|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:02 pm
Getting roused from napping for several days hadn’t been Kiyoshi’s most favorite thing in the world, right after he’d purified, but Yuki had had an infuriatingly good point: the world didn’t have a pause button. Whether Kiyoshi wanted to or not, he did need to get up and actually deal with things. However much he’d wanted to simply stay in bed with Cersei indefinitely, that hadn’t really been an option. Even if it had been, Kiyoshi wouldn’t have actually wanted to go through with it. He needed to be around people.
Senshi business had to get dealt with. A bunch of people who hadn’t gotten advance warning about the purification would need to find out that Muri had gone through with it. Before too long, Kiyoshi had needed to report to Puppy Paws for employee training. He’d gotten flexibility on the start date from Keiran, because he understood better than most people how much purification took out of a person, but still: Kiyoshi knew better than to turn down a job that was just being given to him by someone he trusted. Then, Elsa had purified too, and then, Fang had needed the help to come help him with clearing the Chaos off his world, and then Daedalus after him.…
In retrospect, Kiyoshi……didn’t know if he’d done the best thing for himself by showing up to Fang’s thing without letting some people know ahead of time that he’d purified. Enough people he’d recognized had been there to make Murikabushi feel extremely awkward about it. Looking at things in retrospect, Kiyoshi still felt awkward. He’d only noticed one of the people he’d met before putting in any effort to ignore him. While nobody had had any room to make A Whole Thing out of his presence, which was good, it also meant that he didn’t know for sure if any of the others—people like Encke, Daphne, Cybele, Terebellum, and Lysithea—had seen him, or if they’d thought anything about his presence.
Thankfully, Grieve had ably distracted Kiyoshi from things for a while. Everything about her was fabulous, if you asked him. Maybe she was rough around the edges, but he liked that about her. Unfortunately, senshi business couldn’t get ignored forever just because a b***h and Elsa had brought someone home for dinner and wound up with another new roommate (and a new sister in Kiyoshi’s case).
Tonight, some of the senshi business found Kiyoshi sitting at the kitchen table, powered down so as not to drain any of the time off the weekly limit that Yuki had gotten him to agree on, idly whacking his lips with his henshin pen, and fuming at the spiral-bound five-subject notebook before him.… He’d copied down the form of the bio for the Connections app while powered up earlier today, so Kiyoshi knew that he had the different fields right. But knowing what to put in those fields was another matter entirely, and ******** his life, Kiyoshi simply did not know how to even begin answering some of these questions.
Sure, several were pretty straightforward, but for others…… Some obvious “don’t write that down, you idiot” answer-ideas stood out at him? For most of the questions, though, Kiyoshi didn’t have the first idea where to start. Letting himself scribble down whatever garbage came to mind didn’t help, either. It got words down, yes, but very few of them felt like anything he could post on the app. One of the few answers that he liked nagged at the back of his mind, hissing at Kiyoshi that joking references to Stephen Sondheim weren’t that clever, actually, and he couldn’t possibly have been the only person to think of that when given the prompt “Company.”
After a while, that suspicion rankled enough that he couldn’t take it.
With a heavy sigh, Kiyoshi powered up. As Murikabushi, he flipped his senshi phone over to the Connections app and started scrolling through the other profiles……and groaned as he saw exactly what he was afraid of sitting right there, next to Kaifeng’s insipid, smiling face.
Entirely free of any dramatic nonsense, Muri let his phone slip out of his hand and drop onto the protective pillow of his fancy sleeves. His head followed in short order as he just let himself face-plant on the table, forehead resting on his forearms. ******** of course. Stephen Sondheim was only a queer icon and one of the original fathers of contemporary musical theater. Hardly esoteric or arcane, as far as references went. And Kaifeng was a composer and musician with pretty wide-ranging and eclectic taste in his civilian life, so of. ********. course. he would enjoy Sondheim.
In honor of the agreement with Yuki, Muri should have started a stopwatch as soon as he’d powered up. He knew this. The golden star charm lying on the table beside him knew this. Yet, disappointment over the stolen joke weighed too heavily on his shoulders. Kept him from starting anything, even as he heard two sets of footsteps in the hall.
One set, unmistakably, had four legs and little nails that scraped against the hardwood floor, which meant Cersei. The other, however, had two legs, which could’ve meant at least three different people. Probably Yuki, from the sound of it, which really meant that Muri needed to power down………and ******** yet.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:02 pm
Had anyone thought to ask, Yuki would’ve been the first to admit that he didn’t have the first clue what ******** and Kyoya’s magical girl “purification” business had really entailed. They’d been up in space for quite a while on the night of. Upon their return, ******** apologized for that and explained how Ida-hime-sama had needed to use rather a lot of magical energy to cleanse the Chaos that had linked itself to their soul-seed things.
Checked out logically with the laws of physics, Yuki supposed. As far as he could tell, a soul-seed would be more inclined to stay in whatever state it was already in, whether that meant Chaos or Order. Getting it to change state, then, would require energy. In light of how complex and messy all the cosmic-level aspects of this sounded, it only made sense that the energy required to state-change a soul-seed from Chaos to Order would be, like, a LOT more than the energy needed to shift an object at rest (for example, Yuki’s body, in his desk-chair, with a fuzzy white space-heater with her big, brown eyes wiggling and pacing around his room) into a state of motion (in this case, getting to his feet and escorting Cersei off in search of ********, only pausing briefly to grab a plastic spray bottle with <********> written on it in big, black permanent marker letters).
Not that parsing things out in terms of the laws of physics really helped Yuki feel less like his head was swimming with unfathomable concepts, when he tried to think about any of this. A lot of changes had happened one right after the other. Switching to ******** and Volterra being “Kiyoshi and Kyoya Sakurazawa” instead of “Reiki Rokugin” and “Haruhi Tatsuhana,” Yuki had at least prepared for. Likewise, he’d had time to prepare for an unfairly pretty alien dragon-man friend of Kiyoshi’s to move in. (Soren, Yuki had decided only a few moments after meeting him, was great. He was feisty and he had a good sense of humor, Yuki liked him.)
Coming downstairs one night to find ******** sitting at the table with a strange someone whom Yuki hadn’t initially recognized, though? Significantly less great. He didn’t want to be a b***h or refuse Elsa the chance to change his life for the better since Elsa apparently wanted to take it……but finding out that Kiyoshi had up and brought Elior Who Was Also Elsa home? Just like that? No questions asked because Ida-hime-sama had done the sparkly magic thing and everything was supposed to be completely and totally fine now? Very significantly less great. And Yuki really wanted to be the version of himself who didn’t want to be a b***h to someone who’d just upended their entire life—apparently including abandoning a sister and her pregnant wife in order to purify……
But Kiyoshi was still ******** up, on several levels, about the way that he’d joined the Dark Mirror Court in the first place. Elsa had been intimately involved in that process happening how it had. Maybe more of the blame ultimately rested with Mirrorspace, like ******** said……but maybe Kiyoshi was only forgiving Elsa so easily because he had a crush. Unburdened by such a great disadvantage, Yuki didn’t trust Elsa’s little purification face-turn that easily.
Relatively speaking, Yuki had strongly preferred coming downstairs to find that Kiyoshi and Elior had brought some giant, pink-horned space-Minion with Marge Simpson-colored hair home from whatever had happened on Todd Who Was Also Fang’s planet. No, he hadn’t really understood what to make of Miss Grieve of Grieve, but to his knowledge, she hadn’t done anything to make his favorite boy sad. Quite the contrary, she seemed to get him animated and excitable, with her fascinating tales about wild space adventures that sounded, to Yuki, largely made up.
Heading downstairs tonight, idly spinning a rainbow-colored star-charm on his finger, Yuki half-expected to find ******** sitting at the table with Liánlí, working together on a puzzle-box from up at the latter’s magical Knightly Wonder on Saturn. Worse, it probably would’ve been a puzzle-box that radiated vibes of pure “WARNING: CONTAINS CENOBITES. OPEN AT YOUR OWN RISK” or something.
Yuki didn’t know what a “Wonder” was, exactly, or if they had treasure hidden inside them? But Liánlí/Kaifeng seemed to him like exactly the sort of person who would find weird and potentially nefarious treasure, open it, fumble through the ensuing consequences by virtue of luck and cleverness and having a six-and-a-half-foot-tall alien boyfriend, and then pleasantly insist that that sure had been some unexpected fun, hadn’t it.
As Yuki shuffled behind Cersei to the kitchen, he rubbed at one of his eyes and tried to mentally will the thoughts about that possibility out of his thoughts, into the dumpster where they belonged. He didn’t know what he’d find.
The heap of suspiciously white-clad boy face-planted on the table sufficiently derailed Yuki’s attempts at thinking about anything else, though. Setting the spray bottle down on that same surface didn’t seem to rouse him any, which made it even easier to focus on him. For a moment, Yuki blinked at ******** in bepuzzled silence, trying and pretty well failing to understand what was going on here. ********, a notebook (visible to Yuki only by the spiral binding of its spine), the full senshi fuku out despite ******** whining about how much he hated how he looked in white…… Nothing immediately added up, and Yuki sighed.
“If you’re testing me about my commitment to our weekly time limit agreement, you’re going to be disappointed,” he said as simply and easily as commenting on the weather. While Cersei trotted over to her water bowl for a drink, Yuki busied himself about filling the electric kettle with water and setting it up to get boiling. Whatever ******** was moping about probably demanded tea—for Yuki’s nerves as well as for getting ******** to please not mope so much. “Because I meant what I said about you spending too much time powered up and not enough just being a person. Also, what I said about how you’re going to cut that s**t out whether you like it or not. I have your agreement in writing, and I am very serious about holding you to that.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:03 pm
“My stupid phone doesn’t work if I’m not powered up, Gorgeous,” Muri whined without sitting up properly, fully aware that he was whining and doing it anyway. He’d need to sit up and actually look at Yuki, and he knew it. For the time being, though, Muri simply raised one of his hands so he could pointlessly gesticulate as he explained, “It’s some weird fluke of senshi magic or something? The phone is, like, linked to our magical power and it won’t even turn on without the juice. Completely dead, a ******** brick. But the juice is only accessible if a b***h is powered up, sooooo……”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:03 pm
“That’s all very interesting,” Yuki deadpanned. He wasn’t even lying, not exactly, because everything about the mysterious space magic was fascinating (and he definitely yearned to figure out if he could get ******** senshi phone to run Doom, though that idea sounded very unlikely if it didn’t work without senshi magic). Still, Yuki tossed a flat, mostly unimpressed Look over his shoulder. “You’re still wasting some of your weekly powered up time by moping at the kitchen table.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:03 pm
“I have a good argument for why this doesn’t count, though,” Muri pointed out, without actually thinking about what he was saying, much less what sort of argument he might make in order to support that claim. A throaty, shrug-adjacent sort of noise from Yuki bade him to go on, so Muri did: “Your major points of objection were things like putting myself in harm’s way, ignoring the need to exist as a person outside of senshi stuff, and messy-flirting with cute but troubled Chaos boys, right?
“Well, what I’m doing might be senshi stuff, technically? But it’s more about trying to, like……reach out to more people? Make more White Moon friends? So, that way, I’m not running into crazy, magical nonsense on my own so often, and I have more people who can, like, keep me in check about the cute but troubled Chaos boys. Then, I have to do things about just being a person in order to do what I’m working on in the first place, like? I have to say things about myself, and to do that, I have to work on figuring those things out at all, and how a person interacts with others—such as, in this case, potential new White Moon friends—is a good way for them to, like? Get better ideas about who they are?”
For improvising based on a half-cocked idea that had wandered out of his mouth before he’d fully understood it himself, Muri didn’t think he was doing half-bad.
“Anyway,” he added, “I’m gonna power down soon. Being powered up too long is too risky if you’re not directly out and about in the moonlight and all that.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:03 pm
With the kettle fully set up and getting to work, Yuki flopped into a seat opposite ******** at the table. Down on the floor, Cersei wormed her way between their legs and those of the chairs, sniffing idly at……more things than Yuki wanted to count or fully take stock of right now, this very moment. Her soft fur grazing Yuki’s shins nearly made him giggle, but for the sake of the current Very Serious Conversation, he bit that impulse back.
“Okay, that all sounds reasonable,” he decided. “Now, are you gonna tell me what, exactly, you’re doing right now?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:06 pm
“Trying to write a profile for some Connections app that came with the phone.” A deep breath, then Muri whipped himself into sitting up properly. He gave Yuki a cursory look and a tired smile. But the stillness didn’t last long: Muri needed to shift into a seat closer to Yuki, rather than opposite him. Needed to be close enough to let Yuki see his phone’s screen while he explained things and scrolled or clicked through the Connections app. “The profile is pretty bare-bones, but it’s got all the important stuff you need for going on an app like this to find new magical girl friends. Like, see here……”
Muri hummed, wrinkling his nose as he stopped on a familiar picture. “I’m pretty sure this is way out of date by now,” he said, “because I don’t know about you? But Miss Huntress Princess of the Community Theater Costume Shop isn’t feeling twenty-two anymore, I don’t think. No shade, just facts about the linear passage of time. She’s also, y’know, a whole-a** Princess, rather than a super senshi, these days. So, she looks different from the photo now and blah, blah, yadda. Considering the whole ‘Miss Girl got forcibly dragged into the Negaverse and then got out again’ of it all, I wonder if she even remembers this profile is up……”
As soon as he said that, a chill dropped, heavy, into the pit of Muri’s stomach. His shoulders tensed, and without thinking about it, he scrolled on elsewhere. It was with a sigh of relief that he stopped on a different picture that caught his eye, an image of a frankly stunning blonde with gorgeous turquoise eyes and utterly impeccable bone structure.
“I haven’t really met this lady,” Muri said, “but she came out to help clear the Chaos off of Fang’s world, and……ugh.” Making a throaty, unnecessarily dramatic noise, he pressed the back of his wrist against his forehead as if he meant to swoon. “Gorgeous, she was fabulous, okay?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:06 pm
“You say that about every Princess,” Yuki pointed out with a shrug but without any real vitriol or edge behind it. ******** had his priorities in life, always, and one of them was that he adored Princesses, especially the magical girl ones since he’d learned that they existed, and he desperately wanted them to think that he was cool.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:06 pm
“She fought one of Fang’s undead chrysocyon with her sparkly pumps, Yuki.” Was Muri whining? Yes. Did he need to do that? No. But he really did need Yuki to please understand that Princess Ganymede absolutely had been fabulous, and Muri wasn’t remotely exaggerating to say so. “Plus, Kerberos and Cybele have good things to say about her, so she has to be amazing.
“And see, the profile’s all set up so Miss Princess Ganymede can list things like how she’s a sassy queen who can run in heels—gurl, same, much respect for another player of that specific game—and then tell people what she’s down to do while out on magical girl adventures……how she doesn’t really like her magic (again: gurl, same, mood, I heard. that. one-hundred percent, et cetera, we just have different reasons for the dislike, it seems)……how she’s a ‘mom’ friend and often in the company of some Jupiter Knight, he’s probably sexy to go around with a queen like her. Very straightforward setup on the app, perfectly organized so that people can communicate important intel about themselves to each other. It’s all super great in theory, right?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:07 pm
Feeling ******** tense up, Yuki nudged his shoulder at his boy’s. Maybe he didn’t have all the knowledge and context necessary to appreciate why ******** got so upset about the idea that Miss Cybele had possibly forgotten about some old social media profile—a perfectly normal thing that ******** himself had done before, albeit in strictly non-magical contexts—but whatever the reason, Yuki’s boy was upset. Given the high-concept magical girl drama of it all, the explanation for the sudden Bad Feelings was probably something intense and extremely worth getting upset about. If ******** wanted to move on instead of dwelling on it, fine, but Yuki was still going to offer him something like comfort.
“I’m guessing you’re building up to a ‘but’ here, yeah?” Yuki huffed softly and adjusted his glasses. “Not that I don’t appreciate getting this introduction to a princess you’ve never met, but the way you’re talking? And the whole ‘moping on the kitchen table’ thing? That all says that there’s a ‘but’ coming.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:07 pm
“Oh, there’s more ‘but’ going on than the ‘Anaconda’ video right now,” Muri snarked, but without any real energy behind it. He kept scrolling, until he got himself back to Kaifeng’s profile. “First of all, Kaifeng stole my joke……which isn’t mine and isn’t that original, either. And actually he made it almost a year ago. But still……”
Pouting, Muri tapped his phone’s screen right over the bullet point on Kaifeng’s profile where he answered the prompt for ‘Company.’ “So, I’m longhand drafting stuff to put on my own profile, right? And you can check the notebook, because for this ‘Available or Looking For Company’ prompt? I wrote down ‘I actually prefer Sweeney Todd, but you can never go wrong with Sondheim.’ But then I’m struggling with doing answers for other questions, so I power up to browse some more profiles a little? Y’know, look for some references and a little bit of inspo? Then, I get to Kaifeng……and his answer for ‘Available or Looking for Company’? Is ******** ‘Always preferred Sweeney Todd, lol (if you know, you know).’”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:07 pm
“I mean, you can’t really knock him for having good taste in showtunes,” Yuki pointed out, shrugging and then trying to move off this subject as quickly as possible. Letting ******** dwell on the minor disappointment of Kaifeng the Relentlessly Perky beating him to a joke would never work out well for anybody. “Can I safely assume that the reason for the big sulk is more that you’re struggling with this bio thing in general? And it’s more like a ‘one last straw that tips things over’ situation, when it comes to Liánlí stealing your very cute and funny Sondheim joke even though that’s not actually what he did?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:08 pm
Listening to Yuki made Muri pout even more intensely for a moment……but only for a moment. Yes, he could tell that Yuki’s phrasing was Yuki indulging him while still pointing out that Muri was being ridiculous. Yes, he perfectly picked up on that pointed tone out of his best guy. But on the other hand, Muri very much wanted to be indulged, and to focus on that part instead of paying attention to any obvious facetiousness.
“Yeah, that’s basically the whole issue,” he said, powering back down into Kiyoshi. As his fuku shimmered and shifted back into his Sad-Boy, Do Nothing Day, Utter Bullshit Pajamas: a set of rainbow-striped sleep-shorts and one of Miss Sibyl’s old merch tees, with a photo of Reiki’s drag mom splashed across Kiyoshi’s chest, mugging for the camera and looking like she could’ve won Miss Continental.
(and she WAS *Reiki*’s drag mom. but not Kiyoshi’s. even having warned her about the purification as much as he could do without saying too much, she hadn’t even met Kiyoshi. she knew things about him that most people would never and he knew an uncomfortable amount of things about her, but as far as she was concerned, he would’ve been basically a stranger to her, now. what if things between them couldn’t move on as easily as they had with Yuki. what if she couldn’t understand so easily that Kiyoshi was the same person and the magical glamour bullshit was just some s**t. what if the Negaverse found out about the Haus somehow and he could NEVER go back. what if Miss Sibyl and Miss Cherry could never be his drag moms again. what if Sibyl needed him right now, but Reiki wasn’t there anymore because Reiki had become Kiyoshi. what if trying to see them ever again was like Tigger getting his stripes washed off in the bath and suddenly, everybody in the Hundred-Acre Wood, except for Eeyore, is gaslighting him about how he can’t possibly be Tigger, i.e., himself, because Tiggers have stripes, which he does not, therefore he can’t be the one and only Tigger. what if SOMETHING *BAD* happened, and—!!!)
Grumbling, Kiyoshi shook his head and tugged his notebook over from the other side of the table. “Like, what the ******** is this? A job interview? What skills am I supposed to write down here?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:08 pm
For a moment, Yuki frowned at his boy in genuine concern. They’d already moved on from whatever had upset him about the Miss Cybele situation, so……? What? Was going on here? Why did ******** go tense up again while getting that dead-eyed, tight-lipped expression that he and his Obaasan always did when they got exceptionally anxious?
When ******** opened his mouth, though, a flat, unimpressed expression quickly replaced the frown.
“You are seriously overthinking this,” Yuki pointed out. “Did we or did we not just look at Miss Princess Ganymede’s profile where she listed ‘Running in heels’ and ‘Shining bright like a diamond’ among her skills? And the little Knight who’s like the ‘—of fun’ to your ‘someone will die’? ********, he was using chat-speak acronyms in his profile. What did it say there? ‘Chronically bad at filling out bio sections, lmao’ or something like that?”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:08 pm
“Okay, I see your point,” Kiyoshi started, and then looked at Yuki over the rims of his glasses, “but Miss Thing is a princess senshi, so who’s gonna tell her that she can’t list things that small-minded people might not think are actual skills? Nobody, that’s who. Not unless Miss The-Alpha-and-The-Omega Sparkly Magic Supermodel of the Cosmos is moderating the app or something, and as far as I know? She’s probably way too busy for that.
“Then, with the other example, it’s like……okay, cool, Kaifeng doesn’t mind making himself look foolish on the app……but I do. I mind that possibility very much, actually. Like, he can afford to do that; he doesn’t have the baggage of having needed to purify. And sure, some people might overlook that, or at least not be weird about it? But others might not. If I’m making myself look like a ******** dumb-a** all over the app, it might be like ‘Oh wow, Ida wasted all that energy saving you? Are you absolutely joking me? Why does somebody like you even deserve that kind of chance?’”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
