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.
Anytime you could get a large group of people together in one place was, in Lete’s none too humble opinion, a perfect opportunity for draining energy. Free real estate, you might have said. With so many people flitting around, you didn’t have to worry so much about potentially getting caught. It would only make sense for people to get tired and start feeling headachey or any of the other things that happened from having one’s energy drained. Especially if they were elderly, or very young, or they’d been working long hours this week, or maybe they were just introverts who’d come out for the Star Festival funtimes and did genuinely enjoy themselves, but all that prolonged exposure to other humans took a toll on them.
(Lete tried very hard to focus on all of those categories of people except for “elderly.” No, thank you, she did not need to think about meemaw right now, nor about Leandro probably needing more help to care for her sometimes, nor about any of it. Because powering up into Lete meant she was exempted, for the time being, from caring about all the tedious garbage that threatened to drag Gabi down and ruin her good moods on any given day. Lete was powerful. Lete was cool. Lete had NO. ********. WORRIES. nothing whatsoever, thank you very much!!!! And she very much preferred it that way.)
Thankfully, Star Festival also meant that a lot of people were wandering around in strange costumes for the sheer delight of doing so. Which worked out perfectly well for Lete, because it meant that she could sit herself down on a bench near the lantern festival, fully powered up, and nobody really looked twice at her cute fuku. While sending her wraiths out one after another to drain energy from other people at the lantern festival—and being sure to instruct each one that they should only pass through a single person once or maybe twice, but never enough to make somebody pass out—Lete brought out the notebook in which she’d started keeping her ideas about the Welcome to Nightvale-esque podcast that she wanted to start and get some of her fellow Mirror senshi involved in.
The first wraith came back to her looking like a little puppy with twisty demon horns coming out of its head. The second one looked like a unicorn the size of a housecat when it returned to her, all flush with energy. Four more went and came back after those two, and had Lete bothered to pay attention to the effects of her actions, she might have noticed that a suspicious number of people around the lantern festival were starting to show the signs of having had their energy drained.
But paying attention to potential dangers and consequences was, in Lete’s opinion, something that boring people did. Instead of being even remotely responsible, she sent out yet another wraith and turned back to her notebook. The mirrorwraiths could handle themselves, and Lete had work to do. Podcast ideas didn’t dream themselves up, after all.
Meighei_
Posted: Wed Jun 28, 2023 11:02 am
Fool me once, fool me twice, fool me three times…
Urania’s experience with the native wildlife during the Star Festival had been illuminating and that wasn’t just because she was now holding a lantern infused with some sort of glowing material from the local caterpillars. She’d previously investigated a strange beast as well as unusual cicadas when she had come out exploring the celebration and she was not about to let her guard down because these caterpillars were both cute and glowing (too areas of which she was weak). They might be interesting, they might be intriguing, they might be curious — but she would not be fooled this time! The creatures of Destiny City would not evade this senshi, not tonight.
So you could understand her disappointment when there were no glowing bugs to collect at all. Just glowing paste that had been created from their luminescent corpses.
Could it really just be a regular night at the Star Festival? The senshi sighed in relief. She’d get to take her paper lantern and participate in one of the festival’s many traditions, just as she had with taking a wish and granting a wish. Now to activate her lantern and watch it fly…
… but then she caught something out of the corner of her eye. It looked to her to be a small unicorn. Could it be? This city did have odd beasts and weird insects — surely a mythological creature was not too much to imagine!
But Earth didn’t have those. Her world had, but not this planet. So how had it gotten here? The two other incidents were one thing — each animal, if they hadn’t been so aggressive, could have passed as Earth critters. This one certainly couldn’t.
Urania followed it to its source. A woman who appeared to be another senshi. Like her, but not. She could feel the Chaos in the air now. But she waited another moment to see what she would do and that’s when she realized these were stealing energy.
“Hey! Those creatures of yours. They’re stealing energy and that’s not okay and… um, what are they?”
Vaguely, Lete felt the White Moon aura somewhere in around the lantern festival, and while that initially set her nerves on edge, she tried to simply take a deep breath and banish the thought. Just because a White Moon aura was here, that didn’t make it Lete’s problem. She didn’t need to start anything. White Moon senshi and Knights, love them like Murikabushi or hate them like most of the more sensible Negaverse friends Lete had made so far, did technically have a right to exist in the world, same as anybody else.
As much as the nosy nature and general lack of manners among White Moon senshi and their Knights annoyed and regularly inconvenienced Lete personally, she wouldn’t have any quarrel with whoever had shown up here if they behaved themselves, stayed on their own side of the lantern festival, and let her go about her own business. They and Lete could get along just fine as long as they left her the Hell alone to do her job for the Mirror and jot down more ideas about her podcast and how Welcome to Night Vale hadn’t innovated so much just for this story to not have any queer characters.
Which, of course, meant that Lete soon heard the telltale sound of a White Moon senshi trying to call her out while knowing approximately nothing about anything.
With a glance over her shoulder, Lete spotted the senshi who’d decided to come make trouble, some pale-skinned brunette with big blue eyes, a fuku that Lete’s obnoxious, simpering older Mirror-brother no doubt would have loved (all the lacy frills and the stockings were seriously right up Muri’s alley), and probably as much hair as Lete had herself. Hard to tell, with the other senshi’s locks pulled up in space-buns and hair-loopies, but it didn’t really matter.
What mattered was Lete rolling her eyes and pointedly flipping her notebook closed. (Okay, well, maybe the little purple star charm she spotted on the ground could matter, too. It was cute, it was sparkly, and someone had left it behind, so finders keepers, as far as Lete was concerned. Her star-charm, now.)
So much for getting work on the podcast done.
“They’re called Mirrorwraiths, hermana,” Lete said, stashing her notebook away in her subspace pocket with all the Generally Over It attitude of a Hot Topic cashier who was half-an-hour late for her federally mandated lunch-break. “And they really aren’t hurting anybody. I can only send out one at a time.”
Right on cue, the most recent one she’d sent out came scampering back to her. Full of energy, the wrath looked like a pegasus the size of a typical housecat, with butterfly wings instead of wings. The only thing that set it apart from a normal creature? ……Well, the only thing setting it apart from an organic creature anyway, since Earth unfortunately didn’t have very many butterfly-pegasi running around? Rather than flesh and blood, or other organic materials like chitin and hemolymph, the wraith seemed to be made from thousands of shattered, reflective shards. Holding out her arm, Lete got the wraith to perch there so politely.
Maybe this White Moon senshi had a mouth on her, but she hadn’t attacked yet, so maybe she could be reasoned with. Maybe she could even come to see why the Court was the right place to be, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe letting her get a better look at a Mirrorwraith could help with that.
“See how sweet and well-behaved they are?” Lete tried to smile as she left her bench behind and came closer to the other senshi. The light from the lanterns glittered across the surface of the Mirrorwraith’s……erm, skin? Or whatever it should’ve been called. “Maybe they take a little bit of energy from people, sure, but that’s what lets you see them. They don’t really have a tangible form without help.”
Meighei
Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2023 6:10 pm
Mirrorwraiths? Urania had never heard that term before. So they were some type of creature she didn’t know about. And that piqued her interest more than anything.
“Mirror… wraiths.” She knew what a mirror was and what a wraith was and she tried to combine the two in her head.
The curious senshi moved in closer. Lete wasn’t attacking her, even though she had come in hot. She was even coming to meet her.
“They do look sweet.” She looked at the little butterfly pegasus which looked like the unicorn before it, light glittering about it. “Can I… um.. touch it?”
Lete blinked at that question, and then immediately felt a little bit silly for having done so. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt like that if she’d been more surprised by the fact that this encounter……?? Was going well?? Without this other senshi being Demeter, which basically never happened with White Moon Senshi, in Lete’s experience??
But the actual thing that had caught Lete by surprise was the question of whether or not the other senshi could touch the Wraith……while Lete had it perched on her arm. Which meant that Lete thinking about the logistical issues of touching a Mirrorwraith wasn’t really an issue. Trying to banish that notion from her mind, Lete angled herself and the wraith on her arm closer to the other senshi.
“Just be careful with them, okay? They’re very delicate.” Smiling in a way that she hoped was encouraging, Lete added, “Touching them might feel weird? And they might bristle a little? But just be careful. I’m Lete, by the way.”
If worse came to worst, and trying to introduce this girl to the wraiths didn’t work out, Lete could just try to quickly let this specific wraith back into her mirrorshard, then get violent.
Meighei
Posted: Sat Jul 01, 2023 12:59 pm
“I’ll be careful.” Urania was so enthralled by the creature that she didn’t think of the danger it could cause her. She reached out to touch it. Would it hurt her or drain her energy? Those were thoughts for future Urania.
“I’m Urania. I’m kind of new here. Never seen these before.”
Admittedly, Lete had no idea how this was going to go either, but she felt that uncertainty about more than just the matter of letting an Order senshi touch a Mirrorwraith. She’d stumbled into completely unfamiliar territory when Urania had decided not to shoot her magic off at Lete first—which, in fairness, hadn’t gotten in the way of Lete shooting first with other White Moon senshi before? Or with any knights? But most of them, well. Tended to come on like they were going to shoot their magic off, or throw around their weapons, or whatever unless Lete acted first.
……Maybe some of them hadn’t, really. Demeter obviously hadn’t, but she was special. This girl Urania hadn’t really done anything wrong except make assumptions about Lete’s activities that were technically correct. But after that encounter when Lete had first started everything—the run-in with that other White Moon girl, Angelica of Christmas trees or whatever—how could she trust that any White Moon operatives were really on the level? If they didn’t at least consider that maybe, the Dark Mirror had a better idea for what to do with themselves as senshi than the White Moon did?
At least the Mirrorwraith didn’t seem to mind being touched very much. It stiffened briefly, beneath Urania’s touch. Bristled, but didn’t pull away or lash out at her. While she got her moment to touch it, the wraith looked up to Lete as if asking what it should do with Urania. Under most normal circumstances, the idea of having it rush through and drain her might have appealed……but Lete just gave the wraith a little shake of her head. After Urania had had some time to appreciate what touching the wraith felt like, Lete held up the mirrorshard, to let the wraith escape back to Mirrorspace.
Meighei
Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2023 5:14 pm
Urania touched the little thing and was surprised that it let her. It really was rather cute. She had a hard time believing that it could steal energy.
She watched as it went back into the shard. She wondered what happened to it when it went away. Did it live in there?
“Thank you for letting me touch it. But I really do have to ask that you don’t collect any more energy here. So, um, don’t, okay?”
She activated her magic to blind Lete and then fled.