Generally speaking, Reiki liked to think that he made a habit of avoiding Negaverse auras, but he knew that, in practice, the opposite was true. Not that he considered himself entirely at fault for that state of affairs. Youma didn’t care what flavor of senshi you were, they’d attack you anyway, and plenty of people who worked for the Negaverse—Arsenolite, Heliodor, and Faustite, just to name a few—had proven that they’d rise up to meet you whether you wanted them to or not.
Besides, even the one person in the Negaverse whom Reiki could say he unequivocally had complicated but net-positive feelings toward went after civilians (or had in the past, at any rate…… Reiki didn’t know that Faustite could go after much of anyone right now, not on his own). If Faustite could hate Reiki’s Court but not Reiki himself, then it stood to reason that Reiki could find the Negaverse itself morally objectionable, ethically squiffy, and deeply distasteful on a personal level, but still like Faustite himself.
Following the feel of a Negaverse aura through South End Park, Reiki tried to keep his expectations low. Better not to expect anything, so he couldn’t be disappointed when he went looking for a fellow super senshi whom he already knew—Heliodor, maybe? Or Fire and Blue’d? Maybe Lilith again?—and found a new face. Or worse, possibly found a hostile face instead of one he could talk to like a reasonable person (and maybe hope to distract from going out and hurting random innocents).
Whatever he’d find at the end of the trail, Reiki’s aura-senses led him into one of the community gardens that South End Park had to offer. (He thought, briefly, of Pendour and wondered if she’d come to plant anything out here recently, if she had placed any of the signs marking where people had already put down seeds.) Somewhere in among these plots was someone on the Negaverse’s side, most likely not a youma, and Reiki just had to find them.……
Noir Songbird
Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2023 10:25 pm
Guinevere smiled.
It had been a pretty good night, honestly. She'd gone out, drained some energy, had a nice walk through the park. All well and good, right up until this gross, sleazy drunk came up on her and started making eyes at her tits.
And, look. Guinevere was not a patient person. She was not a chill person. She tolerated him giggling and asking her rude questions for about half a sentence before her hand snapped out, and his starseed was in her palm. And now, she bounced it between her hands, looking down at the body below her.
"If you had just been a little less rude," she told the unconscious man, "this wouldn't have had to happen."
Honestly. Some people.
She heard someone else approach, noted a Dark Mirror aura, and turned to give a bright smile.
"Oh, hi there! Sorry about the mess," she nudged the unconscious man with her foot. "He was giving me some problems, so, you know," she tossed the starseed up in the air and caught it, "I made sure he wouldn't cause any more problems ever again."
Reiki had told himself not to expect anything on the other end of the trail, but some part of him had ignored that good advice. Some part of him had continued hoping for one of the Negaverse agents with whom he already had a rapport, or at least a situation with one of them that he already knew how to handle. The situation he encountered………certainly was one he’d encountered before.
Reiki hadn’t handled it well back then, finding Arsenolite with Raymond Callahan and watching him steal the man’s starseed, too paralyzed by shock and fear to do anything. But as he steeled his nerves and approached the Negaverse senshi, approached the starseed-less man at her feet, last summer almost felt like a lifetime ago.
“And those problems justified this?” Reiki gestured at the man on the ground, then at the starseed the Nega-senshi was playing with, as if something so precious were a ******** toy. He left his hand up, wrist bent back and ready to call on his magic if whatever she had to say for herself didn’t satisfy him. Maybe the general aura of Flagrant Homosexual Drama Queen he’d heard he projected would at least make the gesture seem more pointlessly dramatic, less like an actual threat. “Whatever he did to you—it was bad enough for you to kill not only him, but also every future reincarnation that he might have had?”
Unless she had very compelling evidence that he’d been plotting to do an omnicide of everyone on Earth or something? Reiki doubted she’d have an answer he liked. But she did still deserve a chance to stand down and give the starseed back by choice.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2023 11:06 pm
Guinevere tilted her head to the side, frowning. This Dark Mirror did not seem like he was going to be particularly chill about this, and, if she was honest, she was not looking forward to dealing with whatever issues he had. But, really, it didn’t have to be a whole thing!
“I mean, yeah?” Guinevere shrugged. Tossed the starseed from one hand to the other. Kept doing so, idly, indeed like it was a rubber ball to be bounced between her hands. “Sorry I don’t like creepy drunk guys who can’t keep their opinions about my boobs to themselves. Like, yes, I know they’re big, I wanted them that way, but that doesn’t give you, random drunk stranger, the right to get gross and ask if you can touch them, then try to do it anyway when I say no.”
She nudged him with her foot again.
“And, I mean, it’s whatever, right? He’s just some guy. Who even cares about all his future reincarnations or whatever.”
It seemed perfectly reasonable to her. However, she had the feeling that this dude would not just get with the program.
“I’m sorry that he did that to you,” Reiki said, genuinely but without backing down. “And honestly, yeah? Knocking him out and draining him a little, I’d understand. Wouldn’t stand by it, but I’d understand it. But killing just him is bad enough. Killing him decides that because he was a gross creep to you personally, while drunk, he can never make any better choices.”
Just like killing Michel would have robbed him of the chance to turn his life around like he had. Just like, if Satomi had drank herself to death or stubbornly insisted on detoxing at home, Reiki’s clearest memories of his beloved aunt would’ve been her forgetting him at the mall and bribing him with a Fred Holland Day artbook to try and buy her tequila, despite being only fifteen. Just like Reiki himself wouldn’t have existed in the first place if Ojiisan had incurred any of the consequences that some people thought he would have deserved for any drunken nonsense, and if that had happened before he and Obaasan had had their son.
“But denying a potentially infinite amount of future lives the chance to do things differently? Robbing the universe of one more light just because one version of this starseed made a bad choice? I can’t let you do that.” The plan, such as Reiki had one, was simple: distract her with his magic, then try to snatch the starseed back. Yanking back, like tugging on an invisible cord, he snapped, “Ravenous Hunger!”
Super Senshi Magic
RAVENOUS HUNGER. Enemies within 15 feet of him are wracked with an intense hunger—the sort of hunger that gnaws at your insides, like you haven’t eaten all day. The craving can be for anything—food, drink, affection/intimacy, alcohol or narcotics, the answers to the math homework, etc.—and enemies are compelled to satiate it, but find it even more difficult to do so than they would expect. In addition to the intensity, this hunger makes them feel somewhat sluggish, making it harder for them to think, decide what to do, and see any actions through to completion, even those that they believe will satiate their hunger. Affected targets are still capable of acting and fighting back—though people may react to Murikabushi’s hunger differently—but until the hunger abates, they will struggle.
This spell lasts for 35 seconds, and Murikabushi can use it twice per battle. Additionally, this magic can be varying degrees of thrown off or ignored with focus, determination, practiced self-neglect that makes one feel like this hunger isn’t so bad, being accustomed to deprivation and therefore more capable of powering through the effects, magical protection, or some other, similar means of resistance.
Noir Songbird
Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2023 12:11 pm
Guinevere rolled her eyes. "Why should I care about any of that?" Like, really. How was any of it her problem? Why did it matter what he might have done someday? He had inconvenienced her, and that was enough, wasn't it?
Honestly.
She really did want to protest more.
But his magic hit her like a truck, all at once, and she froze.
Hunger, and pain, and a desperation to find something--anything--so hungry she could dig through garbage if she had to, and that would probably be the only way--
It was half a memory, a feeling, something from the depths of the past that had been erased that night on the hill, when she was brought into the Negaverse.
Her knees came out from under her, and she collapsed, legs splayed, starseed cupped between her hands. Tears began to streak down her cheeks, and distantly, she wondered why. It--it wasn't like whatever this was could get her anymore, she could go home to Faeth and curl up with her and eat whatever she wanted, it would be okay, she'd be okay, she didn't have to be hungry and alone--
But she was. She felt so hungry, and so alone.
"Take the stupid starseed," she said, shakily, and she dropped it on the ground and vanished.
Reiki didn’t enjoy throwing his magic around. Even having worked on it with Tama and Faustite, even having had it confirmed that his magic was not horrible and evil forever, merely something to treat seriously and with respect—by Tama, a Mauvian, who knew what he was talking about because his entire job was guarding the senshi and helping them learn how to be better as senshi—Reiki didn’t like throwing it around at people. He couldn’t be expected to guess even half of the things that he needed to know to use his magic quote-unquote “responsibly.” What someone had been through in their life, where they’d come from and how they’d gotten where they were when he met them, why they were the way they were, what secrets they harbored inside them that made it that much harder to get through their day……
But as the senshi in the pink ribbons dropped that starseed, Reiki couldn’t object. His heart ached for her. Whatever she’d gone through in her life, it had made her cry like that and he’d awoken that pain all over again, and even knowing why he’d done it—even standing by his reasons wholeheartedly and knowing that he’d do it again, given a second chance—he hated having done that to her.…… But all the same, she dropped the starseed and she left.
Reiki trembled as he knelt by the drunk man’s body. He could smell the whiskey on the man’s tongue. And he didn’t look forward to dealing with any nonsense of the man came to and decided that Reiki’s long hair and outfit made him Likely A Woman, therefore fair game to harass. As he held the starseed over the man’s heart, as pressed it to the man’s chest and watched it slip back into place, Reiki hoped that it wasn’t too late. That he’d saved this one, just like he hadn’t done for Raymond Callahan, back last summer.
He hoped that the man’s eyes would flutter open, and then Reiki could say, “Hey, are you alright? Nasty fall you took there. Is there someone you can call to pick you up?”
Please, even if it was just this once, he wanted everything to be okay.
