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!
Kaifeng didn’t entirely suppose that taking time to go visit the Wishing Tree was exactly what he should’ve been doing with his time as a magical knight? But……well, part of the deal here, he’d gathered, was that magical knights were supposed to protect people, look out for them in the face of youma trying to devour them and/or their energy, keep them safe when so much about Destiny City proved incredibly dangerous for people without magic on their side. People would be around the Wishing Tree—maybe not as many right now, after nightfall, as there would’ve been at almost any other time of day—and therefore, it only made sense to go spend some time there and make sure that they had somebody looking out for him.
Maybe Kaifeng’s outfit and folding fan didn’t necessarily lend itself to blending in very well, and maybe he’d get a few stares, but……eh. Probably no more than you got for doing most magical things in Destiny City. A lot of people here, Kaifeng had noticed, really had perfected the art of ignoring things that they didn’t want to try and factor into their view of how the world worked, and what did or didn’t exist in the world. Probably a necessary survival mechanism, all things considered. If you didn’t have the power to do anything about the magical weirdness going on in town, and if that powerlessness upset you too much to deal with, then of course you’d need some way to help shield yourself from it. Looking the other way and pretending that it didn’t exist and/or was completely normal made perfect sense as a way to do that.
(Kaifeng did not think about Zhìháo and his siblings back in Boston. He did *not* think about how many friends Huang Zhìmíng had had among the local Boston PD, how he’d nurtured those friendships over decades of said cops protecting his little independent grocery store and the various locations he opened up throughout the city, nor did Kaifeng think about how many generational friendships Huang Zhìmíng had nurtured among the people who’d followed their fathers into The Force.
He did *NOT* waste a single thought on how many of those fine, upstanding Boston cops—paragons of virtue and civic duty as they were—had ever looked the other way and pretended they saw nothing about Zhìháo or one of his siblings stumbling out of a closet, miserable, disoriented, and probably some degree of dehydrated, or how many of them had ever believed some c**k-and-bull about the children playing Hide And Go Seek, even after Xiuying and Qiang-erQiang-geQiang-er had both gotten too old to play such games and could have easily pawned the Elder Sibling Responsibility of playing with Jiayi, Jiawei, and Xiaying off on Zhìháo and Xinyan.
Kaifeng didn’t think about these things because they didn’t matter. Because even in his civilian ways, he was no longer Zhìháo. Because Zhìháo was gone, only Liánlí and Kaifeng remained, and everyone was better off for that, please and thank you kindly.)
Trying to distract himself from all of those things that he certainly wasn’t thinking about, Kaifeng turned to the stack of papers, on which people were meant to write their wishes. After some consideration, he scribbled one down—“I wish for more people to stand up to bullies and protect the little guy”—and hung it up. In the spirit of the Wishing Tree, that meant Kaifeng needed to take one of his own, and fortunately, he rather liked the first one that he found: “Be nice to a service worker today.”
Well, that sounded perfectly lovely, and even better to share with someone else. His first thought was to message Selenga about it, at least until he recalled that Qi-jie had said something about wanting to have a date night with hir husband at the lantern festival. But there was another White Moon aura nearby.…… Maybe they’d be down to make new friends and also be nice to a service worker.
After some poking around, Kaifeng spotted a senshi with a very fine tail attached to his fuku, on the ground and digging. Probably burying a wish, Kaifeng thought as he came toward the senshi.
“Hi, hi,” he said, warmly and brightly, when he was close enough to not need to be as loud as he usually was. “So, my name is Kaifeng. I’m a Saturn Page. And I just pulled down this wish off the tree that says ‘Be nice to a service worker today.’ Then I saw you and thought ‘Oh, hey, a senshi by themself. Maybe I could buy us coffee or something, and we could both be nice to a service worker together.’” Grinning eagerly down at the senshi, Kaifeng asked, “What d’you think?”
genovianprince_
Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2023 9:13 pm
Monoceros very quietly buried the wish—his wish for Ashanite to leave the Negaverse, no matter how hopeless it may have seemed.
As he buried, someone approached, and he startled, nearly falling over. "Oh, um, hi," he said, standing up and brushing the dirt from his knees. "Hi. Kaifeng. Um, I'm Monoceros, senshi of, uh, porcupines?"
God, he hadn't met anyone new in so long, he floundered. "I, uh... Sure, why not? I hadn't picked a wish off the tree myself yet," he agreed, feeling unsure about doing it, but not really sure if he could refuse either—granting others' wishes was supposed to help with yours, so...
Kaifeng waved “hi” at the senshi—Monoceros—even though he’d already introduced himself and probably did not, per se, need to do that. “Nice to meet you, Monoceros of Porcupines,” he said brightly. It made sense to him that the poor senshi seemed a bit awkward. Most people, in Kaifeng’s experience, sort of tended to be when getting approached out of the blue by someone they didn’t know, even if that person only intended to make friends and spread some more good things in the universe. “I don’t mind taking a detour to look for wishes, if you want to grant one for somebody yourself. There are plenty of coffee places open decently late around here.…”
And now that Monoceros was standing up and Kaifeng could get a better look at him, he added with a smile, “Your skirt looks really nice on you, by the way.”
genovianprince
Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2023 12:25 am
Monoceros felt incredibly shy. Why, oh why, did he attract extroverts? Who just walked up to people and started chatting like this? Extroverts with no sense of timing, that's who! Ahh!! He'd just worked through an emotional journey here, man!!!!
"I, um, thanks," he said, fiddling with the hem of his skirt. The shorts underneath still made him feel bad, like a reminder of who he had been, who he'd fought so hard to get away from.
"I don't really know about grabbing one for myself, I, um. Was going to come back later."
God, he felt like such an idiot.
"We should probably get coffee in casual clothes??"
Maybe Kaifeng had no sense of timing, but on the plus, he was also easily satisfied with pretty much any answer, especially once he had decided to make friends with somebody. And even though Monoceros seemed a bit off-kilter at the moment, he also seemed very sweet, so Kaifeng had decided that they would be great friends. Which, in this particular moment, meant that he didn’t question any of Monoceros’s answers about the Wishing Tree, or pulling down a wish for himself, or wanting to come back later; he just nodded and kept smiling. Some people, Kaifeng figured, probably wanted relative privacy while looking around the wishes that were available and deciding which ones they might want to take.
Instead of lingering, then, Kaifeng started leading them through the park, toward an alley. He paused briefly, spotting something glittery in the grass and crouching down to pick it up (oooh, a star charm! and it was gold!! how lucky for him!!!). As he spun his cute new charm around on his finger, some part of Kaifeng realized, however vaguely, that taking a New Friend whom he had met not even five minutes ago might have come off as creepy, so he tried to help tone things down as much as he could by saying, “We can power down over there. Less chance of being seen by anybody who might be out, y’know?”
Because truly, the lack of other powered auras didn’t mean that somebody might not be lurking somewhere. A Negaverse senshi or one of their Knights-but-not-really could’ve been around the park in plainclothes too, and then Kaifeng and Monoceros would’ve really been in trouble, wouldn’t they? The whole idea of hiding from others to power down just made sense, didn’t it?
In what he hoped came across as a show of good faith, Kaifeng paused only briefly once they were in the alley, and at that, mostly to hold out his star charm and ask, “Could you hold this for a sec? I kinda wanna play with it instead of having to power back up and get it out of my subspace later.…”
After handing the charm over, though, he powered down back into Liánlí: his braid shifted into a high ponytail instead. His lilac pleated skirt gave way to a black-and-red plaid one over a pair of black skinny jeans just as his violet boots shifted into a pair of well-loved black sneakers (not yet in need of replacement, though he thought Hayden would probably start disagreeing soon). His top and waistcoat shimmered a little, soon replaced by an oversized old flannel shirt, patterned in magenta and black plaid, over top of a black t-shirt he’d found at Target some October past, with a little cartoon of three ghosties and the words “IF YOU GOT IT, HAUNT IT” printed around them.
Wearing the same warm smile, he waved “hi” again. “Liánlí, when we’re like this.”
genovianprince
Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2023 9:45 pm
Monoceros followed, rather bemusedly at first, and mostly just went along with whatever Kaifeng wanted for the moment—holding onto his charm and passing it over once Lianli was powered down.
He popped himself down and smiled awkwardly, wishing he were better dressed himself, but he was just in a skirt that went halfway down his chins, decorated in bisexual flowers, and probably some kind of stupid video game t-shirt. He glanced down. Ah, yup. Legend of Zelda. Very cool.
"I'm Robin," he said, waving slightly. "So, um. You had a place in mind, or?"
However Monoceros—well, Robin, now—felt about his own outfit, Liánlí kept smiling about it. And why shouldn’t he have? “Your flowers are a really great touch for Pride month, Robin,” he said genuinely as he led them out of the alley and back onto the sidewalk. Making a pensive little noise, Liánlí did a quick scan of his own outfit. “Damn, I’m not even wearing any buttons.… Not that any of the words I like best would really……”
He hummed, ostensibly passing a glance over the street that surrounded them, but honestly, more than anything, staring into space that happened to be occupied by buildings, streetlamps, traffic lights, and the city’s other assorted trappings. “I mean, realistically, the characters would fit on a pinback button pretty easy? Just physically speaking?
“But they wouldn’t make sense to anybody who doesn’t know Chinese. So, there’s translating them, then explaining what they mean, and why ‘the half-eaten peach’ means anything to do with men in love with other men, and how even that isn’t, like, the most perfectly accurate term for me, but it still feels better than any English word except for queer, and all kinds of history and cultural differences, and just……eh?”
Trailing off into that noncommittal sound, Liánlí threw in a shrug for good measure. “Language is hard,” he decided with a sigh, idly spinning his little gold star charm around on his index finger.
So much so, in fact, that Liánlí didn’t notice how he completely had not answered Robin’s actual question.
genovianprince
Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2023 5:37 pm
Oh!!!
His heart swelled immediately, the figurative porcupine quills he'd been keeping slightly raised defensively relaxing. His shoulders un-hunched, entire body straightening and perking up.
Fellow queer.
He beamed. "It is hard, and you say that like you're already pre-exhausted of telling people, but that sounds so cool, I would love to hear it, if you're willing?" he started to babble. "It's just, like, I wish I had all the time in the world to learn this kind of stuff about other cultures, but I don't, haha. But, I mean, half-eaten peach definitely sounds like it's got interesting history!"
Robin also did not notice his question went unanswered, because all previous thoughts had completely evacuated his brain.
