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 Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2023 11:47 am
Quote: backdated to ~June 24th, rip me.
Not that it didn’t make sense to Kaifeng, because it did. Trying to jaunt back up to his tower only a day or two after the first visit, he’d gotten a huge pile of nothing. Willing himself up there simply had not worked, and it did make sense. Magic, like every other source of power, probably was not infinite or utterly inexhaustible. Trips up to Saturn probably took a lot of energy. Like a battery, it simply needed time to recharge.
Recognizing this fact, however, didn’t make the waiting part any easier for Kaifeng. Didn’t stop him, either, from sighing in relief as he finally materialized in the blasted-looking fields with its algae-infested river, and its creepy trees, and its all-black evil wizard tower in the center of everything.
Back when most of the people in Kaifeng’s life had thought they’d known Zhìháo instead of Liánlí, talking to pretty much anybody had been a recipe for feeling sick and confined and ready to scratch himself clean out of his own skin. Being seen as Zhìháo, being perceived as Zhìháo—as someone so miserable, and snappy-biting, and so deeply, unforgivably unpleasant to deal with—had felt so deeply <******** wrong in ways that he’d lacked a means to properly articulate. ********, he’d even lacked a means of understanding what he’d felt—not until, of all the damnedest things, Hayden had asked why he always played girl protags in the Pokémon games and why he always named them “Liánlí.”
Now, the only thing that itched was Kaifeng’s collarbone—but that didn’t feel very related to anything going on in the hear and now. Almost certainly, it was just the jagged, river-forked scar left behind from getting struck by lightning the other night. Annoying, unfortunate, but ultimately livable.
As he traipsed alongside his river, teeming as it did with that indecipherable green and purple bloom, Kaifeng’s thoughts wandered back to his and Hayden’s assorted dormitory rooms in Cambridge……back to The Square, and lingering out there in the snow, hands shoved in pockets or idly fiddling with his keys, while he waited for Jiayi to come bounding up the steps out of the Red Line train stop……back to choosing a Pokémon team that would give Jiayi a challenge and wouldn’t make him feel like his er-ge had simply rolled over and let him win.……
But—yeah, no, ******** that.
Kaifeng huffed and shook his head with the intensity of a horse desperately batting away flies. Not the memories that he wanted to have right now. He could only make it up to his Wonder so often. Only memories about Xīngyì and his beloved pastel alien had permission to bother Kāifēng right now, because they only ever cropped up for him while he was here.
Twice now, that had happened. First, the memory of said alien defending Xīngyì from the people asking him to deliver that girl to a merciful death. Second—last time, when Liánlí had managed to sweet-talk Hayden into letting him come up here on the grounds that it would keep him out of Negaverse-related trouble—the memory of Xingyi and his pastel alien making observances at the tree that had grown over Xīngyì’s parents’ final resting place……of Xingyi’s tearful insistence that doing so somehow constituted a dereliction of duty on his part, because the Knight of Kaifeng was not meant to favor any particular souls under his care more or less than any others, not even his own family……of the alien disagreeing so firmly, countering that Xīngyì sacrificed so much to serve as the Kaifeng Knight, and he deserved to care for his family.
Liánlí still didn’t know the alien’s name, only that everything felt bubbly, and pink-flushed, and right around him, and that he knocked the breath clean out of unsuspecting Saturn twinks’ lungs, and that whenever Liánlí looked at the mysterious alien senshi—whenever he thought about him anymore, even—his own pulse quickened in the same way as Xīngyì’s.
Much nicer to think about this mystery being, rather than about Liánlí’s siblings or how long it had been since he’d seen them or what might or might not have happened with them after their er-ge left.
Much nicer to check on the tree where Kaifeng had found his signet ring, the one overtop of where Xingyi’s parents had been laid to rest. In the memories that Kaifeng had recovered here, the tree had had pomegranates growing on it. Finding Xingyi’s irrigation contraption in the tower last time should have helped get the tree back to a healthier state………or it would have done, if Kaifeng had figured out where to get enough water.
As far as Liánlí-Kaifeng could tell—both from his own observation and from Xingyi explaining the device in that first memory Liánlí had recovered—the tank-box that looked like an oversized aquarium held enough water to last about three weeks. Perfect, then, for Xingyi with the trips he had apparently made off-world in his time, and for Liánlí, with his limits on how often he could visit this place. The water would slowly stream out from the tank, its flow controlled by Xingyi’s sluice gate and then directed through his aqueduct. When the course got down near the ground, it wove into the ring formation that had been such a nightmare to reconstruct, even having all the same pieces and tools that Xingyi had had. The spikes that supported the ring construct allowed the water to seep slowly into the ground, providing the tree with enough water for it to thrive without withering while also maintaining the arid conditions under which pomegranate trees most readily flourished.
(Liánlí had read up on pomegranates back on Earth. He couldn’t say if this tree was a replanted Terran specimen or some kind of Saturnian pomegranate tree, but either way, it struck him as pretty cool that both this tree and Terran pomegranate trees all preferred dry conditions.)
Yet, the tree today……didn’t seem better than it had during his last visit. Still too dry, even for something so hardy. Maybe a little bit less withered? But only if he squinted, turned his head just so, and hoped very hard—which meant that he was likely seeing things or simply projecting his own hope for improvements
Understandable: last time, Kaifeng had brought as many bottles of water as he could fit in his subspace (at least, without compromising his ability to also bring some cleaning supplies for the cottage), but an entire flat of Costco bottled water hadn’t even filled the entire tank. Aside from how that doing hadn’t helped nearly enough, the idea wasn’t sustainable; Kaifeng needed to use his subspace for other things in addition to water, and those things so easily got expensive.
Crouching before the tank now, Liánlí-Kaifeng narrowed his eyes and frowned at it. “If I were Xingyi,” he grumbled, “and I couldn’t use the river over there………where would I find more water for you?”
An answer did not immediately present itself. Nor did it appear with a few moments of continued glaring.
Sighing heavily, Kaifeng pushed himself back up to standing. He’d need to look into this, yes, but first, he wanted to check the tower. Last time, he’d found the room with Xingyi’s neat little irrigation device, so maybe he’d find something else that could help him with restoring the pomegranate tree where he’d found his signet ring.wc: 1,289.
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Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2023 12:14 am
Quote: ooc note: The mentions of Bélénian pear brandy and the dialogue from Huanxi/Helene have been approved by Prince and Song, respectively! emotion_bigheart where you go, i’m going, so jump and i’m jumping As he crossed the threshold into the tower, Kaifeng huffed and tried once more to banish the thoughts he didn’t feel like dealing with—thoughts about Zhìháo Liánlí’s Zhìháo’s family back in Boston, about the older brother who’d ******** Zhìháo over, about the younger brother who’d lost any safe space that he’d once had with his er-ge.…… Kaifeng didn’t need to think about any of that. He needed to appreciate that none of that could touch him anymore, and certainly not right now, while he was literally on Saturn, entering his tower.
Same as it had last time, his signet ring felt warm, and the floor did not fall out from beneath his feet. So much nicer, this way, striding into the atrium and not getting unceremoniously dropped into the catacombs. Much as Kaifeng enjoyed them, he couldn’t deny that he preferred going down there of his own free will, rather than because he didn’t know about the trap-door and it decided to play a silly little prank on him.
Since he’d taken the left-hand spiral staircase up last time, Kaifeng went for the staircase on the right today. Spring in his step—and nerves itching to banish the silence before it managed to consume him whole—Kaifeng bounced from stair to stair more or less in time with the song that rose to his lips: “Somewhere after midnight, in my wildest fantasies, somewhere just beyond my reach, there’s someone reachin’ back for me~ Racing on the thunder, and rising with the heat…~”
Coming to a landing between floors, Kaifeng dramatically faux-swooned onto a stone barrier around the edge. Aside from himself, he didn’t have an audience. Nobody could appreciate how he arched his back just so as he sang, “It’s gonna take a superman……” Nor could anyone commend him for how he extended a leg like he meant to rest his ankle on a certain pastel alien’s shoulder or pin him to the wall as he finished that thought, “……to sweep me off my feeeeeeet~!”
Without missing a beat, he hopped back into ascending the stairs, gently batting his fan along the spokes in the handrail as he went: “I need a hero~! I’m holding out for a hero ‘til the end of the night~! He’s gotta be strong, and he’s gotta be fast, and he’s gotta be fresh from the fight~! I need a heeeeroooo~! I’m holding out for a hero ‘til the morning light~! He’s gotta be sure, and it’s gotta be soon, and he’s gotta be larger than liiiiiiiiiife~!”
As Kaifeng finally came to the next floor, he stopped singing (though he did keep humming the tune). For all he needed the silence to die and go away, Kaifeng also found himself before a door: simple black wood with an iron knob, but beneath an intricately carved archway. Finding doors in this place always felt so special and important; he couldn’t deny this moment its due of proper and appropriate solemnity by singing Bonnie Tyler’s song with all the burning, active desire that you heard in Jennifer Saunders’s and Caleb Hyles’s performances.
Yet, when he tried the knob, it wouldn’t budge.
Kaifeng glowered, letting himself slouch. What was it with so many of the doors at this Wonder and not wanting to let him in? He kept humming as he tried to inspect the door, looking for some kind of switch, or hidden lever, or ******** something that he’d missed on a first glance……anything that might open the door.
He found what he needed not on the door itself, but in the tiles beneath his knees: while most of the floor had only large tiles of gray stone, a squarish area right in front of the door had several smaller tiles of varying colors instead……and one suspiciously empty square up in one of the corners. Mouth screwed up so pensively and a wild impulse flaring up in his mind like fireflies, Kaifeng reached for one of the adjacent tiles.
It slid perfectly into place.
Wrinkling his nose like an incredibly pensive rabbit, he glanced up at the door again.… No visible keyhole or other obvious lock, and yet it wouldn’t budge.… Could a sliding picture puzzle on the floor really be the answer for how to get in here?
In the interests of clearer thinking, Kaifeng gave up on Bonnie Tyler and swapped in one of his favorite Aurelio Voltaire songs for anything around his Wonder: Left, right, left, then take five more steps, do a pirouette around the statuette.… Maybe it was all in Kaifeng’s head—maybe he was reading too much into the general aesthetic vibes of his Special Wonder Place, or maybe it was just a bunch of pent-up nonsense from how no one had ever allowed to be fourteen-year-old Zhìháo to be the gender-transcendant goth fairy queen that Liánlí had always been inside—but he really did feel like something about Voltaire’s music really synergized so nicely with his Wonder.…
It was almost definitely in Kaifeng’s head. His Wonder had to be at least a thousand years old, if the ages of the space senshi he’d met were any indication. Aurelio Voltaire Hernández had only been born in 1967.
Never let anyone underestimate the musical placebo effect, though. As Kaifeng kept humming through “Oubliette,” he noticed one little tile had definitely been painted with the likeness of an iris, a soft shade of lavender with the start of the eyelashes right around the edge.… A few others seemed like one could have slid them together into the image of a nose.… In an upper corner, he spotted a couple tiles with round divots that looked rather a lot like knuckles on a hand, and a couple more that looked like lips curved in a gentle smile (maybe with a hint of mischief).… Some of the tiles slotted together into an image of fringe that, like Xīngyì’s hair, started black but the ombré’d out into a vivid, shocking pink.
The more Kaifeng slid the tiles around, though, the less he felt like he understood.
In fairness, parts of the picture seemed to be less unclear when he sat back to get a fuller look, rather than hyperfocusing on specific pieces.… From the small parts he’d put together, he could safely guess that the picture was a portrait. Not of anyone whom Kaifeng felt like he would recognize, but of someone who seemed kind, and likely rather beautiful.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Kaifeng pouted down at the puzzle and blew a raspberry.
“Should’ve brought Ming-er with me,” he grumbled. Having Ming-er and Qiye know about the magical knight life but not getting help from them would all too likely upset them—especially Qi-jie. Double especially now that Ming-er had awakened as Selenga, Page of Ida, and could offer actual assistance in avoiding trouble. But, well, Kaifeng had not thought to bring Ming-er along this time, so now, he had to suffer with knowing that he had a room in his Wonder that he couldn’t currently get into.
With a soft hmph, Kaifeng traced his eyes over the carvings on the archway. The tableau showed him a Danse Macabre scene, ghoulish skeletons dancing about with fleshier corpses in varying states of decay, their clothing in likewise varied states of disrepair. Even when he stood up, letting himself get in closer to the art, Kaifeng could not rightly tell whether or not any of the corpses were meant to be anybody in particular. Aside from some of them having horns like Daedalus’s, or antlers like the other mysterious senshi, or other similar sorts of signifiers, none were distinguishable as any specific sort of person: wealthy or working-class, noble or normal, widely beloved or an abject outcast.
In death, all of them looked more or less the same.
“Oh, Xingyi,” Liánlí-Kaifeng murmured, tracing a fingertip up the neck and cheek of a figure with antlers like the mysterious alien senshi from Xingyi’s memories. “Xingyi, Xingyi, Xingyi……what have you put in this room that you want to hide from me so badly?”
As he zeroed in on the mysterious alien figure, with its antlers and its largely decayed face, something cracked its way into his mind.
Under the blanket of Saturn’s perpetual twilight, out in the fields of Kaifeng, Xīngyì Kurogane sat alone. He teetered uneasily on his perch, the flat-ish boulder beneath the pomegranate tree that grew above his parents’ graves.
At his feet, lurked a bottle very much like several of those down in his cellar full of liquor, save that it was empty. Bearing the perpetually unsatisfied ouroboros symbol that Liánlí-Kaifeng now recognized as belonging to Murikabushi—the Dark Mirror senshi whom Encke, Pendour, and Daedalus all vouched for so eagerly—the bottle narrowly dodged getting knocked over as Xīngyì’s feet wove around it, idly swishing this way and that.
He had another bottle in one hand as well, while the other hand curled around the neck and bow of a violin that lay across his lap. Elegant, black, made from the same wood as the assorted black doors found all around the Wonder. The bow dangled perilously, threatening to escape Xīngyì’s hold—but somehow, he managed not to let it go.
No mean feat, really, considering how thoroughly headlong he threw himself into that second bottle—more specifically, into the task of draining it dry. Opaque with a golden sheen to its surface, the bottle didn’t let an outsider see how much liquid it had left in it. Even peering down into it through the neck left that matter thoroughly ambiguous, as though the answer belonged to the realm of fundamentally unanswerable questions, such as matters of chickens and eggs, or why Liánlí’s thoughts had returned to The Twins so often as of late.
The golden bottle’s label bore a drawing of a pear tree, ornate and hyper-stylized, its mix of intricate details and swooshing curves looking like some vision from a dream.
(Something to investigate back on Earth, maybe? See if Liánlí-Kaifeng could perhaps find anything about a pear-related senshi or a Knight with a pear-related wonder?)
Either way, Xingyi helped himself to a lengthy drink—no doubt only the latest in a series of lengthy drinks—before finally setting aside the bottle. With a weary sigh, one that felt far older than Xīngyì himself, he picked up the violin. Began to play a wistful, melancholy tune, full to bursting with pent-up desire. Eyes closed and body unsteady—far more so than Liánlí would have considered safe for handling a violin made with such loving craftsmanship—Xingyi threw himself far too much into the music, into the playing. He slid around on the boulder. For a moment, it seemed that he might fall off.…
Instead, a hand reached out for him. Curled around his elbow. Caressed it ever so gently as it tugged Xingyi back to a more stable position……for which, Xingyi only rewarded his rescuer with a whine.
The mysterious alien senshi pursed his lips. “Xingyi.”
The way Xingyi sighed sounded exactly like rolling his eyes, even though they remained shut as he grumbled, “Huanxi.”
(Liánlí gasped. The name.…… Finally, Xingyi had addressed his mysterious alien senshi by name. Simply hearing it made Liánlí’s heart rattle around his throat, instead of staying where it goddamn well belonged, but—oh. Oh, wait—)
“You would not wish to fall while holding Yùchén.” This didn’t garner a response, but Huanxi didn’t let that silence faze him. “One of your mother’s compositions?”
“Yes.” Xingyi didn’t hesitate, but something about the answer felt wrong. It had the bilious, stomach acid taste of lying. As Xingyi’s eyes opened again, they had the blurry look of someone who might have soon started crying. His face seemed to lack focus, but was it a sign of certain dishonesty on his part, or was he simply drunk?
(Liánlí, for his own part, felt a hollow ache in the pit of his stomach……made him feel certain that Xingyi was lying. Then……was this memory from before they’d gotten married? Oh no, a view of them pining? Even knowing that they must have gotten together eventually, the thought of that hurt—)
“One of her favorites, actually, out of everything she wrote,” Xingyi said, turning his gaze to Huanxi’s face as if it was a miracle that he didn’t start sobbing. The smile Xingyi plastered on seemed unsteadier than he did, as did the shaking of his head. “Anyway, when’d you get here?”
“Mere moments ago.” When Xingyi tried to lean back, Huanxi tugged on his elbow to keep him upright. “What have you been drinking?”
“Why? D’you want some for once? Or just to remind me how bad it is? How long it’s been forbidden by the Helenian Council? Is it even……whatever.” Xingyi’s turn, it seemed, to be denied whatever response he sought. Pouting sullenly, he told Huanxi, “Pear brandy from Bélénos.… Last case with Rin took us there.” He rocked backwards again, with a cryptic little smirk like maybe he just wanted Huanxi to haul him back into sitting properly (which he did). “D’you know they distill this stuff twice? Mn, hits harder than Grieve does, but it’s still. so. *sweet*.”
As if this made some sort of point about the sweetness, Xingyi made a gratuitous kissy face and smacked his lips.
Even he didn’t want to linger on it though—“Huanxi,” he said, moving right on. Trembling and wide-eyed, he looked up at his future-husband. “Huanxi……why d’you always show up like this? Must have better things to do.…”
The memory faded out, leaving Liánlí with an aching, empty chill.
Even though he remembered what that girl—the very much non-dying one—had said in the first memory he’d recovered here? Even though he recalled her snapping at Xingyi about the marriage to cow him how she’d done—“Are you a Kurogane and a Knight of Saturn, or just some privileged, rat-b*****d senshi’s little wife?”—seeing Xingyi and his husband before they’d figured things out……? Oh, that hurt.
But at least now, Liánlí had a name. “Huanxi,” he repeated to himself. “Huanxi……”
It burned, electric, on his tongue and so help him, Liánlí-Kaifeng wanted to say that name forever. Even if Huanxi had reincarnated and wound up with a different name in this life, Liánlí loved that name, Huanxi, and for as long as he could, he wanted to savor that name on his tongue. For now, though, he glanced back at the puzzle on the floor. Then, with a huff, he stomped off down the stairs, heading back outside.
Next time, he’d bring Selenga. Right now, he needed to see about watering a pomegranate tree.wc: 2,425.
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