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 Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2023 9:54 pm
Quote: Predatory Puddles (11) : Summer rains aren’t uncommon, so finding puddles dotting your path isn’t in itself particularly surprising or abnormal. However, as you walk past them, you feel the sensation of being watched, like eyes are on you. If you look into the puddles, you don’t see your reflection--nor the reflection of anything familiar to you. Instead, you see strange, decayed buildings, and odd, rotting plants. Something is watching you through the puddles, but before you can investigate, between one blink and the next, it’s all gone. When you look back, the puddles are oddly non-reflective, and then in the next blink, they’re all gone. The feeling of being watched doesn’t fade, though.
Whether he was out and about in his civvies, or running around in his full senshi geish as he was right now (pretending that “Murikabushi” really felt like him in the way that he wanted it to, even though he’d had thirteen months to settle down about that and he hadn’t), it was often easy enough to simply let Destiny City do what it did. Trying to control any of it worked about as well as wasting good lipstick on a literal pig. Worse than that, just the thought of trying to make Destiny City behave by more widely recognized standards of “normal” stressed Reiki out and made it that much harder to keep a handle on all of his messy little problems.
None of this, however, meant that he enjoyed all of Destiny City’s random weirdness. Most of it was fun, or at least tolerable and not outright harmful to anybody, but tonight’s patrol had brought him around to Ramsett Park and the puddles were giving him the creeps. That they existed at all was no surprise—there had been plenty of summer rains lately—but something about them felt distinctly off. The more he paced around them, the more off it felt, even though Mu-Reiki-bushi couldn’t entirely put his finger on what was happening or why or any of it.… Everywhere he went, it felt like somebody had their eyes on him, and not in a fun way like what happened when Reiki-as-Miss-Sayuri-Disobedience was onstage at Scandals.
Getting closer to one of the puddles, Reiki wasn’t shocked that the “people staring at him” feeling didn’t ease up any—but he was shocked at what he saw when he peered down into it. Not his own reflection, but some horrible scene of decay and ruin. Buildings crumbling, rotten plants—not dried out like the Blight had made things last summer, but putrescent and creeping. Although the sight turned his stomach so hard that he barely noticed the approach of another Dark Mirror aura, he couldn’t look away.
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Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 9:36 pm
Honestly, Acubens would be more concerned if a day went by that wasn't hooky and or spooky in some way. It seemed like the city thrived or at least ran on hooky spooky bullshit, even if she hated it somedays. There were somedays, like the time the snow had been warm and that time there was a magical tea cart roaming around the streets that had been whimsical and harmless. Sometimes they were even enjoyable. Sometimes. Not often, but... sometimes. But them sometimes, things were violent. Sometimes rifts in the city opened up and sucked her and her friends into an alternate dimension. Sometimes a lion in a basement tried to kill a handful of people. Sometimes she and her court got sucked to a castle far away and held captive by an insane queen. Sometimes Acubens had to fight and fight hard. Sometimes she had to run even harder and not stop until she was home. Those times sucked the worst. Those were the times whens he felt like Lesath had a point, and staying barefoot and pregnant would have been the best course of action. That thought had been occurring to her more and more, actually. But that was a conversation for her and her wife to have much later. When the thought was less than passing. And then there were the times in-between sweet whimsy and direct threats. The times where things were... upsetting. Like when Acubens found herself staring at a memory that was nothing but pain. Or when there were Fairies in the parks and monsters in the lakes. Nothing that did any damage but managed to keep the citizens of Destiny City on their toes. It was no wonder so many senshi seemed to be awakened here and only here. Magic coalesced in the city and thrummed like a living heartbeat. And all Acubens could do was just sort of... take it... This year, at least, Acubens hadn't been subjected to anything too out of the ordinary. Or at the very least, too out of her ordinary. She patrolled, she tended the gardens on her realm, and sometimes, when she was very lucky, she got to piggyback to space and learn about the most exotic of flora. And, it would seem, she got to reconnect with old friends. "Is that a beautiful, strong, intelligent super senshi that I see," she nearly crowed, unable or unwilling to keep the pride from her voice, "or do my eyes deceive me?" As thought she had anything to do with his growth... she'd been so s**t about checking up on members of the court lately, and sure, she could make excuses about her job and her real life... but she did have a duty, and if she was going to claim the title of "eternal" then she needed to live up to it. "Murikabushi," she gushed, coming up along side of him with a friendly bump of her shoulder. "Lovely to see you again. Lovelier still to see you doing so well..." She followed the line of his gaze as she spoke, wondering vaguely what was so interesting about the puddle he was inspecting. Which being apparent very quickly. A broken down city. Overgrown flora rotting away on the ruins. the feeling of being watched that stood the hair on her arms on end. "The ******** is that," she breathed.
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Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2023 11:28 am
“I have no idea,” Reiki answered without needing to think about it, “and honestly, I kinda don’t want to know.”
He didn’t entirely process just yet who’d joined him. They had a Dark Mirror aura and knew his name, so he wasn’t too worried—and for all he didn’t want to know more about what was going on with these puddles? Reiki struggled to make himself look away. Staring into that vision of destruction and death…… It was like staring long into the abyss of all his worst impulses, the ones that always tried to lure him with the promise that really, listening to them wouldn’t be so bad, would it? After all, if anybody got hurt, they’d make sure it only happened to him, not to anybody who didn’t deserve it.……
Thinking about the mysterious doom-puddle in that context, though, helped Reiki snap himself out of everything. Closing his eyes, and with an abrupt shake of his head, he snapped himself out of it and finally looked to his side, toward whoever had come up and spoken to him.
“Oneesan!” He couldn’t quite manage a smile for Acubens right now, but his voice brightened up regardless. “It has been a minute, hasn’t it? Soyala—the Mauvian I work with most? She gave me my super power-up back in November? And then a lot has happened since then, too.…”
Reiki said so without any rancor or ill will, because he genuinely didn’t feel any toward Acubens. Sure, it had been a little while since he and Acubens had last seen each other, but she was a busy lady, especially since someone needed to look after all the new Dark Mirrors running around. Reiki knew that he didn’t know all of them. And he felt like Prince Remarque probably had to be taking care of some of them, since looking after new members of the Court and helping them acclimate felt like something you’d expect a Prince to do? But Acubens was an Eternal, and she clearly loved both the Court and Mirrorspace, so it made sense to him that she’d probably busied herself with taking care of the newer, fresher senshi.
Even if he wasn’t correct in guessing that she’d been busy looking after younger Mirror senshi like Rana and (as much as Olivia hated him saying so) Bélénos, Acubens had her own life and Reiki wouldn’t hold focusing on it against her.
Still, he sighed, glancing around at the puddles. Once again, he felt the sensation of somebody watching him. Noticing the violet star charm that glittered beside one of them—and naturally, pausing to pick it up—helped somewhat, but definitely not enough to compensate for………whatever all else was going on with these puddles. Something that felt……not exactly outside the realm of normal weirdness for Destiny City, Reiki supposed? But just because it felt relatively normal didn’t mean that Reiki wanted to hang around it too much longer.
“Do you wanna maybe get out of here,” he asked, gently nudging her shoulder in case she needed help breaking out of the puddles’ spell. “Part of me’s starting to wonder if the White Moon Christmas elf who’s hunting Mirror senshi didn’t set these things up as some kind of trap.”
Mostly, it was a joke. Angelica’s magic all revolved around spruce, rather than puddles, so this mostly likely was just Destiny City being Destiny City. But the anxiety and lack of desire to deal with Angelica’s bullshit were both very real.
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 9:51 am
Weird stuff didn't really effect Acubens anymore, not after living in this city for as long as she had been. However, whenever something went wrong with the reflections around town she got itchy. She'd been sucked into an unforgiving and unknowable mirrorspace too often to not. And while, granted, nothing as horrible as Altea had happened in years, there were still the mild annoyances of being summoned without her consent into a nearby mirror to run some kind of absurd obstacle course for no other reason that, it seemed, Mirrorspace's own amusement. Muri talked about his power up and Acubens tore her eyes away from the puddle for a moment to grin at him, trying to cover her worry as much as possible. so he'd been powered up for a while now... Acubens really had to get better about being present. Something she would lament later, but not right now. Right now there was the pressing matter of these puddles and... wait... Acubens glanced back down at the ground and suddenly the puddles were as flat and dull as the pavement itself. She glanced up at Muri to see if the other senshi was seeing what she was seeing, and when she looked back to the puddles... they were gone... But the hairs on the back of Acubens' neck still stood on end and the feeling of eyes on her skin remained, even as the puddles vanished. She was so distracted, she didn't even ask after the "White Moon Christmas Elf," far too concerned with Mirrorspace acting back up. She'd circle back to it. "Um... yeah, yeah actually. I really do want to get out of here." She shook herself, as though trying to physically remove the sensation of being watched, but to no avail. "I was actually going to head to my realm and check on some things. Wanna join me?"
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