Prompt 13 (Winter Rainbow): Winter weather is usually fairly predictable–clouds, rain, snow, and a sunny day if you’re lucky. It’s unwise to predict anything in Destiny City, though. Lately, there’s been an uptick in unnatural rainbows. The sky almost regularly seems to be covered with some sort of pastel shimmer. The clouds have a rainbow sheen to them during all weather, and more than once you can even make out a rainbow from just the moon’s beams. Scientists claim there are just many water crystals in the air—and that checks out. During the frequent snows, it’s common to observe soft rainbow snowflakes that catch the light like tiny suncatchers. Even fallen snow seems to have an iridescent sheen to it. It’s not a common occurrence, but it’s happening often enough that you're likely to see it at least once this season.
Come morning, Liánlí had a great many plans. Ostensibly, they weren’t all that complicated, as far as plans went—but brunch had more moving parts than one necessarily thought at first blush. Qiye and Ming-er would be coming over early-ish so that Qi-jie and Liánlí could work on making the bunch together. Hayden and Lola would join them later (since Táotáo got along well with Lola, and having puppy playtime together was good for both of them). No doubt, Huanxi and Dewey would want to help in one way or another, and Liánlí personally planned to include them wherever they wanted to be included.
Nobody coming to brunch in the morning was really Christian. Hayden, as a lapsed Catholic, got the closest but he hadn’t bothered pretending to practice since before he’d even met Liánlí. Since Christmas itself wasn’t the reason for the season, the real justification for it all was simply a bunch of family and friends spending time together, celebrating that they got to have each other in their lives, and welcoming Huanxi and Dewey to said family.
Despite having plans for the morning, Kaifeng and Helene had gone out for a patrol together.
Despite trying very hard to focus on the patrol, Kaifeng’s nerves kept itching for it to be the gift-giving part of tomorrow’s party. Every time he looked up at Helene’s face, he imagined how it might go when he got to duck into the basement and fetch the guitar that he’d bought Huanxi. Acoustic, and beautiful, and so perfectly, unspeakably him-feeling in the vibes—ugh, Liánlí hoped that Huanxi would like it.
On the plus side, the rainbow sheen around the clouds felt like the universe trying to encourage Liánlí about this. Strictly speaking, he knew that wasn’t entirely the case. Rainbow-tinted clouds had cropped up all over town recently, day or night, in all kinds of weather. Likewise, he’d seen more than his fair share of rainbows glittering amidst the dance of moonbeams on the snow (both the snowflakes that drifted down to earth, and those that had already fallen). So, magical thinking could do as it pleased and all, but simple facts said that the colors spilled all across the Christmas Eve/Hour-of-the-Wolf Christmas Morning sky had nothing to do with encouraging Liánlí about the gift he had in mind to give his zhiyin, come morning. Still, the beauty of it all made Kaifeng feel a mix of giddy with expectation and unspeakably reassured.
That good mood did not quite crash as he picked up on a Chaotic aura approaching? It did perk Kaifeng up to a higher alert, though. He nudged at Helene’s shoulder, trying to indicate that one of them (Kaifeng, who definitely didn’t have the best grasp of stealth and could admit that this was one of the areas where he could’ve improved) should approach from the front while the other tried to rush past, then come in from behind. Get as many angles of observation as they could before trying anything with the Chaos agent who’d come into the vicinity. If that Chaos agent only meant to mind their own business, then they didn’t need to fight, but if said Chaos agent wanted to Cause Problems, they might catch traps or some other nefarious something by splitting up, however briefly, and approaching from different angles.
As they drew closer to each other, Kaifeng picked out that the specific Chaos feeling seemed to be Dark Mirror. Most of his previous encounters with the Court and their senshi had gone overall decently. Several of them knew how to act right around people and hadn’t caused any trouble where Kaifeng had seen it……but he kept his hands ready around his bamboo bat regardless, because some Dark Mirror senshi were not so well-behaved. Not that there seemed much in the way of civilians out for their Wraiths to feed on for energy, but……they could’ve made themself Exceedingly Difficult. In case they did, Kaifeng wanted to stay ready.
Yet, when he spotted those billowing, translucent purple sleeves and the mile-long legs in stupidly cute thigh-highs, Kaifeng’s prepared tension melted away into relief.
“Heeey, Muri,” he called out with a smile, throwing one arm in the air to wave at the Mirror senshi while his little wispy friend buzzed around him eagerly.
For obvious reasons of protecting one’s secret identity, Kaifeng had never revealed to Murikabushi that he and the other Mirror senshi with the sunlight-looking crown had protected Liánlí on the gameboard, that once. Truly, he never would’ve been able to live with himself if anything nefarious had come back to Qiye and Hayden because Kaifeng had run his mouth to Muri, and Muri had gotten tortured or something (he didn’t seem the type to give up precious intel on purpose, or at least Kaifeng didn’t want to believe Muri was like that). Even so, Kaifeng felt good about Muri on the whole. He knew, in the back of his mind, that having looked out for him didn’t mean that Muri and his other friend couldn’t have gotten up to mischief and harmed other people when Kaifeng couldn’t see it. Between those two working hard to keep him safe while he’d been sort of difficult and overly headstrong about it, and admirable White Moon sorts like Encke and Pendour vouching for Muri, though, Kaifeng was inclined to believe the best about the really exceptionally tall senshi (Kaifeng himself as Not Short, and Muri probably stood taller than he did even without his heels).
Rocking up closer to Muri, Kaifeng was all smiles. “What brings you out to the park tonight, friend-o? Anything fun, perhaps? Maybe some torrid, forbidden romance?”
Without concern for how it came off, he laughed good-naturedly at his own joke. For all Kaifeng could very much imagine Muri engaging in some forbidden, cross-faction romance, he rather got the sense that Muri took his senshi duties too seriously to let himself indulge like that. Maybe that was just Kaifeng projecting what he wanted to see onto Muri, but—well. Either way, he amused himself, and that was worth laughing over.
Posted: Mon Dec 25, 2023 4:52 pm
When Reiki had set out from home, he’d really hoped to find a Knight, exactly as he’d told Yuki. Anyone but a Dark Mirror could have potentially helped him, though, which wasn’t the Court’s fault, not really. Dark Mirrors, in Reiki’s personal opinion, honestly got sort of screwed in the communication department. As far as he could tell, their dinky little compact mirrors could barely do anything at all. Hybris certainly loved plaguing the compact group-chat with updates about whatever happened to be on his mind at any given moment, but using them for anything more serious didn’t seem possible. Regardless of how Reiki would’ve accepted any help he could get, though, Knights were special. Their signet rings were special. As long as the Knight in question knew the recipient they had in mind, the messages could go anywhere or to anyone, regardless of their allegiances.
………Still, Reiki had to choke back an exhausted sigh when he clocked exactly which Knight (well, Squire, more properly, he guessed) had called out to him. Sure, Kaifeng’s crimson dress and violet waistcoat were a distinctly friendlier sight than the vibrant, violet long-coat and clock-hand that would have signified Fang’s Michel (who, in retrospect, had plenty of reason to dislike Reiki, but Reiki didn’t want to admit that where Michel could hear him do it), but……god, really? Like, come on, ******** really? Of all the jumped up Knights in all the White Moon, the one whose gin joint Reiki had crashed into had to be Mx. Borderline Insufferable Sunshine and Rainbows of Saturn with his Hot Topic Hello Kitty stationery?
“Nothing so dramatic,” Reiki told Kaifeng flatly, and he very much meant to go on……but a ping on his aura sense gave him pause. Made him narrow his eyes. “……Is that other White Moon aura with you or what?”
If some basic senshi or little Page was simply passing through, Reiki didn’t want to give either them or Kaifeng a hard time about it. Aside from wanting to generally behave himself and be a kind, mostly decent person, Reiki genuinely didn’t think Kaifeng had much in the way of guile or trickery up his sleeve. Based on precedent, his idea of a brilliant trick consisted entirely of being so upbeat and positive with a rapier in his stomach that he pushed some poor Negaverse General into a nigh-on meltdown, rather than anything that involved real tactics or strategy……but the other White Moon aura was approaching from behind Reiki, and he’d gotten hit with too much freak-a** spectral siren music and too many angry geese.
Opposite him, Kaifeng kept up that little smile, though it looked a bit bemused at the moment, possibly over being caught out on……whatever this scheme thought it was at home. Shoulders slumping in a mix of disbelief and general crankiness, Reiki gave Kaifeng the most unimpressed and ******** Over It look that he could manage.
“Your friend is trying to hit me with a sneak attack, aren’t they, Kaifeng,” he said flatly, his tone not asking a question because……this all seemed pretty cut-and-dry, honestly. Not something he’d expected from Kaifeng, who’d generally been so decent to Reiki before and hadn’t ostensibly judged him for being a Mirror senshi. As tacky as he found the Hello Kitty stationery, Reiki had even saved the periodic “Just writing to say ‘hi’ and that I hope you’re well” notes Kaifeng had sent him with that signet ring. “You want to call them off before I have to use my magic in self-defense, pretty boy. Not a threat, just a promise.”
Raising his left hand as if preparing to yank the invisible string that triggered his magic, Reiki stared Kaifeng dead in the eyes. “Unless your partner’s completely immune to any kind of hunger, my magic might really ******** them up. I don’t like using it on anybody, that’s how bad it is, but if you guys are gonna treat a Dark Mirror senshi as hostile by default like that, then I will defend myself.” Reiki leaned in close to Kaifeng’s ear so he could add, “Again: not a threat, just a promise.”
“Aaaaiiiiyah, no, no, no, no, no!” It had taken Kaifeng’s brain several moments of confusion to catch up with what the happ had started ******** around here. Jumping back from Muri, he shook his head more than a bit frantically. As if it somehow helped make his point, Kaifeng tucked his bat into the crook of his elbow and waved both hands in front of his face. If he’d held still, it would’ve looked like a surrendering gesture. “Nothing like that at all, I promise! We were only going to do that if the Dark Mirror we picked up on had been up to mischief or hurting people, but seeing as you’re not……you know?”
Laughing nervously, Kaifeng flashed Muri a hopeful grin. This…… Things didn’t need to be all fighty like this, did they? Muri was one of the cool Dark Mirrors, unlike the little meimei with the crazy-long hair and the penchant for totally misappropriating Marxist theory in ways that did not mean what literally any of those words she’d said had meant. They could just……calm down and talk like reasonable adult people, couldn’t they?
(That little hiss of Not a threat, just a promise made ******** something itch inside Kaifeng, though, snarling and ready to go off the ******** chain if Muri dared do anything that might hurt Helene. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever heard what sort of magic Muri had before, but……hunger magic definitely sounded like something Kaifeng didn’t want hitting his Huanxi. Not ever, if he could avoid it. Whatever Muri’s magic did, Huanxi had suffered enough hunger before getting to Earth and Kaifeng didn’t want to fight Muri, but if he raised a hand to Helene like that……? If he so much as tried it, Kaifeng wouldn’t hesitate.
But?? They didn’t need? To get all fighty about it, did they?? Whatever Muri had gotten into his head, this was just a misunderstanding and they could resolve it super-easily!!)
Noir Songbird_
Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2024 3:12 am
Helene had not even considered any concerns about their plans in the morning when he gladly went on patrol with Kaifeng. It was just right that they should do their best to attend to their magical duties, holidays or no.
Not that he wasn't looking forward to a gathering with Dewey and with Lianli's friends and family. He wanted to be able to make a better impression on his beloved's family this time--it had not always been too terrible, and he liked to think that at least Xingyi's foster brother acknowledged that Huanxi wanted the best for Xingyi, but a second chance was a second chance and would involve much less fighting with irritating cousins who looked to take advantage of his position to benefit them in whatever way they looked for this time.
But tonight, it was a relatively peaceful patrol, illuminated by the lovely rainbow lights that had been reported throughout the city. It was almost peaceful, until a Chaos aura disturbed them. A short nod to acknowledge, and Helene was off--quick on his feet, hopping up to a nearby fire escape to give him room to flank from above and behind if it was necessary.
It did not seem to be. He heard Kaifeng call out a name--Muri--and he narrowed his eyes--yes. Purple. Red. Lace and flounce, wide sleeves. He had never much known the Senshi of Hunger, a millennium ago, but he knew enough to recognize his colors and his people's stylings, even warped by Chaos.
So he was already n his way back down, though it was with a bit more tension than he would have liked, because this Murikabushi did not seem to have a grasp on the concept of being prepared for the worst while hoping for thew best.
"No need for any hostilities," Helene said, as coolly as he could manage. "It seems we were prepared for a threat that won't be materializing. Hello, Murikabushi. Kaifeng has spoken highly of you."
Felt like an odd thing to be thinking while faced with a very tall specimen of Space Senshi (seriously: he had platforms to his sandals, but they didn’t add much height, and yet, he and Reiki were probably about even, thanks to Reiki’s heels). Moreover, a very tall specimen of Space Senshi who looked distinctly other than impressed with Reiki as he emerged from the shadows to join Kaifeng.
(They were, Reiki decided, definitely ********. Didn’t matter if it was true or not. In his heart, they were ********, and now, Sailor Dayglo Qilin of ******** was probably considering the best way to snap Reiki’s neck over him trying to start some s**t with Dayglo Qilin’s girl-boy-“what’s gender, precious? does it go on avocado toast?”…… Maybe Reiki would ask after the full nature of their relationship later, but first, he probably needed to dig himself out of the dog-house.)
With a sigh, he dropped his hand from the attack gesture, and held up both in surrender. He did not, however, show Kaifeng’s new whomst-ever the deference of averting his eyes. Not him. Not Dr. Murasaki Tatsuhana Rokugin’s grandson. Oh, he did not think. I am a lioness, Reiki thought (and could almost feel the tattoo on his shoulder prickle at having its words invoked, even in the privacy of Reiki’s own mind). I will not cringe for them.
Looking Sailor Dayglo Qilin right in the eye, Reiki said, “I apologize for casting aspersions and jumping the gun.” Your Worship, Reiki thought, but kept to himself, because who was to say it wasn’t some massive offense to sarcastically use a respectful term of address like that among Sailor Dayglo Qilin’s people. “I did not really want to attack either you or Kaifeng. It’s just that several other Knights and White Moon senshi have attacked me before—pretty much exclusively when I was trying to help somebody—because they focused on the Dark Mirror fuku instead of literally anything else. You ever been bowled over by geese? In the middle of summer? When someone you know—a friend—just passed out from heatstroke and all you wanna do is get him to the hospital?”
Not that Anser had even been the worst of Reiki’s experiences with this s**t treatment from people—far from it; she’d really been one of the most reasonable ones, and she was a traumatized twelve-year-old on top of it—but………the ******** geese, though.
“Awwwww,” Kaifeng let slip out before he could think to stop himself. Yes, he edged closer to Helene, but at this point, it was more out of a Desire To Be Close To Helene than any kind of nervousness or fear that Muri was going to continue being bitey (but like, with magic instead of his vicious, vicious words). As if it would reassure Helene that Muri definitely hadn’t actually done anything, Kaifeng reached for one of his hands, gently lacing their fingers together. “I’m sorry, friend. That’s, y’know, obviously not what Helene and I were gonna do, since you’re not up to mischief or anything, like I said? But……still, you didn’t deserve all that just for trying to help somebody. Multiple somebodies, even. Honestly, that is super-rude of people to assume, Chaos aura or no.”
There did seem, to Kaifeng, a rather obvious solution to the problem……but on the other hand, maybe he was missing something and it was not so obvious? He knew that people could leave the Negaverse—that many senshi and Knights had done so, even—but aside from Muri and having briefly run into Ser Hybris of Eggplants and Miss Meimei of the Misappropriated Marxist Theory, Kaifeng really didn’t know very much about the Dark Mirror Court. Perhaps the rules were different for them and they couldn’t leave? Either way, it felt more prudent not to say that out loud when Muri was already quite upset.
With the tension going down between the three of them, Reiki could at least breathe much more easily. “Well, thank you,” he said, “for being one of the only people who doesn’t tell me it’s my fault that they decided to ******** hit me, like? Usually with the absolute most maximum ‘Have you tried not being a mutant’ energy—”
“That’s from a movie,” Kaifeng whispered to Helene, since talking to Muri tended to be very much like reading Chinese literature as far as needing footnotes went, save that Muri didn’t pull his references from The Romance of Three Kingdoms, the Analects, Zizhi Tongjian, the Classic of Poetry, or The Dream of the Red Chamber. “The mutants are sort of a metaphor for queer people.”
“—like, gee, wow, do you people even listen to yourselves when you’re saying garbage like ‘Why did you make me hit you’? Gurl, I don’t even know you, how did I make you do ******** anything? Did you even stop and consider how somebody might end up becoming a Chaos senshi, or were you too busy being self-righteous to remember that other people have full and complete lives outside of the ways that their lives intersect with yours?”
Groaning in exasperation with both past experiences and the ones he would almost certainly have in the future, Reiki rolled his eyes and shook his head. He made a point of taking a deep breath and meditatively letting it go, however, before he looked back to Kaifeng and his Whatever-They-Were. “Obviously, I don’t mean you two specifically, since……we’re good, right? You’re not coming for me, I’m not coming for you, and we can all talk like civilized people?”
Noir Songbird_
Posted: Tue Jan 02, 2024 5:09 am
Kaifeng was alright, and alright enough to come over to Helene's side and wind their hands together, and as far as Helene was concerned, that was the most important thing right now.
"I believe the expression on this world is no harm, no foul?" He tilted his head to the side, thoughtfully. The language felt odd on his tongue, but attempting to meet modern Earth speech where it was seemed wise, especially if he wanted to interact with the wider world as Huanxi Xin, Person Who Definitely Existed In Earth Records.
"Unfortunate that you have to be so guarded. Chaos is insidious, and it is rarely ever invited--there is no purpose in assuming that those who are marked by it chose such, or that they are doing harm unless said harm is occurring in front of you."
A little nod of thanks to Kaifeng, for translating the reference he was unfamiliar with, and a light squeeze of his Squire's hand.
Maybe nodding at Helene getting the Terran expression correct wasn’t exactly necessary? But Kaifeng did so anyway, glancing up at his zhiyin with a (hopefully) reassuring smile and a gentle squeeze-back of Helene’s hand. Wasn’t much that needed saying, though, not until Muri answered Helene’s question. Which did nothing to stop Kaifeng from brushing his shoulder against Helene’s, not entirely unlike playing footsie, aside from involving the wrong body parts.
……Okay, those two were having a moment. Pursing his lips, Reiki looked up at the rainbow sheen around the clouds and studiously pretended that he saw nothing. Sure, he had made up his mind that they were ********, and the evidence that he might’ve had the right idea for once sort of pleased Reiki? But interloping on other people’s PDA—even when it was, by most people’s standards, really pretty restrained—would never not be massively ******** awkward, and Reiki really wanted to pretend that it just didn’t exist.
When the moment passed, he looked back to the happy couple and told them bluntly, “No trouble tonight. Actually……I crave a boon.”
“From a musical that was based on a movie,” Kaifeng editorialized for Helene’s benefit. “I recorded a few of the songs from it for work, I’ll show them to you late—”
“You,” Reiki cut in on………whatever Kaifeng thought he was doing, pointing at the little Saturn Squire just so there couldn’t be any confusion.
With a literal finger being very much pointed at him, Kaifeng perked up, back into the immediate moment, as well as the universe that existed outside of himself and Helene. Pointing at himself, he echoed back, “Me?”
“You,” Reiki confirmed. “Your signet ring. It can send messages to literally anybody, right?”
Smiling and eager about the chance to help, Kaifeng nodded. “Anything handwritten, yeah. I have to know the person’s name and their face.…… I don’t know if I really need to write the recipients’ names on anything when I send it, but I usually do anyway, ‘cause I figure it can’t hurt to have a cheerful address to open a missive.” For a moment, he tilted his head and blinked at Muri. “Do you……need help sending something? To someone?”
Reiki nodded, helping himself to a deep breath. “Will it make a difference if the person I want to message is with the Negaverse?”
“Uh, that might depend on who it is and what you want to send them, I guess?” Generally speaking, the Negaverse was Bad News, point blank, period. A lot of the people in the Negaverse seemed to be pretty actively engaged in helping spread that Bad News, as well. But there remained a lot of pretty obvious questions and currently unknown aspects of the situation right here before Kaifeng in this specific moment. “I mean, I don’t really know what the relationship between them and you guys in the Dark Mirror is—”
“A hot mess of bad blood and history that most of us don’t even remember,” Reiki cut in with a shrug and a roll of his eyes. “Anyway, that’s fair enough. I swear on my mom’s life that I’m not sending anything nefarious.”
……Probably for the best to just come out with it all, as much as he could. So, Reiki explained, “I have some gift bags stashed in my subspace right now. Holiday presents for somebody I care about who’s in the Negaverse, as well as his team. Some of them are friends, some of them aren’t, but even if they aren’t friends, I wanted to send them something nice regardless. There’s a place where I want to take the gifts for him to find them, and I want to send him a little note to let him know they’re there.”
Kaifeng considered what Muri was saying, but it didn’t take him long to nod. “I’d be happy to help with that, sure.”
“Do you want to know the recipient first,” Reiki pointed out. “Just in case that makes a difference.” When that only earned him a shrug and a painfully earnest but not particularly emotional facial expression from Kaifeng, he added, “Does the name ‘Faustite’ mean anything to you? It should, by the way. Back in May, you watched your team’s Miss Cybele pop her pretty, pretty princess wings when he shoved his hand into her chest.”
“Oh, yeah! Jiejie was amazing in how she handled that, wasn’t she? Literal grace under fire, right?”
Smiling came so naturally to Kaifeng that he didn’t stop and think about how it might have come off in this situation, right after Muri had basically admitted that the pretty clear loser in that previous encounter was somebody of great import to him. Only when he looked back to Muri and saw a flat, unimpressed frown coming his way did Kaifeng’s brain catch up with the whole This demon-looking Negaverse guy has people who care about him, of whom Muri is one part of everything. With a slight, pink flush, Kaifeng cleared his throat and glanced away.
“……Sorry,” he said. “Watching jiejie mess up someone you care about? That……probably wasn’t your favorite situation, was it?
“I mean, it’s one of my biggest accomplishments, so I guess I’m not mad at it or anything.” Reiki made a noncommittal noise in response to Kaifeng’s quizzical expression. “Oh, it’ll be a year ago in February. I ran into the two of them, fighting like a bag of wet cats, trying to kill each other. Pulled them apart. Got Cybele to back off. Faustite teleported us out of there. Obviously, I can’t claim any credit for everything they did to actually earn their respective glow-ups to General-King and Princess senshi? But I kept them from killing each other so they could get there, y’know? Which is probably more than I’ll ever do on my own, even after I get out of the ******** Mirror.”
He quirked his shoulders. Idly rubbed one eye. “So, no, I didn’t enjoy Cybele making a mess out of him like she did. Didn’t enjoy her magic, either. But I don’t blame her for not letting him kill her, corrupt her, or turn her into a youma.”
Which, as he said it, Reiki realized might have sounded a bit overly blasé, especially when he was displaying this flazeda attitude about something that he’d already told Kaifeng and Helene mattered a great deal to them.
With a sigh, he tried to explain, “I care about Faustite, like I said. I also freely acknowledge that Faustite is ill-tempered, quick to violence, capable of torture and murder and so much more, and that’s not even a fraction of the picture about why a lot of people find him objectionable. I’m not asking anybody else to care about him, much less to forgive him for anything he’s done just because I personally care about him. And if me wanting to send holiday gifts to him and his team is a deal-breaker for you, that’s okay. No hard feelings, I promise.”
There was………a lot to unpack, Kaifeng felt. Everything that Muri was saying right now felt like it had a truly unfathomable amount of layers going on. As usual, footnotes and translator’s commentary would have helped—but for once, it had nothing to do with all of Muri’s layers and layers of references to things. A lot of story all wrapped up in everything Muri had to say about this, it seemed, and he sounded so unbelievably worn down in telling it.…… Without really thinking about it, Kaifeng squeezed Helene’s hand and shifted closer to him again. Having Helene here felt like a protective ward against falling into sadness or……whatever was going on with Muri tonight.
“No, no, I’m okay with that,” Kaifeng told Muri gently. “I mean, Negaverse or not, it’s holiday gifts. No judgment against you caring about him. Where do you want to take the gifts? We can go there with you, since we were on patrol anyway.” Glancing up at Helene, he added, “If that sounds alright to you, gege?”
Noir Songbird
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 4:33 pm
Helene nodded in thanks both for Kaifeng's confirmation that he was correct in his use of Earth expression, and for the explanation of Murikabushi's request. Mostly, though, it seemed that his duty was to stand silently, to be a second person to observe this little drama and consider.
Chaos was fascinating to him, in all its miserable, dark manifestations and all its horrors. But here, on Earth, Chaos was not a plague or a monster, it was people, whose hearts had been claimed, and yet who still cared for each other, looked after each other--bah, it was clearly more complicated than he wished it would be.
"Yes, that sounds fine," Helene said. As much as he wasn't sure how he felt about the "Negaverse General-Sovereign" of it all, it was Kaifeng's ring and Kaifeng's power, and he would simply stick by his beloved's side to ensure his safety.
With everybody in agreement that there was safety in numbers, the little group set off together, following Muri’s lead. He took them out of the park and more into town, heading down a series of turns that did not immediately strike Kaifeng as familiar.
As much as he wanted to ask where they were going, Kaifeng also didn’t want to put Muri too much on edge, or make him feel like there wasn’t a degree of trust being extended to him. He was taking Helene’s general “visibly not from around here”-ness pretty well (but considering Muri seemed to be friendly with at least Fang and Daedalus, maybe that wasn’t too surprising), and tonight’s initial misunderstanding aside, he was generally decent. Kaifeng didn’t want to make him feel any negative sort of way about this adventure. Especially, he didn’t want to make Muri feel like he was being judged (derogatorily) or anything over his gesture of kindness toward General-King Faustite.
Unfortunately, Kaifeng’s nerves had other ideas. Having both Muri and Helene with him as they made their way through different streets and alleyways, it helped a lot? But silence still grated his nerves too much when allowed to go on for too long. Normally, he liked to think that he’d been getting better and working on increasing his tolerance for quiet, the way that Michel-gege had suggested doing (or at least the way that Kaifeng had chosen to read into what Michel-gege had said)……but even though he’d let the whole misunderstanding go intellectually, his nerves clung to the drama of it all—how intense Muri could be when he put his mind to it, how badly his magic might have affected Helene if he’d started throwing it around, how desperately Kaifeng had wanted things to please just calm down—and the lingering ish-ness of that made Kaifeng’s nerves itch.
It made the silence feel suffocating.
Before too long, he had to speak up: “So, hey, Muri? Did I mishear earlier? Or did you say something about you maybe leaving the Mirror Court?” For a moment, he waited patiently, but a quick glance up at his silent Dark Mirror comrade suggested that Muri was lost in thought. Frowning concernedly, Kaifeng nudged the tall, glamorous senshi’s shoulder. “……Muri? You okay?”
Given his druthers, Reiki would have been perfectly content to walk to the Farnsworth in more or less complete silence. Kaifeng’s companion—Helene, or so Kaifeng had called him—didn’t seem to be that talkative, and as much as Reiki himself could and would talk anybody’s ear off, having to humble himself enough to ask for help always left him feeling……kinda weird.
Worse, he’d need to do so at least a couple more big times in the near future. If he didn’t beg Ida for help in getting out of the Mirror, he’d need to beg Cosmos to help instead and just hope that she would come for him and Volterra, the same way that she once had for Kerberos and once had for Asmodeus.
Not that Reiki wanted to question either of them about their purification stories, because neither of them had had any reason to lie to him. Kerberos, especially, had never done anything over the course of their friendship to deserve that suspicion. But the whole fanciful idea—I wished upon a star, and Cosmos showed up, Asmodeus had told him—did not sound like something that could happen to Reiki. There had to be exceptions to every rule, and maybe Reiki would condemn himself to being ignored by Cosmos by virtue of……he didn’t ******** know. Something. Any of the numerous things about him that made him annoying, exhausting, and insufferable to deal with.
He didn’t enjoy thinking about this, but he still would have been fine with the silence and his own thoughts………except Kaifeng started nudging at his shoulder and making sparkly puppy eyes of concern.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Reiki sighed, pausing briefly to watch for any traffic before leading them across one street. On the other side, he nudged Kaifeng to repeat the question, and at least it wasn’t a terribly difficult one, relative to questions that Kaifeng could have gotten it in his head to ask. “And you did hear me right about that, yeah. It’s sort of a work in progress right now, but I am working on getting out of the Court.”
“Oh, wow,” Kaifeng said, not even remotely aware that this phrasing might have sounded sarcastic if not for his voice’s painful earnestness and his sparkly-eyed enthusiasm. “That’s so good to know, that people can get out of Chaos.”
“Plenty more people in town than me have done it,” Reiki pointed out. “More people have left the Negaverse, I’m pretty sure? But part of that is just down to numbers. The Court doesn’t have Agents like the Negaverse does—they’re sort of like the Negaverse’s Knights, and as I understand, that’s what they become when they leave the Negaverse—and for various reasons, there are fewer of us in general. So, simply due to them having bigger numbers, you’re more likely to find a senshi who used to have the floor-length hair and cracks in their forehead and chest, rather than a senshi who used to have one of our flouncy overlays.”
Rubbing idly at one of his eyes, he added, “Plus, Mirrorspace apparently makes the whole process very dramatic—and since I’m the one criticizing that, maybe you can appreciate just how dramatic it is? Because most of the time, I’m a messy b***h who loves drama. It’s much more straightforward to leave the Negaverse, from what I understand.”
Kaifeng nodded along, letting Muri talk and trying not to openly vibrate with excitement over all of what Muri was saying. Maybe it was selfish to let his mind go in this direction, but the idea of people getting cleansed of Chaos’s influence made him wonder about Helene’s home-world. No, the situations were not the same—even without knowing all the details of what had happened to Helene’s world, Kaifeng knew enough to grok that their Chaos problem was very different from a single individual having been Awakened into a Chaos faction—but if people could be liberated from Chaos’s influence like that, then maybe it would be possible to clean things up on Helene’s world, someday?
“So, how does that all work,” Kaifeng asked, vaguely hoping that he didn’t sound eager enough to be off-putting. But only vaguely. “I don’t even know very much about how Chaos senshi and Negaverse Agents work, really? They exist and are people—whether that means humans or half-youma like your Faustite—and the Chaos has always seemed like a fact of their existence? Not enough to condemn anybody out of hand, because they could just be a decent person who isn’t hurting anybody and happens to be Chaos? But……yeah, I didn’t realize that you could change that fact of someone’s existence. How does it work?”
Listening to Kaifeng babble, Reiki idly wondered if he was feeling the way that Faustite felt whenever Reiki and/or Albite started going on and on about whatever. Not that he could begrudge Kaifeng the questions he had—it didn’t seem like either the Court or the White Moon had the same organization as the Negaverse, which unfortunately left a lot of newbies to learn on their own, without any real guidance—but……gods, Kaifeng could ******** talk.
“Well, I guess the first thing to understand is how somebody becomes a Chaos senshi or a Negaverse agent,” Reiki said with another sigh, after taking a moment to decide how he wanted to explain things. “So, everybody has a starseed, right? Their default state is to exist without Chaos. I’m not really clear on how it all works for Knights, but if you’re a senshi, your starseed is tied to a planet, star, asteroid, comet, or some other celestial body. Murikabushi is in the asteroid belt somewhere. Lete, another Dark Mirror you might have met out and about? Maybe five-eight, kinda curvy, dark-skinned with Nega-senshi length hair and a tendency to throw around words and concepts she doesn’t actually understand because she thinks it makes her sound smarter, even though it actually makes her sound like a ******** idiot?”
Kaifeng wrinkled his nose at the description of the other Dark Mirror in question. “Lilac and seafoam green color scheme? Fuku’s sort of witchy looking? Acts tough but turns into a total paper tiger with the slightest pushback?”
“Ah, so you’ve met the little nightmare, then.”
“Yeah, unfortunately.” Lest he sound unfairly rude, Kaifeng clarified, “Xiao-meimei was sitting on a picnic table with a book while she sent those wraith things after people. Then, she got very rude with another senshi like Helene-gege—y’know, one who isn’t from Earth—and started throwing around misappropriated Marxist theory in extremely incorrect ways.”
“Yep, that has Lete all over it. Sorry for whatever trouble she caused you, by the way? One of the only redeeming things about that one is that at least she’s mostly just a nuisance. She’s a youngest sibling in the most derogatory way possible and like you said, she’s a total paper tiger. All you have to do is whap her with a rolled up newspaper and she’ll run crying to her poor girlfriend.”
Reiki did not, offhand, know who Lete’s girlfriend was but goddamn, he felt sorry for her. Maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe Lete had better qualities that she saved to show her girlfriend and the family she cared about, like Leandro. But that didn’t make her less <******** annoying for Reiki personally to deal with.
“Anyway, her celestial object is a planet out in the constellation Virgo. She doesn’t care about this in the slightest, though, which I just personally do not understand? Preferring the void and emptiness of Mirrorspace to the beautiful, messy reality of space space is just……make it make sense, right? And Helene……” Reiki trailed off, trying to think if he’d read the name anywhere before.
“Oh, it’s a moon of Saturn,” Kaifeng offered brightly. “Apparently, Helene’s gege was also a senshi, so like—what do you think? Reincarnated or is he gonna come down from space someday too?”
Noir Songbird
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2024 5:08 pm
Honestly, Helene was glad that Kaifeng had gotten Murikabushi talking. It was fascinating, to him, to hear the ins and outs of leaving Chaos--it was not an immediate concern for him, perhaps, butt here might be someone who needed that help someday. From him, or from Kaifeng.
And, moreover, if the individual soul could be freed, perhaps...perhaps his home could be, as well.
Though it would likely be quite different. The scale alone, if nothing else. Still, that was a piece of hope he hadn't had, before all of this, and he would hold that very precious.
Murikabushi's sentiments were surprising, and Helen blinked, and then nodded.
"Thank you. It is also my hope--not that my brother has suffered, but...I would be glad for him to still be alive." And his husband, if only for Zhiguang's sake.
Reiki nodded, still aching with sympathy, but did need to look away from Helene rather quickly. He couldn’t lead them to their final destination if he didn’t watch where he was going, if he didn’t keep track of the streets around them. “So, can a b***h please continue with what he was explaining?”
He waited for Kaifeng to nod, but thankfully, that didn’t take long. “Like I said, the natural way that a starseed exists is without Chaos. But the Negaverse and the Dark Mirror Court, they have their own ways of Awakening a starseed that belongs to a would-be senshi or Knight. Well, the Court can only do that for senshi, but the Negaverse can also do it for Knights. Maybe their Agents can be made out of unpowered people also? But every former Agent I’ve ever heard of, they purified into a Knight.”
He briefly considered naming the ones he knew or had heard of offhand, but decided against it. Those stories weren’t his business to out for anyone else.
“Negaverse Chaos can also turn people into youma, though,” Reiki went on, “and they can very definitely be made out of powered and unpowered people alike. I can’t speak to what Faustite specifically had in mind when he accidentally helped Cybele power up into a princess? But there is a distinctly non-zero chance that his intention was actually to youmafy her, rather than making a Nega-senshi out of it. But the method, as I understand, would have been very similar. The Negaverse is direct and brute force about how it brings people into its ranks. Their Chaos gets pumped directly into a starseed, and I cannot imagine how much that ******** hurts.”
The concept Muri was talking about didn’t surprise Kaifeng that much. It was true that General-King Faustite had shoved his hand clean into Cybele’s chest that night at Augusta Bank, and he’d done something that Kaifeng hadn’t truly been clear about the specifics of, aside from the end result. Trying to push Chaos into her starseed made sense and did, indeed, sound like an Extremely Negaverse Thing to Do To Someone. This did not, however, stop Kaifeng from looking horrified by the idea, or from reaching instinctively for Helene’s hand like a comfort blanket.
Both of them were here. Both of them were okay. Other people had suffered what the Negaverse had done to them and their starseeds. In all likelihood, more people would continue to suffer, because the Negaverse still existed and they had to recruit people in order to keep their ranks populated. But Kaifeng and Helene were both okay, and they had each other, which meant that they had two more people who could fight to help protect others from the Negaverse.
“So, Dark Mirror Chaos is different then?” Kaifeng assumed from everything Muri had said so far that the answer was yes, but just because the Negaverse and the Dark Mirror Court worked differently didn’t mean that they couldn’t both be horrifying. Preemptively, Kaifeng squeezed Helene’s hand to soothe his own nerves more than anything. “Shouldn’t it be easier for you guys to get out, if the Chaos isn’t directly put in your starseed?”
“Yeah, you would think that and I wouldn’t blame you. Would be really nice if things worked that way.” Sighing again, Reiki rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “But the way Dark Mirror Chaos interacts with a starseed? First of all, it’s why I’d probably still be a hot mess, if I’d gotten Awakened into the Negaverse? Like, a b***h knows himself, here. I know that I’m just kind of a hot mess, most of the time, regardless of circumstances, and that was true long before I got Awakened a year-and-a-half ago.
“Dark Mirror Chaos, for me, has been one of the worst things that could have happened to me, personally. Other people are fine with it, or at least they think they are. But having a straitjacket made of Chaos ******** smothering my starseed has just been the worst, for me.” A brief pause to look around as the buildings got a little less familiar. Nothing entirely unrecognized, just……Reiki didn’t really come to this part of town as often as he went to others. He still knew which way they were going, but it didn’t hurt to check. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a starseed—and I actually haven’t either—but they’re supposed to burst with light and color. This is just……part of how they work, as I’ve been given to understand.”
Glancing back at the lovebirds, Reiki told them bluntly, “Mine got ripped out a couple months after I’d Awakened. Some android from Murikabushi-That-Was thought stealing my starseed would let him claim it as his own so he could join the reincarnation cycle and become human or some gods-only-know what.” Maybe the shake of the head and the roll of the eyes wasn’t fair, but truly, whatever nonsense Kima and the other robots on Astraya had been on, Reiki did not understand how it was supposed to have worked. “A friend of mine, Kerberos? He interrupted and got my starseed back. But the whole reason Android Kima surrendered it so easily was that he thought it was broken. Because, well, starseeds are supposed to burst with light and color, right? Except that Dark Mirror senshi’s starseeds don’t.
“For a while, I thought that he was probably right, so I’d just be stuck here and miserable? Broken starseed, nothing to be done, very ‘If you can’t fix it, you’ve gotta stand it’ like some ******** Brokeback Mountain teas—”
“Another movie,” Kaifeng whispered to Helene as Muri looked back to where they were going, rather than looking back at him and Helene. “Based on a book. I’ve got both of them at home. Tragic love story between two men. I think you’d either love it or it might hit too close to home in a bad way.”
To say the least. Maybe Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar hadn’t been able to have their real ********’ good life together for different reasons than Huan-ge and Xingyi-ge, but the similarities felt too poignant to ignore, to Liánlí-Kaifeng.
“—but it turns out, Dark Mirror starseeds aren’t broken, that’s literally just the Chaos and it can be gotten rid of.” Which was all, Reiki realized, probably rather a lot to digest. So, he let it hang there between them for a moment before he went on, “The trouble comes from how that Chaos empowers our starseeds. Like, White Moon senshi, connection to their celestial object, the way things are supposed to be. Negaverse senshi, connection to the eldritch horror, world-consuming nightmare monster at the center of it all, pumped straight into their starseeds.
“But for Dark Mirror senshi, Mirrorspace makes a copy of our starseeds. And in order for a Princess or Cosmos to get us out of there, we have to go on a whole quest into Mirrorspace to get the copy back. On that quest, Mirrorspace apparently throws up an evil duplicate of us that we have to fight or something. It’s all, like I said, extremely dramatic and convoluted in ways that I really wish it weren’t.”
All of that was, indeed, Very A Lot and while Kaifeng appreciated the level of detail that Muri put into his explanation, well. It was all Very A Lot. Even with Helene beside him, and his fingers entwined with Helene’s, Kaifeng felt like he’d need a while to chew on all of that before he could really say that he understood any of it. Aside from the fairly obvious and indisputable point of “Muri cared about this issue very deeply, it had likely been eating him up inside for a while, and he wanted to be his true self (something he felt like Mirrorspace and Dark Mirror Chaos prevented him from doing, and Kaifeng could feel for that, even if his own experience had come from entirely non-magical sources),” everything just felt like a morass of information and hurt with incredibly high stakes on all sides.
Even after some consideration, all Kaifeng could think of to say was, “……Wow. Do you……? You have a plan for what’s going to happen with it all, right?”
Reiki nodded, trying not to think about the brief glimmer of hope he’d allowed himself to entertain, thinking that Kaifeng might just be quiet for a while. “Someone I love and trust completely—he’s going to catch me and my cousin when we get out of the Mirror. He’s not on any magical team—I don’t know, he might be a Knight who just hasn’t Awakened yet or something, but I was almost too old to get Awakened and he’s older than I am, so……I really hope he’s not a senshi.”
God, no, anything but that. Even without knowing all of the specifics of what had happened to Blossom’s friend with the un-Awakened senshi starseed, the last thing Reiki wanted was for something like that to happen to Yuki.
“Oh!” Kaifeng brightened up, glomming right onto the opportunity to make the conversation overall more positive. “You have a zhiyin, too?”
Since they had to pause once more to check for traffic, Reiki took a moment to let Kaifeng feel the heat of his intensely confused expression. “I have a queerplatonic best guy, if that’s what you mean?”
Tilting his head right back at Muri’s confusion, Kaifeng hummed pensively. “Well, that’s one valid way to be a zhiyin, I guess? Not exactly what I had in mind, but……to be fair, I’m biased by how I am with my zhiyin.”
He nodded his head back toward Helene, just in case there was any doubt about who his zhiyin was.
Reiki scrunched his face up in a frown. “You know I’m Japanese, right? I have no idea what that word you’re using means.”
“Oh, it’s, um……” Blushing a bit at being called out on his presumption (he……had given exactly no thought to Muri’s ethnicity, aside from Fellow Asian-American), Kaifeng fiddled idly with Helene’s hand. “It’s sort of complicated, I guess? But a lot of older Chinese terms are. And first, there’s another phrase to understand that’s pretty closely related, zhiji. That one usually gets translated into English as ‘lifelong confidante’ or ‘soulmate,’ and those are, like, fine, I guess? As far as translations go? You might also see ‘close friend’ if you have Western translators trying to play down how gay something in an ancient text sounds, which again, is not wrong? But it’s also not as right as it could be?
“I’m not really here for any of these renderings personally, because even though they’re not wrong, they lose something huge in being rendered like that, y’know?”
Nodding, Reiki picked up walking again. They were finally getting close to the Farnsworth, thank ********. “Isn’t that always the way, with translation?”
“Gods, right,” Kaifeng groaned—but he picked up the pleasant, if a bit awkward, explanation pretty quickly. “So, zhiji has a long, rich history, and the real operative point of it is that the first character isn’t about love, exactly? It’s deeper than that. It has meanings like ‘to recognize, to perceive,’ usually specifically meaning things that other people can’t. Or, like, ‘to know something that others don’t.’
“And in Classical texts where you run into that zhī character, it’s often in contexts where you have somebody like a patron or a benefactor, who recognizes in somebody a talent that no one else sees or appreciates. Sima Qian is on some really messy, gendered s**t in Records of the Grand Historian, but he’s still one of the best examples of using the term: shì wèi zhījǐ zhě sǐ, nǚ wéi yuè jǐ zhě róng.… ‘Men of service die for their zhījǐ’—someone who appreciates them, understands them, knows them as well as the zhījǐ knows himself—‘while women will adorn themselves for men who admire them.’”
Maybe if Huang Yicheng and Xiao Yulan had used that character in Zhìháo’s name, Liánlí would have struggled more with the decision to rid himself of it. They hadn’t, though, and that had been their mistake.
Reiki hummed. “If we’re out here comparing the relationship between men and their patrons to romantic relationships between men and women, no wonder why translators feel the need to play down how gay the term sounds in context.”
“Exactly, right! That line is from ‘Biographies of the Assassin-Retainers,’ and elsewhere in the text, Sima Qian even compares courtiers vying for imperial favor to concubines—which is pretty fair, since there are a lot of Classical Chinese stories about same-gender imperial favorites being prized above wives and concubines, in a pretty unquestionably romantic sense. Drove British colonizers in China absolutely insane, trying to reckon with it, because they looked at so much of the culture they found, and they saw it as highly literary, advanced in philosophy and the natural sciences and the art of warfare, unquestionably respectable……but then, you had all the gay s**t that was, for the most part, pretty widely accepted—at least among the nobility—as long as everyone more or less respected the rules of the social hierarchy, and did their familial duty by having children.”
Shaking his head and rolling his eyes, Kaifeng heaved a Very Dramatic Sigh. “But that whole history is another story. Further context around zhījǐ honestly makes it sound even gayer than it already does. Again, part of that is just down to some weird, messy, gendered bullshit about the way a lot of Classical Chinese texts handle women and dismiss them out of hand? But there is also a more general, cultural thing about knowing, and how the real deepest sort of relationship status is truly knowing another person, rather than being romantically or sexually entangled. The more explicitly, ‘all the time, it is basically never not this’ romantic term you can find in some texts, ai ren, literally translates as ‘the man one loves’ or ‘lover man’ in Modern Chinese. In Classical Chinese, the ai character hadn’t really gained the valence of romantic love yet. It meant something more like ‘to be unwilling to part with’—which, sure, is a quick hop, skip, jump connection to romantic love?
“But despite zhījǐ not being explicitly romantic, all the time, the connotations surrounding ai aren’t ultimately considered as deep as the connotations surrounding zhī. Not that the potential romantic and/or sexual angle isn’t also there, but……zhījǐ is a complicated term, and it gets used in all kinds of ways, you feel me?”
“Makes sense,” Reiki agreed. “Sort of seems like the opposite issue of what we have in English, where ‘love’ can mean pretty much anything and doesn’t always capture the depth of emotion, or sometimes falls short of the truth, or whatever. So, where exactly does the zhiyin term you were using come into all this?”
“Oh, well, the zhī character is the same between them, right?” Although he had tried to let himself get caught up in the sweep of the explanation, Kaifeng couldn’t help the tension itching at his nerves as he finally rounded in on something akin to explaining himself. “The second character, yīn, is more straightforward. Several different readings of it, but they all center around the same general theme: sound, voice, music, melody. So, on the most basic literal level, zhiyin means something like ‘the one who knows the tune’ or ‘the one who knows the melody.’”
Kaifeng took a deep breath. He glanced up and over at Helene. The red ribbon at his Wonder had attached them to each other for a few hours, like the red string of fate. They knew that their souls were meant to find each other……but that thought didn’t ease Kaifeng’s anxiety any. Explaining zhiyin went deeper than fated souls, who would resonate with each other every time because they were meant to do that.
“But zhiyin is almost never used without referencing a famous story from Liu Xiang’s text, Shuōyuàn—that is, The Garden of Persuasions.” Squeezing Helene’s hand, Kaifeng tried desperately to reassure himself that he could do this. “Once upon a time, Boyazi was playing his qin—his zither—”
“Oh, yeah, I do know what a qin is,” Reiki said, again grateful to Obaasan for her book recs. “But you were saying?”
“I was: so, Boyazi was playing his qin, and as he did, his thoughts were on Tai Mountain. As he played, Zhong Ziqi listened, and when Boyazi finished, he exclaimed ‘Well-played, as lofty and towering as Tai Mountain.’ Later, when Boyazi played another song, his thoughts were on powerful flowing water. Again, Zhong Ziqi listened, and when Boyazi finished, he exclaimed ‘Well-played, it courses and surges like mighty waters.’
“Later, though, Zhong Ziqi died. When he passed, Boyazi smashed his qin and sliced the strings. For the rest of his life, he never played another note, because none were left in this world worth playing for. The person who’d always known why he played had left him. The person who had known Boyazi so well, and always known his heart, always known how he had expressed that heart in his music……” Kaifeng blushed, ducking his chin and holding fast to Helene’s hand. “So, when you run into zhiyin, a common way to render it in English is ‘the one who knows the melody of my soul.’”
Noir Songbird_
Credit where it’s due: a lot of the information in Kaifeng’s explanation of his relationship status term for Helene is borrowed and adapted from Bret Hinsch’s Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (1990, University of California Press) and Hunxi-Guilai’s essay about the use of zhījǐ in Chén Qíng Lìng / The Untamed and why “soulmate” isn’t per se wrong as a translation, but through differences in contextual meanings, it also misses the real nuances of zhījǐ, “all right guys, let’s have a conversation about soulmates” (March 9th, 2020).
Posted: Wed Jan 10, 2024 4:20 pm
All of this...it was, in an existential sort of way, absolutely horrifying for Helene. He was glad, when Kaifeng reached for his hand, because he too needed the reassurance of the warmth of his beloved's touch. It was one thing to know that the Negaverse existed, that Chaos could touch a starseed, but to imagine it being forced into one, to think of being poisoned in such a way...
Helene had seen what Chaos had done to his world. He could only imagine what it did to a heart.
Half-unconsciously, he reached up to place a hand over his own chest. It hurt, just to imagine it--and worse, to imagine a starseed wrapped in something that dimmed its light. That made it untouchable.
"I trust that a Royal will be able to aid you," Helene said, firmly. And that Cosmos might come to this planet, if a soul needed her--the thought was truly incredible. The guardian of the Galaxy Cauldron had oft felt like no more than a distant myth to Helene--but it seemed she was very real, and very powerful. At least in this way. "And I will be glad to meet you again, when you are yourself in truth. We will have much to discuss."
However he felt about Xingyi's family, the planet of Murikabushi was a beautiful world, as he remembered it, and deserved its Senshi back and free.
But he fell silent, again, at the question. He had wondered what the word that Kaifeng used for him meant, if he was honest, but had been content to accept it as a term of endearment and learn its meaning when Kaifeng was ready to share.
He had not expected it to mean so much, to need so many layers of explanation, to be a word that conveyed a thousand things.
But at its heart--
The one who knows the melody of my soul.
He lifted up Kaifeng's hand, and brought it to his lips, eyes soft and fond.
Kaifeng blushed as Helene brought his hand up for that gentle kiss, and even more so as Helene echoed back the term that Kaifeng himself had used. Distantly, he thought to confirm for Helene that Muri had no reason to lie about people being able to leave the Dark Mirror Court and the Negaverse, that Muri was generally honest in situations where a lot of people probably wouldn’t have been for one reason or another—or at least he’d often seemed that way to Kaifeng, personally—and that the talk of leaving Chaos clearly mattered too much to Muri for him to lie about it. However, for a moment, Kaifeng found that he couldn’t do too much more than giggle fondly at the affection—at the confirmation that Helene felt the same as he did, that there had never been anything broken or wrong about him that meant he’d die romantically alone but the person whose crazy matched so perfectly with Kaifeng’s own had just been up in space—and look up at Helene with a starstruck, dopey smile.
“Zhiyin,” he repeated back. Not that it needed to be said, but……maybe Kaifeng just wanted to say it.
Well, far be it from me to criticize someone else for being sickeningly in love, Reiki mused, glancing over his shoulder at the happy couple, considering where I’m leading them and who all I’m leaving presents for.
In truth, he was happy for their happiness. Jealous of it, too, if he was whole-a**, “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God” honest with himself, since……well. Given everything Greg had put Reiki and Justin through, Greg probably would have made a better youma than a human being, and he genuinely might have been happier that way. Any hope for anything between Reiki and Levi had died in a fire that Reiki had started with his inability to reconcile any of the inherent contradictions in the Dark Mirror senshi life and his inability to be happy with the Chaos bullshit stifling his starseed. It seemed all too likely that Reiki would also kill any fondness that Faustite had ever had for him with what he needed to do for the sake of his own wellbeing, but………at least he didn’t know that part for certain.
Hence why the letter he had in his subspace requested a meeting with Faustite. Because even if he did hurt Faustite with what he needed to do—even if it made Faustite hate him, the way that Reiki had once assumed he had—Reiki didn’t want to be another person who ran out on him for the White Moon without telling him. Didn’t want to decide on Faustite’s behalf how he would feel about the situation and refuse him the ability to speak for himself about it, the same way that Monoceros had done to his General Ashanite. Not that Reiki could entirely begrudge Monoceros that, because he couldn’t, not given all of the circumstances that had surrounded Monoceros’s forcible induction into the Negaverse as well as his escape, but, well……Reiki had different circumstances before him. Likewise, Faustite wasn’t Ashanite, and it felt significantly more dangerous—not to mention disrespectful, on several levels for both adjectives—for Reiki to leave the Dark Mirror without letting Faustite know.
On top of that, he just……wanted to hope that Faustite would understand. That even if he didn’t ultimately agree with Reiki’s choice—which would have been fair enough, really, given the Negaverse vs. White Moon of it all—he might understand that it didn’t change how Reiki felt about Faustite himself, or mean that he thought Faustite needed to be anyone other than himself, violently homicidal mess and all.
Unfortunately, now that Kaifeng had gotten him talking, letting the lovebirds have their sweet moment in relative silence was making Reiki’s nerves itch. He didn’t want to drawl Are you serious? Right in front of my salad? at them—especially when it would’ve taken a few good minutes to explain for Helene a six-and-a-half-year-old meme from out of gay porn and tumblr, the latter of which no alien senshi needed to be traumatized by learning about—but at the same time………were they serious? Right in front of his salad?
“Good god, you two are so adorable,” Reiki snarked, the shade-throwing impulse winning out over any semblance of politeness, “it’s like the first gay main couple in a Disney movie forgot to leave their sassy, queer-coded talking animal sidekick at home when they went on honeymoon.”
………Eh. Not the best read he’d ever thrown at anybody, but not terrible, considering Reiki was tired and emotionally compromised.
“Oh! Hey!” Although Kaifeng perked up and looked back toward Muri, he did exactly nothing to remove his hand from Helene’s, or to pull away from him. “I’ve actually been meaning to ask for a while now—and if you’re gonna leave the Mirror soon, we might be able to do something with any of it—buuuuuut……” He grinned hopefully. “Are you a drag queen? Like, a for reals drag queen? Or have I been reading too much into the swishy-swish, and the fluency in throwing shade, and the general air of fabulousness?”
As he arched an eyebrow at Kaifeng over his shoulder, Reiki could not help but wonder, Do you even know what it means to properly throw shade, you deranged little gremlin? Or are you just being overly generous with me because I don’t tell you when you’re being annoying, because I don’t need to tell you, but I make sure you *know* that you’re being annoying?
………But. For all it might have been briefly satisfying to Dorian Corey all over the situation, Reiki got the sense that too much rudeness out of him might make Helene decide to carry off his freak of a man and leave Reiki to find another signet ring-bearing Knight who might help him out tonight. So, Reiki took a deep breath and just……nodded. “I’m obviously not gonna tell you what name I perform under,” he said. “Could cause a lot of problems for all of us when I’m right at the finish line of a process that has been ridiculously long and tedious even before I can go on the magical Mirrorspace quest. That said, why are you asking, exactly?”
Vibrating with excitement, Kaifeng bounced through his steps. “Okay, well, since you’re a drag queen and you seem generally very up on queer stuff in general? Can I assume that you’ve seen Troye Sivan’s video for his ‘One Of Your Girls’ song?”
He still did nothing to move away from Helene or to reclaim his hand.
Again, Reiki nodded. “Seen it, learned every word, performed it on request a few times while vamping to cover for backstage drama of some kind. Good song. Good way to get some good-a** tips really quickly because you can play up both the sex appeal and the camp factor of the gender-play there.”
“Wowwww,” Kaifeng said brightly, not even remotely caring if his untamed enthusiasm sounded “cringe” to anybody else. “That is so. cool.”
But he did have a question to ask, and he squeezed Helene’s hand for a shot of reassurance that he could do this.
“So, like, when you’re done leaving the Mirror? We’ll be able to hang out without having to be Muri and Kaifeng all the time, right? And see, I’m a musician and composer in my civvies life, and I do a lot of cover songs on Youtube for the self-promotion of it all, and also just because it’s fun. And I really want to do a cover of that song, but doing a video for it without getting in drag is just not it, right? Except I don’t really know—”
“You want me to put you up in drag so you can do a Troye Sivan cover for your Youtube channel?” Reiki glanced back at Kaifeng once more, right in time to see that insipidly earnest smile and an eager nod. He helped himself to a deep breath. “If I give you some homework to get to before we do this—a reading list, let’s say—would you do it?”
Kaifeng tilted his head bemusedly. “What kind of reading list homework?”
“Some texts my grandmother uses for some of her more advanced courses,” Reiki said with a shrug meant to suggest that such things were perfectly self-evident, even though he knew they weren’t. “Stuff about gendered and sexual performances in general, one text that’s very specific to Asian-American perspectives on that, one text that’s even more specifically about Asian-American masculinity and queer men and the whole constellation of complex, interwoven sociocultural issues that are inherently wrapped up in a project like you’re describing……”
A sigh of relief slipped out of Reiki as the three of them stopped, checking the traffic at another intersection. Thank ********, the Farnsworth was only one more crosswalk away. All they had to do was cross this street and go a little bit down the block. And after they handled the business of present delivery, he already had ideas for recommendations to jot down for Kaifeng: José Muñoz with Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics…… Celine Parreñas Shimizu with The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene…… Nguyen Tan Hoang with A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation…… Any number of papers on the whole “No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians” phenomenon (honestly, Reiki might have needed to leave Kaifeng hanging on that until after he’d gotten out of the Mirror; there were too many analyses of the subject and related phenomena from the different queer men’s dating scenes, Reiki knew that he’d miss some just going off the top of his head)…… Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s two edited essay collections; plenty of the contributing authors in there had insights that Kaifeng might’ve appreciated, even for reasons outside this particular project.……
Maybe Heather Love with Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History—not the most obvious connection to make, Reiki supposed, but there was arguably a sort of melancholy quality to the yearning and the desperation that Troye Sivan had baked into “One Of Your Girls,” right down to the ending close-up shot of Troye Sivan in his own girl-drag, looking like Liz Phair’s doe-eyed, glossed up baby sister who lacked self-assurance enough to make her desires known the way that Liz Phair did all over Exile In Guyville but was instead ready to cover “Born To Make You Happy”-era Britney or The ******** Cardigans with “Lovefool”…… Yeah. Yeah, Kaifeng definitely needed to have some Heather Love in his collection of mental references for this project.…… Michel Foucault, probably not for this specific issue, but Reiki could probably find an excuse to make Kaifeng read him later.…… Oh, and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider essay collection, absolutely, without question. All the bad bitches who were due any respect loved Audre Lorde.……
“See, what you’re talking about? It’s a project that I can generally get behind,” Reiki explained, “but I want to make sure we’re coming at it with a sort of……common intellectual ground, you know? For understanding what sort of images and performance I’d be helping you create, and really getting the best handle on your artistic vision here and what you want to say by getting up in drag for that song. Because there are already a lot of complicated sociocultural layers going on there for Troye Sivan, a white Australian twink who has previously written songs that imply he prefers to top. But things get even more tangled up when it’s you or me, considering some of the sexual stereotypes out there about queer Asians.
“Even if we have different visions or you don’t necessarily agree with any of the authors I suggest for you, having some common references will help us actually talk about what you want to accomplish. Y’know, outside of visual s**t like ‘Can you do my face like Divine, can you paint me like Kim Chi or Gottmik, can you make me look as fierce as Tayce, can you make me look as c**t as Shea Coulée, can you beat my pretty little mug like Sasha Colby’ and so on and so forth.”
Positively beaming, Kaifeng nodded along with everything Muri was telling him……which quickly faded as they stopped walking and he got a chance to look around at where Muri had led them. “Uhhh, well, this looks like a nice neighborhood to get tortured and murdered in,” he said, cringing at how unfairly negative he sounded, but……all the same. “Are…… Are you sure we’re in the right place?”
They’d stopped outside of a hotel that Kaifeng wouldn’t have even sent Qiang-erQiang-geQiang-er or Jiayi into, no matter how angry with them he ever felt. For one thing, it looked like it had barely managed to survive a pretty nasty fire, once upon a time. For another: if the outside looked this bad, then how ******** up did the interior have to be?
……Well, Reiki had expected a reaction like that. Helped to have prepared himself for such things, and the satisfaction of being right made it that much easier for him to hold his ground and nod at Kaifeng.
“Yeah. It’s the Farnsworth Hotel. A couple important moments in my and Faustite’s relationship happened here.” Reaching into his subspace for the three (double-sided) pages on which he’d written his letter for Faustite, Reiki glanced over to Helene-and-Kaifeng (Helfeng? Yeah, okay, they could collectively be Helfeng now) and deadpanned, “It’s really a very romantic place inside.”
………Okay, no, that probably made him sound more unhinged and crazy than he was ready to accept sounding.
Reiki sighed. “Also, it’s an ideal drop spot. Faustite and his team know where to go, and it’s probably wildly unsafe for most non-magical people to go into unattended, so I can trust the presents will still be there when somebody comes for them. Plus, there’s a mirror stashed in that alley that I can use to get into the hotel.”
The deadpan comment made Kaifeng blench. Even with Muri’s hasty addendum—which sounded more or less stable and fair enough on a few counts, Kaifeng guessed—he couldn’t get his face to stop frowning like he thought Muri might have gone insane. Mostly, this happened because Kaifeng was wondering if Muri had, indeed, lost his entire gay mind on the walk over.
But……a promise was a promise, and leaving Christmas presents for somebody you cared about was an endeavor that Kaifeng could support. Finally disentangling his hand from Helene’s, he reached into his own subspace pocket for his Hello Kitty notepad, plus a pair of gel pens, one pink and one purple. “If you’re sure,” he conceded, gesturing for Muri to hand him the letter. “I’m just gonna get my stuff ready so we can send your General-King the notes when you’re done dropping off the gifts. I have to write his name on the pages, but hand to whatever you believe in, I swear that I won’t read them.”
And as soon as this was over, Kaifeng was calling it on their patrol for the evening, dragging Helene home, taking Táotáo out one last time for the night, and then burying his face in Huan-ge’s chest, where Liánlí would not need to think about all the potential implications of even the vague possibility that Muri and General-King Faustite had had romantic moments of any kind in the burned out husk of this Farnsworth Hotel.
Noir Songbird_
fin for Helene and Kaifeng; extra tag with the gifts for Faustite and the team members Muri is aware of to follow! emotion_bigheart
Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 2:19 pm
Notes sent to Faustite via signet ring: all backdated to late night December 24th/very early morning on December 25th. Images under the spoiler cut! emotion_bigheart
Click to embiggen!
Written in purple gel pen on Kaifeng’s Hot Topic Hello Kitty stationery
Hello, General-King Faustite!
We’ve never properly met, but a mutual friend of ours (Murikabushi) has asked to borrow my signet ring’s ability to send you messages tonight! (He is asking me not to send you this preamble, or to refer to him as a mutual friend, but that seems rude & weird to me, so as I said: hello!)
Most of what you’ll receive tonight will be Muri’s missives, not mine. This is simply a head’s up to warn you that Muri’s notes are coming, to let you know that he hasn’t revealed much of anything about why he’s writing to you nor anything about you personally (asking mostly makes him get annoyed about respecting your privacy, very sweet), and to wish you & yours a very happy December 25th!
[Saturn symbol] [very scribbly Chinese for “happy holidays,” though it can also be read as “happy day off,” which is about how Kaifeng sees Christmas. “Day off where people give presents and it’s fun.”]
Click to embiggen! WARNING: LARGE FILES.
Written in black ink pen, on Muri’s stationery with the cute bunny illustrations (1 double-sided page)
Faustite, 1/? I’ve missed you recently. Sorry about that. Things got pretty messy in my non-senshi life, had to get out of my place and move to a new one. Mostly only had time for bare bones basics of keeping up with everything in the magical side of town.
But I *have* missed seeing you around. I know you’re a busy man & a lot of people are depending on you. On top of that, it’s a busy time of year just in general, for everybody. So, I’m not sending gifts to you & yours with any expectations or whatever? It’s just, you know, that it’s Christmas, and even if you guys maybe don’t celebrate, I felt like sending something (hopefully) nice your way regardless.
Pink gel pen additions from Kaifeng: “To: General King Faustite” and a Saturn symbol.
2/? I put labels on the bags, so it should be pretty clear which gift belongs to whomst. Wasn’t really sure [scribbles] what some of your team might like, so I guessed pretty broadly? Y’know, trying to go for more generally useful/nice things, which always feels a little impersonal because it kinda is? But at the same time, I’ve only met some of your team once—like Fire & Blue’d (slutty dragon boy?) & Abbey Roadkill (senshi with headphones & pink choker that looks like it’s reading their vital signs? Didn’t say much at the Farnsworth, mostly just seemed confused and really uncomfortable, which is fair enough honestly)—so it’s a little bit like “Sure, I’d love to give them something that feels less like kind of an afterthought or whatever? But I’m only human and setting my craft room back up at my new place has been a time-consuming nightmare, so I tried my best under the circumstances.”
Click to embiggen! WARNING: LARGE FILES.
Written in black ink pen, on Muri’s stationery with the cute bunny illustrations (1 double-sided page)
3/? Of more personal importance, though? I don’t read into not seeing you too much or going a while between run-ins, personally? Like I said, I know that you’re busy & you have a lot of responsibilities to your team & the Negaverse as a whole. Plus, trying to communicate with anyone as a Mirror senshi is just awful. We can barely talk to each other, never mind talking to anybody else. (Deliberate move by Mirrorspace to keep us isolated & dependent on it? I don’t know & I might be totally wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that idea had some truth in it.)
My point being: it’s fair (to me) that we don’t see each other all the time. Even if I *were* a Negaverse senshi, I wouldn’t want to have *all* your attention *all* the time; you’d never get anything else done.
Pink gel pen additions from Kaifeng: “To: General King Faustite” and a Saturn symbol.
4/? Still, all that being said? I *would* really like to see you sometime soon? If we can? Doesn’t need to be today (it’s Christmas & all, plus this is a last minute request at best). Doesn’t need to be tomorrow or even this week (c.f., you’re busy & have an important role in the Negaverse).
But sometime soon, if time allows? There’s something happening for me that: A., I want to tell you about, ideally *before* it happens (but I don’t know as yet when that’s going to be, so we might miss each other, but I hope we don’t); B., I do *not* want you to hear from anyone else (list of people I trust to tell story in *MY* terms/*not* misrepresent things is almost pathetically short) (at that, none of the names on my list are actually involved in any of this [pink gel pen asterisk], they’re just who I trust to *not* ******** up my story by spinning it to fit somebody else’s narrative that I didn’t consent to be involved in);
Pink gel pen asterisk aside from Muri: “this” as in magical stuff.
Click to embiggen! WARNING: LARGE FILES.
Written in black ink pen, on Muri’s stationery with the cute bunny illustrations (1 double-sided page)
5/6 and C., I’d rather say this in person, to your face, because you’re important to me and I care about you, about what you think, and about wanting you to know the truth of the matter, not whatever bullshit someone else might come up with. I’ve been nervous about what you might feel about this, but in that, I feel I’ve been presuming a lot about your feelings, which isn’t the way I want to be. Maybe I didn’t *intend* to do so, c.f., anxiety and all of that—but it still isn’t how I want to be. Feels too close to talking over you about your own feelings & experiences instead of allowing you to speak on them yourself.
If we can’t work things out to meet beforehand, I still want to tell you about this face-to-face. You’ve never lied to me & have always owned who you are. I want to do the same.
Pink gel pen additions from Kaifeng: “To: General King Faustite” and a Saturn symbol.
6/6 Sorry for going on so much right after saying I’d rather have the conversation in person. [scribbles] Saying that I’ve felt ******** up about this for a long time would be an improvement over reality, at this point. Also, apologies for needing to write you by Saturn Knight & his ridiculous gel pen. He tried to take dictation for me but I was *not* about to write you something so important to me on Saturn Weirdo’s notepad with Hello Kitty dressed up like she fell on a sale rack at Hot Topic and said “I’ll take it.” Either way, the Knight’s signet ring served its purpose & he didn’t judge or ask too many questions, just blissfully went along with helping me.
Before I forget, the gifts for you & your team are in a third floor restroom at the Farnsworth. It has a full length mirror I could get into easy, so it just made sense as a drop point.
[scribbly kana: a fairly common sign-off for letters/emails/etc. meaning basically “Take care of yourself.”]
Affectionately, Muri.
Found at the Farnsworth, in the third-floor restroom mentioned in Muri’s note: a cardboard box containing ten assorted gift bags (each labeled with tags dangling off their handles), and two large bags of chocolate-covered pretzels (labeled with post-it notes that say “FAUSTITE” so there’s no confusion about whom they’re for).
Strickenized_
Gift-wise, Faustite gets: a gift bag that Reiki definitely picked up at a Halloween sale, judging by the fact that it has a design of a creepy-looking haunted house under a full moon, with glittery little bats flying around, containing a plush dragon with a crocheted body, primarily done in a green shade close to Albite’s green, with some fine details done in a brighter green reminiscent of Alkmene’s (accompanied by a post-it note that reads “*NOT* flame-resistant but should be safe with cincher, please handle with care 🖤”), and a note reading “I have something else for you too, but it’s not ready yet. If we can meet sometime soon, I’ll try to have it ready by then” (basically, warning him about the gift Muri has for him in “‘cause i’m half-sick of shadows”).
Also, two big bags of Girl Scout-licensed Thin Mint chocolate-covered pretzels. As mentioned above, they’re loose in the larger box of presents, but labeled with Faustite’s name.
Additionally, a lucky person of Faustite’s choosing gets: a sparkly turquoise gift bag addressed to Lilith, containing a hand-crocheted scarf done in bright turquoise yarn (a similar shade to the turquoise details in Lilith’s fuku; made with care, but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a solid quality metal water bottle, black with a shimmery green design of flowers; and a plushie of Dorian Pavus from Dragon Age: Inquisition. (Note: Muri knows that Lilith has purified, but he’s pretty sure that Team Faustite doesn’t know that he knows this, so he figures that it would look suspicious for him to not include a gift for her. May whoever gets bequeathed the gift enjoy!)
Shiningamisgirl_
Albite gets: a matte black gift bag with a glittery design of a flaming heart (think like the emoji ❤️🔥!), addressed to him and containing a hand-crocheted scarf done in alternating stripes of black and foresty green like Albite’s fuku (made with care but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a solid quality metal water bottle, green with a shimmery black design of plum blossoms; and a plushie with a hand-crocheted body, a black wolf with violet eyes and black bat wings stitched to his back (a post-it note fixed to the plush’s head reads “I meant to ask if you have a favorite animal or not, but never got around to it. I think these might have existed on Murikabushi-That-Was a thousand years ago, but I might have just imagined that? Hope you like this very good boy 🖤”).
Noir Songbird_
Alkmene gets: a sparkly green gift bag, addressed to him properly—i.e., to “Alkmene” instead of “Space Buns” or something silly like that—containing a hand-crocheted scarf done in alternating green and purple stripes (which may not be an exact match for the colors from his fuku, but are basically “as close as Reiki could find at the craft stores in town”; made with care but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a very nice quality journal, black faux-leather cover with an embossed design of a rose and thorns; and a paperback copy of Anne Carson’s translation of The Bakkhai from Euripides (the version that got staged at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2015 with Ben Whishaw as Dionysus).
Whimsical Blue_
Fafnir gets: a solid quality metal water bottle, black with a shimmery blue design of a Western-style dragon; a hand-crocheted scarf (made with care but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities), made with a soft, navy blue yarn; and a paperback copy of Federico García Lorca’s Bodas de sangre, as translated by Ted “actually a respected poet in his own right, but most of the world remembers him as Mr. Sylvia Plath, rip” Hughes—all in a sparkly blue gift bag with a tag reading “Fire and Blue’d” because unfortunately, Muri never actually learned Fafnir’s name.
Kolina_
Heliodor gets: a sparkly violet gift bag (think a similar shade to Helio’s hair), addressed to him and containing a hand-crocheted scarf done in alternating stripes of red and gold (as close as to the red and gold shades in Helio’s fuku as Reiki could find at the local craft stores; scarf has been made with care but is not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a solid quality metal water bottle, red with a shimmery gold design of a long, winding Eastern-style dragon; and paperback copies of the first two volumes of the 7 Seas translation of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Heaven Official’s Blessing (a pink post-it note on the interior cover page of volume one reads “I’m not sure if this will or won’t be your taste? There’s a lot going on in the story; it’s sort of hard to gauge who might like it. I hope you *do* like it, but no hard feelings if you don’t 🖤”).
stari_maga_
Jadarite gets: a sparkly reddish-pink gift bag (addressed to “Miss Jada”), containing a hand-crocheted scarf, done in a pinkish-red shade that’s a few shades darker than her hair but not as dark as the red details in her uniform; a snazzy-looking journal/notebook, with a black faux-leather cover that isn’t especially distinctive but it looks sleek and decently elegant; and an officially licensed Star Trektoy tribble that vibrates and makes cute noises when you pet it (as long as it has batteries).
Guine_
Jet gets: a sparkly teal gift bag (think a similar shade to the sash, collar, and cuffs in Jet’s General art!), addressed to him and containing a hand-crocheted scarf in a similar teal shade, made from a yarn that has silver threads woven into it, which gives the scarf some slight sparkle (made with care but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a sleek black journal with a faux-leather cover (no designs on it, but it looks elegant); and a paperback Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest (a pair of pink post-it notes on the interior cover page reads “This pick for you was a bit of a guess? I whittled my choices down to ‘Earnest’ & ‘Dorian Gray,’ then thought ‘Earnest’ might be a more pleasant” + “read, since ‘Dorian Gray’ can be pretty intense? Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book & the criticism/annotations, but no hard feelings if you don’t 🖤”)
daekie_
Pax gets: a hand-crocheted black scarf (made with care but not distinctive enough to be traced between powered/civilian identities); a solid quality black water bottle with a shimmery blue-green design wrapping around the middle, which is supposed to look like the visual read-outs from an EKG (so, it doesn’t exactly match the design of Pax’s choker, not least because the color is wrong, but it’s fairly close); and a black-covered journal with a similar EKG-looking design—all in a sparkly black gift bag addressed to “Abbey Roadkill” because Muri never learned Pax’s name either, I’m sorry for him emotion_bigheart
Meighei_
Tama gets: a sparkly magenta gift bag, addressed to “Tama-sensei” and containing a hand-crocheted scarf, made with yarn that’s a similar pinkish-purple shade as Tama’s eyes (sized for his human form, rather than kitty form); a tankobon of a one-volume mahou shoujo manga that adheres to pretty classic tropes except the main romance is M/M, between the sparkly Classic Magical Boy protagonist and his black-and-purple color-schemed edgelord rival boy (the comic is untranslated and indie-published, and Muri doesn’t know if Tama knows Japanese or not, so he has also included his own neatly typed-up page-by-page translation); and a plushie with a hand-crocheted body, a white lioness with violet eyes and white bat wings stitched to her back (a post-it attached to her back reads “I hope you like her, but it’s okay if you don’t. I think animals like this might have existed on Murikabushi-That-Was at some point, but being fair, I saw this in a dream, so there’s a very strong possibility that I just made it up 🖤”).
OOC note: @ Everyone on Team Faustite who didn’t get something, I promise that it’s only an in-character choice because Muri doesn’t actually know that the vast majority of the team exists. His list of folks to do presents for was based on the characters who were present for holding the hand of the body back after Ida’s princess ORP in 2022, plus Jet because he’s met Jet personally and is aware that Jet and Faustite have a friendship (c.f., lantern gleam and glow). But I think you and your characters are all great, even if Muri doesn’t know that your characters are part of Faustite’s team. emotion_bigheart
