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 Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 9:03 am
When the General appeared on top of the specialty taco restaurant, he immediately collapsed into a seated position. A few haggard breaths later and feeling returned to his arms, slowly chasing away the pins-and-needles heaviness that often weighed them down lately. When he pulled energy from his subspace, he was eager to absorb it into himself. Eager to be able to do more than simply sit and breathe and listen to the throb of his own failing heart.
The night was quiet. He had come just past the hours for the restaurant beneath him, though he had hoped to arrive before they closed. The smell of fresh tacos still lingered in the air, however, tantalizing him with the delicious, crunchy fare that he could have had if he were able to scrape together enough energy and drag himself from his bed. Alas for Faustite, his perpetual hunger for tacos had to wait. Briefly he had considered spending more energy orbs to teleport inside of the store and make his own damn tacos out of whatever ingredients were left over, but he quickly dismissed the idea s too much effort for a likely poor payoff. He barely knew how to bake cookies; a taco was far beyond his capabilities.
So he waited until he felt more awake, more aware. Spent another energy orb granted to him from the team to bolster himself enough for the occasion. Then he summoned his strange new charcoal pen to hand and began to write. orangeish sherbert On top of Crimes Against Tacos Come find me
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 5:41 pm
Lysithea was surprised by the strange message, but she couldn’t stop the small smile that spread across her face when she read it, and quickly, the Senshi set off for the rooftop of Crimes Against Tacos…
Maybe when Faustite was free from Chaos…they could go there together.
There would be so much that they would be able to do together and learn together and…she would make sure that he was happy again.
Even if that meant she had to convince all of his team to come and purify too. Hopefully Albite wouldn’t be difficult to convince…and they were married so…why wouldn’t he come? If she could just get some time to talk with him alone…well. She could do it.
When she felt the aura of a General, she sped up and leapt to the top of the building, giving Faustite a small smile. “Neat new trick you have, brother. Nice handwriting too. How are you feeling?” Holding a hand out to him, Lysithea took a moment to look him over, though hesitated. “...Would you rather talk up on Lysithea or would you be more comfortable just talking here?”
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:03 pm
He could always feel his hackles raise whenever a transcended Eternal was on the horizon. With no way to tell which, he could only be cautiously optimistic that it was Lysithea coming because of his call. But if it were someone else — and he was certain that the White Moon harbored many a transcended senshi with the want to see him dead — then Faustite had to be prepared to stall them while he waited for backup to arrive.
But once he got a visual on Lysithea, there was no need to keep a deathgrip on his tablet pen. He dismissed it as he felt his energy ebb with his retreating adrenaline.
His sigh was audible as Lysithea approached. "Don't know if it's useful for anything else," he confessed. Being able to stay in touch was its own reward, he supposed. He now had a way to communicate with his boys without the use of a tablet, just as he had written Nectaris previously.
"And… Thanks." He looked up at her from where he sat. "Think my handwriting got sloppier since I've been on fire."
Then his attention found her shoes — bright, sparkly, perfectly sized. Perfectly representative of her. "Tired. In pain." The second admission was softer, yet just as noticeable for how the cracks in his skin had spidered further, how smoke leaked from his mouth and nose with each breath, or how his hands were blistered, or the black that had crawled toward his elbows. "It just takes everything."
When Faustite shifted again, he struggled to stand. His bones hurt with the herculean level of effort that went into moving anymore, but he tried to keep that to himself. Once he was upright, he looked back at her. "Doesn't matter where, long as you warn me first."
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:22 pm
“I’m fine talking here. But, let me help with what I can since I am here. We still have a little while to go before the 23rd and…I’m not going to let you suffer if I can help it…”
Letting her hand drop for a moment, Lysithea closed her eyes and summoned her magic, pressing it to Faustite in an attempt to provide some relief from whatever he was going through…but.
“...You know, we could just do it now? I could call my friends and we can get it over with and save you right now and you don’t have to keep suffering…” There was a plea in her voice, and even if she figured it was useless to ask…she couldn’t very well stop herself. “...You look like s**t and I’m not sure what I can do to help other than pour all of the magic I can into you, which I am happy to do, don’t get me wrong.”
Seeing him like this though.
…It made her want to cry.
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:28 pm
It helped — it always did. The fraying of his body would ease, would knit some of itself back up like torn cloth being mended, though Faustite knew his youma would burn its way through Lysithea's assistance again eventually. Last time she used her magic, it took his youma side a count of days to reduce him to the same level of pained lethargy. At least with this, he could keep planning. Keep working.
He heard her plan, her plea. It was a hopeful thing — hopeful in the same way that Taenite was for a different solution. Hopeful the way that Albite had been when he said this was an illness, a youma flu that he had picked up somewhere. She was trying.
"It wouldn't work." Faustite sighed, though it quickly devolved into a smoky cough. Faustite had been able to weather it more easily now that his lungs didn't scream with each breath. "You said, before, that I have to want it.
"I don't. Not yet."
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Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:33 pm
Lysithea nodded, giving a soft sigh and using her magic again, trying to to look to upset by his rejection. She should have expected it, should have known. Honestly, she did know but still. “...You know I can help Albite get out too, and whoever else you’d want to bring with you. You know I’d love to have them back as well…I…I miss Albite a lot. He’s a big jerk but. He’s pretty great. And I know that he’d…I mean. I think that he’d make a good Senshi, and I’m sure if we asked him he would come with you, Faustite…”
…And if they forgot that they were married. “...If you forgot you were married, we could just have another wedding and I could be there this time, and we can all live happily ever after! Oh! We could have it up on Lysithea and you two can ride off into the sunset on unicorns…if…there’s more than one….and if they’ll let you ride them…but…whatever! It’s terribly romantic.”
And it was, at least…in her mind it was.
“...Can I ask…what’s holding you back?”
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Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2023 4:19 am
It was strange to feel somewhere close to normal again, as if normal hadn't already been redefined a dozen times to fit a description of his daily existence. This was a normal of some months back, when he had just started to manifest a cough. When he wasn't as tired.
Faustite cracked a soft smile, a wistful thing, at the thought of Waru and his cooking misadventures with Ana. That she said Albite was proof enough that those easy, simple catches of bare humanity, when they were just two people in a kitchen trying to coordinate for the sake of a good meal, may have been erased from Lysithea's memory. That the fleeting moments of apologizing to her with a unicorn kigurumi were now meaningless, as temporary as the scene that had transpired. That it was gone from her memory suggested that it may never have happened, and without some record left behind, then once he forgot that moment as well, there was no proof it ever happened and no resultant impact. Completely and utterly transient.
She thought it was the people that surrounded him that prevented him from considering leaving the Negaverse. He supposed that was a fair notion. He loved his boys, all of them, but he loved them with the understanding that they may do as they wished, unbidden and unbound by any part of his love. To leave them behind was a terribly painful notion. But, to be fair to them, him becoming a youma — considered a husk of what he once was — was just as terribly painful.
Maybe the answer was that he didn't think it was fair to forget pain. That he couldn't derive drive from a vacuum like that. And even if he retained whatever fundamentals that composed him as a person, even if he liked himself the way that Nectaris had liked herself afterward, what would become of all that context? It was no different than an actor being haunted by a hundred thousand iterations of their own face renamed and redrawn into role-playing characters in the corners of the internet, assigned new names on billboards, bought by shady companies that digitally render those same faces onto ugly pornstars.
That missing context becomes its own new context — a story of events told to him that he did, where people tell him to take responsibility for them or demand that he returns to finish what he'd left behind. Like fractals of dead hyperlinks, his life would become an incomplete library without reference materials for how he flinched at the thought of going to another foreign world.
"… I know that I'm going to die," he explained slowly, as if he was picking which words to use as he said them. "I know what I stand to gain or lose as a youma. Better than most. But coming to terms with an indeterminate loss and a manufactured new self, it's not… I can't just do that at the snap of your fingers.
"It took years to make myself out of what other people made me. Took becoming youma to do it, I —" Smiling, he shook his head at the thought. "How many more years, then, until I can proudly say 'I am I'? People who do this, they become living ghosts of the people I knew. You're a living ghost of the Lysithea I knew. And I have to live with that pain, knowing she's gone forever. Like smoke." Faustite blew out a puff of it, watched it dissipate in the night air.
"And you're asking me to inflict that pain on everyone I know. Right now. That's not my decision to make alone."orangeish sherbert sorry it's kind of a cerebral wall
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Posted: Tue Apr 04, 2023 6:39 am
“I do understand, Faustite. And if I don’t understand fully…I’m trying to…I just want you to be safe. You’re important to me, you always have been. I don’t remember how things were between us before I corrupted, but I do remember that I knew your name…even if I knew nobody else's, so you had to mean something. Had to have been someone important to me. I’m becoming more of myself, and it has taken time…but. I’m becoming the Lysithea that I know now. Maybe not who I was before everything, or even who I was in the Negaverse…but I have become happy with who I am.”
She wanted to hold him. Wanted desperately to provide physical comfort, but she knew that was impossible at the moment. “...I think…at least, I know if I were them…I would rather you be someone new and alive...rather than be gone forever. Part of you will remain. And it might be the part that you want to remain.”
If he had so much past baggage still weighing him down…wouldn’t a fresh start be a good thing? Possibly. Or it could just…lead to issues with no known cause which…honestly sounded rather terrifying.
“Whatever you choose. I love you. I support you, and I will do all that I can to help you.”
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Posted: Sun Apr 16, 2023 3:27 pm
Faustite couldn't understand why Lysithea needed to join the White Moon just to be happy with who she was, but he was too exhausted to probe deeper. There would be time for that, he told himself. If they could pull this off and make him human again, then they would have more moments like these where they could discuss such matters without the risk of being found and interrupted. He wondered, however, if she hadn't simply come over because of White Moon propaganda telling her that she's not herself unless she leaves the Negaverse.
While Lysithea spoke, Faustite struggled to his feet. It was a minutes-long process of wrenching himself up and onto his own two legs with the help of a nearby parapet, knowing full well that he could not ask Lysithea to lend a hand.
"They should still know what comes," Faustite answered quietly. "Know what it's like to have that kind of shock."
Once his head stopped swimming, Faustite looked at her. Coughed plumes out of the corners of his mouth. "See you again soon. Send me the loc when you can." She likely had to discuss it with her court first, determine what areas were more or less private or defensible.
Damn if he wasn't exhausted, though. Even the effort of thinking was proving to be too much.
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