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 Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2022 4:26 pm
Trust was sparing in the Negaverse, especially with such a valuable captive. Faustite understood this; better to trust such a treasure to the Negaverse's proven ones, assuming that they could be trusted to retain their loyalty. So far, each did.
Faustite descended the stairs past the guard, the way lit only by his own fire. The shadows of his grate flickered and fled further down the hallway with each step, with each echoing footstep to chase them. He did not see the captive's soft glow until he saw her — small, dirtied, wilted in the corner of a barred cell.
There was no need for keys. In a blink, he was on her side of the bars.
"Surprised you're still alive." He raised his hand, as if to shrug, and metal formed about his hand. It encompassed each finger in delicate chain adorned with the harsh violet crystals endemic to the Rift. Once, it had been something of Knightly origin. "Would've had your limbs taken off and used for a draining cow. Taken your teeth out so you couldn't bite out your own tongue. Guess she has higher goals for you." Flame eyes wicked down at her, where old revulsion curled his lip.
He wondered: why alive? Why let her continue breathing?
Must've had a grand design for this one. Or Jet was the one in charge of her fate, and he thought her a better living trophy than a dead one. Whatever it was, it wasn't for him to know.
Faustite turned his index finger over in the air. "Lie back."sunshine alouette lmk if anything needs to be changed~
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Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2022 5:26 pm
Ganymede glanced up from her tired slump on the floor, her back against the rough stone of the wall. If she didn’t think about it too much, she could ignore the lingering throb of pain where her wings used to be.
“Chrysocolla,” she greeted her guest, offering something like an indulgent smile.
The last time she saw him, he was mourning a dead squid.
Though her brows lifted as if in curiosity or surprise, Ganymede gave no indication of fear. Years ago, his words may have set her nerves on edge, but she was not as young and inexperienced as she used to be. Pain didn’t frighten her anymore.
“Higher goals,” she said, turning the idea over in her head. Someone certainly wanted her here for a reason — Jet, or Laurelite — but it seemed clear to Ganymede that there wasn’t much agreement among the rest of them. “Higher goals for me, but not for you, hm? I suppose I should be flattered.”
She did not lie back. There was nothing in her cell for her to lie back on, except for the floor, and she refused to make herself that vulnerable. The most she would offer was to lean against the wall behind her, and tip her head back.
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Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2022 4:04 am
How she could smile at anyone with that name, Faustite did not know. He frowned whenever he heard it, even when he introduced himself as that terrible, useless senshi.
"Correct," he answered tersely. That they had her bound up instead of producing, alive instead of dead, indicated some other plan at work. Perhaps the Queen wanted to break her transcendence somehow, and spread the word to only those who needed to know. It wouldn't be the first time secrets were kept in the Negaverse; he and Jet had a taste of that with their mission. Whatever the Queen's plans were, whatever Jet's plans were, they were both mum about it. At least to him.
Faustite refused to believe they had no idea what to do with the girl.
So she would defy him. Faustite scowled. Felt like the whole world troubled to defy him, or perhaps that no order of his was worth obeying. Sighing through his nose, Faustite stooped, took up her ankles, and dragged her forward until the wall was no longer at her back.
Pity for her ankles, he supposed. If they decided to kill him for leaving slight burns, then that solved a slew of problems at once.
"Works better when you lie. back."
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Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2022 5:33 pm
Ganymede kicked her feet in his grasp. That was instinctive. She didn’t intend to react, but when a burning boy grabbed you by the ankles, that seemed like an intuitive response. A shame she couldn’t do much damage to him, weak as she was.
So she was on the floor, wing stumps pressed into rough stone. Ganymede hissed but made no further effort to fight back, simply laid there and directed her narrow-eyed gaze toward the ceiling.
“The least you could do is take me out to dinner first,” she joked.
She had nothing left in here but jokes, and sarcasm, and snide smiles. If Ganymede was going to die — today, tomorrow, a week from now — she wouldn’t do it cowering.
“I heard you’ve got a General King in charge of recruitment,” she said, keeping her tone conversational even through the wincing. Now the skin over her ankles burned along with all the other aches and pains she suffered. “What was his name again? Lepid-something. Lepidolite? Haven’t been able to meet him yet, but if I do I’ll make sure to ask him what joy he gets out of recruiting sulky little boys.”
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Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2022 1:42 pm
Her kick caught his hand, cutting it on the heel of her glass slipper, and Faustite shook it out with a wince. Let it drip black as he held his hand above his heart, bent at the elbow and kept close to his torso. He said nothing for it.
There was nothing to be said. Strange how easy it was to forgive someone who was going to die. Literal or figurative, Ganymede would meet her end here, he was sure of that much — Laurelite wouldn't let her be turned loose.
"Don't flatter yourself," he muttered with a roll of his eyes. Leave it to the enemy to assume they were worth pursuing.
He paced to her side, where he knelt with some effort — one of the articulated pieces of his grate caught, and he had to manipulate it to kneel down properly. He considered ignoring her — it was easy enough to scalp a memory off of her and leave — but she was stuck here. Might be left to rot for however many years were left in her. What did it matter what he said to her?
"Wasn't Lepidolite who picked me. Was a General named Umber," he shifted carefully, lowered himself into a seated position. "Guess this can wait." Faustite tsked as he unfastened the shield glove bracelet from his hand. He set it next to him, on the side furthest from Ganymede.
"Wasn't my choice to join the Negaverse — that was chosen for me. Assume it's the same for senshi. Wanted or not, you're beholden to your power and your planet. Is that so?" Flame eyes settled on her, waiting.
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Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:31 am
Ganymede studied the stone ceiling, searched it for cracks or gouges or odd shapes — anything of even the most negligible interest to ease the long, tedious hours of captivity.
“As a Senshi, I can do what I want,” she said. “Maybe not in my previous life, which wasn’t really mine anyway, but… in this one, who would know if I didn’t use my power? I could’ve awakened one night and decided, no thanks, this war is garbage, and never powered up again.”
Years ago, it’d been so tempting to leave all this behind; she’d had enough going on in her life that a magical war seemed like a waste of the minimal effort her younger self cared to give anything. She could’ve hidden her pen away somewhere, let it collect dust in the back of her closet or become lost in a drawer of junk. Back then, she didn’t have the power to make a difference.
Maybe she didn’t have that power now, either.
“My choices are my own,” she continued. “All of our choices are our own. Senshi, knights. We’re given this power because we were born with a certain starseed — or we belong to a certain bloodline, in the case of some knights. We determine for ourselves how we use that power. There’s no one pulling our strings, giving us orders and directing our actions. We are what we are, whether we care for any of this bullshit or not, but we do what we do because we want to.”
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Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2022 6:54 am
Faustite was silent as he listened. Waited for her to finish as much as he wondered about this lack of compulsion to do and act and collect. As ever, a margin of his consternation crossed his face. He doubted he could face the world as she did, knowing he was the sole purveyor of a power belonging to the dead, and the sole arbiter of his own will. That he had to have a will, and he had to exercise it over all things.
"Your choices are your own," he echoed, "and they landed you here. Sitting in a cell, wings removed, in the Queen's Citadel."
He supposed, then, that there was trite comfort in knowing that she was the one making her decisions, and that was supposed to allay any frustrations or fears or rancor against the inevitable end. She'd tried by her own will, and that was to mean something. Even if she ended up just another starseed to decorate their filling coffers.
"What a ******** waste," he murmured to himself.
He reached for the bracelet he'd set aside, and donned it on his right hand — hoops fitted over his long nails, delicate metal lilting over each narrow knuckle until they wove together at the base of his hand. After ensuring every clasp was secure, he hesitated, then pressed his palm against her chest.sunshine alouette memory time~ sumfin' powered!
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Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2022 9:41 am
Ganymede rolled her eyes because it was all she could do in this place. If she had the energy to strike, she would, but they kept her too weak for magic, too weak for much of anything except running her mouth, which she only cared to do for so long. It took days only for her to tire of these conversations — too many agents asking questions when they didn’t actually care to hear the answers.
She had no patience, and little sympathy left.
With a hand on her chest, Ganymede assumed Chrysocolla meant to go for her starseed, thought maybe the bracelet he wore might be some sort of experimental device intended to access what was previously deemed inaccessible. When he made no further attempt to sink his hand deeper, she could only watch, confused by his intentions.
For Ganymede, memory was a strange thing. She had so many — seventeen years of a normal life before she became a Senshi; eleven years of grief and terror since the night she awakened; and, beneath all that, another life from long ago, when her starseed lived within a different Ganymede. Where those lives intersected, the memories blended together.
She knelt on the floor amongst the rubble in the palace on Ganymede and stared up at a hole in the ceiling, where the night sky was strewn with stars…
… Then she was Liesel in the same spot, staring at the glittering chandeliers and the painted figures on an intact ceiling, while a man in white robes drew a familiar symbol onto Liesel’s forehead with warm, golden oil…
A burst of light brought Ganmyede to herself again. The light cleared and she was surrounded by ghosts that disappeared one by one: first the man in white, then all the other finely dressed people that crowded the throne room, until only a Knight of Jupiter remained…
… Liesel caught his eye and smiled…
Ganymede watched the Knight fade, then cast her eyes toward the ceiling again. Through the hole that once showed darkness and starlight, she gazed upon a sky so clear and blue, it could only be the result of magic.
Her world lived, and so, too, did she.
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Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2022 11:07 am
Faustite's attention shifted rapidly, yet he never saw anything in the room. His countenance followed what was felt by Ganymede, then by Liesel, then by Ganymede once again, as open and honest and unguarded as it had always been. Then the crystals on the bracelet faded to a dull violet, and he pulled his hand from her chest.
Faustite was quick to pull the thing from his hand and banish it to subspace. Normally he didn't bother discussing memories with the person whose recollections he witnessed, but there was no guarantee that he would see Ganymede for more than the one night. He might return the next night and find her gone, killed by her captors when they tired of puzzling out her secrets. Or he would find himself barred from her company for reasons obscure, or all those memories would've gone to waste when the Queen integrated her into the Negaverse.
"The tie between you and your Planet — it's codependent, isn't it."
Faustite checked his hand, as if the memory left an indelible mark where the back of his hand had thrummed. "Saw you in some foreign place. Can only assume you weren't on Earth. You looked up through a fallen roof at an unfamiliar starscape. Then the roof was hale and people surrounded you, then you were alone, and daylight shone down."
He shifted again, drew a strained breath. "Was as if you were in two different times. Explain that to me."
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Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:12 am
Confusion creased Ganymede’s brow. How had Chrysocolla seen any of that? The strange bracelet he wore and dismissed just as quickly? The Negaverse had devices like that? For what purpose?
Seeing into the past could be a dangerous thing for anyone in Metallia’s army. There was too much truth there.
“I have memories of the past,” she said, because it didn’t seem like particularly dangerous information to share. “A thousand years ago or so, when my starseed belonged to a different Sailor Ganymede. I didn’t experience any of these memories until I began to visit my homeworld. Back then, the memories were more like ghosts, short scenes I could watch but make little sense of. The more I went, the more I regained. Once I became a Princess, the memories came like a flood.”
Ganymede considered his explanation — the broken roof, the stars, the ghosts around her, the daylight — and matched his words with the corresponding memory.
“You must have seen the day this happened,” she said, lifting a single glowing hand, the phantom scar bright and golden across her palm. “Not the scar, but… the glowing. The first time I went to my homeworld, everything there was dead. I took care of it, fixed it up where I could, relived what it would offer of the past, accepted the things I couldn’t change, and all that nonsense. One day I relived a memory, a ceremony from the past, when the person I was back then committed himself to his people. When the memory faded, daylight returned to Ganymede. My world was healing. Suddenly, none of you could get your hands on my starseed.”
She smiled, content with the knowledge that, despite her current weakened state, that protection remained intact.
Ganymede glanced toward Chrysocolla, studying what she could of his face.
“That’s a strange device for a Negaverse agent to have,” she observed. “I wasn’t under the impression that memories meant much to any of you. I suppose it could be dangerous for us if you stumble across the right one, but… you’ll find mine can be a bit jumbled. That’s the burden of having a thousand year old memories, or something.”
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Posted: Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:39 am
She had memories of the self she was before. ******** fantastic, Faustite thought, and his displeasure for it wore plain in his features. Instead of picking through the memory span of a twenty-something, owing to her standing, he faced unknown years between at least two lifetimes. If he couldn't direct the device in some way, then how was he to put together anything coherent out of pilfering her memories?
He shifted again. Let the fire flicker out toward the side of him. Better than settling under his lungs.
Even if he left now, he gathered a wealth of interesting information. Far be it for him to say what could be acted on and what could be a dead end, but that privilege was now left to his betters in the Information branch.
"Your planet spawned those marks," he inferred bitterly. By virtue of healing it out of its dormant, broken state, it sounded. Ganymede reiterated a ceremony, which had a direct impact on the planet, or seemingly interacted with a very timely resuscitation of the planet. There were, thus, two things he could say: that memories were directly related to the planet, and that the planet invoked those terribly inconvenient marks.
More than a starting point, perhaps.
"Maybe they don't mean anything to my peers." For several, they hadn't. But for a few, memories were so excruciatingly important that they threw their lives and service away for them. "But memories have power — enough to be a transaction fee for crossing from one side to another. Enough to grant you that," he said disdainfully, as he pointed at the golden laceration on her hand, "and enough to survive a thousand years. Enough to precipitate on planets and wonders. Enough to be bottled in little golden hourglasses."
Then he summoned an empty one, a delicate thing, its glass splintered all the way down and its vial empty of the golden fluid. He offered it to her. "Another version of me owned that bracelet. Dug it out of an ancient past. Found that much through these."
He disliked how easy it was to talk to her.
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Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2022 8:09 am
Assuming the little demonstration was now over, Ganymede hoisted herself up on shaking arms and settled back into a seated position.
She took the vial and considered its splintered glass. “Can’t say I’ve seen one of these before.”
Either by virtue of experience and the benefit of context or some innate understanding of magical objects, Ganymede had a vague idea of what the purpose of the vial might be. She rolled it between her fingers as she studied it, unsurprised to find that it no longer seemed functional.
Chrysocolla’s fire lit her cell better than any dim light out in the hall, better than her own golden glow. It allowed her to follow the cracks in the glass. Ganymede traced the tips of her fingers over the patterns, like they might offer some insight.
“What interest do you have in my memories?” she asked. “Why not seek out more of your own? If it’s information about the past you want, I don’t have anything against telling you what I know. I doubt the Negaverse would be able to use any of it against us, except to craft more lies, but you all do that anyway.”
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Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2022 6:55 pm
"Naïve question," he answered.
"Keep that. Consider it a souvenir, or a metaphor." He considered the way she touched the useless thing, as if trying to deduce its abilities from the myriad cracks in the glass. Like broken things store all their meaning in their fractures. The thought soured him.
She had asked him why he hadn't searched for more of his own memories, and before he could answer, a rap sounded on the bars. "Time's up," a gruff voice declared.
Faustite rose slowly, mindful of his shoulder. "Because, despite everything, I am I." He turned and vanished to the other side of the bars.
"Next time, Pet of Jet." He spared her another glance before the guard nudged him out.
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