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 Posted: Thu Sep 12, 2024 1:38 pm
Laeradr had gone to answer Daedalus' call to action to help cleanse his planet. That was all well and good, he'd done a good thing for someone he didn't know, that was par for the course as a Knight. Well, Squire. He soooo wanted to know how much longer it would take before the Code thought he was worthy of being a Knight. Then again, he had sort of... totally slacked on his Squire duties. It hadn't been his fault—his family always came first, especially since he couldn't ever tell them any of this stuff—but of course it still mattered that he hadn't done much. Oh well. He was back on the ball now. Right. The point. That he had been making to himself, before his ADHD went ballistic on him like usual. He'd never actually met Daedalus, which he was sad about, because getting up close and personal to an alien sounded awesome, but he'd missed his chance, and it wasn't exactly like you could spot them wandering around during daylight hours. So, when he saw the guy with the horns down the street, he practically leapt at him with enthusiasm. "Yo! Wait up, alien guy!" he hollered, probably not immediately endearing himself to said alien. Catching his breath and up to the guy, he grinned, giving him a lazy two-finger salute. "Hey. Sorry about that. I, uh, I'm Learadr, nice to meet you! I've been hoping to meet an alien since, like, forever!"
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Posted: Wed Sep 25, 2024 3:04 pm
After hearing the accusation leveled at him so many times out in Destiny City, Corvina still didn’t know what, exactly, a “cosplayer” was supposed to be. Shuangxu had tried to explain it and Corvina had sort of gotten the impression that cosplayers were sort of akin to actors? They dressed up in costumes that they usually made themselves, or bought from people who specialized in making them, and they sort of pretended to be characters from stories that people liked? But sometimes, they didn’t really do that? It was all very complex and contextual, which contributed to Corvina’s lack of understanding.
Some of them had been out in one of the parks where Corvina liked to patrol tonight, though. Taking pictures with each other. Minding their own business. The sorts of things that meant somebody needed to keep the youma and Negaverse away from them so they could continue having a nice time uninterrupted. Corvina didn’t offhand recognize any of the characters they were dressed as, so they must not have been from any Shuangxu—or if they were, then not a game that Corvina had heard him talk about yet. From a distance, closer to the edge of the park, he kept an eye on their little party, watching out for any Chaos that might have tried to take advantage of them.
A youma had needed to get dusted, but it hadn’t put up much of a fight.
Even watching over the group from a distance, though, Corvina found himself feeling……sort of strange. Two members of the group stood out in particular. One, a tall young man, broad in the shoulders and chest, with several many layers of black and dark gray between his shirt, vest, cape, knee-high boots, cape-jacket situation, and the black fabric wrapped around his arms. Someone had loudly exclaimed about his presence, calling him “Rise Lee,” which sounded like a very strange name to Corvina, but……hey, maybe it was normal on Earth? (Many things on Earth were normal when Corvina considered them weird. This wouldn’t have been new.)
The other, though, was a petite girl with orange hair done in twintails. Her elaborate-looking headdress had a set of black horns (which almost certainly weren’t real because humans did not grow those naturally). Corvina didn’t entirely understand all the overlapping layers of swishy and sometimes partially see-through fabric in her outfit, but……it looked like something that Alys would have worn. The “Knee Lu” (another very weird name, why did Earthlings give their famous characters names like this) character wore the wrong sort of colors for Alys, who would have preferred reds, and blacks, and purples. But otherwise, the design of the outfit would have suited her nicely.
She probably would have worn it to chase after that Ganymede Knight she had definitely not fancied romantically and only ever seen as a rival, certainly not in any way where Alys had wanted the Knight to pin her to the wall and kiss her senseless (except that Alys had very blatantly wanted that).
On the other hand, the tall young man in the black and gray was wearing something that Varamyr might have worn. Probably for a trip off-world, but the vibes (Corvina thought that was the right Earthling word?) were correct, right down the Rise Lee having much of his chest left somewhat exposed by several undone buttons.
So caught up in watching them and feeling around for Chaos energy signatures, Corvina utterly failed to notice the approach of a friendly aura—not until a Neptune Squire had swooped in to his side and……did? some sort of strange salute? (Making an openly befuddled expression, Corvina returned the gesture. He didn’t understand the significance of pressing two fingers together and then slapping them at one’s forehead, but Shuangxu would be disappointed if he failed to observe some kind of human social nicety by not reciprocating the gesture.)
Brows furrowed in confusion, Corvina blinked at the Squire for a moment. “It’s a pity you weren’t born during the Silver Millennium, then,” Corvina said, failing to understand everything about what was happening or why. “We weren’t so much of a rarity back then.… Corvinates, Idans, Pyrrhans, Lysitheans…… There were many of us, once.”
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Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2024 9:55 pm
"...Yeah," Learadr said softly, calming down almost immediately. "It really, really is. I would have loved it—it's depressing when you think humans are all alone in the universe. Kind of a sucky way of growing up." He shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable and extremely aware of the fact that he'd flagged down this random alien with no real idea of what he was going to ask him or anything like that. No great conversation topics came to mind despite the wide net he cast about in his thoughts, trying to harness it in. At least there was a brief moment of delight in the way the alien senshi returned the two-fingers salute Laeradr had given him first. It had to be so silly, and yet, the guy just... did it. Maybe he thought it was an important custom, Laer didn't know and he didn't plan on correcting the guy, either. It was cool. It was fun! "Can I ask you some questions? About what it was all like, back then? How you're adjusting to planet Earth, like, I dunno, how different is the weather and that kind of thing? If you're not busy. I'm kinda eager to learn, is all."
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Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 4:24 pm
Corvina still didn’t understand what, exactly, was happening here, much less why it was happening to him. Why right now. Why tonight. Why him. Corvina simply did not know and listening to the Neptune Squire who’d apparently decided to find him interesting did very little to help him figure out something that resembled an answer.
“Well. At least humans aren’t alone, these days,” Corvina pointed out. “The numbers of non-humans might have dwindled, but we are still here.… Of course, troublemakers like that dragon-man with the museum are still around, too. And there’s always Chaos. Space harbors that garbage whether it wants to or not, just because it can’t fight back on its own.”
Frowning bemusedly, Corvina tilted his head at the Squire’s request, which……helped exactly not at all. Strictly on principle, Corvina didn’t have much respect for Neptune Knights. Clearly, Ida Knights were the best (by which Corvina meant Lanting specifically but with some nominal respect for other Ida Knights as well). He often wanted to say Lysithea Knights were the least respectable just because of Dunnottar and enjoying it when Dunnottar was upset, but during the Silver Millennium, far too many Lysithea Knights had proven themselves more than capable as warriors and anyway, unicorns were fearsome beasts.
But Neptune Knights had long been a mystery to Corvina. Hardly the worst faction of Knights (in his extremely biased opinion that no one had asked for), but nevertheless, incomprehensible. Their insistence on serving as diplomats confused him terribly. And this new Neptune Squire didn’t particularly help with that. So, ultimately, Corvina shrugged at him and nodded, by way of saying that……okay? He didn’t really know why the Neptune Squire wanted to ask him anything, but answering questions wasn’t difficult and certainly better for making Lanting happy than anything else.
“The weather on Earth is quite temperate compared to what I’m used to,” Corvina said, starting with the most recent question because it was the easiest. “My world’s climate was more extreme in every direction. Heat waves were severe, humidity was suffocating, snowstorms buried cities for weeks at a time. Our flowers were beautiful and extremely hardy, because they had to be. And what it was like……?”
How to answer a question like that? Most things Corvina said about his world tended to make Lanting upset, but……maybe it would be less like that for this Neptune Squire? Maybe that was just Lanting? Perhaps he was simply more sensitive to anything that he perceived as pain on Corvina’s part, even if Corvina told him that it didn’t hurt or that it was just how things were, and maybe that explained why Lanting didn’t seem to like hearing some of the details about where Corvina had come from and how he’d lived before?
“My people were warriors,” Corvina said. “As both their senshi and their crown prince, I was trained in combat early and expected to prove my prowess often.” He neglected to mention the part where those tests had been a matter of life and death, where people had judged his fitness to continue living based on his success or lack thereof.
“My mother wasn’t present—” She had left their world shortly after Corvina’s birth, never having intended to stay, “—and my father didn’t handle that well. Being the king and raising a son at the same time—even with the help he had, between his council of advisors and the help with raising me specifically, it might have been too much for him.” Mother’s abandonment had broken him. Everyone on their world had known that. The father Corvina had never known, he’d apparently been vivacious, charming, maybe a bit eccentric but beloved by all regardless. As far back as Corvina could remember, though, his father had been unstable in nothing but unpleasant ways.
“But it wasn’t that bad with him, really,” Corvina said, quirking his shoulders. “I could bear it fine. At least, until our people started being harmed by his failure to properly protect their best interests. Then, I had to step in and step up to rule.” Something he’d earned through a coup and challenging his father to honorable single combat.
Corvina tilted his head again, blinking at the Neptune Squire. “……Is this helping you learn anything?”
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