|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2022 2:30 pm
Faustite's frown deepened the longer he looked at the thing. In the dead of night, with only a street lamp a block away to peer into the neighboring alleyway, it was difficult for the General to tell what he observed. By his own firelight, it looked like… Gelatinized runoff. Like some jellied people-stew that formed from an unattended corpse. It smelled terrible enough to raise bile in his throat.
It felt like chaos, but not his chaos. And worse yet, it had turned hostile toward the lone youma that used to consider this enclosed garden its territory. Now, the garden looked dead and diseased, with smoke wending off of furled, spotted leaves. There must've been a dozen of the creatures there when he had arrived; there were a dozen still, but his sudden presence and given them temporary pause. He couldn't say if it was due to his similarly chaotic energy, or the fact that he was on fire, but the reprieve gave them time to study each other. They didn't look flammable, but —
He didn't have time to discern much more than that. A pair lunged in tandem, their shambling bodies reaching globular, club-like arms toward him and the youma at his feet. He stooped for the thing — what appeared to be a cat as black as night — and backsepped narrowly out of range of the swiping appendage from his second adversary. His nose wrinkled as the stench of it hit him.
A quick leap landed him on an awning for a first-floor apartment's patio. Some of the eaves cracked when he landed, their shattered pieces raining down and pattering on the barren garden dirt. A handful of the sludge monsters were quick to navigate their gelatinous bodies over to the ruckus, for which Faustite snorted.
The cat in his arms hissed, exposing a mouth full of nothing but teeth. He hushed it, but they had already heard. Unfortunate; he wanted more time to figure out what the ******** these were before he had to eliminate them.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2022 5:20 pm
She felt the chaos aura as she approached the apartments with the garden. Felt like a General. Was it Prehnite again? Painite? She knew there was a Blight spot there, she'd see it on patrol the other day. Was that signature someone new? If it was, this could be another chance to spread the word about them, or to find out if the people she had talked to were doing so. Surely they were... but she had no way of really telling. She could only hope, with a situation as potentially dire as this one was, that they had seen the importance.
As she made her careful way forward across the rooftops, she reminded herself that the more people out looking for the chaos seed, the faster and more likely they were to find it. More and more she was growing sure that everything hinged on this, was centered here, in DC. After all, this was the epicenter of the war, the place where all these magical forces gathered out of all the possible planets in the universe. It was also the place hit hardest by the areas of dead land and plants. No one else had reported as many spots as they'd found in the city so far.
A thump crack and the patter of falling debri sounded nearby, the power signature moving, and Ida picked up her pace till she stood at the edge of the roof, peering down at a young man with a cat and some bright light source, and a boiling mass of inky black Blight on the ground below. That mass formed up into vaguely humanoid shapes before falling back, and Ida made a face.
"I see you've met the City's most recent infestation." She called out in a neutral voice, leaning over to try and get a better look at the officer below. "Are you okay?"
Such an odd thing to be asking a Negaverse officer, especially a general. Hopefully she wouldn't end up regretting it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2022 8:28 pm
They both felt the approaching aura — an aural version of searing one's retinas. A pain that burrowed so deep that it invaded the whole body, suffused it, and left them both starving for a way to snuff it out. While the cat youma in his arms began growling and yowling, Faustite soothed it with a few pets; he knew better than to antagonize someone that hadn't immediately attacked him, declared enemy or not, when so many more boiled below.
And he knew nothing about them. By the sound of this senshi's observations, she might have some insights. The cat youma yowled again and huddled in his arms; he hushed it as he half-turned to get a visual on this stranger.
Faustite hadn't recognized her voice, and unsurprisingly, didn't recognize her face. She was transcended — explained the particularly offensive aura — and the faint glows on her body looked like orchids. Her sphere, then? Couldn't assume any kind of magic from that, and her transcendence teased him for not getting a chance at her starseed once she'd said or done her part. Terrible luck, he thought.
"We're fine," he answered tersely. It was true in a physical sense — neither had yet been hurt by these strange goo amalgamations. His attention returned to them, and he asked in his own manner for a briefing. "Explain them."
Whatever they were, they must have been enemy to the White Moon and Negaverse both. Their chaos didn't yield to Metallia, and he had no Dark Mirror — nor a want to find one — to test if that chaos was more amenable to these creatures. He had only her, and an angry cat youma that was nothing but teeth on the inside, and a growing want to walk the ******** away from this whole mess and find himself a starseed to snack on.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2022 9:18 pm
One dark brow rose at the terse command for an explanation. This officer wasn't one that she knew, so it was hard to judge if this was just... how he always was, or what. Ordering her about was a bit... presumptuous, but at least he wasn't immediately teleporting up here to take a swing at her. Or turn the youma he held on her. We're fine... Like she cared about the well being of a near indestructable, mindless monster he cuddled like it was a real animal. But inwardly she shrugged, setting those thoughts aside.
"I've been calling them Blight." Ida said as she settled into a crouch, neatly tucking her skirt under her. It decreased the distance between them a little bit, gave her something to do as she settled her hands on her knees. "They suck all the life energy out of places they infest, killing plant life, animals, anything that stays inside the area too long. They've been attacking people like they did you, when they get too close and are alone. They don't seem to like revealing themselves to crowds. They've been showing up on other worlds too, and Wonders. I've talked to a number of other people who've found similar spots of dead things on their places of power."
Perhaps best, in this instance, not to come out right away with the fact they'd first appeared on her own world, years ago. Focus on the present and shared dangers... and the shared responsibility. The Negaverse liked to think it was trying to save the Earth, right?
"I think there is a main source for all of this, hiding somewhere. If we can find it, and destroy it, it should destroy all of the monsters and stop the energy drain." There, a clear goal to aim for. Hopefully, that would appeal to him and motivate him to help.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Aug 31, 2022 4:53 am
Blight. He mulled the name over as his attention returned to the globular things that rooted around in the garden. What she had said concerning them seemed t rue — no part of that courtyard garden yet lived, and there was no one around but him and his youma acquaintance when they were attacked. That this Eternal admitted to hearing of 'blight' on other worlds was itself curious — which came first? Was this one of Destiny City's famous magical bullshit marathons, or a problematic infection from some carely senshi or knight's world?
And the name — he smiled sardonically. Poor Fafnir. Did they know each other? Was she aware that was his sphere of influence?
He didn't know this Eternal, but Faustite could guess that she wouldn't take kindly to him depositing the cat youma in this space after clearing it. He murmured to it to hold off for a day, close to its deceptively soft little ears, then waved an arm over its back to banish it to the Rift. With his hands empty of youma, he was free to leap back onto the rooftop near the crouched senshi.
"Where?" He saw nothing that could be an obvious source of power in the mess below. She had spoken of a main source, true, but perhaps there were localized ones as well. Perhaps their disorganized little brigade of dipshits and dickcheese had already gotten started on that main source, in which he wasn't interested in wasting energy on it. And if they intended to wait around and let the Negaverse deal with it, well — they'd already let the Dark Mirror live, what was another chaotic competitor?
Standing so close to her incited something in him, but he tamped down his grimace as best he could."Need that patch gone. Assume you know how to destroy it."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2022 7:20 pm
His sudden movement prompted Ida to straighten hastily, all senses on alert. This was her first good look at him and what she'd taken for some sort of light source was.... him. Her look of wariness turned to one of horror, brown eyes wide, as she stared at the ball of fire that burned where his insides should be. A metal skeleton seemed to confine it, but she couldn't wrap her head around... how he was alive.
The light from his fire cast his face into odd shadows, but he didn't look familiar. Dark eyes with slivers of fire-orange irises... long, clawed fingers stained with soot.
"What are you?" She burst out, unable to help herself. "How...?"
This was the first time she'd ever seen anything like this. She'd known the Negaverse kept monsters in its depths, but where had they been keeping this one? He must have been human once, but what on this Earth had led him to this end? They had dark, twisted magics at their command, if they could keep someone living this way, who should have rightly died of their extensive injuries and... missing organs. All the medical knowledge she'd gained rebelled against his very existence.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2022 7:52 am
Where the Eternal clammed up in horror, Faustite rolled his eyes. “A ******** barbecue, you tactless ********,” he hissed, words spitting like a steak on the grill. What the hell kind of answer was she expecting? Did she want him to lay out all the terrible steps taken to get him where he was now? Or did she want to know who installed all that metal, who was trying to keep him functional enough that he could continue doing his job? For how much she stared at his middle, he decided it was either the metal bolted into his skin, or the fire behind it.
“You going to catch flies or answer my ******** question?” Faustite shifted, hand on his hip, as he waited for her to figure herself out. Much as he would’ve liked to sear her skin off for staring at him so, she was the easiest and most readily available source of answers for what plagued his cat youma associate.
Whatever those blob things were, they threatened youma comfort. They threatened Negaverse operations. They would not be allowed to interfere.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2022 1:56 pm
She turned her eyes away at his venomous response, casting her mind back for the questions he had asked. Ida might have felt bad for her reaction, had he been anything other than a Negaverse officer, but as he was, she figured her response can't be that out of the ordinary for him. Who could look at someone with flames in their middle instead of flesh and not think it strange and horrifying? The Negaverse made monsters and used them in their work without compunction, as far as she could tell. Bischofite had been horrifying too, but at least all of his parts had been flesh, bone and feathers. And mouths.
"I don't know where the source is." She said with a touch of sharpness, smoothing an impassive expression onto her face. She didn't want to know how he'd gotten this way, she decided. It'd likely have been traumatic, and he did not strike her as someone willing to accept sympathy from the other side. Ida flicked her eyes back at him and waved a hand out at the city.
"We have to find the source. Destroy it, destroy all the little ones along with it."
She tried to sound confident about it. She was, mostly, sure that truly was the solution. It had worked in the past with these things. And she was not going to share that small, worried voice inside her that whispered 'what if these ones are different?' This was the only solution she had found, thus far. She had to pursue it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2022 2:06 pm
So she had enough sense to stick to the topic of conversation. It was more than he could say about her allies, and all the whinging they'd done about how being human was such a vast and indisputable improvement over the condition he was in now. Far be it for her to wax poetic at him about being human again when she hadn't known the first damned thing about him.
Faustite's attention returned to the lurching, unsteady bodies below. They hadn't left a trail, though he had but this one sample size to study. There were others, she had said.
"How have you tracked them? What areas do they choose? What kind of energy?" Questions that each begged answers if the Negaverse were to stop the encroach on their cattle. If these patches wanted energy that they couldn't use, however — that of electricity, or plants, or anything that lacked a starseed — then this incident would receive a lower priority in the Database.
"Need everything you know. Leave anything out and we'll have a Problem."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Oct 16, 2022 3:54 pm
Humming somewhere up in her sinuses, Ida lifted her hand and called up her senshi phone, thumbing it open to find the map she had started and all the markers of the spots she had found. She turned the screen to show it to him, a small frown still pulling her eyebrows together. There was no good way to share this, she figured, without going somewhere and finding some sort of machine that would print out an image from a senshi phone. Maybe cat HQ could do it, but that would involve finding a cat and then meeting with this general again... not something she really relished.
"I've been making a note of every spot I find and plotting it on a map on my phone." Ida said. "The most common areas to find them are parks and open areas where there isn't buildings or concrete. I don't have a definitive answer as to what kind of energy they use, but from the effects I've seen, it seems like lifeforce. To start, only plants, but it progressed to insects and anything unlucky enough to get caught in the dead spots or by the monsters once they emerged. They leave behind dry, withered, ashy husks."
A Problem hmm? Capital P and all, from the way he emphasized it. Well, he was going to have to get over that, because she was not one of his little underlings and owed him nothing... other than a somewhat desperate need for more help with this situation. But this was a threat to Earth and thus to everyone. That should be motivation enough. If Earth died, the Negaverse would suffer the most with no where to go but that dark, ugly place they called the Rift. He should be working with her... but he was what he was. She'd let him bully her about as long as it was towards a common goal, but no further.
"As I told others... what we needs is eyes. The more people we have looking, the faster and more likely we are to find the source of all of this. I don't know precisely what it will look like. A black mass, a growth of some kind? It has to be somewhere people don't usually go, somewhere with very low traffic, or someone would have stumbled on it already. Maybe somewhere the dead spots are concentrated. The monsters don't seem to want to face more than a couple of people at a time... any attacks I've heard of or seen, it was only one or two people at most." It was much the same thing she'd told Fulgurite. Was there more she was forgetting? Ida thought that was everything... there was still just so much she didn't know about the Blight and how it worked.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2022 2:22 pm
This was simply too much standing in one spot. Faustite gave up on pretense and began to pace.
Not that he was moving, venting smoke about, he could think about the information she offered more clearly. "So it favors plant life and attacks pairs of people at most. Careful hunter, then. You said it attacked some of your worlds, so distance doesn't affect it. Doubt you'll find an area of concentration, even with all the eyes on this shitheap of a planet.
"Could lure it, though. It wants vegetation and a couple easy targets — could have some people act as decoys, see if the source comes to you." It worked on the White Moon. And if this Blight had the reasoning skills to avoid a challenge and still hunt the energy it needed, on Metallia's turf, then it could likewise be tricked.
"Can say that the rank and file haven't seen much more than the odd spot. Nothing clustered. Nothing obvious." He'd have seen reports on it by now, but none have shown up in his purview. None of the others mentioned much of anything, but for Albite, who bemoaned the loss of plants that he had no business growing down in Negaspace. And Faustite couldn't say if that had anything to do with this blight, or if it was Albite's own stupidity that got the better of those plants. Faustite was willing to bet it was the latter, however; Albite never proved terribly savvy about checking his facts before springing into a brand-new hobby.
Not that this one needed to know.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2022 4:39 pm
It made her itch, almost, to watch him pace the way he was. Full of too much energy to sit still, or too much anxiety. Ida would put have put money on the latter, if she'd been asked, but the tension in him could have some other cause, who knew? She tried to ignore the discomfort it gave her and simply listen to him.
Calling Earth a 'shitheap' made her wrinkle her nose, but she gave no comment on it. It said a lot about this boy. His idea for a decoy was interesting, but something she discarded after considering it for a moment. There just wasn't much else to comment on in what he said, reiterating what they knew and extrapolating some conclusions from it. No clusters of dead spots was not terribly surprising... she hadn't found any yet either, but at least it was confirmation from another source. Maybe the heart of this was hiding itself. Maybe it wouldn't be out in the open. There were certainly enough abandoned places in DC to hid something like that.
"There is a gas station not far from here, maybe two blocks over, called Derek's. There is a waterproof tackle box stowed behind the duct work that I check every few days. You can leave a message for me there if you want to reach me, otherwise, you can attempt to reach out to another senshi. I'll leave a notebook in it with what I know so far and anything new that comes up. If it's important, I'll find one of your lieutenants or something, and have a message sent to you, unless you have another method." She said. It was the best she could really do these days as it became more important to communicate across faction. She could have told him about Kerberos, but... even if Kerberos accepted the risk of always being available in the park, she didn't really want to expose him further. Who knew what this man would do with that information.
"Hopefully, if we can work together, we can put an end to this mutual threat."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2022 4:48 pm
Oh. Derek's. Faustite was reasonably sure that was where Waru had taken him before, early on when they'd met. Before they'd gone out to see Waru's place for the first time, he remembered spotting a roach on the floor and eating it. Maybe he'd find more free protein if he visited this journal of hers.
He blinked at her when she offered for him to add anything to it. "… I'm on fire," he reminded her haltingly. The critical error in this arrangement caught him by surprise enough that he simply stopped and stared at her for a moment, wearing his bald surprise. Once he recovered himself, he defaulted to pacing again. To keeping the fire from cooking his lungs.
"Make someone write in it for me," he offered, knowing it would circumvent accidentally setting the notebook on fire and ruining all of her collated knowledge. Perhaps the wind was just so that she didn't feel the heat coming off him — it would explain her lack of acknowledgement for the very real fire hazard that he was.
Besides, senshi magic was ephemeral whimsy. Parlor tricks.
"If," Faustite echoed. He was uncertain that it would be wise to collaborate, even if she was forthcoming and earnest about this blight. What was to say they wouldn't use Negaverse agents for bait? Had he been on their side, he'd have seen it as a prime opportunity. Far be it for Faustite to commit any of their soldiers to a fate like that. Far be it for him to help the White Moon, either, but if this blight disaster threatened an agent that was caught in the crossfire, or a youma that wandered into these disgusting dead patches? He supposed it would be an alliance of necessity.
So he spared her a cool look before he evaporated into flame, thoughts already trained on the Citadel to catalogue what he had just learned.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
