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 Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 3:51 am
Pyrrhus still wasn't sure what to make of what he'd learned. That he was on Earth, in the year 2024; that it had been a thousand years of darkness and misery; that the galaxy he knew had undoubtedly been upended by centuries of change.
That everything was different. That he might never see the people he had loved again. That even the ones he hadn't seen die before his eyes might be....gone.
(That there was some small chance that Bernard had been reborn, and might forgive him for what he'd done, if he even knew about it.)
He'd found somewhere to sit--a wooden bench, set alongside what looked like a well-tended path--and stared down at the ground, wondering at the sight of lush greenery and blooming flowers. It was hot and a little sticky, but that hardly mattered--Earth was still alive, and that, at least, felt like a relief. Felt like a reason to hope, instead of despairing over everything that had been lost. Even if it also felt....very much like his world had ended all over again.
Just....this time, like Saturn swinging her glaive, it had restarted, too. And maybe he could find someone to help him, if he looked. He wasn't too proud to admit he needed it; hopefully there would be some sucker who took pity on a lost visitor from another world.
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Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 4:43 am
Patrolling together with Helene was always a lovely and overall enriching experience. Granted, Kaifeng felt that way about most things that involved his zhiyin, and he would absolutely cop to being biased, if anyone had decided to call him out on such. But the reality of his bias didn’t change the fact that patrolling together with Helene always felt so much safer than doing so alone. They could have each other’s backs, cover each other’s weaknesses or take care of things that one or the other of them missed, and make sure that neither of them had to stand against anything alone.
That was nice. For most of his life, Liánlí had been very obnoxiously against the idea of love, and monogamy, and ever being in romantic love with anybody. He hadn’t seen any way that anybody would ever love him like that. When he’d gotten out of Boston and started dating around, he’d learned that people could have felt that way about him, but something always wound up feeling off on his own end, which had made him wonder if maybe he wasn’t broken. Maybe, there was just something wrong with him that meant he could want romantic love, deep down in the heart of hearts that he hadn’t enjoyed sharing with people not named Hayden (and definitely not with his old therapist), but he wouldn’t ever get it.
What a privilege and a relief—what marvelous good luck—to have had Huan-ge find him, and to take Huan-ge home, and to get to build such a life with him.
The night had been mostly peaceful, so far. Not much to report, and when another Order aura had cropped up on Kaifeng’s senses, he gently tugged Helene’s hand to go check it out. If they were a friend, then running into them would be worth it. If not, then at least Kaifeng and Helene would have given them a shot.
Getting closer to the source of the other aura, it was pretty easy to see that they were another long-survivor senshi like Helene. Even without being totally up close just yet, something about their profile and their hair reminded Kaifeng of the paintings that Xingyi-ge had used to fill the corridor leading up to the chamber where he’d placed their Wonder’s Code Piece. There had been that line of five paintings, with the two dark-skinned, sort of purple-toned elf-looking senshi who could have been blood family, for as similar as they’d looked to each other.…… Kaifeng couldn’t help but wonder if the resemblance was real, rather than in his head.……
“Hey, friend,” he called to the senshi on the bench as he and Helene got fairly close. “Everything alright? Need any help or anything?”
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Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 4:34 pm
Sometimes, the simplest things were a marvel to Helene.
Having spent centuries alone, watching his world crumble, and years before that grieving the loss of something he had never had the courage to have, it felt....wrong, sometimes, to know that he would have the simple joy of waking up next to Lianli for years to come. That they would be able to patrol together, to grow together, to find their way side by side, and make a life that he thought would be forever denied to him.
But he instead got to spend summer nights wandering Destiny City with Kaifeng at his side, glad for the company, and for the occasional entertainment of interrupting someone doing harm.
Or, as it were, find someone in need of help in other ways.
Every time he found someone he had once known, it was a little bit of a shock, and in some ways this one felt especially so. Especially so soon after finding those old portraits--to have a familiar face staring back at him in reality, and not just in a painting, felt...eerie.
"Pyrrhus?"Pyrrhus jolted--two voices, new people, potential threats--and before he'd even fully processed who was talking or what they were saying, he was on his feet.
It took him a moment to realize that he was very definitely not being threatened. In fact, the Squire of the Knight-and-Senshi pair before him was calling him "friend" and asking if he needed help. And the Senshi--
The Senshi knew his name. And Pyrrhus knew him, too.
"Helene?"
They hadn't been great friends, or anything. Different people, very different cultures. But he'd always respected the Senshi of Inhibition. And if he was with a Saturn Knight--
"And you....Kaifeng? You look....different." But Helene was the same, somehow, if diminished. No more wings, just like Pyrrhus. "I--yes, I do need help."
It almost hurt to admit.
"I just....got here, as it were."
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Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 8:45 pm
For a moment, when the other, new survivor-senshi got to his feet, Kaifeng worried that maybe they’d approached too suddenly. Or maybe they hadn’t appropriately gauged how the other senshi was feeling aside from sitting by themself on a bench. Or maybe they’d messed up something and put the poor guy on the wrong kind of edge—but thankfully, things seemed to ease up a bit. Whatever tension might’ve been there in the heat of one moment, it seemed to dissipate with Helene recognizing the other senshi (and hopefully from the fact that a fellow Order senshi and a Squire didn’t want to hurt this Pyrrhus).
“Yeah, uh. Reincarnation cycle, y’know? Xingyi-ge didn’t live this long, but……we share a starseed and a calling as the Knight of Kaifeng, so?” Smiling in a hopeful, earnest way (one that he hoped would be reassuring), Kaifeng gave Pyrrhus a little wave. Then, he reached into his subspace for some of the evening’s “in case somebody ends up needing them for whatever reason” snacks that he’d brought. “We don’t live too far from here, if you want to go somewhere a little less……much? It’s us, our dog, and Stribor, another survivor senshi, in a pretty big house, so? There’s more than enough room for you. And we’re less likely to have one of the Chaos agents in town come out of the woodwork. Some of them are at least reasonable people, but then you’ve got others attacking people on-sight and pretending they’re the victims.”
Although Kaifeng considered the two plastic containers he’d pulled out, he……really wasn’t sure which of the potential snacks Pyrrhus might like or not. So, he held them both out. “Are you hungry? I’m……not really sure what you might like? And if you prefer meat, we have some at home; I just don’t usually take meaty snacks on patrol since Helene’s vegetarian? But……” Holding up the container in his left hand, Kaifeng said, “Básī dìguā. Sweet potatoes, roasted in a spicy-sweet caramel glaze.” Then lifting up the somewhat bigger container in his right hand, “Shaobing. They’re these traditional, sesame flatbreads that you can fill with different things. These ones are filled with eggs and vegetables. So……any preferences?”
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Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2024 10:49 pm
Helene moved to stand next to Kaifeng, and if he was wary, he felt he had good reason. Pyrrhus wasn't irrational, certainly, but Helene suspected that whatever had killed his world had not been kind, and he had known the Senshi of Nihility to be willing to jump to violence if he decided it was necessary.
(And to have a very loose definition of "necessary.")
So, he would let Kaifeng be kind and accommodating, but he was wary, ready to offer whatever protection he could.
"Such an arrangement would provide access to food, shelter, and safety. This world...is different, Pyrrhus. You will find it much harder to simply exist as yourself. Earth is not...built for us. For people from other worlds."
It was a difficult truth to accept, Helene realized, but it was one he had been forced to acknowledge, the longer he was here.
"And the food is safe. This Kaifeng is a remarkable cook."Pyrrhus regarded Kaifeng for a long, thoughtful moment. People had always told him he looked something like his dead uncle--the one that had been Senshi before him--and so perhaps it made sense that this Kaifeng looked like the one he knew, but somehow different. Less haggard, perhaps. Less miserable.
Well. Wasn't that nice for them.
"I see." He should have been more prepared for that. How many familiar-and-yet-different faces would he see, the longer he stayed on this foreign world? Would there be a Heibing, shifted slightly to the left, rendered as an Earth native rather than himself? A Bernard, but no longer the man Ryla had married?
The thought of it made his chest hurt.
"Dunno if I sohuld trust your opinion on anything to do with Kaifeng," he told Helene, who looked offended by the suggestion. "Bias. Lots of it. But the....thing. The flatbread, with eggs. Shaobing?" He tried the word, and it was a little clumsy on his tongue. "I haven't had anything with protein for years." At minimum. Decades, maybe. He didn't want to think about it. "Maybe the other thing too." He wasn't exactly going to pretend he wasn't starving, and anyway, they were offering to take him home, which sounded like an offer for more food, maybe.
He paused.
"Do you have meat in the house? I know his people," he gestured casually at Helene, "don't eat it, but trust me, Pyrrhans do."
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Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2024 11:42 pm
Helene might have felt offended by the allegations of bias in Kaifeng’s favor, but Kaifeng giggled good-naturedly about it. Gently, looking up at Helene with a fond, starry expression, he nudged his shoulder into his zhiyin’s as if to say It’s okay, I’m biased in your favor too. (And Kaifeng was biased in Helene’s favor. He didn’t see any shame in admitting that, either.)
Pyrrhus’s pronunciation of shaobing might have been a bit clumsy, but Kaifeng nodded and kept smiling at him anyway, all the while busying his hands with first, putting the básī dìguā back into his subspace, and then, with opening up the shaobing and handing it over. Hopefully, Pyrrhus wouldn’t worry over-much about needing time to get used to Mandarin words and intonations. For his first time, he was doing quite well.
“We do have meat at home, yeah,” Kaifeng affirmed, staying close but trying to give Pyrrhus some space to eat if he needed it. “Helene and Stribor don’t eat it, but I do, and we have semi-regular guests who do. My cousin, their spouse—he’s also a Knight, if you run into him, but I don’t think he’s a reincarnated one—and my best friend? It won’t be that hard to have more meat around for you, or to keep the meat dishes and the vegetarian ones separate. We have chicken, beef, bacon—it’s a particular way of cutting and preparing pig meat?—and some prawns in the fridge right now. But getting different kinds of meat for you won’t be a problem. I can make you something with meat when we get home too, if you want?”
And there was something else, something it felt like he was forgetting—until it came to him in a flash. “Oh, we’ll need to talk to a Mauvian, too,” Kaifeng said warmly. “That won’t be any trouble, but Helene, Stribor, and all the other long-surviving senshi in town have these little Mau-crafted glamour-charms that let them pass for human.…… Well. I don’t actually know if Corvina has one or not? I feel like I’ve only seen him out and about powered up, with all the pink, and the horns, and the tiger tail that humans don’t normally have? Lanting wouldn’t, like, deliberately withhold that from him or anything? That’s really not like him. But I still don’t really……”
Kaifeng waved a hand dismissively, mostly to bring himself back to the point. He could talk to Lanting and ask if he needed help finding a Mauvian for his incredibly large space-boy later. “Important point is, Mauvians have a charm that can help you out. They can also set you up with a senshi-phone, so you can keep in touch with people, call for backup if you ever need it, use the flashlight on it to find something you dropped. So, like, maybe not calling one tonight, to give you time to eat and rest and everything? But whenever you feel ready, we can get you in touch with one of the Mauvians in town.”
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Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2024 1:14 am
There was a part of Helene that was not entirely thrilled by the prospect of inviting as chaotic a person as Pyrrhus into the home he shared with Kaifeng. He valued the peace and quiet of it, and Pyrrhus was not, in his experience, someone given to peace and quiet.
But it would be cruel, to leave him abandoned, and also, Helene suspected that Kaifeng would--fairly--be displeased if he voiced his objections, so he swallowed them, and simply returned Kaifeng's very charming smile with a fond, small one of his own.
It was true, he supposed, that he was biased in Kaifeng's favor, but that was part of being in love, he thought. Realistic assessments of one's partner's flaws were well and good, and Helene could certainly manage one if he needed to, but frankly, he preferred open adoration.
"Best not to wander alone, either. There is Chaos in this city, and it is powerful enough to claim Senshi. You will be safer if you have others to help rely on for protection."Pyrrhus took the container of shaobing with a murmured "thank you," and did not waste any time, pulling one out and starting in on it while he listened to Kaifeng's sales pitch of Things They Would Have To Do. It was reassuring to hear that although several members of this household were vegetarian, he wouldn't be expected to hold to that--particularly since he was fairly certain that he'd be willing to hunt down and butcher his own meat if he had to, as long as it meant there was food. More than cave moss and dubious mushrooms.
He finished the first one, and paused for a moment.
"I can cook something for myself, if you don't want to," he said. He'd...figure out what Earth meats tasted like and what they went well with, if he had to. "And I'm guessing you know of a Mauvian? Because I did notice that thinjgs seem to be...different. Now."
His shoulders dropped, and he shoved the second shaobing into his mouth to contemplate for a moment.
"....Met one of those Chaos senshi. He seemed pretty confused by me, which just made us even. So, yeah, I'd rather stay with you guys than risk being turned into...." He shuddered. "That."
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Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2024 1:27 am
Figuring out a situation with a new housemate would definitely take some effort; it always did. People had different needs in a shared living space, and different comings and goings. But leaving a new arrival from space out in the wilds of Destiny City wouldn’t have sat right with Kaifeng, in his spirit, so he first leaned up to gently kiss Helene’s cheek. Then, he turned to give Pyrrhus a warm and (hopefully) reassuring smile.
“Cooking for you isn’t any trouble, but in the morning, I can help introduce you to the kitchen, if you want? That way you can cook for yourself when you want to.” And with a significantly reduced risk of accidentally burning down the house. That was important. “Same as getting in touch with a Mauvian. There are a few we know in town. I can message them with my signet ring, and I’m sure they’ll be glad to help you get set up.”
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