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 Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2024 11:14 pm
Waiting for nightfall was exhausting and Corvina hated doing it, so most of the time, he didn’t bother. He understood the whole concept of “Most people on Earth will react negatively to seeing a Corvinate because they are only used to dealing with humans.” That made sense, as much as it deeply annoyed him. But at the same time, as long as he went out powered up, people couldn’t connect Corvina the Senshi to……whoever he was supposed to be as a civilian, now. When he did that, a lot of the Terran civilians who saw him seemed to think that he was playing some kind of game or wearing some manner of elaborate costume.
(Shuangxu had explained the specific words that Corvina heard thrown around, “cosplayer” this and “LARPing” that, but they still didn’t entirely make sense to Corvina. He expected he simply needed to learn more specific, contextual things unique to Earth that he simply hadn’t encountered yet. Or maybe he needed to encounter them for himself, in a hands-on way, before Lanting’s explanation would really make sense.)
Still, even if Corvina hadn’t waited for nightfall to head out, he certainly stayed out after it. Most of the nefarious garbage that Chaos got up to in Destiny City started after dark. Staying out to try and prevent it only made sense. Stalking through the city streets, Corvina looked around for any of the youma-beasts that needed stomping. He tried to seek out Negaverse auras. Any of the “Dark Mirror” auras he felt got chased all the same, but there hadn’t been very many of them and it felt like they always slipped away into mirrors before Corvina could confront them. Only after long enough that he’d stopped keeping track of the time, something managed to hold his attention without him trying to fight it: another Order aura, of a lower power level, much like Corvina’s own.
Corvina followed it almost without thinking, leaving the park he’d been patrolling and heading for an alley. Getting up high enough was a simple matter of clambering up the very useful silver staircases on the sides of some of the city’s buildings—“fire escapes” or whatever they were called—and once Corvina had the right rooftop, he spotted……a very familiar silhouette. One that he hadn’t seen in quite some time, between the coup against his father and his longlost mother bringing that accursed plant to his world. Petite but muscular, with a large bow on their fuku and pointed ears—shorter than Corvina’s own, but distinctly pointed nevertheless…… Maybe it could’ve been someone else, but on the chance that it wasn’t……
Furrowing his brow, still on the fire escape rather than the actual roof, Corvina called out, “……Pyrrhus?”
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Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2024 11:37 pm
So far, Pyrrhus's only real complaint about Earth was the weather. Namely, the overly long, disgustingly hot days and too-short, still-warm nights. Most of that was down to his sun avoidance, though he hadn't been able to dodge all of it--and of late, he'd noticed freckles blooming on his skin, like little reminders that he was spending more time in the light than he liked.
Still, at least there were nights. Pyrrhus didn't have those anymore, its cool ever-night replaced by brutal, scorching sun, and it was good to be on the surface and enjoying being around life again.
He leaned against a half-wall around the roof he'd chosen to observe the city below from, watching the streets below. He should be looking for Chaos, ready to fight, but at the same time--he'd been doing that for a thousand years. He owed himself a breather, he thought.
And then there was a voice.
A familiar voice.
Pyrrhus's heart jumped into his throat, and he turned.
"Corvina?"
There was no mistaking him, even if he wasn't all the way up on the roof. Pyrrhus had known singularly few people so large, and the pink skin and pointed ears confirmed it, even if there was something very much missing, and it took him a moment to notice the broken base, which made his stomach lurch in secondhand horror.
"What happened to your horns?"
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Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2024 2:07 am
Very little on Earth was worth smiling about. Corvina had been here long enough to have learned that several times over.
Still, a smile lit up his face as he bounded the rest of the way up onto the roof and stood looming over Pyrrhus, nearly two feet taller than him and practically vibrating with relief and excitement about running into someone Corvina had once called a friend. Part of him—a part that his own people had desperately tried to train out of him but that Alys and Varamyr, at least, had tolerated—wanted to scoop Pyrrhus up in a hug. In a rare moment of self-restraint, though, Corvina held back, remembering that Pyrrhus didn’t enjoy being touched without warning or a chance to prepare himself. It made more than enough sense, considering what Pyrrhus’s world had once been like, and the sort of life he’d led, the regular assassination attempts from that useless, extremely off-putting cousin of his……
After whatever had befallen Pyrrhus and his people for the past thousand years, Corvina could hardly imagine that his feelings toward unexpected touching had improved.
The question, though, briefly caught him off-guard. Blinking absently, as though Pyrrhus had spoken a long since extinct and deeply obscure dialect of Murikabushian while asking Corvina to solve some of the “calculus problems” thing that intellectually gifted Terrans enjoyed doing in the twenty-first century for gods only knew what ******** reason. Furrowing his brow, he reached up to touch the still-sensitive stumps of horns that had once been quite impressive—and then, with a soft gasp out of Corvina, he realized what context his old friend was missing. “Oh, right, you didn’t—it was right around……”
Well. Right around something involving a big heist and some mysterious, possibly cursed artifact.
“The heist that you pulled off a little before everybody lost contact with your world,” Corvina said, feeling very awkward in how he was talking around the incident in question. Partly, he just didn’t know all of the details about what had happened. A heist, an explosion, Pyrrhus’s husband dead, and then, his world had gone dark (which hadn’t made any sense at the time but seemed, in retrospect, to indicate that they had been set upon by Chaos). Mostly, though, Corvina was not accustomed to mincing his words, but he also didn’t want to upset one of the few people in the universe who actually liked him by speaking too bluntly about Pyrrhus’s late husband (nor did he want to insult the man’s memory; he had been a fellow senshi and, while not quite as skilled a warrior as Pyrrhus, still strong and formidable in his own right). “Of course you wouldn’t have heard, much less seen. That was around the time that this happened.”
As though either of them could have forgotten what he meant, Corvina gestured at his horns.
But he also wasn’t answering the question yet. So, rather than risk having that pointed out to him, Corvina explained, “The old Lanting happened. Zhiheng didn’t……” Corvina cut himself off briefly, debating how to continue that thought. He and Shuangxu had disagreed somewhat about how to interpret Zhiheng’s actions, and Corvina still believed that he had the more correct measure of things than Shuangxu, but Shuanxu had been so adamant that Zhiheng breaking Corvina’s horns hadn’t been justified.… “After the coup against my father, I went to Ida. Went to see him. But the old Dunnottar had just fallen in a battle. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have gone. Would have let Zhiheng have time to grieve, as one does. But I didn’t know, and he didn’t want to deal with me right at that moment, so……”
Corvina shrugged. “He made his feelings known. And then things get sort of blurry in the memory until the part where I realized I’d killed him.” He sighed—then let the initial eagerness creep back onto his face. “But you! You’re still alive. And yourself instead of some new Pyrrhus like the fancy-skirted slut of hunger.”
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Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2024 3:43 am
It felt auspicious, meeting Corvina again so soon after coming to Earth. Like if at least one friend was alive, there might be more he could find. There might be hope that he wouldn't be alone.
So Corvina's smile was met with a broad one of Pyrrhus's own. It was equally warming to see Corvina stop just enough away that Pyrrhus had a moment to evaluate without being immediately swept up by his very enthusiastic old friend. It was nice, to have someone remember that unexpected touching tended to make Pyrrhus bite people.
His smile dimmed just a little when Corvina explained when exactly he'd lost his horns--not a casualty of Chaos, then, if he knew enough to timeline it to Pyrrhus's. Endeavor. With the crown.
His deeply, painfully failed endeavor with the crown.
"Yeah, if it was around then, there were--circumstances." Probably, he could tell Corvina the truth. But he'd asked an important question, and didn't want to interrupt the story that Corvina was going to tell him--one that was likely difficult and painful, both emotionally and possibly literally.
It made Pyrrhus glad that his people didn't have extra breakable appendages.
And the story--it made Pyrrhus's chest ache. He of course knew about everything going on with Corvina and the previous Lanting--(which meant or at least implied there was a new Lanting?)--and really, it was a thoroughly told tale, in some ways. Boy meets boy. Boy immediately falls in love with boy. Boy thinks repeated refusals are just boy playing hard to get. Things get....sticky.
Perhaps it wasn't surprising that things had ended so tragically. Perhaps that was the inevitable trajectory of love in the kind of life they lived. Requited or not.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That things ended up that way. I..." His eyes dimmed, and he briefly looked away. "But you said the old Lanting. Is there a new one, then?" Best to just ask the question and find out. Maybe the new one wasn't such an irascible b*****d, and liked over-enthusiastic violent courting. A better match for Corvina, if that was the case.
"I'm me, yeah. And you're you. It's good to see a familiar face. I--is your world infested by Chaos? I get the impression everyone who's lived this long got ******** up in that particular way."
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Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2024 4:32 am
Corvina nodded, listening to Pyrrhus’s side of things. Not that Pyrrhus was saying much about what had happened, but Corvina could understand that as easily as he followed what Pyrrhus was saying. He hadn’t told Shuangxu much about……well, anything with his father. Or with his mother. He’d mentioned Alys and Varamyr—especially the former, since seeing that Chaos-conjured image of her up on Daedalus’s home-world had upset Corvina so much—but he hadn’t mentioned Yushi at all, not even to say that his beloved younger cousin had been an Ida Knight as well.
(Part of Corvina had to wonder if Yushi had been reincarnated or not. Plenty of people certainly had been, both senshi and Knights, so maybe Yushi was one of them? But then again, maybe he wasn’t? Who could tell which way was up about any of these things? Not Corvina, that was who. And who could tell how Cosmos worked or how the cauldron chose to do anything in this universe? Definitely NOT Corvina, that was who.)
Nodding was also helpful when Pyrrhus asked more questions, considering the answers to both of them.
“I’m living with the new Lanting, yeah,” Corvina said, deciding to sit down on the roof’s half-wall. Partly, it was for ease of talking to Pyrrhus; getting on Shuangxu’s physical level often required sitting or kneeling or something, given Corvina’s height, and Pyrrhus was even shorter. Talking to him while standing was a pain in the neck (Terrans did not seem to use that phrase literally very often, Corvina had noticed, but in this situation, he did mean it literally). Mostly, though, sitting down made it easier to feel……something like relaxed. Not all the way there, but something kind of close to it. “There’s a lot I don’t think he understands yet? About how things in the universe work……used to work……”
Corvina slouched, pouting (even though he would not have admitted that he was doing so) and projecting an air of sullenness. Needing to think of things in terms like these—how the universe used to work, all the differences between that and how the universe worked now—felt like it could’ve driven him to madness, given enough time.
“……A-Xu tried to tell me that Zhiheng didn’t have a right to break my horns after I showed up to their Wonder like I did,” Corvina said, keeping his voice down because he was relying on civilian names to distinguish between the two Lantings. Even if “A-Xu” was a nickname and not necessarily traceable back to Shuangxu, and even if he didn’t feel any Chaotic auras, protecting Shuangxu was not a duty to take lightly. “Sometimes, he acts like it’s strange that I had to fight to prove my worth and defend my right to serve as Corvina’s senshi.” Which was also his right to stay alive, but that didn’t need to be said. Pyrrhus was one of the few people whom Corvina trusted to understand that. “A-Xu wants me around, and I don’t want to be anywhere else? But……”
Corvina shook his head, drawing a blank on how else to express his confusion with the simple, straightforward things that Shuangxu inexplicably……didn’t seem to think were so straightforward.
None of which helped answer the last question Pyrrhus had asked, but……that was difficult. Shameful enough for Corvina to hang his head over it and look away. “It was my fault,” he said, softly. “What happened to my world, I mean.…… Nobody with any sense would’ve trusted her when she showed up from Murikabushi, carrying some strange plant. But……” He sighed. “She said that she regretted having left me there, with him……until I’d helped her replant it in one of the palace gardens. She left the next day, and then the Chaos started settling in.”
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Posted: Wed Aug 28, 2024 10:08 pm
Pyrrhus nodded, slowly. "I've been staying with Helene and his new Kaifeng," he said. It seemed like the possessive was appropriate--though frankly, he'd use it the other way too. Kaifeng was Helene's, Helene was Kaifeng's; it had been as true a thousand years ago as it was now, even if back then they'd been stupider.
Pyrrhus had been proud of himself, once. For not being stupid. For chasing after Bernard, going for what he wanted instead of pining away the way so many of his fellow Senshi did. But it had ended up the same, hadn't it? Bernard was dead. He was alone. And Ryla didn't think he was the kind of person who got lucky that way twice.
Still, Pyrrhus wrinkled his nose, and glanced down briefly at the city below him, considering what Corvina was saying about how his new Lanting felt about what things had been like before.
"Maybe it's a good thing," he said, "that he doesn't get it. That he doesn't know how things were. Means he's had a better life than that, right?" There had been people--Senshi, even, and Knights--like that, even a thousand years ago. People who'd lived the good life and had no idea what it meant to have to fight for every scrap you had. Pyrrhus had always envied them, to a degree.
Mostly, hew dealt with that by breaking into their houses and stealing their fancy stuff. That was probably not viable, anymore.
"I do think maybe he isn't wrong about it being ******** that Zhiheng broke your horns? But I wasn't there." Still, he was inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to his old friend, rather than to the irascible Knight that had always treated Corvina like hie was dirt under his show.
"It was my fault on my world, too," he said, softly. "That crown we stole....Bernard and I thought we could harness it. Heibing told us we were ******** idiots. Heibing was right." He looked over Corvina's way, and exhaled. "It killed Bernard outright. Poisoned my world. And now it's ******** up. There's sun. I can't be on the surface of my own ******** planet because the ******** sun won't set."
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Posted: Thu Aug 29, 2024 3:28 pm
“Oh, I’ve seen those two around,” Corvina said, sort of off-handedly and with a largely absent nod to match, when Pyrrhus mentioned where he’d been staying. “Still only know Helene by reputation, but A-Xu is friends with the new Kaifeng. And he and Helene seem to like showing up wherever there’s Chaos—whether that means helping some Daedalus banish the Chaos off his world, or this whole……thing?”
Pulling a sour face, Corvina vaguely waved a hand at the air. Words escaped him, even though it hadn’t been very long since the incident in question. “I don’t know if you ever ran into him before,” Corvina said, reaching into his subspace for the glossy white card with the opalescent ink that spelled out the strange man’s name. “Name is Almadel. Purple outfit. Elegantly curled horns pressed close against his head. Heard people down here refer to him as a ‘mysterious merchant,’ but when Lanting and I went to help him with a kosopod infestation, it was at some museum out in orbit somewhere.”
The frown deepened, giving Corvina a look like he had just sucked on ten thousand of the most intense lemons known to any people in the universe. Kosopods had that effect on Corvina. Detestable creatures who did nothing but consume food and breed, exactly as he’d told Lanting while they’d been up at the museum. The queen that had nested there was easily the worst one Corvina had ever personally encountered.
“Anyway, the point is that Almadel had a kosopod infestation and put out a call for aid without warning anyone what they were getting into.” Which was probably fair enough. Nobody had seemed to know anything about them, among the Earthling-born senshi, Earthling-born Knights, and whatever those freaks were from the Negaverse, the ones who seemed kind of like Knights but also distinctly *NOT* exactly Knights. “Helene and the new Kaifeng showed up regardless, seemingly out of a genuine desire to help without any expectation of reward. Weird behavior, but I guess people like that have always existed, so whatever.”
Corvina shrugged, because it really wasn’t the point. If Helene and Kaifeng wanted to be weird like that, then it was their own business. Corvina’s business lay much more with Pyrrhus, and what he was saying, both about his world’s fate and his guessing about Lanting—Shuangxu Lanting, that was—and how he’d had the sort of life that meant he could live without knowing what constant war was like. While Corvina didn’t know that he had a good response to any of that—he definitely didn’t have a good response to the idea that Zhiheng had been in the wrong for breaking his horns, which still struck Corvina as a completely ludicrous idea that should not have been given serious consideration—his face still spelled out quite clearly that he was thinking about what Pyrrhus had said.
The thoughts didn’t amount to very much, but Corvina was thinking them.
“That sounds horrible,” he conceded, to the story of what had befallen Pyrrhus’s world, thinking about how the world had once been a land of eternal night and how Pyrrhus had done his best to avoid exposure to the sunlight on Corvina’s own home-world. “All the plants my people used to pride ourselves on cultivating? They turned against us. Probably others died earlier than we realized back then? Energy draining, Chaos seems to love that? But my cousin wound up being the first official recorded death.” He huffed softly. “Yushi had come to retrieve Zhiheng’s remains, so he could have a proper Idan tree-burial. I was going to let him. But some of the vines in the palace gardens—they started moving and strangled him.”
Corvina slouched, his expression……not quite softening? But growing more pensive, tinged with something like regret. And he did regret the whole affair. If he hadn’t trusted his mother in spite of all the reasons not to do so, then sure, maybe Alys, Varamyr, and Yushi might still have died? Maybe Corvina would have died as well? But at least they would have reincarnated together, instead of the other three perishing and likely having reincarnation out there in the world somewhere, while Corvina had spent a thousand years alone.
“At least other senshi like us seem to do different things to rid their worlds of the Chaos,” he said. “I’ve only seen how the process looked on Daedalus’s world, but I’ve heard of others. Somebody called Fang had one recently that the new Murikabushi, Kaifeng, and Helene all participated in.”
It was probably possible to say Murikabushi’s name like a name instead of a slur, but Corvina didn’t want to.
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Posted: Mon Sep 16, 2024 4:50 pm
Pyrrhus couldn't help himself--he looked distinctly displeased to hear of at least two melees that he hadn't been around to be involved in. Yes, sometimes he felt tired of fighting after a thousand years of it, but a fight in a museum--which meant plenty of things to steal!--against kosopods? Or a fight to rid a world of Chaos? Those sounded much better than hiding and hunting in the dark tunnels under his world.
"Helene and Kaifeng seem like...exactly the kind of people who would show up to help someone without caring what they were getting into," Pyrrhus huffed. "I mean, they brought me home, and Helene knows who I am." Who he used to be, what he used to do. Though it wasn't like there was much opportunity for that kind of work anymore.
Apparently, no one needed mercenaries these days.
Still, he shut up and let Corvina think, rather than interrupting him, considering he'd handed over a lot of things to turn over.
And Corvina's story, in truth, wasn't any better.
"I ******** hate the way Chaos turns our worlds against us. But if there's a way to fix it, then good. I can't bring back the people, but at least maybe I can make it a place I can go back to without having to hide in the caves like a skervin." He huffed. "If it can be done, we'll just have to do it. Take our planets back."
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Posted: Tue Sep 24, 2024 4:29 pm
Corvina nodded slowly, thinking very hard about everything that Pyrrhus was saying. It really was a lot to follow—not in that the concepts were complicated, but in that a lot of them conflicted with ideas that Corvina had largely been taking for granted—and he would likely need to continue thinking about all of this for a while. Several of the notions that Pyrrhus was challenging for him (whether intentionally or not on Pyrrhus’s part), Corvina had had in his mind long before he’d ever allowed the Chaos to infect his world.
Thinking so hard about so many things that Corvina felt must have been wrong felt like an oncoming headache. But same as Lanting didn’t challenge Corvina without having some kind of good reason for it (even if said good reason might well have been that Lanting took a certain very specific pleasure in seeing a warrior like Corvina sufficiently humbled before others), Pyrrhus wouldn’t challenge his ideas without feeling like he had a good reason for it. Maybe Corvina didn’t have the answers right now, but he could at least respect his friend by thinking about it.
“I believe in you,” Corvina said softly, giving his old friend an earnest look. “As I’ve heard, there are often significant differences in the process of clearing Chaos from one’s world? But whatever your world needs, I know you will see it done. Few in this universe can rival your determination. And whenever you’re ready to face your world’s infection of Chaos?” Corvina gave Pyrrhus a very serious nod. “You need only give the word and I will stand with you.”
………He might need to find one of the Earthling Mauvians and get one of their “phone” things. Apparently, having one made life considerably easier.
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