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 Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2024 12:23 pm
Investigating last week with Michel hadn't wrought much—mostly because Fang had gotten too spooked by the fresh tracks to... actually track whatever it was that was out there. The tracks had been too... unreal. Uncanny? Was that the word? They didn't... fit the world quite right in a way that made every single hair of his stand on end, and he had fled to come back and look more later, This time, he enlisted Kaifeng to help. Michel had a good, steady presence that helped Fang keep a good head on his shoulders, but Kaifeng's more bubbly presence might help him stay more relaxed as they tried to track the tracks, this time. He did some stretches as he waited for Kaifeng to come to him—just in case they needed to run, before the could teleport safely back to Earth.
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Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2024 3:32 pm
Getting asked to come investigate nefarious goings-on at someone else’s place of power up in space was an enormous honor, one that Kaifeng took with the utmost seriousness. As he jumped across some of the town’s roofs, getting to the park where he’d meet up with Fang, part of Kaifeng wished that he could have brought Helene. Partly, it was because another set of hands and eyes never went amiss in situations where one had no way of knowing what one might find. Partly, however, Kaifeng wished that he could have brought Helene so they could both learn some ways to approach the issue of the Chaos on Helene’s world. If Helene didn’t want Kaifeng returning to his moon with him for Kaifeng’s own safety, then perhaps there was still something that Helene could learn from Fang?
But to make that happen, Kaifeng would need to more properly introduce Fang and Huan-ge, which he had not done yet. So, when Kaifeng bounded across the park and over to Fang, he came alone, with a smile on his face and his bamboo club in hand.
“Evening, friend,” Kaifeng said, reaching out for one of Fang’s hands. They’d need to be touching in order to get to Fang’s world together, after all. “Are you feeling ready for whatever’s out there?”
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Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2024 2:07 pm
Fang perked up, smiling slightly at Keifeng and taking his hand easily. Kaifeng made being friends so easy. He adored him for it. "Ready," he confirmed, feeling somewhat more confident than he had at the start of his adventure with Michel. Though really, it was only because of Michel that Fang felt good at all this time. Without Michel, Fang wasn't sure where he'd be, but he doubted he'd have had it as good as he did now. In a blink, with little hesitation, Fang took them to his planet, and they landed in the broad meadowland he'd always thought of as home.
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Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2024 3:10 am
Even after having found the bottle of Fangan liquor hiding in Xingyi-ge’s stash at his Wonder, Kaifeng wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Fang’s world. The picture on the bottle’s label had shown him a beautiful grassland, and the world that stretched out before Kaifeng now didn’t look entirely dissimilar to that picture? But at the same time, something felt different from the illustration that Kaifeng remembered seeing.
(Made sense, probably. The picture had likely been made long before Fang’s world had fallen to Chaos. Whatever had happened couldn’t have left Fang’s world the same as it had once been.)
“You’ve been up here before, right,” Kaifeng asked, idly rubbing his chin as he took in the scenery around them. “Should we look out for anything in particular?”
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Posted: Fri Apr 19, 2024 7:18 am
Even Fang couldn't help but think that Kaifeng's first question was awfully silly. He was from here. Of course he'd been here before? "Fang lived here," he said pointedly, following it up with a gesture to the distance, some hundred yards away to the treeline—where their den had once been, hidden among small shrubberies and tucked up against a small rock formation. He tilted his head at Kaifeng. "Dead walk. We think," he added with some hesitation. "Michel called them 'zom-bees'. But we not... see them. Just... smell. Fang smell. See tracks, fresh."
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Posted: Sun May 05, 2024 6:45 pm
Kaifeng tilted his head right back at Fang initially, blinking at him and wondering where the first response had come from? Although he followed Fang toward the den, he still didn’t understand—until it hit him like a bolt and Kaifeng had to slap his own forehead.
“Apologies for the confusion, friend,” he said with a sigh. “I meant to ask, have you been here since the most recent strangeness started? Not like……” Kaifeng pouted, gesturing vaguely at nothing in particular. “Not like, in general? Aiyah…” Kaifeng sighed. “Words hard. Especially when you grew up bilingual. The language we usually spoke at home? It prioritizes using as few words as possible. Say what you mean in four characters, you’ll sound like a scholar. So, there are things you can say that make sense in Mandarin, but not in English. Not enough words to connect the dots.”
Making an uneasy sound, Kaifeng slouched. “……Switching between those two ways of doing language messes with your head.”
Still, what Fang had to say about the actual issue at hand, that was more interesting, and significantly more important. “If the Chaos here is making the dead get up and walk, ‘zombies’ is a good term for it,” Kaifeng mused. He could have easily haggled over the semantics of different terms for undead beings and what the terms actually meant, but it didn’t feel terribly helpful to do so right now. “I haven’t seen anything like it before, personally? But the Knight of my Wonder is supposed to be a caretaker of the dead. Helping you put them back to rest and find out what’s making them behave like that? Definitely sounds like one of those duties.”
Maybe it wouldn’t have been a thousand years ago, when Xingyi-ge had been very busy with their own Wonder. But……that was then, and right now, in the present, Fang’s world needed more active caretaking.
Looking out where Fang gestured toward the horizon, he didn’t make out any shapes moving just yet? But since Fang had mentioned tracks, Kaifeng took a moment to look around for any. He wasn’t an expert tracker like Fang—he wasn’t even a moderately well-practiced detective like Xingyi-ge had once been—but Kaifeng could still use his senses, could still try to suss out any helpful clues. Any new tracks could have pointed out a direction for him and Fang to head in, where things might have been happening since Fang’s last visit.
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Posted: Mon Jun 03, 2024 12:51 pm
Fang nodded through Kaifeng's explanation of his native tongue and English—it wasn't too unfamiliar to him, though Fangan definitely utilized more words than Mandarin, it seemed. It just dropped a lot of... other kinds of words that Fang didn't really have the language for. He didn't know the language for language itself. "Hope so," Fang said, ears flicking back and forward again, listening. "Fang not sure. Not meet any, last time. Just see tracks." He frowned. "Fang think, we check grave. Buried mother near here." He gestured to Kaifeng for him to follow, and Fang trotted in the direction of the old den he'd stayed at for most of his life.
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