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 Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2023 2:42 am
The nights, while not necessarily warm, were definitely better than the frigid winter temperatures that could make time spent outside downright miserable. In some places, there were signs of spring popping up with fresh green leaves and the promise of colorful floral. It was a very welcomed change, especially to the senshi who was taking time to enjoy spring’s coming children.
Knelt down beside one of the many benches that were sprinkled along a dirt walking path, Harmonia gently brushed a finger over the new green leaves of what looked to be tulips. “I am so ready for Winter to be over.” She murmured. Even if it was officially spring, old man Winter still clung on like a bad cold. The blue and gold eternal was ready to kick him to the curb. She was more than ready for spring!
Standing, she stretched her hands upward before dropping them with a small sigh. She’d opted for the park today thinking some people might be out and about, but the chill still must have been keeping people locked away in their homes. No matter, it meant she was likely to encounter any issues. Youma were less likely to show themselves if there was no one around to entice them out.
“Might as well do my patrol anyway. Get some exercise in.” Not like her job at the veterinarian didn’t give her enough exercise, but she enjoyed the fresh air and being out in nature. Perhaps that was her excuse for the patrol in the park.
So, off she went on her patrol. It wasn’t far though until she felt a strong aura that held that deep heaviness she associated with those who were chaos aligned.
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 2:04 pm
Faustite could feel it. This would be the last time he would visit Destiny City without a highly motivating reason to do so.
With that realization came a crestfallen feeling that made home in the place where his stomach should have been, freezing away his impetus to do much of anything. While he knew that he could drain energy to keep himself outside for longer, to give himself something to do, it hadn't appealed. There was the chance that he may run into Cybele again, or the Earth Knight, or the Saturn Knight, or any number of White Moon with whom he made enemies. That proved a precarious spot to be in if he wanted to avail himself of their ability to burn the chaos out of him, and with it, the youma.
So Faustite resigned himself to a lethargic walk. In the dead of night, there would be few who took notice of him. Most joggers in the city knew better than to be out at night, given the city's reputation for the strange and unnatural. The high crime rate warded off many of the nosier ones, though he supposed that if he encountered a particularly adventurous civilian, he would have to do away with them.
And while he expected to feel White Moon auras while he wound his way down the path, particularly Kerberos's, the one that overlapped with him was the correct rank but less teeth-itchingly saccharine. This one felt like perhaps it wasn't transcended, though many of them were.
Faustite couldn't help but wonder if this one was Cybele. He summoned his tablet pen, ready to send out an emergency call to some of his team should the need arise, as he waited for the Eternal in question to reveal themselves. While he waited, he remained in the center of the path, knowing he had better visibility in a clearing.
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Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2023 5:19 pm
That aura didn’t move as she approached. It was either a good sign that they were tolerant of white moon or she was about to find herself coming face-to-face with an irate General or Eternal. The path she followed wound along, and it wasn’t until she rounded a large bundle of bushes and small tree that she finally came within sight of who it was that had piqued her curiosity.
She stopped dead. Eyes wide. He was…he was a lot to take in all at once.
With care to not appear as if she was intending to attack, Har gave the General a genial wave as she slowly approached. All the while she wrapped her brain around the fact that the young man in front of her was on fire. Literally. Like he was his own travel fireplace, and flame roared within him where his gut should be. That was the biggest, most obvious of observations. Smaller things like the color of his hands and eyes eventually registered as she neared. Plus, he held something in his hand.
Twelve feet away or so, she stopped. She didn’t want to intrude too far upon him at first, both for her own safety and to not possibly trigger him into feeling the need to attack out of defense. It was like approaching a wild animal you didn’t know anything about. She had to stay careful and aware.
She was still in complete awe though over him. She’d never seen anything quite like him before.
“I guess you don’t really feel the chill in the air?” She said with an inviting smile in a poor attempt to break the ice between them. “If so, I am slightly jealous of that to be honest.” Awkward. Why was she so dang awkward?
“I have no intention of attacking you. Honestly, I came to see who you were out of curiosity, but I am pretty sure we’ve not met before. I think I’d remember you.” She mused. “I am Harmonia, Eternal senshi of Harmony.” She offered him another smile, hopeful perhaps he’d be willing to just…well..not attack # 1 and #2 not run off right away if he was inclined to.
”strickenized” She cinnbun who only wants to say hi and make friends.
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Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2023 5:08 am
The senshi that emerged from the foliage wasn't Cybele. Didn't look anything like her, though they felt precisely the same. Lacked the purpose with which Cybele had moved, too, so Faustite supposed that any fight would be made marginally easier to win. Not that winning would ever be easy like this.
The wave, however, made this encounter even stranger. He continued to watch her, even as his brows peaked with confusion. For the moment, his tablet pen was dismissed back to subspace.
Faustite was not one to break silence, so for as long as she quietly approached him, he quietly observed her. Noted details of her as he tried to remember the — oh. There was no need to remember the Database, then. This was the same senshi that Hopeite had captured, though she had gained rank. Wore those ugly, useless wings now. Faustite set his jaw; if anything, such a sour experience should provoke her to attack.
Yet she didn't.
"Take it you don't feel the heat." She was close enough; she might've felt it rolling off of him since his fire problem had worsened. Certainly he felt it, between the blisters and the superheated fissures in his skin. He didn't comment on her jealousy. Her joke was a margin too on-the-nose for what Faustite actively dealt with since they had come back from the Rift.
"I remember you," he said after a beat. "Hopeite took you." Perhaps she'd blocked that from her memory, or was fortunate enough to have lost it in some way.
He supposed, then, that he wouldn't object if purification cost him all his memories of Schörl. If he could be so lucky.
"Told her to bring you into the Negaverse. Either she did and you left, or she never did."
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Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2023 10:18 pm
"I feel it." She said sheepishly. "Doesn't mean I can't still be jealous that you never do." It wasn't a lie, there was definitely a temperature change standing where she was and the source was obvious beyond his own declaration.
At the mention of remembering her, she blinked owlishly at him until he mentioned Hopeite when she visually flinched at the name. Memories of her days in that warehouse still haunted her. Less than when she'd first escaped when she was constantly on her guard and refused to power up. Even as a civ she feared the woman she had once called a friend taking her by surprise to cart her away again.
She still had nightmares though of being forced fed starseeds and her own being played with as if it were nothing more than a curious trinket.
She didn't want to revisits that time. Those memories had been locked away as soundly as she could, not wanting or willing to revisit them.
A flash of a memory. A boy similar to her age with dark eyes and smoking pipes from his back.
Her arms crossed in front of her in comfort, closing herself off from the half-youma general. "You were the boy with the pipes?" There was some resemblance as she focused on that memory. The eyes were still dark, but now had red irsis's, hair was still dark, and his frame was similar as well, even considering the grate of a mid-section.
"You didn't hurt me." She said matter-of-factly. She didn't remember his name, that was long gone from memory, but she didn't have any other memories attached to the General. Nothing that said that he had brought anything else but a sense of fear.
She worried at her bottom lip with her teeth before speaking again. "Whatever it is they did to you, I hope it's something that you wanted." She stated softly, eyeing that form of his up again. Sure, she had joked not minutes ago about the benefits of having an internal fire, but the logistics of it all was daunting the more she ruminated on it. "The pipes had looked painful. At least now you look more at ease..." She paused. "If tired."
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Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2023 2:19 pm
"There's drawbacks," he countered simply. Then he sputtered and coughed.
Faustite was used to being peered at by the White Moon, but not in a manner so like trying to remember something about himself. Like she was trying to place when she last saw him, what the context was, rather than trying to puzzle out what he was and if he counted as a sentient, feeling thing. Even if her first commentary had been on his inhuman features, something like that was rare. That she didn't pity him for it was also rare.
While he did not nod to her question about his identity, he did assent to her recollection that he didn't hurt her. "Not you." That violence had been reserved for Hopeite, for how she flinched in the face of this one. Whatever this girl remembered of those times, years and years ago, need not be complicated now with the backend of the Negaverse's dealings. She did not need to know that Hopeite was less cruel than she could have been, that losing her hair and sustaining rope burns on her wrists and ankles were not the worst of it. Better that she thought him the fairer of the two, especially for how the White Moon watched him now.
Faustite tired of being on edge around this one. Seemed as though she was more interested in talking to him than attacking him, though he could not say if that was a ruse. Sighing out his exhaustion, Faustite sat where he was.
"'Want' never factored into it." Faustite did not enjoy recalling the pipes, nor did he much appreciate having such a target sticking out of his back. It was but one way to keep him alive, even if his General wanted the satisfaction of turning him into a living engine for those ******** smokestacks. She was one of the few who cared to remember it, however. Even Encke had made no mention sense, and that boy was always the senshi that came to mind for probing his sore spots.
Faustite scratched his neck as he clarified. "Most officers like me don't need such things. Youma side and human side grow together, harmonize. But, it's different to house living fire. Parts of you get… lost," he stated carefully. "And other parts need reinforcement." Faustite tapped the grate with a long nail.
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Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2023 11:55 pm
Arms still crossed, her fingers dug into her elbows leaving small crescent marks where her nails dug in. "Well I appreciate it." He said quietly as he confirmed her memories. Unbeknownst to him, her time there had been harrowing. Sure, when he had seen her she had been simply locked away. Kept like a small little prize there to only appease Hopeite's strange desires. It wasn't until later that the experiments began, her starseed played with, a soul shoved down her throat...
She locked it down. Threw those memories back into the compartmentalized box where they belonged.
"I am sorry." She said as she watched him settle on the ground. It eased the tension she hadn't realized she was holding in her shoulders. Eventually she dropped her arms back to her side. "Everyone should have a say in something that, I assume, is very life altering."
A hesitant step towards him. She paused a moment watching. Gauging. Something about Faustite told her that he wasn't interested in violence. Perhaps it was the fact he had deescalated the situation by sitting, or maybe it was the tired look of near defeat on him? She wasn't sure, but something ailed him and it called to her. So, hesitation put to the side, she joined him, getting as close as she comfortably could with the heat radiating off of him. She sat on the grass and looked to the grate he tapped in emphasis.
"It's fascinating." She confessed. "But, it sounds like you and your youma aren't getting along?" Being the senshi of harmony, Harmonia was quick to catch the specific word he used. "Or have you managed to cope now? I will adit, I prefer this over what it was before. Better adapted and less forced." Settling on the ground, she criss-crossed her legs in front of her, leaning forward to rest her arms on her knees.
She very much appreciated the rolling heat from him. It was oddly soothing. Like a never-ending magical fire.
"So, can I know your name?" She tilted her head to the side, blue hair shifting over her shoulders. "I mean, youd on't have to tell me if you don't want to of course, but I'd prefer not to call you 'The Burning General'. It makes you sound like some sort of evil being." She offered a genuine smile. "Like a big baddie out of some young adult fantasy."
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Posted: Sat Apr 22, 2023 8:41 am
He smiled sardonically. "Suppose I could have said no. Chosen to die instead." It was never an option he considered, but he knew a few officers — and a great deal of White Moon senshi — who thought death was preferable to youmafication. Who may have thought that, if something went wrong with their youma side, they were better off dying to it than trying to ameliorate the problem. "But… Never regretted it. Much. Rather continue breathing than sit with my back against a chair. Or have a stomach that doesn't make people wince."
Faustite paused to cough, and in that window, heard something that stirred his flagging ire. "Didn't ask you your opinion." He fixed her with a lidded stare. "Imagine if I said I like you better without the pink in your hair. Looks less like a baby shower."
Faustite huffed. "Not like there's some formula to being part-youma. Know near a dozen of them, and none are like me. Few are similar to one another. Much like for youma, the classifications people come up with for us are cheap and arbitrary. Don't think it's like a spat. But if you imagine," Faustite held both of his hands up, palms toward the sky. "A person," he bounced his right hand, "And a cat," he bounced his right hand, "You can imagine how they would fit together. Maybe cat ears, cat paws, whiskers on a person shape. Fur. Some s**t like that. They've both got four arms, two eyes, a mouth, two ears. One has a tail, so your resultant half-youma might have one of those. Or two, or four, whatever." Faustite shook his hands out to dismiss the idea.
Then they came back to their original positions. "Now take person and fire. Not ******** much in common. Rather, fire doesn't have a form. It isn't alive. In merging one with the other, you're not adding parts to a person, you're subtracting." And that, he supposed, was a shock and a nuisance, but they'd always found a way to overcome its challenges.
Until now. Until the past few months since they visited the Rift for that second mission. All that time spent powering that damned building only for it to be fed back into him in an instant. Made sense that the youma parts of him would soak up all that energy, for the human side never needed an infusion quite like that.
He almost chuckled at the way she asked for his name. A big baddie out of some young adult fantasy — he supposed it wasn't terribly far from the truth. He wasn't big, but this ongoing war would be perfectly at home in a young adult fantasy, and of all its participants, it would be easy to consider him bad. But that placed too much emphasis and too much importance on his day-to-day and his past accomplishments for his own taste.
"It's accurate," he observed. Then, after a thought, "Chrysocolla."
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Posted: Wed May 24, 2023 12:23 am
Her initial concern for the cough he had was quickly knocked away. She dipped her head at the scolding she received as a hand went to her own blue and pink waves, unconsciously wrapping a few wefts around a finger. "I didn't mean any offense. I just meant..." She stopped herself and sighed, dropping her hand. "Never mind. Sorry for offending you. I hadn't thought about it like that."
His explanation about the merging of youma with a human helped to expand her thinking on what it might be like for him. She had viewed it more like an entity within and entity and not so much as two very different beings cohabiting a body in whichever way they could make it work. A visible wince crossed her face as he said the word subtracting. That word in conjunction with a human body wasn't the most appealing thoughts.
When she was finally given a name she perked up a bit and smiled again if a bit more timidly considering the information she had just learned. "Chrysocolla." The name rolled off the tongue easily enough as she repeated it to lock it into memory. "Glad you think my villain assessment fits." She paused a moment. Realization dawned on what she said. "Oh no! No! That's not wha tI meant. Like....you aren't necessarily a villain. Just that we're on opposite sides and you're in all dark and..." She stopped herself mid ramble. He said he AGREED Har. She mentally reprimanded herself.
She was making a mess of this when all she really wanted was to have a nice, pleasant conversation. "Sorry again."
She took a moment to recompose herself, hoping he wouldn't leave while she gathered her frazzled thoughts. It was only a minute or so. Certainly enough time for Chrysocolla to walk away if he wanted.
"Um...if you don't mind me asking yet another question..." She bit her bottom lip, looking at him hopefully. Maybe she hadn't offended him enough or even at all?
"What keeps you in the Negaverse? I mean, it's been at least a few years. Why do you stay? What makes you want to side with chaos?" There was no judgement in her voice as she shifted from her crossed leg position to rest in a kneeling position hands rested upon her lap. If anything Har was eager to hear the answer if it was given. This question had become a recent favorite of hers to ask. "I am just trying to understand people's positions." She added.
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Posted: Wed May 24, 2023 6:09 pm
Faustite rolled his eyes; of course she didn't think about it like that. It was the trouble with most of the White Moon; they didn't think. At all. Made it a veritable wonder that they managed to survive this long, that the Negaverse was still struggling to be rid of them so many years after the start of the war.
But it was better not to think about such things, especially if he could not erase the possibility that he would have to join them.
"And I kill people for energy," Faustite added pointedly to the end of her rambling statement about villainy. It didn't bother him to recognize that he wasn't working toward the betterment of mankind, or to acknowledge that the acts they were asked to perform were morally and ethically wrong according to most schools of thought. He did not find any succor or pride in the idea that they were defending earth from an alien enemy that seemed to do nothing except in response to the ways that the Negaverse hurt the human populace. All of that could be comfortably written off as villainy in the context of young adult fiction; certainly he read enough — and remembered enough — of it to agree. "Imagine you don't do that."
He coughed while he waited for her to get around to asking her next question. This one had the same proclivities as Albite toward avoiding the crux of what she had to say, though the two went about it in different ways. She liked to play shy and drag her feet on asking while Albite tripped over his own feet while he tried to chase six different ideas in six different directions and ended up saying nothing at all.
"Who says it's chaos?" Faustite asked at the tail end of his coughing. "Part of it's necessity. Got recruited, got youmafied." But that was an admittedly small part of his rationale.
The rest required a long, quiet pause as he tried to assign words to reasoning that he seldom, if ever, spoke aloud. "Don't care to be human again, either. No one else keeps me out of the conniving mess that is society." Even if she countered by offering a whole world to him, as was their trump card often enough, it entailed an irrefutable loneliness for the fact that no one else ever lived up there. And if someone did, it stood to reason that both of them were reared while mired in society's poison and were helpless to reenact much of its critical failings.
"And people deserve to die," he finished quietly.
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Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2023 2:40 am
Well, he had a point. The acts that the negaverse required of their ranks were...well, they weren't morally right. She certainly didn't like the idea of them draining people of their energy, sometimes killing them for it. It was a horrific way to a means and she honestly felt there had to be a better way. Perhaps her naivety was showing itself again, but a part of her truly wished there was a way to make everyone happy here. They all lived here. Earth was their home now. Beyond wiping either side out, which was also a horrific thought, what else were they to do?
What she was and wasn't surprised about though was his reasonings. They were, in all intents and purposes, very selfish. He seemed solely focused on what he could get out of the situation and din't appear to care about others. Her heart broke for it and naively, again, she hoped that there was something more than just a need to avoid society. While she could understand an introverted perspective, this felt like it was going too far.
"That's a broad stroke." She said quietly as she rose from her kneeling position on the ground. Pausing a moment, she brushed away flecks of dirt and grass that clung to her know indented knees and calves. "And a sad one."
"While society can be...exhausting at times, life would be terribly lonely without it in the long run. Even the negaverse is a society of sorts and you seem well entrenched within it. I am sure there's at least one person you must care for there. Otherwise, what is your purpose? Just to hurt people? Kill them?" She shrugged though. If there was something she had learned, it was that changing people's thoughts and beliefs would never be easy. Some were too strong to break, but, even if she managed to give a kernel of thought nothing would change over night. She'd learned that the hard way. "And if I am wrong..." Her eyes reflected her grief for the half-youma. "Then I am truly sorry for you. You deserve better."
She sighed. "Call me soft naive, whatever you want." A shrug as she turned away from him. "But thank you for telling me. For taking the time."
Her head cocked to the side slightly, reminiscent of a dog curious to something around them. A pause as she debated something before shaking her head as if in answer to her own silent question. "I'll be on patrol in this area the rest of the night." It was a careful way of stating that if he opted to cause trouble here, she wasn't going to allow it if they ran into each other again. While Harmonia wasn't a fan of fighting, she'd not sit idly by and watch people be taken advantage of either. She hoped he'd take it for what it was and leave.
With a last offered smile, Har turned and left the way she had come.
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Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2023 8:00 pm
"Might be so," he admitted quietly. "But I've seen what people do to each other.
"Taking their faces and reassigning identities. Making digital ghosts of stock people whose real names and real lives are lost as noise. Killing each other over parking spots, promotions, promiscuity. Decadent thrillseeking that kills the planet. Modern-day reinventions of legal slavery. All of it — it just keeps going." Though he could not, he realized, as he started coughing again. Exhaustion filled him thereafter, and he was moored in a sudden struggle to keep his eyes open.
She was right, however. There were components to society that were imperative, like the social aspects that fulfilled their basic needs as a social species. But there was so much else that could be burned away only to the benefit of everyone; these were glossed over in favor of emphasizing how the Negaverse was itself a society, and that Faustite must surely care about someone. At this, he remained quiet; his first thoughts were of his parents and brother, all now long dead with no means to return them to life. She hadn't specified that those people had to be alive.
Faustite had nothing he wanted to offer her in return. She gave him pity, but he never wanted pity. Seldom did the White Moon ever offer understanding, or even attempt to grasp where he was coming from for his rationale. To him, people needed to die. It was a necessity. But to her, he must have been a pained, tortured thing. He must have been acting on instinct to hurt others as he had been hurt, because a sound and rational decision that people had to die was simply inconceivable.
Typical senshi, he had figured. She couldn't see beyond her humanistic views. Couldn't comprehend a viewpoint that differed from her own.
He did not call her naïve, despite her expectation of it, though it was not out of respect for her. He was simply too tired to open his mouth and shape the words with his lips and tongue and breathe life into them with the tired rasp of his voice. When he watched her balefully as she retreated, he hadn't been thinking about how idealistic she was, but rather, how narrow-minded she must have been to jump to such conclusions on his behalf.
There was no point in continuing, he realized, even if she wasn't off with a veiled threat mentioned in his direction. The White Moon was incapable of listening to him. They would not hear, for what he had to say wasn't so critically humanized as what they expected. Because he missed that expectation, they would never dare process what he said. So it was, and so it shall be.
Faustite was too tired to punch the ground in frustration. He was too tired to sigh. He could only slump to the ground, curled in on himself like an overcooked shrimp, and radio back to one of his team on the off chance that someone could spare him a teleport. It was all he could do.
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