their violence-starved enemies.
He watched her distant form for as long as he could stand idle. Then he paced down the long line of houses, and he didn't care that his clangorous metal heels stirred a few residents from their sleep. When he reached the edge, he leapt across the gap in an arc of smoldering fire, and landed in a brief crouch upon the turret of a rehabilitated victorian.
Instinct whispered to him in dulcet tones of friend, so he aimed to meet her at the perpendicular. A stone's throw from a Captain, he wagered.
"Wait," he called when he was in earshot. In the sallow sodium light, he saw her curls, the belying curve of her uniform — this one, he was sure —
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Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:46 pm
The auras at the edge of her senses barely registered. Sylvite was flying high. Even the strongest of the people you'd usually run into on an evening like this were just her equals, now. Yeah, she knew that she still wasn't invincible, but she was just going to take these first few weeks of new power and enjoy being at the top of the totem pole. The literal glow, on the other hand, caught her attention as she landed an extra long jump and skittered to a halt on top of an old building. Sure, she was used to seeing stars and streetlights, but the color of this one was weird enough to get her to do a double take, and that was when she saw the face that was kinda illuminated against the shadows. A person. A person who was telling her to wait. Sylvite squinted as she stepped forwards. Despite everything, she wasn't really the best with faces. There was a reason she had a desk full of notes on people, and a digital copy loaded on her tablet. There was a reason she actually had to rely on the database. Some people, though, were pretty unforgettable, especially if they happened to be literally on fire. "Oh, hey," she said, giving a quick wave as she got close enough to talk without shouting. "I remember you."
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Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2021 2:27 pm
Faustite finished the last few paces to bring them into conversation distance. He was wary of the large skylights set in even segments about the roof, though he was more careful of the light that yawned out from one of them.
I remember you too, was the appropriate response. Reintroducing himself was the appropriate response. Paying out platitudes was only proper.
But the first words to leave him were "When did you get promoted?" For what, too, of course, but he half-hoped she would answer with more detail than his question demanded. He only remembered meeting with her before, in some kind of park, and she had been helping with the whereabouts of Umber. Or, something to do with Umber. Something long tarnished in the rust of two years spent in the Rift.
As he got closer, firelight afforded him a better look at her garb. He hardly remembered her uniform well enough to spot the embellishments, but he paced around her all the same. Striped tufts adorned her shoulders, and he poked the puffy material. The dramatic billow of her cape caught his eye next, furling and unfurling in the wind, lazy and less tempestuous than his split cape.
The Negaverse always had fashion.
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Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2021 1:51 pm
Skipping the small talk was fine. Sylvite leaned closer to give him a better look at her clothes, tilting her shoulders to show off the barely there sheen of the fabric before she stepped backwards and twirled. Her cape-skirt puffed out and spun really nicely, and she was grinning by the time she turned back to Faustite, hands clasped in front of her. "It's cute, right?" she asked. He didn't have to answer. She knew she looked good. "It was a couple weeks ago, I guess. After the whole Feldspar thing." She squinted at him, sucking in her cheeks a little bit. "Were you there?" The question was kinda pointed. She didn't think he'd been there. With the fire and everything, she should've noticed him if he was, but she'd been known to miss stuff like that before. Although, she didn't think she'd have missed him for years, and even though she'd seen him here and there after they'd met when she was still on the Umber case, none of that had been exactly recent. Interesting. "Yeah, we had to rescue this dude from the Rift. Like I said, a whole thing," she added, very ready to catch him up to speed if he needed it.
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Posted: Fri Apr 16, 2021 6:04 am
He supposed it looked cute. Aue always told him that cute shouldn't be the purpose of their uniforms, but it often was — they were killers dressed the part, thanks to Metallia's cosmic tailor. He gave a perfunctory nod; the greater part of his attention was on what she had to say.
"I wasn't there," he admitted. "Was in the Rift. For two years," he added, and flushed under the glow of his own candlelight.
"What happened?" The question doubled for the state of the world, of the war, of their faction over the gap he lost to his Rift-bound adventures. Far be it for him to expect her to know anything, though she was a general now, and thus capable of it. Faustite sighed inwardly as he curled a hand over his disappearing hip, and began to pace as if standing under his own fire was uncomfortable.
It was, but he hated admitting to it.
"Must not've been the part I was in."
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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 6:56 am
"In two years?" Sylvite looked up as she thought back, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth to fill the weird silence as she squinted at the stars. "A lot," she said. It wasn't a good enough answer. She was Information, it was kinda her job to keep people in the loop in situations like this. It didn't matter if the person in question seemed surprised that she'd gotten promoted, like she was still a dumb kid just because she liked clothes and did flips off of buildings sometimes. She stood up a little bit taller. "Let's see. Sparknotes version," she said, and clasped her hands in front of her while she watched him pace. "An alien came to town. Like, a real one, not reborn like the senshi or anything, and he just wanted to sell stuff. He said he'd be back, too, so maybe you could meet him." That would be an interesting meeting to be a bug on the wall for. She sucked in her cheeks, thinking a little bit more. "Uh, some people got sucked into an alternate dimension for awhile. I didn't get to see that one, though." She clicked her tongue again, annoyed this time, but she moved on quickly. "Oh, I set up an ambush for one of the senshi leaders and I ended up getting her for the Negaverse, captured a couple other people. That was probably one of the highlights, y'know, for me," she said. She ran a few fingers over her long skirt. The ambush and Cybele probably had as much to do with her new clothes than the rescue mission did. "Then, the Rift thing. It was a new guy in over his head. He got trapped by a youma, and whoever recruited him didn't really care that he went missing, so. Yeah. I did some paperwork afterwards, got promoted, and I'm his General now." She could go on about this stuff for awhile, but she'd promised the short version, and she finally took a longer pause and a deeper breath. "The Rift's really big, though," she said. "I'm not surprised we didn't run into you." She took a step to the side to come face to face with him, even with the pacing, and she tilted her head. "What were you up to down there, anyway?"
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Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2021 5:48 pm
The first part was a footnote. For that, he blinked at her. He told himself that she must not've had the time or means to learn more of this one.
The second part was another footnote, more distressing than the first. He tightened his jaw. His posture grew stiff as he held himself to the pain of his perpetual self-immolation. It was better, he decided, than granting himself leave to speak his mind.
The third got a mild grind of the jaw for being an aside — capturing a senshi leader deserved more than an offhand remark by the very person who executed the ambush. It rekindled a measure of hope for this conversation — that he wasn't wasting both their time by asking. Sylvite struck a blow, an influential one — and she was rightly commended for it, despite her other shortfalls.
The fourth part was a reminder that the Negaverse's greatest enemy was ever the Negaverse, was ever the power they held above the senshi. As much as it was an everlasting, painful brand for Faustite, it was nearly the end for this as-yet-unnamed lieutenant. What a list, he decided. Pity that he wasn't there for any of it.
"Congratulations." Faustite permitted himself to pace again, and the sweat of his burden now a thin sheen over his firelit features. "On the ambush, the title, and the subordinate." She didn't need him to tell her she did good; those words were insulting at her rank. "I'll read the reports when I can."
As for him — "The Rift is bigger than the earth, and it's never the same. In days, a mountain range becomes a ravine. I've seen it." Faustite looked askance to the stars, transfixed by the strangeness of their constancy. "It's a lot easier to miss people down there than up here."
I was far off, anyway. Farther than a Lieutenant could've gone.
"I was looking for something that I never found. So I came back."
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Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2021 3:44 pm
"I dunno," said Sylvite, finally stepping back to let him walk in peace. "It's not that hard to miss someone up here." Recent events had her thinking back to her early days in the Negaverse, when she'd basically been overlooked, and it had her wondering if there were other Lieutenants out there like that. Up until now, she hadn't wondered if there were any Generals who needed that support, but as she watched the way he looked at the sky, all that changed. She had promised Axinite that she'd be there for everyone in the Negaverse. "Look," she said, a little bit softer, "If you want to read the reports, you can. They're good. They're concise. I worked hard on them, but like," she rocked back slightly on her heels, "If you wanna talk about anything, the not-Sparknotes war stuff, or about the Rift, or stuff that's not in the database at all," she puffed out her cheeks as she looked him over, trying to see anything besides soldier, "New movies or video games that you missed, stuff like that, I dunno what you're into." Probably not Animal Crossing, unfortunately. She leaned forwards, tilting her head. "It's kinda my job to make sure that everyone is in the loop."
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Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 5:33 am
Faustite shut his eyes, tightened his jaw, blew a smoky sigh out through his nose. Head dropped, he broke away into a pace, going nowhere, going anywhere, knowing full well there was no departing from his own anger.
Her offer, however kind, was meant for a human audience.
Threadbare restraint nevertheless held. "Sylvite. I'm on fire. I don't get to have a life like yours." Video games, movies, art, poetry, theatre, sports — didn't matter what it was. He could don a skin for three hours and pretend to lead a human life again, or he could evict all pretense and accept himself as separate from both worlds. Being dragged back toward the human world both rawed and inflamed what he thought he had already accepted and put behind him.
But here he was, thorny about all the human things he couldn't have. Better judgment told him to leave, and he began to as his feet carried him past all the skylights toward the farthest parapet, but he hesitated, paused by a what could it hurt.
After all, did he have a reputation to salvage? Wasn't pride a human thing?
"Restaurants," he conceded. He wanted to know about new restaurants.stari_maga omg my roommate and i have joked about eion getting super addicted to animal crossing lol
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Posted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 4:18 pm
Sylvite just watched, sucking her cheeks in slightly, as he started walking faster and faster. She did squint at him for a moment, because obviously she knew that he was on fire, but she took a quick breath and managed to avoid any snappy comments about how she wasn't stupid. "You're still half human, aren't you?" she said instead. "We could get you Netflix set up, or games, or like, a cat." She wasn't being confrontational, and she didn't follow him while he walked away. It was an offer he could take or leave. "Or you can go hang out with rocks in the Rift for a couple more years, I guess," she mumbled with a shrug while he got to the edge of the roof. While she'd much rather have Faustite be a happy, productive officer, he was also a General and that meant he got to make his own choices. Although she did crack a smile when he stopped and asked about restaurants. "Uh, there's a new taco place down that way," she said, nodding down to the streets below. " Delicioso. They're kinda hole in the wall, usually busy, but it's cheap and really good." She was a broke college student, she didn't get out to fancy restaurants much.
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Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2021 12:23 am
Faustite rolled his eyes at her comments, even if she was behind him now. It doesn't work like that, he wanted to say. We can't be people and we can't be humans, he wanted to say. We have to be something past both of them, he wanted to say. Despite the hard-won meditations given at the youma seminar, Faustite still wanted to fall asleep to teen romance slice-of-life dramas and play puzzle games on his phone without having to worry if AT&T developed a to-scale map of Negaspace and the Rift based on his cell phone usage alone.
But it was dangerous, getting comfortable with life. Growing attachments. Shift weight, about face, think about tacos.
"We're getting tacos." He paced diagonal to another parapet, then remembered Sylvite wasn't a Captain anymore and he lacked the authority to continue ordering her around, but he let the order stand anyway. Leading and following fell to the work of their personalities, now.
'Down that way' — no senshi by feel. No youma, no agents either. Felt like something was going down further east, but he long ago learned to ignore it. If it wasn't under control, they'd hear the SOS.
He whisked his phone into reality, and with the battery shrieking at him to let it die, he checked his bank statement. "A lot of tacos," he decided, more to himself than to her. The phone vanished in the same quick, almost unwanted fashion.
"Then you'll tell me about whatever it is you're interested in." It was as close as he was getting to what do you do outside of the uniform. He stepped, and dropped off the ledge.
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Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2021 1:55 pm
"Okay." Sylvite followed him to the ground, throwing in a flip on the way down, because what was the point of jumping off a roof if you weren't gonna do it with a little drama? Her new skirt fluttered nicely behind her when she stuck the landing, and she looked over to Faustite with a small, satisfied smile before tilting her head. "Are you just gonna walk in there on fire, though, or do you mean that I'm getting you tacos?" she asked. While she was aware that he couldn't technically tell her what to do at this point, she was more than willing to play along. This was the first time pretty much ever she'd seen him actually interested in something, and she was wondering if she'd be able to figure out more of what he liked. Also, if she'd gotten a reputation as a source of free food from all the snacks she kept on her, she was okay with that. At least, until she started running low on cash. Then she'd figure something else out. She started down the street, getting ahead of the other General. "Just a couple blocks this way," she said. "You'll see it, it's got a glowy sign and everything."
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Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2021 7:27 pm
Faustite froze a moment at the question, considered it, then continued walking. It had been at least two years since he was Eion. Far longer than that, likely; he'd spent less and less time in that second skin since becoming a General.
He remembered that it never took long to enact — a few seconds at most. The skin was a suffocating, smothering thing that liked to constrict Faustite until it stole his breath and his magic. With that, he stepped into an empty side alley as he recalled what he could of crafting that skin. The recipe remained incomplete; no matter what he tried in the moments that followed, Eion's skin never ensconced him. Incensed, he abandoned the thought and returned to following Sylvite, who was now a short jog ahead.
"Looks like you're getting the tacos." Faustite wrenched his phone from the ether, then underhanded it toward his fellow General. "Catch —"
It was a durable thing if she fumbled it. Heat-resistant cases oft had kevlar in the corners.
"It's 0263. No facial recognition, obviously." Apple had no business knowing his identity. Neither did Sylvite, but there was little to do for it when his home screen was a monochromatic, pseudoartistic selfie. Not that she'd need to go digging through the pared-down device for anything other than Apple Pay.
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Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2021 5:46 pm
When Faustite’s clinky steps vanished from where they’d been next to her, Sylvite slowed down and turned around. She saw him stepping out of an alley looking slightly more frustrated than usual if she was reading things right, not that she had too long to read into it before he was throwing a phone at her face. She caught it one handed. Looked like all that testing out her reflexes had been good for something. She somehow kept a straight face when she looked down at the wallpaper, and using every single ounce of restraint in her body, she kept herself from snooping farther. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “Like I said, busy, but I’ll try to be quick.” With that, she was off, sprinting down the sidewalk towards a green and red neon sign that was barely visible in the distance. Luckily it was past dinner rush, and even though there were still a couple college kids around drumming up late night business, it wasn’t enough to keep Sylvite waiting too long. Less than fifteen minutes later, she was sprinting right back. “Faustite! Taco time,” she called, singsong. “I hope you’re hungry because I got the deluxe twelve pack. There’s also chips and like three kinds of salsa. It’s a variety, there should be something you like.” She held out a brown paper bag that had a few little grease dots on it. The phone was in her other hand, and she offered that, too. When he checked his balance again, he’d see that she hadn’t used his money.
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