Quote:
The Guardian (12) - Maybe you expected weeds and mushrooms down here. Maybe you expected bugs. You probably didn’t expect a raven. Or, at least, it looks like a raven. It is a rather large bird, and seems so impeccably groomed that it almost doesn’t even look real. It has no dust, no dirt, no feathers out of line. Sometimes, it seems to mind its own business, but in the darkness you can hear its flapping wings and scratching the ground nearby. All the same, it is very curious about you. Sometimes it will follow you around. It is unintimidated by you in the slightest, and seems to hold no regard for personal boundaries. It might stand at your feet, or on your shoe, or land on your shoulder if it feels like it. It will pick through your hair or pockets, like it is looking for something. It likes jewelry, and you might be wise to remove what you have once the bird starts poking around.

The raven does not just croak or chatter, it talks. Sometimes, it will repeat what you say perfectly. Sometimes it will repeat it in a mocking tone. Sometimes it says something completely new. Maybe you hear it whisper ‘help me’, or you hear it weep, or scream, but sometimes–when you look at it–it seems like it understands. Occasionally, it makes a vague observation about your expression or hair, and while it does not carry out a conversation, there is an intelligence in its eyes that makes it seem like it’s amused by you. It cannot be caught and will shriek and attack if you attempt to cause it, or the cemetery, any harm. It will bite, scratch, and peck until it chases you way, so it’s best to do no harm and let it be.


Vanya hated certain routes through Destiny City. Absolutely hated them.

Sure, he knew his way around them perfectly well. He could navigate more or less decently, get where he needed to go and make sure that the customers got their food delivered in a more or less timely manner. But sometimes, taking multiple orders out all at once required venturing down……interesting paths, traversing areas of Destiny City that one probably would not have wanted to traverse given one’s druthers. Plus, the times around certain holidays only made it worse.

Pedaling his bike down Applewood Street—leaving the last of the five concurrent deliveries he’d gone out with and heading back toward Nagisa’s since his shift wouldn’t be over for some time yet—Vanya had to thank some kind of lucky star that, at the very least, October was better than Star Festival. True, you might run into drunk frat guys closer to the DCU campus, or kids out trying to score some early trick-or-treating time. But those packs of people generally felt sparser and further spaced out from each other than the throngs of Star Festival-goers who flooded the streets every time that summer holiday rolled around and took over town for several weeks.

Weird incidents and encounters, of course, went hand-in-hand with both these times of year, whether one liked it or not. In the past several weeks, Vanya had fled from multiple packs of spectral dogs chasing him through this alleyway or that one (and without any tall, sassy Dark Mirror senshi leaping out of nowhere to save him and telling the ghost-dogs to go back to Party City where they belonged or whatever else Murikabushi might’ve had a mind to say).

He’d heard more disembodied screams than he cared to count and any time he’d chased one of them, they frustratingly hadn’t amounted to anything. On more than one occasion, Vanya had even powered up into Farbauti, fearing that he still didn’t entirely know what to do with himself in a combat situation but that failing to power up and investigate meant that he’d get a terrible grade in Sailor Senshi Things—something that was both normal to fear and possible to achieve. Every single time he’d done so, however, he’d followed the sound of screaming only to find a big, fat nothing at the end of it. Not even a youma that he could distract into chasing him so it would leave random people alone.

Stopping outside of any store with electronics on offer had seemingly opened him up to TVs and radios abruptly turning themselves on and crackling at him with static that often seemed very pointed, though for no reason that Vanya could identify. Okay, there were the pleas for help, the warnings that some ambiguous and ill-defined “They” were coming—but that didn’t exactly clarify anything, not in a town like Destiny City, where the truth of things rarely ever matched up with whatever they appeared to be at any given time.

(Part of Vanya felt like the static wanted to tell him to sort his ******** life out, but that didn’t make it special, really. Anybody could’ve told him that. Besides, people other than Vanya seemed to get spooked by random staticy electronics as often as he did—if not more than—so it hardly seemed fair to act like hearing that nonsense more than once indicated in any way that he was somehow the main character of the universe or like any of these episodes had anything to do with him specifically.

Realistically, the number of times he’d run into said static only meant that Vanya offered Destiny City more opportunities to screw around with him and throw his head into disarray, rather than anything about him being targeted or whatever else he might’ve tried to claim while pretending to be one of his assorted troll alter egos on X-Formerly-Known-As-Twitter. Contrary to what he professed to believe from behind the security of Tradwife Wannabe Mary-JoBeth Who Only Did Anything In A God-Honoring Way, or Frat Bro Brayden Who Resented Any Accusations Of Having A Gender-Neutral Name, or Mikaylah With The Blue Hair And Pronouns—or, well, the dyed blue hair, Vanya mused, silently cursing the fact that his own icy blue locks grew this way naturally?

Despite all the ways he knew how to Protest Too Much while putting on one or more of his assorted Internet façades for whatever reason he had in mind today, Vanya Renault was, perhaps, the Least Ever Main Character Energied Person it was possible for anyone to be. It therefore stood to reason that he’d only heard the weird, staticky cries for help or equally weird, equally staticky warnings about Them—whoever they were—because of simple statistics reasons. Thanks to his job dragging him all over hither-and-yon, he offered the city’s electronics more opportunities to assault him with these warnings, therefore he heard them fairly often. But it didn’t mean anything about Vanya personally, because why would it ever.

Because unlike Fang, Demeter, Daedalus, Murikabushi, or anyone else Vanya had met on the powered-up side of things, Vanya simply lacked the Main Character Energy necessary for these warnings to mean anything beyond “he’d happened to be present when whatever made Destiny City’s electronics act up in this manner had felt like doing the thing.”)

More to the point, however: all of these encounters, to Vanya, felt considerably less stressful than everything that went on during his adoptive hometown’s annual Star Festival. Summertime bullshit during Star Festival sometimes felt less dangerous and less overall threatening than all the goings-on at Halloween—but therein rested the very reason that Star Festival bullshit stressed Vanya out so much. Sure, sparkly rainbow meteor showers were pretty and sometimes involved meeting with handsome Saturn Knights who made Vanya’s heart do supremely unauthorized things. Yes, the mysterious fireflies and fairy lights all over Destiny City’s many gorgeous parks were lovely……but nice things didn’t just happen to Vanya, not without some hidden caveat or a catch that wouldn’t present itself until he dared to momentarily think himself safe and happy.

Every time he let himself get close to enjoying the magic of any given Star Festival encounter, that wound up happening to him. Something would ultimately go wrong, or something would crawl out of the woodwork to make him regret enjoying himself, or Something Bad would happen that would probably make Negaverse Generals feel like child’s play because at least Negaverse Generals—much like the vast majority of Destiny City’s Halloween weirdness and assorted October shenanigans—had enough basic decency to be overtly and obviously terrible. They had the Chaotic Bad Vibes auras about them, they drained energy from innocent people for miscellaneous nefarious purposes that Vanya didn’t entirely understand—but that more experienced White Moon allies like Asmodeus, Demeter, Fang, and Aokigahara had assured him were very definitely real—and that, at least in Vanya’s mind, made them a significant improvement on and infinitely preferable to rainbow meteor showers that made one feel hopeful and happy.

Not that Vanya regretted anything about the meteor shower on his birthday where he’d met Aokigahara—and he did have to admit that nothing terrible had happened as a result of the encounter yet—but the delay in Bad Things Happening because of nice things like that only meant that the inevitable Bad Things would no doubt be so much worse than the initial happy feelings about meeting a handsome stranger and sharing birthday cake under an incredibly romantic meteor shower or whatever else Star Fest might have offered you. At least ghost dogs trying to kill you and Negaverse Generals doing whatever terrible things they had in mind on any given night would be upfront about the Bad Things they planned to do to you. At least you could get them over with relatively quickly and get back to the rest of your life, ideally without having the rug ripped out from under you too terribly much.

Which didn’t entirely make the stress of all this disappear, but it did make the bullshit easier to swallow. A couple weeks ago, Vanya had checked multiple volumes of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels out of the library. To cope with all the stress of existing in Destiny City during Halloween season, or something like that. To feel less alone in all of the abundant weirdness of this month. Because, even though the strangeness of Gaiman’s story-world and Destiny City were often wildly different from each other, the fact that people survived against the best efforts of Gaiman’s assorted bad guys? It did console Vanya somewhat. Reminded him that, even though he wasn’t really very good at anything, he could at least emulate the humble cockroach and refuse to die.

Turning a corner mostly to avoid waiting at the crosswalk, Vanya considered the civilians, though he still felt really weird for thinking of them as such. Even though “civilians” didn’t deny any of them their basic humanity—a civilian was, after all, still a human person—Vanya had a lingering Not Quite Right feeling about the terminology. Something about the entire way of thinking made his brain itch with a feeling that he couldn’t entirely describe, couldn’t entirely put his finger or any particular words on, could not bring himself to see as normal. Part of him felt certain that saying the word aloud would summon some of the free-range teenagers wrapped up in this magical nonsense to criticize and denounce him—maybe going so far as to put up some call-out post on the Connections app or something—because he simply hadn’t known that there was anything offensive about calling non-magical people “civilians.”

(The fact that Vanya had, in his time, done similar things to Internet strangers over considerably smaller infractions was not lost on him. If anything, it only served to further convince him that this possibility would absolutely, definitely happen if he ran his mouth around the wrong people, and that he would probably deserve it. Even if the infraction they made up wasn’t really one that most people would consider “deserving” of that retribution, Vanya had written enough spurious Internet callout posts that it wouldn’t matter. His alleged crimes in this as-yet hypothetical situation that he’d made up in his head being mostly bullshit? Would only have been fair and justified by karma, given his own conduct on the Internet.)

Plus, there remained the consideration that……Vanya didn’t feel particularly different from the throngs of people he thought of as civilians.

He didn’t feel like he shouldn’t have counted himself among their ranks.

Of course, the henshin pen burning a hole in his hip pocket reminded him that he was different from them now by sheer virtue of having a starseed that said so and, inexplicably (in his own mind), not losing those privileges yet. Certain misadventures he’d gotten himself into aside, nobody had come out of the woodwork to tell him that Ash had made a mistake in Awakening him and he wasn’t actually supposed to be Sailor Farbauti after all.

Maybe he didn’t power up as often as some of the magical people in town did. If nothing else bore consideration, there was the simple, undeniable fact that Vanya’s magic as Farbauti felt kind of off, like something about it wasn’t right (aside from the obvious issue of why anyone would want to use magic that, as far as Vanya could discern as yet, made one’s enemies angrier and more powerful). Sometimes, it felt like too much to handle. Other times, it barely did anything. And still more times on top of that, he’d try calling out his attack phrase only for it to do exactly nothing.

Using it on himself didn’t feel very good either. Not really. If it meant ******** up his hands every time because punching things in real life was significantly messier than in kung-fu movies, then Vanya didn’t feel like he could justify using his magic terribly often. He needed his hands……to work……and even with the good healthcare coverage he got in Destiny City—better than he ever remembered his parents’ sense of healthcare coverage in Louisiana being—going to the urgent care about it……felt dangerous, in the same way that the assorted Nice Events of Star Festival felt dangerous. Any help that came into Vanya’s life would, inevitably, be balanced out by an equal or greater amount of suffering because that was how the universe maintained itself, in his experience.

On top of the aversion to powering up brought on by his magic being all weird and s**t, Vanya had work because unlike all the free-range teenage senshi and Knights who still lived at home, never mind all the city’s magically empowered trust-fund babies, he didn’t have the financial security blankets that they did……but still, Vanya hadn’t had his magical powers rescinded by anybody.

Which meant that, no matter how strange he felt about thinking of them as such, most of the people out on the streets did count as civilians in a way that he did not, anymore.… He had counted among those numbers, once, but choosing not to power up at any given time—or lacking the energy to do so as often and as consistently as people like Murikabushi, in all his increasingly inexplicable desire to save everybody’s day—didn’t mean that Vanya could still pretend to be one of them. Even trying to let himself feel that way made his henshin pen weigh more heavily in his pocket, like it wanted to remind him that he couldn’t run from it simply because he had “normal person responsibilities” as well, or something.

Granted, some of them were probably senshi, Knights, Negaverse, or Dark Mirrors taking their own downtime, the same way that he was (at least in a magical weirdos fighting other magical weirdos sense of the term “downtime”).

Finally held up by an unavoidable crosswalk, Vanya glanced around at the different people filling up the streets tonight. Softly humming along with The Mountain Goats playing on his earbuds—And I reach deep down within, but the pathways twist and turn, and there’s no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn……—Vanya drank in the sight of them all: some olive-ish, brown-ish skinned lady with dark, reddish-purple hair, ostensibly dressed up as Faith Lehane from Buffy The Vampire Slayer…… a pale, curvy woman whose pink-and-seafoam hair kept trying to escape from beneath a fire-engine red Ariel wig that looked like she’d taken it out of a plastic bag mere moments before putting it on her head…… a tall, lanky someone-or-other with twin-tail braids, wearing a black-and-purple plaid skirt over a pair of skintight black pants with Hot Topic bondage straps hanging down the back, ostensibly not costumed as anyone in particular, but arm-in-arm with an even taller, green-haired somebody-else, who was wearing flannel straight out of Butch Lesbian Fashion Quarterly (despite not being a butch lesbian themself, as far as Vanya could tell? But hey, maybe he was wrong? Not to brag, but he was very good at being wrong)……

Any of them could have been Knights, or senshi, or somebody Chaos-flavored, taking time off from their duties to their respective factions and presumably enjoying themselves more than Vanya usually got to do with his own alleged downtime. What did Vanya even know about them or their lives?

Nothing, if he was completely honest with himself. That was what he knew: nothing. Absolutely ******** nothing. Frankly, that sentiment applied just as well to judging what he knew about anything that went on in Destiny City.

Approximately the same amount of knowledge he’d had before Ash had tossed him his henshin pen, then. Which meant, ultimately, that his situation hadn’t changed very much at all, so he had no business complaining about any of it, not even in the relative safety and security of his own thoughts.

Moreover—and of far more immediately pressing importance—complaining inside his own head wouldn’t serve Vanya well at all, right now. The quickest path back to Nagisa’s from the site of his last delivery, unfortunately for Vanya, happened to take him through the Hawkins Cemetery. Pausing briefly outside the graveyard, he checked his phone, both so he could pause the music (couldn’t go through a graveyard while listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not unless he wanted some ridiculous Destiny City graveyard monster to catch him off his guard), and so he could stall for a moment by looking at his texts. Only one new message had come in since the last time he’d checked, from Cheryl back at the restaurant, letting him know that some joker at DCU had sent another prank order and that, when Vanya’s shift ended, he’d be able to take home some wagyu beef and chicken tempura, among a few other things.

Which bought him another moment of texting, not only so he could thank her for letting him know—and for claiming those dishes for him even though she didn’t need to be so kind and her impressive musculature probably required a lot of protein—but also so he could fire off a couple quick texts of his own.…… One went to Autumn, offering to share the chicken tempura with her (she didn’t have too much experience with Japanese food, and whenever he shared some with her, Vanya wanted to ease her into things with dishes that probably felt closer to things she’d eaten before, rather than trying to rush headlong into giving her ika sansai—squid and seaweed salad—or any kind of sashimi, and possibly scaring her off all Japanese cuisine forever).……

The other text went to Todd, offering him the wagyu beef (even knowing that it was ridiculously high-quality and a delicacy that he wouldn’t get to have for himself very often, Vanya felt like Todd, with his fondness for good meat, would probably appreciate the filets more than Vanya would himself, and even if he would someday, inevitably, scare both Todd and Autumn off of being his friends—because Vanya always managed to do things like that and ruin everything good in his life—until that happened, Vanya really, really wanted to enjoy getting to have them both in his life, and he wanted to be a good friend until they figured out that he was broken and remembered how much better they could do than wasting time with him).

Still, Vanya couldn’t justify stalling here all night. Not when more orders waited at the restaurant, and more customers needed to get their food. Taking a deep breath, Vanya tucked his earbuds down the collar of his shirt—that way, he’d have a quicker time putting them in on the other side, when he didn’t need to worry about any further malicious cemetery denizens—then hoisted his bike over one of the places where somebody had jammed and whittled the fence down into practical non-existence.

Despite remembering how some of the old ladies back in Shreveport had cautioned him and other youngins about whistling and/or humming in graveyards, Vanya couldn’t help himself. Yes, their superstitions warned that doing so would attract evil spirits, and when he’d been a little kid, that threat had scared him. Anymore, though, it didn’t mean that much to Vanya. Evil spirits in Destiny City tended to be youma—or at least it had certainly seemed that way since he’d gotten his henshin pen and learned what youma even were—and if any of them lurked around, they’d be attracted to Vanya no matter what. They’d be attracted to any of the other interlopers in the cemetery no matter what as well, and at least Vanya had his henshin pen in his pocket, so he could far more easily rescue himself if any youma heard him humming a different round of The Mountain Goats as he pushed his bike around the trees and headstones, trying not to disturb any of the dead (but not really caring if he ******** things up for the weirdos recording podcasts or Tiktoks in a graveyard like their parents and/or guardians hadn’t taught them any ******** manners): But I am just a broken machine, and I do things that I don’t really mean……

He was getting into the bridge—Feel the storm every night, hope it passes by. Hallucinate a shady grove where Judas went to die……—before something cut him off: a loud, thought-shattering caw-CAW!

Vanya startled. Jumped. Whipped around a few times, only distantly registering the sound of his bike clattering to the ground.

When he spotted the source, he sighed himself into a heavy, completely over it sort of slouch. Pushing his glasses back up, Vanya tilted his head back and frowned into the branches of a nearby tree—and more specifically, at the raven(? maybe? Vanya didn’t know jackshit anything about identifying birds) perched there.… Whether it was a raven or not, it certainly looked like all the ravens Vanya had ever seen in films: large, black, stately……far too impeccably groomed for a wild animal—seriously, Vanya couldn’t spot any dirt at all on its gleaming, ebony feathers and that, he felt quite certain, probably qualified as unnatural…… But on the other hand, maybe this bird just had higher standards for its appearance than the others of its kind did……

A chill shivered down his spine, though, when the bird turned to look right at him. Like, full-on eye-contact and tilting its head in a mirror of how Vanya had bemusedly tilted his own. For a moment, Vanya wondered if he still knew how to move himself—and then the bird cawed, “Ni hao!”

For all that made him jump back, it also shocked Vanya out of that frozen state. “I saw a different bird on Twitter the other week,” he said bluntly, crouching down to pick his bike up off the ground, “and he could say that, too. You’re not ******** special.”

That Internet bird hadn’t even lived in Destiny City. Not that Vanya had recognized the other urban skyline in the video, but he’d seen enough to know that it had been Somewhere Other Than Here. Crows and ravens were supposed to be pretty intelligent birds, as well. So, it probably just made sense that this particular raven wasn’t ******** special because it had somehow learned how to greet people in Mandarin.

Undaunted by Vanya’s impassiveness, the bird huffed, puffing up its chest as if offended. “******** special,” it repeated, rustling its feathers.

“Yeah, yeah, uh huh, sure thing, Moses, old pal.” Scrubbing one hand over his eye and down his cheek, Vanya tried not to yawn. Partly, he didn’t want to seem too bored and risk offending the bird any further and getting attacked for it like some bullshit out of Alfred Hitchcock (or like what he’d heard would happen if you beat up chickens in any given Legend of Zelda game). Mostly, though, Vanya simply didn’t want to risk attracting anything more serious and time-consuming than this ******** bird. He didn’t know if anything else lurked around the graveyard, waiting for him to let his guard down, but Vegas odds about Destiny City suggested that it probably did, and Vanya needed to get back to work. “If you wanna preach to me about Sugarcandy Mountain or whatever, though? We’re gonna need to make it a walk-and-talk sermon. I mean, assuming that’s okay with you.”

Whether it was or wasn’t, Vanya didn’t wait for an answer. He simply made sure his bike was more or less upright, then resumed walking it toward the other side.

Must’ve taken the bird a moment to process what was happening, because Vanya had enough seconds of solitude that he almost let himself start humming again. Right as he inhaled to do so, however, a loud, agitated flutter of wings rushed up from behind him. He tilted his head back and blinked up at the drying paint-primer clouds above him, expecting the raven to dart out ahead……but then oof!’d and jerked to the side as the bird plopped down on his shoulder.

“Rude,” the bird chastised Vanya, scratching its beak through his hair but, for no apparent reason, not really bothering to peck at or otherwise harm him. “Rude! Rude! Rude!”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time, Moses. Or do you expect me to call you something else?”

The bird stomped one of its little feet against Vanya’s shoulder. “Eat the rude!”

Vanya pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course you do, Doctor Lecter. With some fava beans and a nice Chianti, no doubt?”

“Alive!” Caw-cawing once more, the bird ruffled its feathers. “Do you feel alive, Will!”

Most of the time, Vanya didn’t mind the people still clinging to hope that Netflix or Hulu or somebody would renew Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series for the fourth season that NBC had denied them. He didn’t mind that they could sometimes be incredibly annoying on Twitter because most refused to rise to whatever rage-bait he posted on any given day, and plenty had proven savvy enough to call out his rage-bait as obvious rage-bait, even when Vanya had successfully fooled the Swifties, the Stranger Things fans, and the TERFs who’d only started loving Harry Potter since JK Rowling had decided to maintain her public relevancy by hating trans people. Honestly, they all seemed like decent and probably pretty cool people who simply thought that the sexy but menacing cannibal psychiatrist and the bedraggled but sexy FBI profiler who was probably on the spectrum should’ve been unfairly sexy Murder Husbands forever and ever.

Right now, though, Vanya itched to piss the Hannigram weirdos off and Cause Problems On Purpose because he really needed to get back to work, and ******** his life, this obnoxious bird was waylaying him with quotables from their ******** ship that it had learned from ******** even knew where.

Apparently feeling quite ignored, the bird nosed at Vanya’s scalp and repeated, “Do you feel alive, Will!”

“My name is Vanya,” he said with a sigh, “and I feel like I’m fading.”

Something halfway between laughter and a death-rattle shuddered out of the bird, and Vanya supposed that he should’ve felt unnerved by that. The sound definitely wasn’t natural, and given the usual course of both Halloween weirdness in Destiny City and Vanya’s life in general, it probably indicated something bad. Still, the late-stage capitalist need to pay his rent compelled him back to work, so Vanya only rolled his eyes and pressed on through the graveyard. Part of him expected the bird to get bored and clear out, off to bother someone else, but instead, it ruffled its feathers again, seeming very pleased with itself, and stayed put on Vanya’s shoulder.

At least Moses-or-Hannibal-or-Whoever-It-Was didn’t feel inclined to run its mouth any further. It had apparently satisfied itself by getting that banter out of Vanya—and possibly by not finding anything of value in his already messy hair—so it simply……perched on his shoulder and stayed there. He picked up humming again, and the first tune that came to mind must have twigged something in its little borb-brain because after a couple bars, it joined in with him, warbling pretty decently, “I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy, because I’m easy-come, easy-go, little high, little low. Any way the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me……tooooo me……”

Despite himself and his general annoyance with this creature, Vanya chuckled. Whatever other annoying habits it had, at least the bird had good taste in music.

Finally, only a couple paces off from the exit—or at least from the place where the fence would most easily accommodate Vanya in lifting his bike over and out of here—Moses pushed off Vanya’s shoulder. His wing whapped Vanya on the back of the head as he fluttered off, but it seemed largely accidental. That fact meant that Vanya probably shouldn’t have been a little s**t to the poor, silly creature……but as he glanced up at it—up at the nearby black tree and the branch where the bird settled in—a wild impulse seized him.

“Hey,” he called up at it. “Hey, Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are?”

Although it said nothing in response, the raven tilted its head in acknowledgement of Vanya addressing it.

It took truly superhuman effort not to preemptively snicker as Vanya told the creature, “Say ‘Nevermore.’”

Watching the bird narrow its eyes in obvious annoyance, Vanya couldn’t help but burst out ******** you,” the bird cawed, which only made Vanya laugh even harder.

When it swooped down and whapped him with its wing again, it definitely meant it. But, still laughing in something like triumph over having gotten his moment for once, Vanya moved to get his bike over the fence. He had to get back to work, and honestly, he couldn’t begrudge the bird its annoyance at getting Got in the way that it had.

And as he mounted his bike again and retreated toward the sidewalk, he heard the raven screech out again, <******** YOU!”

[wc: 4,800]