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 Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2023 12:43 pm
Quote: The Wishing Tree (2) : Your wish is only said to come true if you grant the wish of someone else; when you write your wish, you must also take one off of the tree and do your best to grant it. What wish do you pull off, and how do you intend to ‘grant’ it? Do you work with someone else to grant this wish, or do you work alone? You may get approval from another player to use the wish their character hung up, but no names are attached so your character may not ever know who wrote it! follows am i my brother’s keeper? (jk kimora)
This probably did not include meandering through the offerings that dangled off the Wishing Tree, considering taking more of them home with him and unwittingly opening up one of the ones he’d left before: “I wish I could break out of this ******** Mirror. I just don’t know how.”
Well, he stood by that sentiment, but it didn’t help Reiki right now.
So, he flicked the wish away and proceeded to another one. Then another after that. And so on and so on, all while softly inflicting the song currently stuck in his head on anyone who might have been eavesdropping: “These days I’m way too lonely. I’m missing out, I know. These days, I’m way too alone, and I’m known for givin’ love away, but I want someone to looooove me. I need someone who needs me—”
“‘Cause it don’t feel right when it’s late at night and it’s just me and my dreams!”
Hearing a new voice, Reiki perked right up. Whipped around to search for the source. Thankfully, he didn’t need to look for long: a guy about his own age, pale peach skin and hair like bleached moonlight, carrying a phone in one hand and wearing denim cut-offs and a tank-top with the cover art from TSwift’s Reputation album splashed across the chest. Visibly unsteady on his feet, the guy wobbled as he tried to come closer to Reiki. Not even two steps in, he gave up and slumped against the Wishing Tree instead. Probably the best decision for him, really. Between the staggering and the way he slurred his way through Lil Nas X’s lyrics, it didn’t take a ******** math genius to figure out that the guy was s**t-faced and……ah, yep. Yep.
On his skinny, pale wrist, the guy sported three of the rainbow-striped rubber bracelets that Scandals was selling to raise money for the queer community center.
Reiki took a deep breath, held it for a count of ten, then allowed himself a dramatic sigh. He could feel at least one White Moon aura lurking around here somewhere, because of ******** course they were. In all likelihood, it probably wasn’t the jumped up Neptune Squire from before, or the lesbian Christmas Elf version of Aldo Raine, and if it were Anser, then Reiki hopefully wouldn’t have had anything to worry about because he had NOT hurt Gabe last summer, thanks. Maybe it was someone like Izanami, Monoceros, Fang, Daedalus, Pendour, or Kerberos, who knew that Reiki was on the level and not wildly dangerous to everyone who dared get close to him. Maybe it was somebody who wouldn’t up and attack Reiki for existing in the vicinity of a drunk civilian, regardless of how his Mirrorshards had not come out of his subspace in ages and he certainly hadn’t loosed a Mirrorwraith on Destiny City.
But maybe it wasn’t somebody who knew better. Maybe the aura did belong to one of the aggro assholes, and maybe Reiki should’ve washed his hands of the whole situation. Maybe it would’ve been safer for him to just turn around and walk away when he technically had zero real obligations to do anything for this guy……but if the White Moon lurker were anything like Angelica, then they’d hate him for existing, no matter what he did, while Reiki would only beat himself up (this time) if he shirked his duty as a senshi and ignored someone who clearly needed help.
Another deep breath, and he went over to the tree. “Hey,” he said gently, reaching out to help offer the drunk guy some extra support. “Hey, you okay? Do you need help getting home?”
The drunk guy shook his head. “Friend’s pickin’ me up,” he drawled. Didn’t seem like he was slurring enough to be in danger of alcohol poisoning—or at least, Reiki hoped that the relative apparent cognizance meant something good. “Bench outside a cwaff-fé? Or something? Grove Street? I think? It’s got free wifi and cats……”
Reiki glanced back over his shoulder. He only knew of one cat-café on Grove Street, and it was literally right across the street.… Biting down another sigh, Reiki nodded and gently untwined the guy from the tree. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got you. We’ll wait for your friend together, okay?”
All he had to do was get this guy to the bench and sit with him until his ride showed up. Surely, not even the most aggro White Moon assholes would risk attacking him while he babysat a civilian.
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 12:27 am
Asmoedus felt that, in some ways, it was sort of her job to check in on Dark Mirror auras. They were her old Court, and her feelings of responsibility were....well, complex. Because some of them were like Lete, and needed to be reminded that the people they drained from were people, and some were...less so.
She wondered if anyone even remembered her. Remarque, maybe. He was...decent, and probably the one she felt worst about leaving behind. Always looking after them, like a mother duck and her collection of ducklings, but this particular one had flown the next.
In any case, there was a Dark Mirror Super aura, and she grit her teeth and moved closer, and when she saw the fashionably dressed gentleman helping someone across the street, she narrowed her eyes.
But there was no Mirrorwraith. Nothing at all.
So she came closer, and whistled, briefly.
"Need some help, or are you two good?"
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:16 am
No. Of course the person with the White Moon aura wasn’t going to leave well enough alone. Because why would anything in Reiki’s life ever go smoothly. Why would the senshi he longed so much to just join already do literally anything to make him feel like he maybe had somewhere to turn about it when they could instead come over and treat him like a criminal for trying to ******** help people. (This wasn’t true. Reiki knew it wasn’t true. Most of the White Moon senshi he’d ever met were perfectly reasonable and he counted them as friends, but every single encounter with one of them who wasn’t reasonable stung pretty deeply.)
Still—being a d**k right off the bat probably wasn’t going to end well for the civilian here, and he was the important one. So, Reiki plastered on a (visibly strained) smile and looked back at the other senshi. Petite, red hair, cute and vaguely steampunk-looking fuku, complete with goggles on top of her head. “Just trying to help a friendly neighborhood Swiftie over to that bench,” Reiki told her, nodding his head toward the spot in question. “Pride Month celebrations, right? You know how it goes. Well, it seems like our friend here remembered the part about the Stonewall Inn being a bar more than the part about the first Pride being a riot—”
“Caaaaall me byyyyy your naaaaame,” the drunk guy interjected, so off-key that it wasn’t even funny, but bless him, he was trying. “Tell me you LOVE ME in private. Caaaaaaall me byyyyy your naaaaaaam—”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, that’s on me.” With a long-suffering sigh, Reiki shook his head. “I was singing something else from Lil Nas X while I was over by the Wishing Tree. He overheard and decided it’s singalong time, now. But he has a friend coming to pick him up at the bench, okay? I just wanted to make sure he got over there and into his ride’s car safely.”
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 3:49 pm
Alright. Good. Cool. This was one of the Dark Mirrors who was fairly reasonable and chill. That was always a positive. These were the ones that she'd almost stayed in the Court for, people who really did think they were doing something right.
And maybe they could have. If not for the play-nice orders. If not for the Court being on a knife's edge, never able to take a side.
"Good taste, if not really the pipes to carry it through," Asmodeus said, smiling wryly. "Pride celebrations are that way, though. Let's get him to his bench, then." She casually dipped herself in under the man's other arm, taking some of his weight onto her shoulders with ease. Tiny and delicate, sure, but a Super Senshi with all the strength that implied.
"Good on you looking out for him, too."
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 4:22 pm
“Oh, you don’t need to tell me twice what Pride celebrations are like, Little Miss Cherry Bomb,” Reiki said with a small laugh, welcoming her help with their poor, drunk charge.
Okay. Cool. This White Moon senshi had some ******** manners and wasn’t rancid or hateful or ******** homicidally obsessive, like certain Angelicas whom Reiki could have mentioned. “Unless he got those wristbands some other night this month? I was probably at the same celebration as him. Absolute best bartenders in town.”
Granted, Reiki was biased by how much he loved Scandals in general. But even accounting for his biases, he really did love all the people who tended bar at Scandals—“The bar selling those right now? They give out wristbands for people who don’t drink but who want to be out where other queer people are, or don’t want to skip their friend’s bachelor party, or……y’know.”
Reiki made a throaty, shrugging sort of sound rather than shrug physically and upset the delicate balance they’d worked out with the drunk guy. “Maybe who want to come see their grandson perform but don’t want to get pressured in ways that could ******** up twenty-six years of sobriety.”
Nobody at Scandals had ever pressured Ojiisan about not ordering alcohol when he’d come to one of Reiki’s shows. As much as Reiki also liked the other queer bars in town, he couldn’t say the same about The Closet or The Baker Street Tavern. Being good to his grandfather in that specific way was one of the many things Reiki cherished about Scandals.
One of the things that he’d have to give up—at least for a little while, if he went through with his idea about inviting Faustite and maybe Albite to a show—in order to feel right in his own skin again.
Assuming he ever found the way out of there.
At least, for the time being, Reiki could focus on helping Miss Cherry Bomb get the drunk guy over to the bench and settling him in place. Once he was safely seated, Reiki turned to her and held out a hand. “Murikabushi, by the way,” he said, even though the name felt like a lie on his tongue. “And……thanks. For not judging me guilty by virtue of existing or whatever. I know the Chaos aura is suspicious to most people by default? I get that, I do? It’s just……”
He allowed himself another Dramatic Sigh. “You know. <******** exhausting, when you’ve got somebody who’s fainted from heat-stroke, or gotten roofied, or been totally mangled by some Negaverse a*****e, and all you want to do is help? But some Sailor Untitled Goose Game, or an obnoxious loudmouth Neptune Squire, or a self-righteous Saturn jackass just wants to hold you up because oooh, Chaos aura bad.”
With a soft huff and a shake of the head, though, he added, “Sailor Untitled Goose Game is okay overall, though. She only got as aggro as she is because a bunch of other Chaos jack-offs put her through Hell before she can even buy her own drinks. She’s a good kid just trying her best to do what she thinks is right.”
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Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2023 3:03 am
Asmodeus sighed, but it was a fond, happy sort of sigh. This whole thing....it was actually pretty nice. She hadn't had a lot of positive interactions with the Court since she left it--mostly because the whole thing had been emotionally ******** harrowing--but this guy...he seemed like someone she would have been friends with, back when she was part of it.
"That sounds really great. Which bar is it?" Maybe she'd drag her partners there, have a good time together. "I don't really drink, but it really is good to just...be where our people are, you know?" She paused. "...If you don't wanna tell me, you don't have to, I know all this can make things...weird."
At least the poor civilian was probably wayyy too drunk to remember any of this conversation.
She let him drop onto the bench with care, and straightened, and stretched.
"Be pretty shitty of me to judge the whole Court just for existing while chaos, when I used to be one of you," she said. Then, she winced. Ugh, maybe he'd judge her a traitor and get all weird about it. She hoped not, things were going so well. "All that traumatizing Chaos does....that's part of why I left. I just...I couldn't do the whole standing by thing anymore, you know?"
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Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2023 10:33 pm
Although the surprise of what Miss Cherry Bomb said walloped Reiki upside the head, he somehow managed to keep his facial expression from getting too wild.… Maybe that was just? The disbelief swirling around in his mind? After he’d been trying so hard to find someone—anyone—who knew how to get out of the Mirror…… After so much digging around, and wondering why he could only turn up some occasional Order senshi who didn’t know how to escape the Mirror any more than he did or ******** Persephone, who didn’t want to escape the Mirror…… Could the woman who had all the answers really have just……? Dropped into Reiki’s lap? Like it was no big deal?
“You…… Are you—you’re for real with me right now? This isn’t…” Reiki shook his head, gesturing vaguely at nothing in particular. “The bar in question is called Scandals? It’s over in the gayborhood, right across from this great, 24-hour diner owned by a really cool lesbian couple, but—?” Reiki cut himself off as he abruptly remembered that breathing was a good thing and that he should probably do more of it. As he recovered, though, he looked back to Miss Cherry Bomb with a sparkly-eyed expression that silently begged her to please, please, please be for real. If she was playing games with his heart about this, Reiki didn’t know what he would do. Cry, maybe. “You really did it? You found a way out of that godforsaken, frozen s**t-hole called Mirrorspace?”
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Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2023 11:07 pm
"It's still a big secret?" Asmodeus asked. She couldn't help herself, really--but then,t he people that had helped her....she hadn't seen Navi in years, and it wasn't like Cosmos just showed up to chitchat at random. So perhaps it made sense that it was still hidden knowledge. "Yeah, i found a way out, with the help of someone else. It's....funny, actually."
She smiled,a bit bitterly.
"You have to go into Mirrorspace, and you have to want to leave. And it'll sort of...guide you to where you need to go. You'll have to deal with some kind of weird clone version of yourself--it tried to talk me around to staying but I punched it until it shut the ******** up--and then I took this weird, copy starseed out of Mirrorspace with me, wished upon a star, and Cosmos showed up."
Which sounded fake, she was sure, but it was true.
"But you have to want it. That's the key. You have to want to leave. Chaos won't let you go otherwise."
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Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2023 1:26 am
At the first thing that Miss Cherry Bomb had to say, Reiki shrugged. “I mean, I’ve only met our Prince one time,” he said, “and I didn’t even know that we had a Princess too. Not until I ran into said Princess’s wife a couple weeks ago. Outside of them, the most senior Court members I know personally are Elsa and Acubens, and one of them only knows that escape is possible, not how to do it. I don’t know about Acubens-oneesan, but……” He sighed, and shrugged again, even though it felt like the physical version of pointlessly repeating himself. “Even if she does know, it’s not like it’s in hers, or Remarque’s, or Persephone’s Wife’s—Leto, yeah, I know her name, but I haven’t met her, so she can be Persephone’s Wife, as far as I’m concerned, y’know?”
Huffing softly, he concluded, “I mean, it’s not exactly in their best interests to go telling people how to get out of the Court, right? There’s barely enough of us to fill a lecture hall as it stands. If they clued more of us in to how it’s even possible to get the ******** out of that tedious, simpering wasteland they call Mirrorspace? They might lose too many people for the Court to survive.”
Grimly, part of Reiki wondered if that wasn’t an actual concentrated effort on someone’s parts. On one hand, that sounded like way too much organization and actual forethought for the Dark Mirror Court as he knew it. Namely, as a bunch of chronically disorganized rabbit-hearts with no sense of internal cohesion or team unity, which maybe wouldn’t have been a problem if they’d had as many among their ranks as the White Moon did, but they obviously didn’t have those kinds of numbers. On the other hand, though, just because most of the rank-and-file Mirror senshi seemed to avoid taking things seriously at all costs—seemed to be, as Faustite had so bluntly said of Lete, cannon fodder waiting to happen—didn’t mean that the leadership was anywhere near that incompetent.
Reiki may not have known Remarque’s whole story. He certainly didn’t know Persephone’s Wife from a hole in the wall. But neither of them could have popped their pretty, pretty princess wings without being willing to get their hands dirty in the actual business of the war. No, he couldn’t assume that they would have come up with some conspiracy together to keep all of their little Mirror senshi ignorant of how to escape……but he also couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t have done something like this.
Glancing over his shoulder, Reiki spotted somebody getting out to help the poor, drunk civilian into the car. The civilian, still stuck on his Lil Nas X Singalong Time, had moved on to “Old Town Road,” and the friend who’d come for him sighed an extremely long-suffering sigh while trying to pour him back into the car. But since the civilian wasn’t on the bench anymore, Reiki half-sat, perching on the back of it.
“Anyway, wanting to get out of there isn’t a problem,” he assured the other senshi, folding his arms over his chest. “I was already halfway out the door when Mirrorspace started, like? Nagging me to come visit every ******** night, back in January? And hilariously, Miss Cherry Bomb? All that so-called quality time together has only exacerbated the desire to sashay out the goddamn door as quickly as possible. If I have to deal with Mirrorspace acting like the b*****d child of Lana del Rey and the pleading face emoji just because I have more important things to do than humor it one more time? I am going to ******** scream.
“About the only thing that might give a b***h his doubts?” Reiki dramatically snapped his fingers for emphasis. “Is the sheer number of people among the White Moon who act like it’s impossible to be a good person unless you dress exactly like them and have the exact same opinions as they do. Or like anything good you try to do doesn’t matter unless you’re part of their specific little White Moon clique. Like, there’s one arrogant, Bond villain-monologuing little lesbian Christmas elf running around, hunting Dark Mirrors like it’s Inglourious ******** Basterds right now, and acting like she’s sooooo justified when her actual motive?
“Is that she had a big, lesbian romantic misunderstanding with a friend of mine—which happened during last year’s Starfest, for context—my friend unwittingly hurt her feelings but tried to apologize, and Little Miss ‘Why weren’t you at elf practice’ over here won’t grow up and get over it already. Which is especially stupid because the b***h is cute. She could have twenty girlfriends in a New York minute on any sapphic dating app, but no. That would require, like, a semblance of emotional maturity on her part. But the way she and some of the other White Moon senshi out there talk, I’m supposed to just be okay with calling Angelica one of the good guys, and I should, like, lick her ******** last season pumps because she deigned not to murder me yet?
“Genuinely? I know a Negaverse General-Sovereign who’s more open-minded than Miss Christmas Tree, Miss Christmas Tree over there. And, so help me, I do not want to get hauled out as part of anybody’s rotted, heartless ******** time-share presentation about why leaving your Chaos faction is literally the only way to be a decent person when there’s at least one wannabe genocidal maniac running in a White Moon fuku right now.”
With another soft huff, Reiki shifted his arms so that he was more hugging himself than not. Forcing himself through a few deep breaths, he allowed himself to slouch. “But staying in Mirrorspace when it makes me want to rip out my own starseed just to spite a bunch of close-minded assholes? Sounds even stupider than blah blah, cut off nose, blah blah, spite your face—y’know what I mean?”
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Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2023 7:42 pm
ASmodeus shrugged. "I don't even know if Remarque knows. I haven't seen him since I left." Perhaps because she was too guilty to face him. Perhaps...a lot of reasons.
She kept thinking she ought to look for him again. Maybe she really would actually make an effort.
"True, though, that I guess they wouldn't want people to leave. But Remarque never struck me as the type to not want people to make their own decisions." Not that she'd known him very well, really. Not that she'd known anyone very well. It had made leaving so much easier, in the end, having next to no close connections in the Court. Instead, she'd forged them with Order, where she'd ended up.
And good for that, since it had given her Hati and Skoll.
A small relieved sigh passed her lips, seeing the civilian get scooped up to go home. Good, he wouldn't be at risk from anyone less scrupulous than Murikabushi; always a positive.
"Nah, that's true," Asmodeus acknowledged. "Some people really want to be right, and really want to believe that just because you're on the other side, you're evil and terrible, and you can only fix yourself by picking their side--but, I dunno. The risk, to me, of validating those assholes weighed less tan my desire to get away form Chaos. To stop having to play nice with the Negaverse when all their weird Chaos monster wants is to destroy the world. And I..."
She inhaled, tensely.
"I saw. What makes a mirrorwraith. I think...I think they were people, once. Not anymore, obviously, but....some of us, we fell through the cracks of Mirrorspace to this...weird palace, with this weird lady as Queen, who kept acting like her mirror-servants were living people and. I don't know if she tried to turn us into them on purpose? Or if she was just so insane that she couldn't tell the difference between alive and dead? But we were...changing. And I don't know, what the whole experience taught me was that there was something fundamentally very scary at the core of the Court. And yeah, sure, Remarque would tell you that we can build something different. But I don't want any part of a world built on that kind of foundation."
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Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2023 6:26 pm
Not that Reiki wasn’t listening to Miss Cherry Bomb, because he was……but he also happened to spot something left behind on the bench: a star-charm, and oh, that was his now, yes, please, thank you. Maybe it was a little bit overly magpie-ish of him, but Reiki really liked collecting these little charms every year during star-fest, and now, he had one of this year’s golden yellow ones to add to his growing hoard for 2023.
Good thing he found it, too, because the story that Miss Cherry Bomb had about what had inspired her to leave the Court……it sent a chill right down Reiki’s spine, straight to the pit of his stomach, and ********, ********, ********, okay, cool, he desperately needed to fiddle with something now, thanks. The star-charm provided the perfect little toy for him to ground himself so he didn’t completely lose his mind, trying to fathom what she was saying.… It made sense, in a way, didn’t it? Youma and Mirrorwraiths served such a similar function, save that youma seemed to be significantly more effective and interesting. And considering what Faustite had implied? What he’d offered to do to Greg? What Kerberos had said about the train-wreck that had happened in the midst of so many attempts to save Faustite by turning him completely human?
“I mean, not that we can actually say the Negaverse as an institution has a moral high-ground over anybody,” Reiki said, currently choosing to leave out the part where the entire concept of institutions in the war had increasingly grated on his nerves for a while and he wasn’t sure that anybody had a moral high-ground over anybody else, “but at least youma are still alive. As far as I’ve gathered, they’re warped by Chaos into something other than who or what they originally were, but they can have an actual life.
“Which means,” he added so that it didn’t sound like he was trying to completely make excuses for youma or for the Negaverse, “whatever was done to them by the Negaverse’s Chaos can be undone. Having heard from a few people who’ve been involved in it before, it’s a whole Thing—complicated, involved, a lot of moving parts, just a whole-a** Production—but if you get all the necessary people and tools, you can do it. Not that I haven’t been surprised before, but considering the wraiths are all made out of magic mirror shards? Pretty sure there’s no way anybody can heal them. Whatever happened to make them that way, they all seem stuck with it—and given the usual track record with the Court and the Negaverse about consent, Vegas money says none of them chose to be that way.”
Which, although he knew better than to say so to a White Moon senshi, was honestly a point in the Negaverse’s favor. Most youma probably didn’t choose to be that way? But the fact remained that someone could choose that life, or they and half-youma could, like Faustite, find themselves and their bliss in being how they were. Mirrorwraiths, as far as Reiki had seen and now heard, didn’t get any sort of choice in anything.
And the Court really wanted to talk about how they were so. much. better. than the Negaverse. Like, seriously?? At least some people in the Negaverse actually gave a damn about the youma. But only Miss Cherry Bomb had bothered even telling Reiki that Mirrorwraiths had been ******** people, once upon a time. Did anybody in the Court <******** care that not only were the lot of them glorified magical girl parasites, but they also had to exploit creatures who’d had their lives stripped away from them and been turned into some undead mirror-creatures in the name of making that parasitism ******** function?
Jesus, at least the Negaverse was, for the most part, ******** honest about who they were and what they did.
“Metallia might be trying to end the world as we know it by devouring everything, but she still needs more of this planet alive than not to get its energy. Mirrorspace, as far as I’ve seen? Is nothing but endless sterility, and confinement, and death. If Remarque wants to believe they can build something better, that’s his business and it’s his innate right as a sapient person to be totally self-deluded, but……”
Reiki huffed and shook his head. “I don’t believe that Mirrorspace is capable of actually building jack-s**t. Not really. None of the things it lets you believe you’re making are actually real. None of them are made to last. And most of all, absolutely none of them are worth the cost of stealing energy from people who can’t defend themselves. Besides which, do we have no concept of <******** triage? Like……Kim, there’s people that are dying, and yes, actually, choosing to ignore that in favor of <******** around in Mirrorspace does strike me as morally indefensible? Never mind how, A., the entire plan of building a sanctuary in Mirrorspace is honestly just the magical girl version of Elon Musk trying to colonize Mars, in the most derogatory way possible; and B., again: the effects of Negaverse Chaos can be undone.”
The more Reiki spoke of undoing what had been done to youma, the more part of him wanted to say “save them”; that sounded like the terminology that Order senshi wanted to hear and like they would have used themselves (which meant it would probably help Reiki go down more smoothly for this poor girl who hadn’t asked to get pulled into all of his feelings on the Court and why he hated it here).
Frankly, he didn’t doubt that some of the other Dark Mirror senshi would have used the same terms to condemn the Negaverse and talk about youma—or worse, about half-youma, who were sapient in a way that didn’t seem to be true about all youma—and then turn right around to s**t-talk the White Moon out the other side of their mouths (probably with all the poignant self-awareness of a broken toothbrush that was, like, covered in residue from scrubbing disgusting, mildewed bathroom grout that hadn’t gotten properly cleaned for at least a decade).
But he couldn’t bring himself to say that, no matter how much it probably would have been a better way to sell himself to Miss Cherry Bomb as a fellow future White Moon senshi. As he thought about the entire conceptually disgusting core of the Save The Youma idea, Reiki thought of General Jet and his commitment to helping everyone in the Negaverse. He didn’t know if Jet could actually find a properly equitable solution that might keep things safer for the Negaverse’s senshi while still letting youma thrive and be happy? But if anybody could do it, Reiki chose to believe that that person would be Jet………and yet, so many of the White Moon’s senshi and Knights—maybe even several of the ones whom Reiki really liked on a personal level—might have thought that any efforts to see them cared for counted as something like resigning them to some kind of damnation.
Weren’t there cases like Greg’s, though? Situations where someone, frankly, would’ve made a better youma than a human? Greg had gotten gifted so many things, including his life and his starseed, that he completely took for granted, that he wasted and squandered, all the while assuming that he was entitled to have everybody love him and that he deserved the “right” to tame Reiki.
None of which addressed how badly the “saving them” language made Reiki want to vomit in the trash-can up the block a little ways. ********, he hoped nobody had the sheer audacity to say something like that to him, after he left the Court. Or before it. Truly, it would have taken some absolute titanium nerve to throw around “saving him” language about Reiki as if forcing him to give up so much of his life as he knew it would actually change him any as a person.
As if it would make him any less of a dramatic, disagreeable, messy b***h for him to let some heinous-looking white fuku wash out his complexion because that was how they wanted the human heart to work.
As if he’d change sides and suddenly want to slap on some big, vapid, sparkling goo-goo eyes and simper his way through a whole tour of ******** apologies to Michel and how he accused Reiki of seeing Fang as cargo then demanded that Reiki just trust him outright, and Angelica with her wounded pride and sad bruised little lezbean heart that totally super justified talking like a genocidal Bond villain, and that feral gremlin in a princess gown with the indiscriminately Chaos-targeting magical arrows.
As if some question of magical girl allegiances would ever make him stop being Noshiko’s Son or Murasaki’s Grandson.
“Anyway,” he said with a heavy sigh, combing his fingers back through his bangs, “as much as all that gets on my nerves? I’ve been okay with doing my own thing, acting like one of your senshi who just happens to wear black, and obstructing both the Court and the Negaverse from inside the former. My big tipping point with everything is just……” He shrugged. “I mean, it started with a magical space robot ripping my starseed out of my chest, and then it’s slowly been building up from there, I guess?”
Which was a perfectly normal and completely hinged sequence of words to say. Obviously.
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Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2023 1:29 am
Asmodeus wasn't exactly surprised that her little knowledge bomb had deeply upset Murikabushi. It had upset her, when she'd discovered it--when they'd all seen what Altea's madness had created. When they'd seen what she had done to the man she loved. There had been one or two Senshi that tried to side with the mad queen, then, and it had left Asmodeus feeling hollow and confused, even without her being essentially certain of her choice.
But there had been so few of them there.
"It's not exactly something anyone would want to spread around," Asmodeus said. "and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I misinterpreted. Maybe they're something else, and maybe it doesn't really matter, because you're right. I don't think you can fix a Mirrorwraith." She exhaled. "I don't know anything about purifying youma? If it can be done, that's news to me, but I don't know everything there is to know or anything like that. I do know that purification requires consent, though. You have to want it. And whatever Mirrorwraiths are, anymore...I don't think they can want anything."
It chilled her, in truth, to think of it.
"I think....I think it might all be the same, in the end," she said, and she broke eye contact with him, to sort of...stare off into the distance, as if that would make things easier. "Whichever Chaos wins, I mean. I think deep down, all Chaos wants is to consume. To gain more power. And then to move on and consume more." Like a swarm of locusts, or something. "Mirrorspace...when I was in the Court,t here was barely anything we could do with it, most of the time. We found the Mirrorscape not long before I left, but I never got to do much with it. Wasn't really invested, you know?" She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe if I'd stayed longer, I'd understand better. but I got out of there pretty quick after I could get in on my own."
Because she was a coward. Who couldn't stay, couldn't try to talk to the people she'd known--could only run. But it was for the better, in the end.
"Now, though, I've got a whole world, and I'll take that trade over whatever Mirrorspace can give any day."
And yet, still, she smiled, at the ever-so-casual way that he described what had pushed him over the edge. It was a wry, sardonic thing, but a smile nonetheless.
"You know, as you do," she said, and she shook her head. "Every day, being a magical girl makes someone say a whole new sentence that has never been spoken before. It's truly amazing, isn't it."
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Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2023 3:54 pm
“Honestly, sis, you’re not missing anything in the Mirrorscape. Not that it’s exactly reassuring or anything, but……” Reiki sighed, briefly considering whether or not he was being fair. Probably not. But by the same token, he didn’t really feel like being fair when he’d spent months trying to Understand Mirrorspace Better and mostly wound up feeling smothered, strangled, suffocated, and otherwise stifled. Trapped, even, you might’ve said. “I dunno. New Year’s Eve, I finish the show I’m in, power up to go home and get my makeup off more easily. Every mirror I pass by seems to be calling me in, so eventually, I get sick of it and go. I wander into the mirrorscape, I go find the citadel, the mirror in the floor drops me on a little island the size of a baseball field and covered in something that, hand to God, looks like uncooked heroin, and……”
He shook his head and quirked his shoulders, pulling a face that looked completely lost for words. “I do not, for the ******** life of me, know what the fuss here is supposed to be. Like, oh boy, cool, you can break open those asinine little crystals—” For illustrative purposes, he reached into his subspace and pulled out one of the violet ones that always seemed to make Reiki feel very “A Primer For The Small Weird Loves” energy off of Mirrorspace, like she was giving him very big Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you vibes. It was very that. “—and they make stuff happen, or whatever? These guys grow black roses. The red ones make fire or lights or heat or something like that. The gray ones make rocks, for when you really, really wanna feel like Charlie Brown on Halloween.
“But it’s all very like……okay? So, what? Is there an actual, real purpose to literally any of this, or are we just ******** around? Because it sure feels like we’re just <******** around. Which sure does feel like the opposite reason of why senshi starseeds even exist, if you ask me, but only one person in the Court ever has.” And Reiki didn’t want to talk about Levi. Nor about how we’re just trying to survive sure felt like a hollow argument, in light of the literal magical girl superpowers. “Not to paraphrase every basic, butch-masc white boy’s favorite movie that he didn’t understand? But everything about the Mirrorscape feels, at best, like polishing brass on the Titanic.”
A silent shout-out to David Fincher, Tyler Durden, and Brad Pitt for making that line so memorable.
It was, however, besides the point: “I think I’ll appreciate the delightful absurdity of this life more when I don’t constantly feel like I have a straitjacket on my starseed,” Reiki told her with a small, tired sigh. “Which is where the magical space robot enters into things. Because I wouldn’t know that Dark Mirror starseeds are so wrong if he hadn’t pulled mine out of me, and if one of my White Moon friends hadn’t helped him get it back. Mind you, I probably still would’ve been discontented with a lot of things about this situation, because I’ve had a problem with energy-draining since before I met the robot in question, and the ‘actual space travel with actual space planets’ envy has been the realest ever since my Trekkie a** learned that White Moon people apparently do it all the time? It’s just……y’know?”
Once more, Reiki shrugged. Because he knew, yes, but knowing didn’t make it any easier to put functional words on, much less say out loud: “Starseeds are supposed to burst with light, and life, and color, right? But Dark Mirror starseeds don’t. Not that I’ve seen one, obviously, but I did see how freaked out my friend and Kima the Magical Space Robot were about seeing mine. Plus, Kerberos wouldn’t lie to me, not about something like that. And knowing that Mirrorspace Chaos blocks out its senshi’s true colors like that? How it paints us all the exact same, most singularly unappealing shade of silvery, chrome-y, reflective bullshit, then expects ******** gratitude out of it? When it sure feels to me like the b***h only wants to deal with Mirror senshi as, at best, vaguely person-shaped pseudo-concepts, rather than the people we actually are?”
He huffed, tucking his bangs behind his ear again. “If the rest of them want to live half-dead like that, then fine, whatever, it’s their business.” Turning up certain affectations and certain flair, putting on his best Crystal LaBeija sneer, Reiki added, “Mirrorspace can make happy little AliExpress knock-offs of a Malibu Barbie Dream House with all the rest of them who will flock to her, but not Murikabushi, darling. Anybody but her.”
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