Firework Flowers (13) : A rare and unique breed of flowers that blossom into long, stiff-stamened, spherical orbs like those of the blossoming Powder-Puff flowers are on full display in Destiny City. A unique hybrid of several species, these plants were being engineered at a small landscaping company. While they were only meant to exist in their private greenhouse as they continued development, a simple accident resulted in thousands of seeds spreading across Destiny City. Thankfully, the Firework Flower is a beautiful, albeit temporary addition. The stems grow rapidly and look like tall blades of grass until the week before the flower blooms; the bulb is hardy and opens overnight to reveal the beautiful firework flower, which can be found in almost any color. However, unlike normal Powder-Puff flowers, when these flowers are jostled they explode in a burst of colors. Whether it is a simple touch or a strong breeze, these ‘Firework Flowers’ seem to burn up from the center of the flower outwards. It creates a beautiful display of light–especially at night. Scientists describe it as a harmless chemical reaction and encourage everyone to appreciate the flowers while they are here. The dust from an explosion can carry on the wind and will glow for a few hours after the reaction. The explosion cannot harm anyone and poses no danger to anyone.
Something weird was definitely going on in the city. Cernunnos, of course, didn't really have the experience to truly know, but things were happening now that he'd never seen before, in place he was... used to be the same.
Crouched in his usual park, the pale senshi squinted dark eyes at a patch of strange flowers that had seemingly bloomed within the last week. They didn't look like any of the other flowers he was used to seeing out here, even the ones people called 'weeds'... and when he'd reached out to touch one, it had exploded, bursting with light and glowing pollen. He'd nearly singed his fingers, but had managed to jerk them back just in time. The display had certainly been... pretty, and the flowers were too, but all the Earth plants he'd seen so far were not quite so... volatile. Was this normal and just not something he had encountered yet? Or... was it part of the strangeness that had settled over the city with the onset of that festival everyone had been talking about?
Enough other odd things had happened to him lately that he was starting to wonder if it wasn't just because he was alien to Earth that these things were strange.
Soft ears perked forward as he bent down lower, trying to get a better angle to study the strange plant. Maybe he should try to find that other alien girl... Lysanna? She'd seemed to know about Earth plants. Maybe she'd know what these were.
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Posted: Mon Jun 17, 2024 3:28 am
It was hard for Ekstrom to really get a grasp on what counted as “weird” in the city these days, having been around the magical block for about a year now. It didn’t make the new happenings any less interesting, thankfully, but she’d come to just expect weird things to happen and had been getting better about controlling her emotions about it all.
But pretty, exploding flowers? Come on.
The Mercury knight was grinning as she walked, the gloves on her uniform looking a bit singed from her recent encounters. She wasn’t much of a botanist so she couldn’t get technical about any of it, but she could at least appreciate the view. A myriad of questions ran through her mind, and she wished she could bring one back to her wonder to save and maybe, if she ever figured out how to get the place fully running, run some tests on it or something. How cool would it be to be able to recreate this kind of thing. She could run her own mini fireworks shows whenever she wanted!
It had so far been a pretty enjoyable night of setting a few of them off–y’know, for science–though uneventful outside of that. She half-expected to run into some kind of youma or shady chaos folk, but so far there’d been no one and nothing, save for a stray charm that she picked up a little bit earlier that evening. As she headed into a park in the interest of finding more of these flowers, though, she perked up a bit and made a dash straight for someone crouching down to get a look at something on the ground.
While it could have been another one of those charms, if she had to guess…
“Evening!” she called out from afar, if only to avoid any knee-jerk reactions of elbowing her in the face or something like that if she surprised them up close. “They’re pretty, don’t you think?”
The sudden voice so close behind him had the small boy jumping nearly out of his skin. The force of it toppled him over backwards in a flailing of limbs. On his butt in the grass, he stared wide-eyed at the stranger, ears pinned back into his hair, and snorted down his nose.
"Geez, you scared me!" He groused as he took her in, giving her a look up and down from hat to fuzzy hem. Her cold weather get-up felt out of place in the hot summer evening, but it was the symbols on her uniform that really gave him the feeling this wasn't a normal earth person. Another from that secret war? Hati had explained that there were Knights here, people who protected things called 'wonders', where senshi protected whole planets and things. He wasn't totally up to date on all the planets knights could be from... but he suspected that was what the outfit was about.
At least she didn't have that horrible creeping feeling the chaos types had.
"Yeah the flowers are pretty... are they normal around here? They're not like your normal flowers." Cernunnos' voice was still grumpy as he rolled onto his knees and pushed to his feet, brushing the grass stains on the back of his pants. "You should be more careful about just popping out at people like that. My heart nearly crawled out of my throat..."
This place was still strange to him, and the people no less than the place itself. He was still struggling with their customs, on top of all the stuff he had to know about the war itself and all the factions operating within it. Sometimes, like now, he felt deeply overwhelmed by it all... lost and alone in a strange and alient world. And achingly homesick, when he stopped to think about it. It made him grumpier than he really meant, crossing thin arms over his narrow chest.
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Posted: Sat Jun 29, 2024 10:12 pm
Ekstrom jumped in turn at his reaction, and stared wide-eyed at his toppled self for a moment before it registered that this was actually her fault. Her expression quickly turned from surprised to mortified, and she hurried over to offer him a hand back up.
“I am so sorry! Honestly, there’s no good way to greet anyone like this without surprising him, but I really didn’t mean to scare you.”
As she held her hand out to help him up, she noticed something different about him–pale purple skin was certainly not a human trait, nor were horns or ears like he had. She bit her tongue to be polite–she’d already scared the poor guy, she didn’t want to accidentally offend him by asking overly personal questions either–and instead focused on his questions.
“No, they’re not normal. I’d say, ‘I wish they were,’ but as interesting as I find them, I don’t really want that, either. Too volatile. If you can imagine children playing with them, it’d be every parent’s nightmare. I’m sure a ton of other issues would crop up if they did eventually become a normal thing around here. The city would never hear the end of it until they were all gone.” She raised the hand she wasn’t using to try and assist him to show her singed gloves.
“I’ve been messing with them all night, though. I wanna take a sample back to my wonder to study, but even if I jostle it just a little bit it just explodes. It’s always pretty, but y’know. I don’t think I’d find out much with just a bunch of the leftover ash.”
The senshi blew through his nose again, humming a little in disappointment. Another weird thing going on... what was with this city? The whole place was enough to learn about all on its own without a bunch of not normal stuff happening to muddy it all up. How was he supposed to know what belonged here and what didn't? Without asking people like Hati every time..
He gave her his hand when she offered, after a moment of hesitation. He hadn't super needed it, but it had seemed polite to allow her to help. She didn't really strike him as a particularly dangerous person, without that creeping feeling, so it was probably a good idea to play nice. At least he was right about her being a knight. She mentioned a wonder, so that was pretty conclusive there.
Cernunnos smirked a little as he flicked a hand dismissively, raising and dropping a shoulder.
"I'm sure the children would figure out pretty quickly that it hurts to touch them. That's how children learn, right? They have to figure out things are bad so they don't do them again. I'm sure everyone would figure out how to live with them if they stayed around." His head tilted then as he considered something, and then he waved a hand at some of the unopened flowers.
"If you want to take some, why don't you try some of the ones that aren't blooming yet? They're not explosive, right? So just move it before the flower shows up." It seemed fairly straight forward, at least to him. Did he know much about plants? Not really. Did he know if they'd survive being moved? No, but it also seemed silly to him if they wouldn't. Lysanna would probably know... but the alien girl was not here to ask about it.
"I guess I don't really care either way, personally. They're neat and kind of fun to play with, but if they're not normal and not going to stick around, I don't know how much they ultimately matter to me. I've got enough other stuff to try to figure out about your world without strange phenomena."
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Posted: Wed Jul 24, 2024 9:46 pm
“That is true,” she chuckled. If these things did wind up sticking around the city would no doubt adapt to their presence over time. On demand mini firework shows year-round seemed pretty neat, actually, but she still thought it’d be better if these things weren’t actually here to stay. There were enough things going on in this city without it, or really any of the other strange things that happened around here.
His idea pulled her right out of the train of thought, and she went absolutely wide-eyed.
How did that not occur to her?!
Without much thought she grabbed the other’s hands and held them up just in front of her face, on which was now an ear-to-ear smile and a perfectly beaming expression. There were practically stars in her eyes, even. “You’re brilliant! Seriously, that’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”
She caught herself before she could go on, and so quickly let him go and cleared her throat, a tinge of pink on her cheeks. “Sorry! I'm sorry. I got excited at the idea of getting these things to my wonder. I can grab those samples later. Anyway, um…you mentioned figuring out my world. If I can help at all I’d be happy to." Not that she was an expert or anything like that, but unless he was looking for very scientific answers about everything, she was fairly confident she could bring something to the table that could help him.
