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One Foggy Night (6) - As the seasons shift, the temperature changes too. It’s not uncommon for fog to roll in, sometimes from the mountains, sometimes out of nowhere. This fog is particularly thick and difficult to see through; Destiny City has issued several weather warnings and cautions being out or driving at night. It’s easy to get lost and difficult to see obstacles. Not to mention the strange, smothering sensation of dread and fear that rolls in with the fog. While there is sometimes the sensation of being watched, it worsens when the sun goes down. Some have even said they’ve caught glimpses of a tall, horned figure traveling with the fog. The news has reported that this is probably just a side effect of climate change and suspects that weather patterns should return to normal towards the end of the month.
Going out into the fog seemed like a pretty objectively bad idea; Lete realized that much without needing to think too hard. Sure, the news could say it was an effect of climate change all they wanted—and hey, what did Lete know about climate change, maybe that did play into things somehow—but despite what Certain People Who Were (in the words of Fall Out Boy) The Patron Saints Of Liars And Fakes, And Also Hypocritical, Lying TRAITORS!!! happened to think of her? Lete did have a brain her head and she did know better than to out-of-pocket believe everything she heard on TV, or read on the Internet, or whatever Certain Lying, Traitorous People Who Shall Remain Nameless But They BETRAYED!!! the Dark Mirror Court And Were Also Terrible thought she did with herself.
(……Or maybe he was still in the process of betraying the Dark Mirror Court. Lete had, in the weeks since Prince Remarque’s mission into Mirrorspace seen that dirty little liar lurking around with his bell-sleeves, and his fluffy skirts, and his completely unnecessary high-heels—seriously, come on!! Why did he even need those when he was already over six feet tall?? And as yet, Lete hadn’t seen her hermano tarado donning the hideous, sanctimonious white-shaded outfit of the White Moon senshi he wanted to love so much.
So, like……she didn’t know. Maybe Hybris had managed to talk some ******** sense into him? Maybe one of the Court’s Eternals had gotten leverage over him and gotten him to stop talking all kinds of stupid garbage about how Mirrorspace was bad, and Mirrorspace was evil, and why are you just okay with stealing energy from innocent people when Mirrorspace only gives you empty promises in return, I’m friends with your ******** cousin, Gabi, and I know that your family raised you ******** BETTER than this! or whatever other garbage he thought he was on about.)
Maybe going out into the mysterious fog because Lete knew that Murikabushi would disapprove of her doing so was even stupider than going out into the fog at all. She didn’t know, okay? Reflecting on her own actions sounded like about the single stupidest thing that Lete could’ve possibly done? Thinking about why she did things or what the consequences of her actions could be—indeed, even admitting that there was a potential she could’ve been in the wrong for summoning her mirrorwraiths and letting them drain people of their energy for her—all sounded like Truly Someone Else’s Problem because Lete didn’t want to deal with it so honestly, why should she have.
Anyway, the fog offered her extra protection from any potential White Moon interlopers who may have tried to aggro her for, like, existing and just doing her job and stuff like that. Not that she felt any White Moon auras around right now, as she skulked through the foggy ups and downs of Hampstead Park, setting wraiths loose on people one-by-one. Lete seemed to have struck gold for once, frankly, because the only people she chanced across were civilians waiting to make kind donations of energy to the Dark Mirror Court. She felt like she should have sensed some auras. Everywhere she traipsed, it felt like she had somebody watching her, and usually, that feeling meant that White Moon senshi or their silly little knights were lurking around to be <******** COPS and interrupt Lete in her work.
And yet, tonight, the feeling mostly amounted to nothing. Lete even stopped counting how many wraiths she set loose on people and how many people they worked on, and still, no ******** White Moon cops emerged from the fog to take issue with her doing her ******** job and picking up slack for Murikabushi on top of it because he’d told her to her face that he hadn’t drained any energy in over a year. No White Moon cops was so much the better for Lete. How fortunate!
……Until her civilian energy-sheep weren’t the only people out here anymore.
She didn’t know how long she’d been at it by the time she saw the……person? A while, probably. Maybe she could’ve gotten her civilian phone out of her subspace pocket, but that wouldn’t have helped much because Lete hadn’t paid attention to what time she’d started this patrol.
And none of it mattered anymore at the sight of that silhouette in the fog: tall and slender, their bearing imperious (because Lete could use smart-aleck two-dollar vocabulary words too, Muri!!!), their elegant horns long and proud, looking like some sexy Cernunnos something or other, or maybe like Cate Blanchett as Hela in Thor: Ragnarok.…… Lete had already drained a lot of people tonight, hadn’t she? Not that the Court had actual energy quotas for its senshi to meet—though now that Lete thought of it, she filed that idea away to propose to Prince Remarque some other time, maybe, because if the Court had had energy quotas for its senshi, maybe somebody would’ve identified The Murikabushi Problem before it spiraled beyond all hope of making him sort his ******** life out and stay with the Court where he BELONGED!!!—but……even if Lete had had energy quotas to meet, she certainly would have exceeded both her own and Murikabushi’s by now.
So, therefore, it was probably okay for her to abandon what she’d been doing and dart off further into the fog, chasing after the horned figure.
“Hey,” she called out. “Hey, wait a minute! Mixter Fog-stalking Cryptid Being!!” Oh, Lete hated running. She hated jogging, too. Frankly, the vast majority of cardio, in her opinion, could absolutely go ******** itself. Like, she knew it kept a b***h healthy, but god, at what cost? Still, at the present moment, she had to curse her own distaste for cardio just a little tiny bit because it seemed like the more she chased after the tall, mysterious horned cryptid-being, the further away they got, which was utterly, simply unfair. “Hey, please, wait! Do you want to be on my podcast! Maybe!! Pretty please?! It’s gonna be all about the beings like you who make Destiny City so special, and please, wait, you……”
Stopping abruptly in the middle of the path, Lete trailed off. Wilting quickly gave way to slouching as she pouted at the fog before her. Whether the horned figure had escaped or not, she wouldn’t have been able to tell, the fog had grown so thick.
She could, however, follow the sound of someone complaining loudly into their cell-phone. Whoever they were, they had a supremely annoying voice, all nasally and way too loud for anybody’s comfort.…… If they had so much energy to be so loud, then really, Lete probably couldn’t drain enough for them to actually miss any of it, and Mirrorspace always needed more energy.
wc: 1,129.
