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 Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2023 5:44 am
It was such an arduous ordeal to be in the office without energy anymore, but Faustite wanted to live the days of old when he only needed too survive on enormous quantities of food. He wanted to tell himself that this was still a transient virus, like Albite had suspected so long ago. Or that it could be fixed if he just subjected himself to his team's magic for long enough that his youma half had to settle down. Or, at any moment, Axinite would burst through the door, manic with a fresh idea of how to save him on his tongue. Or that Faustite might himself come up with a solution. Surely the onus was on him of all people, for it was his trouble that had gotten others so concerned.
Other people that went beyond the clean lines of the Negaverse. Murikabushi seemed worried, for all that they hadn't gotten along much before. Normally cute boys didn't offer their laps to him if they weren't a part of the Negaverse, and most of the boys in the Negaverse didn't offer their laps to him, either, on account of them being straight or him being on fire or him being liable to set them on fire.
And there was Kerberos, who acted concerned, which was alarming enough. More alarming than that was Encke, the virtue-signaling schmuck with a sphere like a Spencer's gag gift, being concerned about him. Faustite doubted that he had the capacity to lie, let alone the imagination to come up with a convincing one.
He supposed those other people would want him to take up Bloodstone's implied suggestion. Just leave the Negaverse. Just go purify. Stake a claim on some dead land up in the sky and call it freedom because nothing existed to tell him what to do anymore. Call it a choice because choosing to die isn't much of one. And for all they wanted to tout how free he would be, how he could be himself without the influence of whatever the ******** Encke liked to talk about, how he'd get to start fresh and live as he was meant to, and all those empty bullshit sensationalist claims that dismissed the work he put into accepting who he was and choosing to accept what he was. But everyone had a narrative to push.
Lose one part of himself or the other. That was what everyone cautioned. What everyone pressured, including Bloodstone, but that tightwad of a General wasn't the keeper of all the Negaverse's knowledge. He hadn't access to the resources and report history that Axinite had, and all these rushes to make a decision didn't account for the time that Axinite needed time to find a helpful solution.
Axinite had been his boss for years and the man had yet to fail him. Even as Faustite felt like he was on death's door for how exhausting it was to simply exist on his stool, in his office, he still expected that Axinite would come to a conclusion worth waiting for. If there was one, he would find it. And there had to be one.
There had to be, because Faustite just wanted to stay himself.
The sound of a sharp rattle drew him from his thoughts, drew him away from the reports he was to reread and submit on behalf of a subordinate. Faustite's first thought was the door, so he said enter to it, but no one came. His brows furrowed. Maybe someone was trying to get into the office next door, which was empty for the past few years. Maybe a couple of devious Captains were hazing a Lieutenant.
He'd almost gotten up when he heard it again, and realized the rattling was next to him. As he glanced to his left, he saw that his bookshelf door had come ajar, if only slightly, and that wisp he'd kept locked up had spilled out onto the floor. It bobbed about as if trying to wave for his attention, so he stared at it. A brow quirked. Faustite wondered why it just recently started trying to escape to freedom.
What he did find was that it quickly came to dancing around the stone that had come from Almadel's latest project. Some other wisp, smaller than his own, had been meandering inside of it ever since. It never seemed to want for anything, even air or water or food. And while Faustite was quick to dismiss it as something akin to a youma, whose preferences were to remain unseen and unbothered, the wisp from his bookshelf seemed much more keen on perceiving the trapped wisp.
"Want me to break it out?" Faustite asked as he leaned over the side of the desk to look at the wisp and its petrified buddy. He couldn't read the little creature half as well as he could read Headache's traffic signs, but he supposed the excited bobbing was, more or less, a yes.
Sighing smoke through his nose, Faustite carefully crawled onto the floor next to his desk. As he rested his back against it, Faustite picked up the stone from the bookcase.
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Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2023 6:54 am
Quote: Content warning: Contains suicide.
As if he needed to put himself under another microscope. Faustite rolled his eyes.
But when he looked back at it, the reflection in the rock had shifted. It required Faustite to squint, but as he stared into it — he saw portions of materials that slowly built up something recognizable: onyx, metal, glass, bright threads of light. Then he saw great encasements with molten white threads dipping down into them, lined with glass catwalks that were limned with the glow of intolerable heat. Bright glass tubules bore flame from place to place to place. But the ethereal image in the wisp's stone was never long to linger on such subjects, and stole his attention away from them as it took him deeper inside the complex.
As Faustite brought the stone closer to his face, he saw the massive elevator shaft coated with chains. He was taken into them, past them, down to the hatch, passed through the hatch, down into the great domed office of the overseer, where it once again took him to the fire-laden tubules. When he looked at them again, ethereal writing floated over top of them. Five minutes of battery time remaining. Five minutes, and the plant would shut down and trap them all inside, with no hope of teleporting and no choice but to wait for rescue. Faustite was certain he had been asleep then; as the others regrouped in that earlier room, they would have had to notice their remaining time dwindling. If Faustite couldn't climb into that exhausting tube again, then it was up to them to contact the rest of the Negaverse or come up with another option.
Faustite did not envy them the amount of worry that would have inspired. He supposed, though, that it would have been most on Jet to figure something out as the highest ranking officer. What a burden that would have been.
But the view in the crystallized wisp stole him away from those musings, as it turned from the dwindling timer to the scene occurring behind it. The armies of youma that had accumulated only stared at Galvorn, who was at the center of all of them. Yet Galvorn hadn't been as antagonistic toward them as was the case with their agents and senshi. The former General was looking down, no doubt at the master computer built into the floor.
No — he was looking at the glass itself. Faustite understood with a morose pang what that dawning realization must have felt like. He experienced something similar, if much less profound, from his days of almost being friends with Chrysocolla. Once his stabbing migraines had passed, Faustite had gotten the idea to examine a mirror. His findings had been a violently unsettling incongruousness with the him he remembered and the him he saw, just the same as what Galvorn was experiencing. Their choices on how to reconcile it with themselves, he would soon find, was inestimably different.
Rather than freeze, Galvorn was pushed to action, His rolling serpentine self immediately darted for the bins full of weapons, tearing off the tops with an unstoppable urgency as he sifted through them. At the bottom, one of his long arms had dug out a longsword with brilliant engravings woven in the hilt.
Moving like a creature possessed, Galvorn returned to his spot before the glass database for the factory. Sparing no hesitation, the youmafied General brought the weapon down again and again onto the glass, forming great, spidering white cracks in the surface until it inevitably grave and crumbled into chunks. But even at that point Galvorn kept going, as if atomizing the glass that had shown him his true form would somehow rectify the incongruity and bring himself back to a sensible form. As if it would erase all the years passed since he was frozen in a state of youmafying, as if it would return him to a time he felt he knew, and a war he felt they could win, and the familiar faces of friend and former friend and enemy alike.
But even once the database was crushed beyond repair, it hadn't erased his extra arms or reptilian body. All it had done was scatter youma to the edges of the room and banish those who weren't as brave as those who remained. None spoke, lest they say something to draw Galvorn's ire. And it was then, Faustite supposed, that Galvorn felt that crushing isolation from his own identity as a respectable General. As a human being.
Faustite stared with bated breath at the scene. Galvorn raised his sword and gazed at his reflection in its polished surface. His countenance became a grim acceptance, then he turned the blade on himself and gouged it through his own chest, straight out the other side, with a bellowing grunt. With as much strength as he could still muster, he wrenched it out once more and examined the contents left on it.
Blood. iniquitous, atramentous blood. Bloody that quickly turned to ash, much like the hand that held the blade.
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Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2023 7:22 am
Faustite grit his teeth as he watched the youma that was once Galvorn dissolve into dust. The sword clattered to the ground, and the clangorous sound echoed through the dome of the office like a signal for the remaining youma to leave. Faustite thought it strange to watch them turn away from the scene without a word, but youma did not always understand such affairs with the same depth of anguish or bitter anger that people often had.
Stranger than that, however, was the rush of bright light that burst from the shimmering remains of Galvorn and shot across the floor. It pinged up to the tubules, flooded through them, rushed up the building like brilliant veins. What he saw had kept pace with it, and his view screamed back up the elevator shaft until he saw the familiar faces of his comrades. One of the senshi that had gotten speared was being triaged, Jet was helping see to the wounded, and some of the others were heatedly discussing strategy. Some simply waited, keeping a solemn watch while some of their friends and teammates slept. Taenite and Heliodor were there, too, watching over Faustite while he slept. Albite looked ready to go out of his mind with worry. Kamacite looked morose. At the time, there was no sense of impending victory — as he watched, Faustite had gotten the sense that many had written the mission off as another loss.
But then the light rushed through, maxing out the times on the tubules and causing the lights to surge. As Faustite's view panned over to his own sleeping form, he saw the flame in him nearly burst out of its cage with the vigor that was imparted to it by the brightness that shot through the building.
Faustite understood what happened, though he couldn't explain the logic behind why he understood it with such certainty. When Galvorn dusted himself, the potential energy concentrated in his youma form had been dispersed and it surged up the building, as if looking for a new home. Faustite's youma side was as much a receptacle for energy as any, so a portion of it had concentrated in him — had fed the part of him that was inhuman. It explained why he hadn't slept for days, for his human side had that excess energy to burn, and then he returned to normal. His youma side, however, accepted that energy and converted it to power.
Which explained why he was now dying. His human side simply could not sustain the increased energy demands of his youma side, and any energy he accepted would only act like the stasis that held Galvorn's tenuous and imminently breaking grasp on his own humanity.
Faustite also understood that his youma side had always grown with him: when he was a Lieutenant, the youma in him manifested as black eyes and taloned darkness that hardly extended past the second knuckle of his fingers. As a Captain, it had gotten worse, crawling further up his fingers, but it mostly manifested internally. At General came its most pronounced and dramatic changes, but never once had it been the one to grow before his power as an officer. Faustite hadn't thought it possible. He supposed it would not have been possible, except in such circumstances as these.
Bloodstone was right, then, but he had the problem reversed. It wasn't that his human side was too weak, it was that his youma side had been induced to become too strong.
One could not drain a youma, he knew. One could not demote a youma, either, for they never had a rank. If one grew more powerful, it was because of its bond to an officer who had been promoted. Each of these things he understood to be true. Thus, he also recognized that the Negaverse had no way to diminish a youma's power — to do so would be to reduce the potency of an army that had long been the Negaverse's backbone and possibly hamstring the Negaverse itself. Why would they need such a method, or tool, or spell? <********," the General whispered as he let the rock with its wisp fall out of his hand. It clattered next to the wisp that then bobbed on top of it.
That was it, then. His options were to become unalive as all youma were, or leave his youmafying self behind by way of the White Moon's offer. He just had to decide which was worse.
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