The Lantern Festival (9) : Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand the strange, glowing qualities of the luminescent caterpillars found in the caves by the reservoir. The caterpillars still shrivel up if they are taken out of the caves but their glowing secretions have been processed into an organic paste that can withstand the outside world. The city is selling paper lanterns infused with various seeds. The glow paste is full of minerals to support healthy plant growth without risking damage to the environment; all lantern purchases come with a small packet of activating power that will heat the paste up enough to mimic the effects of a candle without the concerns of flammability. When the glow paste loses its heat, the lantern will return to the Earth and upon the first rain (or any contact with water) the paper will dissolve and the seeds may begin to grow. All proceeds from the lanterns are put right back into the community to support local conservation and environmental protection efforts.
An incredibly convenient thing about Reiki’s work at Scandals was that it meant he had a reliable hoard of small bills to keep clipped together in his subspace. Sometimes, you got an audience member who threw you a $20 bill as a tip because they were having so much fun at the show. Very rarely, those precious individuals who tossed you a $50-spot thinking it was a fiver or even $100 because their working, mental concept of money fell more in line with “I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost? Ten dollars?” than with the standards held by most people.
Mostly, though, Reiki caught $1’s and $5’s for his tips while performing. Perfect, at the moment, because the clip of tip-money in his subspace meant that he didn’t need to power down in the middle of a patrol just because he wandered into the city’s lantern festival and felt like buying one. He could simply pull out the clip, hand over the cost of the lantern, and be on his way. Better not to risk being seen while powering up or down. One couldn’t be too careful while out and about, dolled up in one’s full senshi, knightly, or agent-ly, powered up geish. (—Truly a bold thought for Reiki to have when he regularly ignored any semblance of caution or common sense, but admitting it was half the battle or something, right?)
As he moved out into the park, looking for a place to hang the lantern, Reiki felt another powered aura nearby.… Negaverse, probably a General or an Eternal senshi like Albite.… The hope that it might have been Faustite flared up, the way it always did whenever Reiki felt a sufficiently powerful Negaverse aura, but as he weaved his way around some floral hedges, Reiki silently prepared himself to run into someone else. The Negaverse was a decently sized organization, as far as Reiki knew, and Faustite wasn’t their only General, just the one who Reiki knew and liked personally. Statistically, the odds favored running into someone different.
Still, Reiki kept his head up and his expression even as he felt himself getting closer to the General-or-Eternal’s aura. At least there probably wasn’t a risk of them just out and attacking him for existing in the same place as them, like there was with so many people among the White Moon’s ranks. Not that Reiki considered himself good at keeping his cool—he was not, and he knew that—but avoiding a fight with someone who had a better chance of beating him than vice versa? Sounded like a good plan tonight.
Guine
Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 11:42 am
It wasn’t unusual for Jet to be at the park at this hour of the night. It was the same place and time that he offered to meet with those he’d spoken to about being recruited into the Negaverse. It might have been a slower process, and it might not result in actual recruits, but Jet had seen the effects of being forced into the Negaverse versus willingly joining. There were outliers, of course. Those who were forced to join became incredibly loyal, but there was a higher chance of defecting with the same practice.
Being out in public as a General was always easier. It didn’t draw nearly as much attention as a General Sovereign’s aura, but people still tended to stay away.
Something about the festival had sparked some of Jet’s creativity though. A lantern sat next to him on one side of the bench, which he’d picked up on his way out to the park, and the other side had several pages of scribbled music notes, and the purple star charm he'd picked up from one of the stalls near the lanterns.
The aura of a Dark Mirror Senshi was unusual, if only because they tended to scurry into their mirrors and vanish at any sign of trouble. Or they stuck around to cause more problems than he would like to deal with at the moment.
Still, Jet looked up to see who approached him, and took a moment to take in the Senshi’s outfit. Colors matched. Hairstyle as well. Same with height.
“Enjoying the festival as well, Murikabushi? Did I pronounce that right?” he asked with sincere curiosity. He’d only read the name in the database, but it was pretty unmistakable for who this Dark Mirror Senshi was.
Ah, he supposed it was only fair to share his name, although he couldn’t say he had the best experience with the Dark Mirror Court. Better them than the White Moon at least.
“Jet,” he introduced as he set his pencil down on the notebook.
Whether they’d speak or politely ignore each other, Reiki decided to leave in the General’s hands—and it seemed that he chose speaking. Turning toward the voice, Reiki found himself facing a fairly young guy with lovely teal accents decorating his uniform. Probably not too much younger than Reiki himself, though the mop of brown curls enhanced the youthful appearance of his face. Like a brunet Botticelli angel, Reiki mused as he came over to the bench. Better that they didn’t need to raise their voices to speak to each other.
“You got close enough for me, so please don’t worry about it too much,” Reiki said earnestly. It wasn’t often, in his experience, that people actually tried to get the pronunciation of any given Japanese name correctly. “Japanese intonation can be really tricky to pick up on, especially because it’s so different from how English stresses different syllables. Even getting raised bilingual and in America can make your diction sound slightly off to people who only speak Japanese, or who grew up in Japan.”
As opposed to Reiki and his siblings, who’d grown up in Destiny City and would never pronounce anything correctly enough their maternal grandmother.
The fact that this general was guessing about the pronunciation of Reiki’s senshi name meant he’d probably read it rather than heard it. So many potential implications wrapped up in that alone—and all of them fell by the wayside as soon as the General introduced himself. “Jet…?” Reiki repeated, doing exactly nothing to conceal the fact that he recognized the name and it meant something important to him. “You—sorry, I don’t mean to be rude or anything? I’ve just heard about you……from Faustite.”
Folding his hands together and letting the lantern dangle past the hem of his skirts, Reiki explained, “He said that you helped him, during his slow youmafication illness. And that you kept the senshi with him safe they followed him into the Rift?”
Reiki knew what he wanted to say to that—but first, he ended with the upward inflection of a question because he wanted to hear Jet’s side of the story. Not having been present for any of the endgame ********, Reiki could only go off of other people’s accounts, and leaving out too many perspectives would never help anyone. It had made a mess out of historical scholarship for generations, and in this context, it meant that Reiki’s understanding of things would turn up woefully incomplete.
Guine
Posted: Thu Jun 22, 2023 8:34 pm
For a moment, Jet couldn’t hide the surprise on his face when his name was recognized. Not just recognized, but he wasn’t sure what to think about the Senshi’s reaction.
He felt ridiculous for his ears heating up and turning red, but hopefully it was dark enough that it wasn’t an issue.
“You know Faustite,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but he wasn’t exactly all that surprised, given Faustite’s, well… given the company Faustite liked to keep. So far, Jet had no problem with them. And if Murikabushi spoke positively of Faustite…
Jet would have to make sure not to be around the two of them together, lest he have to awkwardly wait for them to stop making out, or whatever it was that Fausite would like to do with any of his lovers.
“There aren’t many outside of the Negaverse that are familiar with the Rift. It’s where youma live. Inhospitable to practically everything else. Youma are especially known for disliking Senshi. Or maybe it’s their energy, I don’t know.”
There were too many outliers to sift through. Too much information to figure out exactly how youma work, because as far as he’s aware, they are all individual. Except for their desire for energy and starseeds. But aren’t all creatures drawn to what nourishes them?
“There were others,” he said after a moment. He couldn’t take credit for being the only one helping, or the only one keeping the others safe. It wasn’t in his nature to shove others beneath him to gain prestige or praise for himself. “Those not as emotionally tied to Faustite to keep everyone else safe. I’m glad things worked out the way they did.”
Sounded like General Jet didn’t exactly need confirmation that Reiki knew Faustite, but as he joined Jet on the bench (being careful about his skirts and Jet’s lantern), Reiki nodded for him anyway. Partly, he hoped it showed that he was listening and wanted to hear what Jet had to say about everything. And on another hand, he partly just……wanted to keep this meeting going well. Aside from Jet being someone who mattered to Faustite—even if he wasn’t a romantic entanglement like Albite, Heliodor, or Lilith’s Brother, not getting along with friends of someone you had feelings about never went very well for anybody, in Reiki’s experience—it was wearing on Reiki lately, how many people didn’t seem to think that the people in the Negaverse were people.
Faustite was younger than Reiki himself. Jet seemed younger as well, though not by quite as much. Faustite, per his own testimony, had half-youmafied at fifteen. No, Reiki couldn’t say anything about Jet’s story, since he didn’t know, but him making it to General while so young likely meant that he’d been at this for a while. Even if both of them were unshakably loyal to the Negaverse, didn’t it matter, what had happened to bring them to those places in their lives?
As far as what he wanted counted for anything, Reiki wanted it to matter.
“Whoever did which parts, or however the division of labor fell? I’m really glad that he had you with him,” Reiki said with a small, gentle smile. “That he had support through it all. I tried to do what I could, when he’d allow it, but…”
Shrugging, he went on, “Limited scope of what I could do.… From what I’ve heard about what happened with the plan to have a White Moon Princess heal him, then take him back home to the Negaverse? I’ve felt a lot of ‘I wish I could have been there for him,’ because……I take a lot after my grandmother? We’re both very ‘I want to help, I want to do something to help’ people. I realize, though, that if I had been there, I would’ve just been in the way and unnecessarily complicated the situation when everything was already messy enough. Thinking that maybe Faustite wouldn’t have made it in the end, or more people would’ve gotten hurt? Makes it easier to accept that there wasn’t a lot that I could do.”
Saving Faustite and Cybele from each other, Reiki supposed. That probably counted as doing a good deal. It had ended in both of them getting a pretty significant power-up, though, and Reiki didn’t know how Jet thought about all this? Perhaps the fact that Cybele had also gotten a power-up eventually would have outweighed the fact that Reiki had rescued Faustite. Whether Jet was here doing due diligence for the Negaverse—a General-Sovereign going on dates with a Dark Mirror senshi did sound like a pretty big deal—or doing due diligence as Faustite’s friend (that? seemed to be the relationship here?), Reiki wanted to make an impression good enough that Jet at least didn’t try to keep Reiki away from Faustite with a shotgun or something.
After taking a moment to consider whether he really needed to say so out loud, Reiki added, “I’m glad that everything got resolved without Faustite needing to become fully human, too. I know that I don’t know everything about how he became half-youma, and what I do know is pretty awful? But I’ve gathered from Faustite that he deals with a lot of people—White Moon, Dark Mirror, and Negaverse—acting like he’s broken, or like his life is worth less than it would be if he were human instead of half-youma? And I can’t accept that—the behaviors or the underlying logic. If it had been the only way to save him, that would’ve been one matter, but…”
Reiki sighed. “I do get some petty satisfaction from the fact that the people who think that way don’t get to trot Faustite out, and use him and his story as their case-in-point argument about why humans’ lives matter more than half-youma’s.”
Guine
Posted: Fri Jun 23, 2023 5:55 pm
As the Dark Mirror Senshi moved to sit down on the bench with him, Jet tilted his head in curiosity, then quietly gathered the pages he’d spread out on the other side of him, carefully organizing them into his notebook.
“Give me names,” he said simply after a few moments as he continued to carefully straighten the pages of music.
“The names of those who have recently treated Faustite in such a way. I can’t do anything about what has happened, but I can make sure those in the Negaverse are properly reprimanded and retrained. Those in the Dark Mirror will be reported -- and if nothing is done, perhaps our alliance should be renegotiated. And any White Moon will be first in line to become youma themselves.”
There was a particular shine in his eyes when he finally looked back up at Murikabushi. A promise? Maybe a threat -- at least to those whose names he’d learn. Maybe he was just restless and looked forward to an obtainable goal.
“I do know of one who treats Faustite as though he was less than human. Faustite.”
He watched carefully, for any change in the Senshi’s demeanor, any surprise, any offense. Depending on the reaction, he would know just how well this Dark Mirror Senshi knew Faustite. Or if they, like the rest of those who flocked to Faustite because they obviously didn’t find him undesirable, were simply blinded by the flame. Quite literally, it seemed.
There was no ill will he thought or wished of those who practically worshiped the ground Faustite walked on, but he did wonder if they were content with going with the flow, or if they wanted to actually help Faustite rise up above the stigma that came with being part youma.
“You just slipped, too,” Jet pointed out, although there was no true accusation in his tone, merely vague amusement. It always happened with the self-righteous -- slipping into their own preferred biases.
“Concerned that he might have not made it in the end. Whether or not he would have been saved. No, he would have always made it. It was just a matter of what form he took. It was his decision to see if the White Moon could remove the youma side of him. Or… are you saying that youma are lesser beings?”
Jet’s correction earned him a bemused frown and a tilted head. What Jet was saying hadn’t been what Reiki meant to say—he wasn’t sure, at first, how he’d allegedly told on himself—but as Reiki listened, Jet’s objections came together. They made more than enough sense, and the only right response was meeting them earnestly, with respect.
“No, you’re right,” Reiki agreed, giving Jet a small nod. “I didn’t intend to say anything like that, but I see how it sounded that way. And you’re right, that is how a lot of people—among every faction—see youma. And unlearning that would probably be difficult enough without senshi starseeds being extra-appealing to youma. Plus…” Reiki took a deep breath. “Everything about the process that was actually at play for Faustite? How he was slowly full-youmafying? I learned that truth after the fact. I spent months thinking that Faustite was dying. Even after hearing that people thought he had gone full youma instead, I have still been thinking of it as a kind of death. Not because of any judgment about the relative value of anyone’s lives, but…well.
“The way Faustite explained things to me? He said, first, that half-youma aren’t very well understood, even in the Negaverse. Then, that ‘half-youma’ is a bit of a misnomer. He made it sound like it can be helpful, in some contexts, to think of the youma half and the human half? But overall, a half-youma experiences things differently from humans and from youma. So, based on that, I’ve felt like there would’ve been something lost in Faustite becoming either fully youma or fully human. Even if he would’ve still had the same soul—and even if either outcome is obviously better than death—he wouldn’t have experienced things as a half-youma anymore. Felt, to me, like it would’ve been a loss of his perspective as a half-youma, when he made it sound like each half-youma’s experience is so unique to them.…
“But…I don’t know. There’s a lot that I need to work on. And probably a lot that I’m ignorant about, or thinking about with a frame of mind that isn’t best suited to the situation.”
Trailing off, abruptly very aware of how much he was talking, Reiki glanced down at the grass. The ambient light from all the lanterns and the city in general danced across something sparkly—a star-charm, Reiki noted as he picked it up. Vivid red, not entirely unlike the red ribbons on his chest, waist, and biceps. Laying the charm out on his skirt, Reiki wondered if he wasn’t maybe being too forthcoming with Jet right now. Friend of Faustite or not, Jet was still a Negaverse General……but Reiki also didn’t think that he was being overly personal? At least, not with details that revealed him as too much more than overly sentimental (true), exceptionally talkative (true), and prone to overthinking things that may not have seemed important to everyone (very true).
But……there was also something special about Jet, it seemed to Reiki. So many of the Negaverse senshi and agents he’d met—at least, outside of Faustite’s team—they didn’t seem to think very much about anything but themselves and their own desires. But Jet…… If how he would have threatened to harm anyone who made things hard for any half-youma—not just one he counted as a friend—then maybe, Jet was someone who cared about more of the Negaverse than just himself.
“As for names? I’d love to give you those, but Faustite hasn’t given me any, aside from yours and the name of another Mirror senshi—who’s apparently vanished into the aether. Faustite’s spoken more in general terms, tried to downplay how much it bothers him while still acting visibly bothered. Probably because you’re also right about him treating himself like he doesn’t matter. Most of the other names I know are people on his team, and none of them have disrespected him like that as far as I’ve seen personally.”
Hell, Lilith had probably left the Negaverse by now, and when they’d spoken, she’d still shown a lot of respect for Faustite. Then Albite, Heliodor, and Lilith’s Brother all seemed like they would sentence anyone who disrespected Faustite for being half-youma to lingchi, then take turns making the thousand cuts until the offender died.
Though……Reiki did know one name. Not from Faustite, but all the same, he said, “Don’t know how much the one name I have helps when she’s apparently long gone? But I have heard horror stories about a General Schörl. Stuff like her taking a senshi who had a drinking problem, dumping vodka on his head, and threatening to set his hair on fire—while he was powered up, so his hair’s down to the floor.”
Talking about this behind Kerberos’s back gave Reiki some pause, made him swallow thickly as he considered whether or not he should say anything else.… Maybe he could keep things nameless, though? And tip Jet off so nobody else in the Negaverse would have to suffer like that again? “After that incident, General Schörl locked the same senshi in a room for two weeks of forced detox. Don’t know how much you know about alcohol detox, General? But I’ve seen it play out without proper medical supervision, and it’s a miracle that senshi didn’t die.”
Telling a certain part of the truth risked undermining everything, but at the same time? It was only fair for Jet to know the truth about the source: “That senshi isn’t with the Negaverse anymore, so you can factor that into how you evaluate his accounts however you like? For what it’s worth, though, I don’t believe he lied to me about what General Schörl did to him. Had a bias in his telling, absolutely; nobody can completely erase their personal biases. But he’s been honest with me about having killed for the Negaverse before he left, among other things. And in that specific situation, I’d hit him with my magic, and he was trying to help me understand what it does and diagnose some issues I’d been having with it.”
Strictly speaking, Reiki had no reason to trust Jet. They’d just met each other, and “friend of Faustite” didn’t necessarily mean “someone to trust.” Some of Faustite’s friends, after all, were youma and would try to eat Reiki’s starseed without Faustite there to tell them not to.
But—the way that Jet asked for the names and that gleam in his eye, they made Reiki want to trust him. Made him want to believe that Jet was also someone who wanted to help people. Maybe primarily people in the Negaverse—that was just fair, considering he was one of their Generals—but still. People in the Negaverse needed help, too. Needed someone to look out for their best interests. Even if Jet was only one person, he had a position of power in the Negaverse and maybe—maybe—he could help change things in the Negaverse for the better.
“And I’m telling you about this now,” Reiki explained, “because the way you’re talking makes you seem, to me, like you care about everyone in the Negaverse. And I know that one person can’t change everything about an institution, or know every abuse of power that goes on? But I still want to hope that no one else in the Negaverse will need to go through something like that senshi or Faustite did. And even if no one can punish General Schörl, I want to believe, Jet, that you can still make things better for all of the Negaverse’s agents, senshi, and youma going forward.”
Reiki huffed, then offered Jet an embarrassed, apologetic smile. “And, uh. I really hope Faustite or Albite warned you that I can talk enough for ten people. And if he didn’t, uh……I’m sorry about that?”
Guine
oh my god, jet sweetie, i am so sorry for this ridiculous chatterbox boy emotion_bigheart
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2023 5:36 pm
Jet was quiet as he listened. He wasn’t particularly bothered by how much the other spoke. Nothing he was currently saying was enough to irritate him. And he knew others who tended to ramble or rant more than actually speak. If anything, the more he heard, the more he could learn. He didn’t immediately trust that everything he was hearing was undeniable truth, but it was good for a baseline.
He also knew that it didn’t matter whether or not Jet said that he cared about everyone in the Negaverse. Anyone could say anything, and those naive enough to believe them were just fools who deserved to be tricked.
Murikabushi saying that he wanted to believe that Jet could make things better earned a small snort of amusement. He was just one person -- and Murikabushi even said he knew one person couldn’t change everything. To truly make things better, it needed to be a collective effort, but he liked to think he understood what Murikabushi meant.
“I was fourteen when I joined the Negaverse,” he shared, and maybe it came out of nowhere, but with all this talk about believing in him to change things, and being told stories about the horrors of what the Negaverse was capable of doing, he thought it was only fair that he offered a little bit of insight on why he was who he was. Why he said and did the things he did.
“Had an older brother. He worked so hard to take care of me. He was all I had,” Jet continued. He knew the possibilities of someone looking up information, of piecing things together to figure out his identity. But it wasn’t a secret that he had a brother, nor was it a secret of when he’d joined the Negaverse.
“Found out he was in the Negaverse the same night a Senshi murdered him in front of me. There was no question what I wanted to do with my life at that moment. I had nothing left. But the Negaverse took me in. I’d rather suffer the hell of your choice than go through what I experienced before joining the Negaverse again. And I don’t want anyone else experiencing it either,” he hummed almost casually, but there was a certain edge to his voice. The memories were there, almost always suppressed, but there.
He glanced over at Murikabushi then, and tilted his head curiously. “The Negaverse has its problems, there’s no denying that. But the White Moon is just as cruel and unforgiving. Sometimes even more so, because they don’t have the support the Negaverse can offer.
“They’re all rogues and vagabonds, claiming to be part of something bigger, when all they care about is working towards their own individual goals. They want to restore their worlds? Their wonders? Good. They can leave Earth. Even if they claim to be part of a group, they only have interest in their namesake. No greater goal. No setting aside their ego to form something beyond the illusion of teamwork. Just remember that the next time you’re listening to stories from the White Moon. They’ll tell you of the cruel and heartless things the Negaverse has done, while conveniently forgetting about everything they did and continue doing.”
He paused for a moment, and he wondered if he would be accused of going off topic, even though he felt as though the theme of their conversation continued. After a moment he continued.
“I never met Schorl. But if those stories are true, and I don’t doubt that they are in some variation at least, then it is my opinion that she doesn’t deserve a rank."
He'd heard enough about her from Faustite to make him never want to meet her.
"As for Faustite, he is in a unique position that he could use to help and empower those who are like him. I can only do so much as an ally, but will do what I can to work with Faustite and other youma or part-youma agents.”
It was more complicated than that, but a chat in the park on a bench in the middle of the night, having only just met…? He doubted there was enough time in the day to discuss all the fine intricacies of humans and youma dynamics.
The apology received a shrug. "My partner usually talks just as much, but he uses infinitely more curses."
Jet’s story didn’t faze Reiki, not really. Listening to it made his heart ache, for certain, but nothing about it sounded all that surprising, in the context of the war. Yes, he frowned in sympathy over the notion of Jet joining up at fourteen, and yes, Reiki’s eyes glistened, hearing Jet talk about his beloved older brother, about losing his brother, about losing his brother because some White Moon senshi murdered him……but none of it truly surprised Reiki. All three of the major factions had teenagers in their ranks—and the occasional youngest sibling twenty-something who didn’t want to grow up, like Lete—and all three of the major factions had blood on their hands.
And with Jet’s brother being Negaverse? Of course one of those self-righteous jackasses would have murdered him without a care for anything.
Besides, Faustite had become a half-youma at fifteen. From what little Reiki knew about those circumstances—which truly was almost nothing—it made sense to think that he’d been around in the Negaverse for longer. Plus, it made all too much sense as a recruitment strategy for every faction: get ‘em young, reward them for loyalty and prioritizing the war over anything else in their lives, inoculate them to the horror of it all and make it so all they know anymore is fighting—or at least depending on Mirrorspace to hide from the fighting, more ostrich than human or youma, because burying your head in a heap of finely shattered mirror-pieces had ever helped literally anyone—which made it that much harder for them to engage with the real world, as the rest of society understood it.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Reiki said softly, gently, “and that the White Moon senshi who murdered your brother probably not only didn’t face consequences for that, but also believed they had every right to do that……as if a Negaverse uniform—” Or a Dark Mirror fuku, “—means you lose your right to live, and ******** any survivors who love you on top of it.”
Only one thing Jet said really stood out as something that Reiki felt inclined to quibble with, but after mulling it over for a moment, the worst vaguely protest-adjacent something Reiki could manage was, “The senshi whose story I shared just now, he’s only one of them, and he’s one who has, in my experience with him, tried to be fair to the Negaverse even while talking about what Schörl did to him. He has, for example, met me getting outraged on his behalf about the forced detox incident? By pointing out that he didn’t know if anyone really knew what sort of things Schörl got away with doing, and that plenty of people in the Negaverse aren’t like her. I agree about exercising caution in listening to stories from people in the White Moon; that’s just a good practice to be in with anyone, especially if they try to say they don’t have any biases.
“But please understand, General Jet: when this senshi told me his story, it wasn’t meant to be about the Negaverse as a whole. It was about experiences he had while in the Negaverse, but that was set-dressing for the actual story. The focus was on his substance abuse and sobriety, because my magic had triggered him about that.…… It gave him a craving for alcohol so bad that he did briefly leave Earth, just to get away from the temptation.” Reiki nodded at nothing in particular, more for himself than for anyone or anything else. “His point in that conversation was not about the Negaverse as an institution; it was about what he’d personally been through in one specific aspect of his time among your ranks, and he told me because I asked, because I wanted to understand what my magic had done.
“My point in bringing it up is that I believe what he said about his experiences and don’t want anyone else in the Negaverse to suffer like that. I don’t know all your internal workings, or how Schörl got away with what she did. It’s just something that I wouldn’t wish on anybody, and that I want to hope the Negaverse might have ways of preventing.”
Taking a deep breath, Reiki paused. He nudged his glasses up so he could idly rub at one eye, and tamped down the impulse to start humming “Wig In A Box.” For one thing, he needed a quick moment to mentally regroup because, whether or not he was being interviewed about his fitness or lack thereof to continue doing whatever he and Faustite were doing, the conversation was………kind of A Lot.
For another thing, Reiki needed to keep himself grounded in the facts of the conversation, and to remind himself that, A., in one aspect, he was probably reading too much into the things that Jet was saying; and B., even if he wasn’t imagining anything, then it probably wasn’t personal. Jet was, as far as Reiki could tell, someone who cared deeply about the Negaverse and their people. He was someone who had suffered greatly at the White Moon’s hands. Warning Reiki to be careful with believing stories from White Moon senshi and Knights? That made perfect sense, and it didn’t mean that Jet thought anything in particular about Reiki. They had, after all, only just met, and what little they’d known about each other before had (as far as Reiki knew) only come from Faustite.
Given the impression Jet had made so far, Reiki felt like he probably meant it as a friendly warning, not as a condemnation of Reiki’s preference for compassion and giving people the benefit of the doubt as much as possible.
Still, more did need to be said: “Anyway, I have plenty of gripes with the White Moon, but I can’t rightly criticize the then for any of your points about disorganization, ego-driven s**t that doesn’t go anywhere, and all of that. I trusted that someone I knew in my civilian life would be part of a team that cares about using the power in our starseeds to help people, and wound up in the Dark Mirror Court. And on the whole? The Court is just as guilty as the White Moon of all those same things: disorganization, astronomical self-interest that prohibits us from doing anything of actual value to anybody, claiming a moral high-ground that we’ve done jackshit to earn, and no desire to change or to use our senshi powers to help anyone but ourselves.”
Reiki huffed and rolled his eyes. “Because why do anything that might help anyone else, improve the world in any materially meaningful ways, or actually matter when we could instead ******** around, building Malibu Barbie Dream-Houses in Mirrorspace.”
Levi had spelled that out for Reiki pretty clearly: How much help can we offer to other people, when we’re just trying to survive?
More than the Court was currently offering, obviously! That was Reiki’s entire point! Because literally any efforts, even half-baked or deeply misguided ones, would have been a considerable ******** improvement on absolutely nothing, which was what the Court was doing now! The math here was pretty simple and straightforward, actually!
Guine_
Two months of mental blank space while trying to write this boy’s tags, and then, all of a sudden, THIS NOVELLA,
soz jet, hope you enjoyed learning that muri is not happy in his current life position emotion_bigheart
Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2023 9:18 am
Jet wasn’t particularly looking for sympathy for what happened. It was in the past and he’d grown from what he’d experienced.
Just as he’d experienced how limited information was passed to the Dark Mirror Court, it seemed.
It was a good thing to note. He didn’t particularly care about the Dark Mirror Court as a whole, and would personally like to rip the mirrored starseed from a number of them himself, but this one seemed easily influenced, regardless of what actual true information he had. And Jet doubted he would dare to attack him. Especially since he was so fond of Faustite.
Which was probably why his lip twitched in amusement when he was addressed as General. The power level he currently was, of course. Using rank to address him at all, however, meant there certainly was a broken line of communication somewhere that he had no intention of correcting at the moment.
But things had changed in the Negaverse. He already told the Senshi that he’d never met Schorl. He knew some of the things she’d done from Faustite, but since there wasn’t a way to magically make her show up so they could investigate what she did, it was a weird thing to get hung up on.
Especially since Murikabushi couldn’t provide the names of people who had recently treated Faustite poorly.
It seemed that he was stuck on what happened and not what they could do to move forward. For all he knew, this Senshi who had suffered from poor treatment had never reported the incident, and was now crying about it after turning traitor instead of letting the Queen pass down judgment. Which was likely what happened. People tend to let their egos control them rather than seeking help.
“Oh?” he tilted his head curiously at the critique of the Dark Mirror Court. “Does that mean you’ll be joining the Negaverse instead?”
Something about the way Murikabushi said everything about the Dark Mirror Court -- and how he couldn’t rightly criticize the White Moon -- made Jet pause and watch the Senshi with a little more scrutiny. Easily influenced indeed…
