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 Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 11:39 am
Wonder visits were always a magical and special thing, and personally, Kaifeng loved sharing them with people. He had plenty of things in his life that he loved and cherished—Huanxi and getting to make a beautiful life with his zhiyin; Táotáo and having found such a perfectly wonderful little companion at the local shelter; Qi-jie, and Hayden, and Ming-er, and Dewey, everyone in the little family that he was building for himself as Liánlí; his music and getting to share it with people in whatever forms that happened to take—but being the Knight of Kaifeng was something different from all of that.
Not that being the Knight of Kaifeng ranked as any more or less special than any other of the numerous good things going on in his life. But it was something different, something entirely its own in terms of experiences. As much as being Kaifeng’s Knight felt an unspeakable privilege quite a lot of the time, it also carried with it a lot of responsibilities, and Kaifeng never wanted to disregard those or treat them any kind of frivolously. If anything, all of his duties and responsibilities as his Wonder’s Knight only made him more eager to serve it well, to dedicate himself to its protection and to use the power that it gave him to protect others.
Arguably, taking somebody who still had a Chaos aura signature to his Wonder counted as Kaifeng violating some aspect of those ideas. Even knowing Muri and knowing that his forthcoming purification was only being held up by love of his family, Kaifeng could see why someone would say that. After all, Muri hadn’t provided many details about why he wasn’t in white yet, so they could have said he was lying about wanting to get out of the Dark Mirror Court. He’d mentioned not wanting to ruin something that was very important to his baby sister—something that she’d worked her a** off to prepare for and that she took very seriously—and while Kaifeng could respect a motivation like that, he could also imagine someone pointing out that he had no objective evidence that Muri even had a sister.
Difficult needle to thread, since he would’ve felt like a heel for demanding proof that would have inherently risked outing not only Muri’s own identity, but also the identity of someone who was, for all Kaifeng knew, a teenage girl. Tonight, Kaifeng chose to find his balance by ignoring that which other people considered “good common sense” and simply take Muri up to Kaifeng anyway. If anyone had wanted to ask, he did have a selfish motivation, too: once Muri was purified, Kaifeng hoped that having trusted him with a Wonder visit would mean that Muri did him the honor of a visit to his home-world.
As he waited by the picnic tables in Ramsett Park for Muri to meet him—idly swaying his head in time with the song he was humming: Your blood like wine, I wanted in, oh darling, get me drunk and make me feel. It’s not my fault. I’m not to blame. These ain’t my sins, I broke my chains. There’s more to do and I still want to live……—Kaifeng tried not to think about how difficult he’d found it to power up before leaving tonight. That…… It left a heavy chill in the pit of Kaifeng’s stomach, feeling like something hadn’t wanted to let him power up at all. But he’d managed to get into uniform, so it was probably nothing, right?
Right. Yes. Exactly—and so help him, Kaifeng was going to manifest good vibes going into this Wonder visit with his soon-to-be-ex Mirror friend.
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 11:40 am
Given his druthers, Kaifeng was distinctly not the half of his romantic relationship with whom Reiki would have preferred to spend an evening. Yes, he’d spent more time with Kaifeng than with Helene—but based on his dealings with both of them, Reiki personally just liked Helene more than his Knight. Not that Kaifeng was really doing anything wrong or hurting anybody (he wasn’t, in either case), but Helene’s dry, understated kind of wit and very to the point way of expressing himself—so very to the point that he just wouldn’t talk to someone if he didn’t feel like they were worth his time—was more Reiki’s speed than Kaifeng’s relentless, perpetually sunshiny optimism.
On the other hand, not to be too “desperately seeking the ‘Astarion approves’ notification” about it (not least since Reiki decidedly wasn’t trying to kiss Helene, very much unlike his preferred relationship status with Astarion Ancunín), but being decent to Kaifeng seemed like a good way to farm favor with Helene. Besides, Reiki was never one to turn down an offer of a free visit to space.
Rocking up to the picnic tables where Kaifeng had told him to meet up—the only downside of his signet ring: Muri could not currently send Kaifeng a return message and had to rely on luck to get a say in setting up any kind of meeting between them—Reiki silently went over the mental affirmations he’d been using to prepare himself for tonight. Kaifeng wasn’t doing anything wrong by choosing to be such a sunshiny presence in the universe. Reiki didn’t know his life or why he chose to be this way, and for all he knew, being so positive and doing it on purpose meant a lot to Kaifeng for reasons involving deep-seated trauma that he only shared with Helene and maybe one or two other people. Despite his “I’m just a silly lil’ guy” routine, Kaifeng was competent and capable as a Knight, and Muri was going to respect him as such instead of giving in to any impulses to read a b***h to filth.
Reiki paused, however, as he got close enough to hear Kaifeng humming.…… Wait a ******** minute, Reiki knew that tune—
“Who’s your choice for a romance run,” he asked by way of saying hello, coming over and settling next to Kaifeng on the picnic table. “Personally, I’m an Astarion girly. Of the lady companions, Karlach does it for me the most? But my Durges’ hearts all belong to one specific sassy, queer vampire spawn, y’know what I mean?”
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 12:48 pm
………As soon as Kaifeng realized that he’d started blinking bemusedly at Muri, he felt rude for having done so. But at the same time—“Aaaaaiiiiiii……yaaaah, sorry, gege? But, uh……no? I don’t know what you’re talking about, actually?” By way of emphasizing his point, Kaifeng shook his head slowly. His eyes felt unnecessarily wide as he looked to Muri for some kind of clarification. It didn’t help much that the only thing Muri met him with was the furrowed brow, wrinkled nose, and pensive frown that, in Kaifeng’s experience, tended to accompany Muri thinking quite a lot about something.
Then, in a flash of insight, it hit him.
“……If you’re talking about the game the song is from,” Kaifeng ventured with a cautiously hopeful smile, “then I haven’t actually played it for myself? I’ve watched some Let’s Play videos, and some compilations of fun moments? And a V-Tuber who I did some channel music for in my civilian line of work, he’s played it on his stream a few times? But I haven’t…actually……played it?” He shrugged slowly, his hopeful smile gaining an edge of desperation and cringe. “…Sorry for being a fake geek boy?”
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 12:50 pm
“Ugh, don’t call yourself that,” Reiki told Kaifeng without even needing to think about it, waving a dismissive hand at the Saturn Squire’s nonsense. “You’re not a fake geek boy for being more interested in the music than in the game itself. I don’t even know if you’d like it or not………mostly because I don’t really know what you like, aside from ‘music,’ ‘Helene,’ and ‘being a Knight.’”
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 1:26 pm
Well, hearing that got Kaifeng to perk right back up. Not so much the first part—any discourse about “fake geek boys, girls, nonbinary babes, or anybodies” wasn’t something he cared for in the first place, and he’d mostly used the term in jest—but the second part of what Muri had to say made him smile. Made his cheeks flush pink a little bit, as well. “It’s true, I do love all those things,” he agreed, trying exactly not at all to refrain from gushing. Why should he have tried not to do that? Muri had listed off three of the most important pieces of Kaifeng’s entire life, and Kaifeng felt flattered as a river of jade to be known—in at least one person’s mind—for loving his passion, his calling, and his zhiyin. “For what it’s worth, I do genuinely really like the song. Like, I might have learned about it because one of my supporters on Patreon suggested it for a cover, but it’s a gorgeous piece of music, right? Borislav Slavov went off on composing it.”Quote: To explain Kaifeng’s wordplay: 逢迎 féngyíng is a term from literary Chinese meaning “to flatter, to curry favor with” (the literal translation of the characters is “to welcome every time”). But you can create a soundalike by combining 漨 féng (an ancient name associated with a river) with 瑩 yíng (which has several meanings related to shine, luster, and gemstones, and is sometimes used as a word for jade in literary Chinese). The resulting féngyíng—漨瑩 as opposed to 逢迎—could thus be read as “river of jade,” but would still sound like the féngyíng that means “to flatter.”
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 2:38 pm
“He really did, didn’t he,” Reiki agreed, sliding one hand under his glasses and rubbing idly at his eye.
Part of him couldn’t help but wonder if Kaifeng was stalling for time, if maybe he was dealing with something like that Knight from the other evening. Thinking about how the other Knight’s shield had shattered against that youma still made Reiki need to bite down on a shiver.…… It wasn’t right, for his shield to have shattered like that, and it didn’t feel good at all, knowing that he and maybe others were out and about in town with aura senses that weren’t working properly. If Kaifeng were experiencing some kind of magical knight-related difficulties, then it would’ve made sense that he was (allegedly, hypothetically, entirely in theory) stalling for time despite how he’d offered Reiki the chance to come and see his Wonder.
Not that Reiki necessarily wanted to read too much into Kaifeng getting all kinds of distracted, because he didn’t. Attributing too much significance to Kaifeng letting his attention wander did not simply court disaster; it presented itself before disaster’s parents and grandparents in full, high-whore fancy garb, dressed to the absolute nines, with five years’ worth of tax returns and a whole-a** PowerPoint presentation ready about why it should be allowed to take disaster for its wife because it would build disaster a real ********’ good life and make sure all of disaster’s needs were met, if not exceeded. After all, on the first night they’d met each other (back when Cybele had popped her princess wings), Kaifeng had gotten distracted and wander off from people who were concerned about the whole profusely bleeding stab wound until Pendour had taken matters into her own hands and kidnapped him off to get medical help.
As if it might give him some better answers, Reiki dragged his eyes all over Kaifeng’s figure.… He didn’t look any thinner or paler than normal. If anything, he seemed hardier and like he might well have had a thirst trap waiting to happen wrapped up in that dress and vest, though Reiki also sort of hated the part of his brain that wanted to linger on Kaifeng’s physique—whatever of it he could see through Kaifeng’s uniform, anyway.…… Maybe he was fine? Maybe nothing was wrong with Kaifeng at all and it had only hit the shield-Knight from the other day?
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Posted: Sun Mar 31, 2024 3:48 pm
Completely oblivious to the scrutiny that Muri was subjecting him to—and very much trying to ignore the feeling like something heavy, wet, and cold weighing him down from everywhere and nowhere all at once—Kaifeng continued smiling. Normally, he was used to Muri being pretty talkative in his own right, more than easily keeping up with Kaifeng’s own standard level of chattiness, but from how he’d described the whole process of leaving the Dark Mirror Court, it sounded pretty intense. Maybe Muri was too tired to be quite as chatty as he might’ve been under any other circumstances, and if so, then that made perfect sense in Kaifeng’s queer little brain. More than perfect sense, even.
Ah, well, if Kaifeng needed to carry more of the conversation, that was okay. He’d been working out.
Kaifeng had been working on other things too, so it was easy enough to discuss—“Y’know, a big reason why the song really stuck out to me, and why I liked it so much? Is that it reminded me a lot of Xingyi.” This statement earned him a bemused look not entirely unlike the morning of December 25th, when Muri had pointed out that he was Japanese actually and had no idea what Kaifeng had meant by calling Helene his zhiyin. For a moment, Kaifeng met it with a lost expression of his own until everything in his brain clicked into place—“Oh! Xingyi is for me what Airan is for you—”
Muri started trying to cut him off with a How the Hell do you know about—but Kaifeng waved a hand like batting away flies.
“Helene knew Airan, way back then,” he explained, “and both of them knew Xingyi. The first time Helene came up to my Wonder with me, we went and found this box that Helene and Xingyi had retrieved from this whole……y’know, this whole thing? Call it a ‘misadventure,’ I guess? Well, it had happened with Xingyi’s younger twin cousins, and this senshi called Grieve—she’s around without reincarnating if you run into her, she’s great—and probably some of their other mercenary friends, out on Murikabushi-That-Was, and in the course of it all, they had somehow come into possession of this old Saturnian artifact. Kaede, the elder of Xingyi’s cousins, spent the whole time being rude and unfair to Helene, so after enough of that Xingyi-ge got sick of listening to that disrespect and decided to just let whatever happened to his cousins, Grieve, and all of them, happen. He and Helene got involved again when Airan came down—he was friends with them too, actually—and then Airan agreed that the relic should go back to Saturn, where it belonged. So that’s why I know who Airan is.”
The explanation seemed to satisfy Muri, who mostly nodded and bid Kaifeng to go on with what he’d intended to explain.
“So, Xingyi was the Knight of Kaifeng before me, right,” Kaifeng rabbited on, eager to share this with someone else. Even if Muri wasn’t as close to him as, say, Selenga and Hayden, he was still a friend and Kaifeng liked sharing Xingyi Things with his friends. On top of that, Xingyi having had family on Murikabushi the World meant that parts of his story were probably of interest to Muri the Senshi. “And Xingyi—he had a really rough life. I don’t know all of it by a long-shot yet? Just what I’ve gotten back from a few memories. There have been some vials of golden liquid up at my Wonder that unlocked memories when I drank them—” Muri nodded, wearing a look of recognition, but Kaifeng didn’t quite know what to do with that, so he mostly mentally filed it away for later, “—but sometimes, all it takes is being up at my Wonder to get one of Xingyi’s memories back. In a lot of his memories, Xingyi-ge is drinking, or drunk, or sober but wishing that he weren’t, and even without the memories here—not to mention how Helene doesn’t really like being around alcohol, after everything he went through with Xingyi-ge? There are two whole wine-cellars that I’ve found up at Kaifeng, both of them full to absolute bursting.
“So……I don’t know? I’ve been feeling a lot of things about Xingyi, I guess? I still don’t really know a lot of things about him, including how he died.” Obviously, the question meant a lot of pain for Huan-ge, who was already dealing with and unpacking so very much after a thousand years of pain and loneliness and death, so Liánlí had tried not to push too hard. He wanted to know more about how Xingyi had died, same as he wanted to know absolutely everything about this person who felt like more of a part of him than Zhìháo ever had. But Kaifeng didn’t want to harm Huan-ge in his desire to learn more about Xingyi. Please, he never wanted to do that to his zhiyin. “But one of the things Xingyi had to deal with a lot of in his life? Was people thinking that he didn’t deserve to be the Knight of Kaifeng. They gave him so much s**t about it, and Xingyi internalized a lot of it, and he had people who loved him regardless—I mean, obviously, Helene was one, but he had others too—but he still struggled a lot, y’know? With not feeling like he was enough, and with the feelings he wanted to bury in drinking like he did, and with all kinds of things besides.
“And—I don’t know, maybe it’s something about the Kaifeng Knight’s role being a caretaker of the dead, but……? I’ve been thinking a lot about how I don’t know if Xingyi actually got buried, much less got any proper memorials after he died. Obviously, it didn’t prevent his starseed from reincarnating……” Kaifeng gestured at himself, waving his hands up and down his torso by way of saying, I sit here before you, so you know that Xingyi managed to reincarnate. “But I still kinda want to do something for him, y’know? And music is what I know best, it’s my passion, it’s why I breathe and get up in the morning and all of that, so I’ve been keeping track of songs that make me think of Xingyi, or that feel like songs Xingyi might have enjoyed, or songs he might’ve identified with in some way, like—oh!”
Humming nothing in particular, Kaifeng reached into his subspace pocket and pulled out his civilian phone. “I can share, actually,” he said, angling his phone away from Muri as he keyed in the passcode for it. Personally, Kaifeng wouldn’t have minded letting Muri see the passcode, or the selfie with Huanxi and Táotáo that served as Liánlí’s lock-screen image. But Muri was very sensitive about protecting people’s identities, and Kaifeng couldn’t begrudge him that, since he did have miles to go until the purification was done. Any unnecessary stress getting heaped on his poor shoulders wouldn’t have been fair.
As he clicked through his apps and files, Kaifeng went on, “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this guy, Noah Kahan? He’s this American folky sort of guy, kind of like a backwoods New England Hozier, with some clear influences from Mumford & Sons but not in a copy-pasting kinda way? He actually did a song with Hozier on his last album, but that’s beside the point.” Shrugging, Kaifeng finally clicked in so he’d be only one click off from playing the music. “So, Noah did a different song on that album, and it broke mainstream because it got a remix version with Post Malone. Both versions have their merits, and it really made me think of Xingyi, so I’ve been working on a cover……”
Finally clicking what he wanted summoned up the sound of Liánlí’s acoustic guitar on the opening chords, and then his voice as he sang, “I’m rememberin’ I promised to forget you now, but it’s rainin’ and I’m callin’ drunk.…”
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