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 Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2023 2:02 am
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Having so little time and so much to do did not exempt Reiki from doing his usual patrols around town. This was just simple facts, as far as Reiki saw them, even if simple facts meant a lot of pushing himself up against his limits of what he could easily handle. Not as bad as things had gotten during Starfest 2022, when he’d had to learn the ropes of being a magical girl and work around a full complement of Pride Month drag show bookings.
But still, a lot of work went into preparing to leave the Dark Mirror Court, and a lot of work also went into doing patrols. A lot of people wouldn’t have thought any less of Reiki for easing up on the latter, but how could he? As a sense, even one currently tainted by Chaos, Reiki had certain responsibilities and he refused to tolerate any slacking on his own part. So here he was out in Southside Park, all dolled up as the Black Mirror’s vision of who and what Murikabushi should’ve been.
Wasn’t long before he found someone who affirmed that Reiki coming out here like this had been the right call. Someone White Moon, with an aura about as powerful as his own, collapsed in the grass by some picnic tables. As he got close enough, Reiki could see that her outfit had the pastel gradients and stars of a Cosmos Knight.
“Hey,” he said softly, kneeling down to check on her. “Hey, excuse me? Miss, my name’s Murikabushi, can you hear me? Or tell me what happened?”
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Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2023 2:12 am
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Everything hurt. Also, Casablanca was dying. These were, as far as she was concerned, clearly objective statements, in the wake of whatever the strange Dark Mirror's magic had done. Everything hurt, she was dying, and it was all super miserable and she didn't want to be here.
She pressed the heel of her hand to the side of her head, and whined, softly. It was definitely improving, now that the magic had clearly ended, but she still felt horrifically overwhelmed, and she sort of wanted to throw up. The amount of sensation the other Senshi's magic made her feel had left her dizzy and disoriented, and she only really realized there was someone else there when she heard someone call out to her.
And then she felt the Dark Mirror aura,and she whined miserably, flopping over onto the grass.
"If you're here to finish me off for your buddy," she said, not at all (read: extremely) dramatically and making an extremely reasonable (read: absolutely unreasonable) conclusion from all of the evidence (that is to say, zero) she had, "just do it quick, her magic sucks and you'd be doing me a favor. Ow."
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Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2023 6:41 am
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Fortunately for the Cosmos Knight—though perhaps unfortunately for her preconceived notions about how an encounter like this should have gone—Reiki only met her dramatics with a bemused stare and a tilt of the head.… “Buddy”? So, some other Dark Mirror had attacked her……and then everything started coming together. The way the Knight was splayed out on the ground, how exhausted she seemed to be, how it seemed like everything either was or had been overstimulating her recently, the picnic tables adjacent…… God ******** damnit.
“So, I take it you’ve run into Lete, then,” Reiki said, keeping his voice soft, though he did let himself shake his head. That jumped-up ******** little nuisance, just……ugh. “Five-foot-eight, kinda curvy? Dark, purple-y hair down to the floor? Throws around extraneous Spanish while reading books on picnic tables and obviously sending Mirrorwraiths after people?”
It seemed the likeliest conclusion to Reiki, at least based on the available evidence. Either way, he reached into his subspace for one of the chilled, closed bottles of water that he kept in there. Reaching over, he gently curled one of the Knight’s hands around the bottle. “It hasn’t been opened yet, you can check the seal,” he said. “Anyway, my name is Murikabushi and if it’s Lete who ******** around with you, I’m sorry. Her first encounter with somebody from the White Moon was just……” Shaking his head again, Reiki exaggeratedly widened his eyes. Sometimes, words couldn’t communicate nearly as much as the human face could.
Not that this stopped Reiki from explaining: “Like, okay, for contrast here? My first encounter with a White Moon senshi was overall positive. I was genuinely being kind of a jackass to someone who’d hurt a friend of mine.” Not the best thing to admit, but…well. Reiki had been in the wrong that night with Daphne and Reiki’s Michel Who Wasn’t A Jackass Saturn Knight. If this Knight already had a bad view of Dark Mirrors, maybe it would help to be honest about how Reiki hadn’t always been in the right, hadn’t always used his magic correctly or responsibly. “So, this White Moon senshi ran in and kicked me to stop me from doing what I was doing. Then, we had a nice talk. She’s a big part of why I don’t drain people anymore, but Lete?”
Reiki sighed again and shook his head, reaching into his subspace again. “When I found the two of them? Miss Angelica of Spruce was talking about killing all Dark Mirrors like a Bond villain, while Lete was cowering on her a** and her magic wasn’t working. As far as I know, all she’d done that night was exist while Dark Mirror, which just pissed Angelica off because of some romantic drama with a totally different Mirror senshi. Not that any of it excuses what Lete did to you; it doesn’t. But her behaviors aren’t typical of the Court and……”
Reiki hummed pensively, setting a little bottle of aspirin on the Cosmos Knight’s stomach. “If it helps any? Lete’s magic is really futzy because she got Awakened late? She’s punched herself in the face with it at least twice that I know of.”
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Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2023 10:56 am
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Okay, so, this other Dark Mirror was not moving like he wanted to strike her down. That was nice. Maybe death was not coming on this day.
She nodded, at his description, unhappily. "She'd be a lot hotter if she wasn't such a b***h," she said, and she proceeded to mentally skate right by calling a Chaos Senshi "hot." It was a statement of fact, anyway. Lete was gorgeous, she was just also awful. She turned to look at Murikabushi, as he offered her water, carefully taking it and opening it to take a sip. It did help, and she shifted to sort of...lean on the nearest bench. "Thanks. And, uh. Sorry for accusing you of wanting to kill me."
At least he didn't seem to have taken too much offense.
"And, um. I'm sorry that happened to her. That sounds really ******** up." She frowned. "I only got in her face because she was doing that draining thing, and it's not cool, you know? But I'm not gonna lie, it does sorta make me feel better to know that she's had to have a taste of her own medicine."
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Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2023 11:49 am
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Patience did not come easily to Reiki and never had, but in situations like this one, he found it somewhat easier to be patient……to wait as long as the Cosmos Knight needed to shift around, get as comfortable as she could under the present circumstances, answer Reiki’s little monologue however she felt like doing, and so on, and so forth. Lete’s magic was a ******** b***h to deal with, as far as Reiki had seen, and the Cosmos Knight was doing very well to power through it at all.
Listening to her response, he nodded. “No worries. You had no reason to trust a Dark Mirror aura, especially not after dealing with Lete,” Reiki told her gently, trying to offer her some kind of positive reassurance. “I’ve tried talking to her and getting her to calm down, but she’s a stubborn little b***h and honestly? My cousin’s daughter is more mature than she is.… My cousin’s daughter is five.” Almost six, granted, but Morikawa Reika lived in Kyoto with Mom’s side of the family, and either way, Reika-chan remained significantly more mature than Lete.
With a soft sigh, Reiki shifted to sit beside the Cosmos Knight, also leaning back against the bench. “Anyway, you’re totally right about the issue of draining people and how it’s gross. It’s not too uncommon for Mirror senshi to justify it to themselves by going like ‘Oh, I only drain energy from jerks and douchebags and wannabe gentrifiers or whatever, so it’s okay’—Lete’s sort of an anomaly among Mirror senshi in my experience because she doesn’t really do that? Way more of a Negaverse-style approach of ‘Energy draining is energy draining, it doesn’t matter who you get it from, why split hairs when it’s not like you can know for sure what somebody’s life story is and we quote-unquote need that energy for reasons.”
To help emphasize exactly what he thought of the reasons in question, Reiki rolled his eyes and quirked his fingers into sarcastic quotation marks.
“Usually,” he added, “her justification for why energy draining is okay actually? Goes back to some word salad made out of Marxist theory that she only halfway understood, barely half-remembered, and might as well have mixed together by smashing the fruit with a hammer. Like, I’m working on leaving anyway, and not for anything to do with Lete? But if I were a newbie to the Court and she were the one showing me around? I can’t imagine that her way of doing things would inspire me to stay.”
Felt weird to admit that he was leaving the Court to a Cosmos Knight he’d just met when Amsvartnir hadn’t gotten any updates since Reiki had had that meltdown on him during the battle where Cybele had popped her Princess wings, when Daedalus, Dagon, and Encke knew that Reiki wanted to leave but hadn’t exactly heard a coherent plan from him about it, when Fang, Pendour, Stirling, and Monoceros hadn’t really heard anything, and when only Kerberos, Ida, and Asmodeus knew for sure about how Reiki and Haruhi needed to get out of the Dark Mirror Court, and one of them only knew because she’d been the one who’d told Reiki what to do if he wanted to get out………
But on the other hand, there was something easier about admitting it to this Cosmos Knight. Same as it had been easier to tell Sonora and Selenga about wanting to leave. They didn’t know him, not really, for one thing, offering up his forthcoming change of alliances seemed like the quickest way to let them know that he was on the level and didn’t plan to harm them or drain them or whatever. For another thing, though……Reiki didn’t feel as nervous about telling these people who didn’t know him. Indeed, the only anxiety dogging the back of Reiki’s mind right now……involved Faustite. And Albite. And Acubens-oneesan. And hoping that the two of them, especially Faustite, would understand.
People Reiki didn’t know, who in turn didn’t really know him either, could take his leaving for some kind of moral stand as much as they wanted. But he didn’t know what he’d do if he failed to properly explain himself, and wound up making Faustite and Albite think that him leaving the Court had anything to do with morals or ethics rather than being something fundamentally selfish.
It didn’t matter if a stranger assumed that Reiki’s objections were purely moral or ethical ones, that all he cared for were the cosmic stakes of the war or whatever blah-blah-blah happened to come about magically because of his defection. Just as long as the people he cared about understood: leaving Mirrorspace was about Reiki’s own soul and how stifled it felt inside the Court. How the chrome-plating magical garbage on his starseed felt like a ******** straitjacket, and how if he stayed here any longer than absolutely necessary, he knew that someday, he would crumble, break, and decide to let himself die instead of fighting for something better.
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Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2023 12:28 pm
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Casablanca drank her water thoughtfully. The longer she sat, and the more distance she got from the magic, the better she felt, which was nice, because she did not enjoy her head spinning and her stomach feeling sick just from her like, attempting to exist.
Ugh. Bullshit. All her magic did was sparkle and do a little healing.
"But that's...dumb. I mean, St. Mag's doesn't exactly teach Marxist theory, but that sounds....really, really wrong, like how does exploiting people fit into the whole....to each according, and whatever? Or has she decided that the Mirror--no,l you know what, never mind, don't explain it to me, I don't wanna know and I'm not gonna get it."
She huffed, unhappily.
"...Congrats on getting out, though. Whenever you do. That's...like, a big deal, and it's really good for you."
She sighed. Pushed herself up to stand.
"Thanks," she said, wiggling the water bottle. "I think I'm good to get myself home. You're a really good guy, Murikabushi." She paused. Smiled. "I'm Casablanca, by the way. Hope we run into each other again, once you're wearing white."
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