|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2024 11:45 pm
Quote: Backdated to September 20th. Follows old aches become new again, occurs around the Light Up the Night ORP/the Biolumina Club opening.
Planet Earth…… He’d been here before, but not very often. And anything he knew would have been a thousand years out of date, by now. He certainly didn’t recognize words like “Virginia” or “Destiny City,” beyond acknowledging them as names. Wandering away from the boy, Thalassa didn’t know where to go any more than he knew what to do. The city sprawled out around him in a largely incomprehensible mix of grays, blacks, and bright colors, surrounding all the green of the park. Every potential path felt equally dangerous, brimming with possibilities that he couldn’t expect.
But Thalassa wouldn’t get anywhere by waiting around for someone else to show up and catch him off his guard. So, he ducked through the shadows, around the trees and assorted metal poles with lights attached to them, looking for something—anything—that might help him better get his bearings.Leaving the club with Ryla, Liánlí didn’t regret coming out at all, but he did find himself stretching his arms over his head in the way of his that usually preceded a deep yawn. As soon as they got home, he felt liable to pass clean out on Huanxi’s chest, even if he was on the couch or something instead of in bed, and just sleep there until………sometime later, probably. Much as Liánlí liked having his usual routine and all, the idea of letting himself sleep in tomorrow morning sounded infinitely appealing.
“Kind of a shame that the glowsticks all died off so quickly,” he said, kneading a knot at the base of his neck in the hopes that it would wake him up a bit more. (He did not connect any of the dots about how tired he felt and how many glowsticks he had idly twirled around while Ryla had gotten to talk with the very handsome, silver-haired guy in the glasses.) “Usually, when you get those at places, you can take them home and they’ll last for a couple days. You might have to store them in the freezer to help them do it, but still.……”
At least getting home wouldn’t be exceptionally difficult. Tired though Liánlí was, he felt up to the walk back home through the park across the street. Hitting the cooler, freer air of the outside even felt nice after being cooped up in the club. It might have been entirely uneventful, had starting down the path not presented an unexpected sight: someone very tall and worrisomely thin wandering around the path nearby, obviously a senshi by the look of their outfit, and under the glare of the street-lamps, something about their ears looked……odd. Liánlí couldn’t peg what flavor of odd, not from this distance, but the safest guess seemed to be “space senshi.”
Part of him didn’t really want to power up right now. He wanted to go home and fall asleep on Huanxi’s chest. But a space senshi wandering around in unfamiliar territory was a suitable call to action, so Liánlí took Ryla by the wrist and ducked into an arrangement of shrubberies to power up without anybody seeing it.Without a good way to track the time, Thalassa couldn’t say exactly how long he spent, meandering around the park in a daze, failing to find anything that gave him a better sense of his bearings. ********, he was probably going to need to wander further than this, if he wanted to sleep somewhere that at least allowed him to pretend he was relatively safe. But the largest settlements on Thalassa had been nothing like this place and the more he looked out at them, the more the buildings felt somehow suffocating.
The flare-up of another powered aura—distinctly non-Chaotic, thankfully, and currently more powerful than Thalassa himself—yanked Thalassa out of those thoughts, though. Without needing to think about it, he pivoted and followed the feeling toward some rather tall bushes. Someone free of Chaos’s influence? Who would presumably know their way around here better than he would? They were going to help him get himself sorted out in this century whether they liked it or not.
Peering quizzically at the shrubbery, Thalassa said, “……Hello? Fellow senshi or Squire, whoever you are?”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2024 11:58 pm
Ryla wasn't sure how he felt about the whole...club....thing. He'd thought it would be fun, to go where the people were, to be in the middle of sights and sounds and beautiful bodies moving in rhythm to music that varied from passable to actually good. Every planet had something like it, he was pretty sure, whatever they called it--dance halls, festhalls, clubs, lounges....the point was to drink and eat and be merry,. and Ryla had fully intended to.
He hadn't expected to have feelings. To meet a silver-haired stranger and try to be charming and find that he didn't....want to. Because whoever this was, he wasn't Bernard, and apparently the hole Bernard's death had left in his heart hadn't so much healed as awkwardly scarred. The kind of scar that hurt when you pulled at it.
So he was subdued when they left, not sure what to make of the man he'd run into and even less sure about what he wanted to do with...anything that might have gone forward. Evren was handsome, sure, but....
He wasn't Bernard.
"Mm, maybe whoever sourced those went cheap," Ryla said. "They were handing out so many, it sort of makes sense." Then again, something like that couldn't be expensive anyway. Ah, well. A minor disappointment.
He felt Lianli's tug on his wrist, and frowned, and his eyes were drawn to the figure before them, and--no.
No, it couldn't be. Not tonight, not when he was wallowing in the past, the universe wouldn't so kindly throw something like this in front of him.
He went when he was tugged. Powered up. And when he heard that voice, it was a flood of memories all at once--and he moved back out quickly, heart pounding.
"Thalassa? Is it really you?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2024 6:42 pm
Even if powering up had been his idea, primarily, Kaifeng didn’t entirely know what to do from there.
Part of that was down to just feeling tired, he realized. But another part was……he normally didn’t end up with other people starting these conversations for him. Dewey, he’d found all alone. Pyrrhus, he and Helene had found together. In both cases, Kaifeng had been the one to start the conversation. So, ending up in a place where he’d put himself but not being the one to approach the other space senshi? Had Kaifeng feeling extremely I don’t know, I didn’t think I’d get this far.
Sure, Helene had opened things for them when he’d arrived. But Helene was also special and different. You know, for reasons.
Kaifeng felt even less certain of what was happening when Pyrrhus left his side and went out to meet whoever had joined them. Still, he followed his friend out from their hiding space and blinked bemusedly at the alarmingly thin senshi before him.Thalassa couldn’t say what he expected to come out of the shrubbery. Distantly, he noted the presence of a very human-looking Saturn Squire, and that, he supposed, was probably about what he could or should have expected? But the senshi who stood with the Squire, though……
“Pyrrhus…? You…… You’re……”
Impulse screamed at him to close the distance between them and hug that petite idiot. Only barely was that avoided, as Thalassa recalled midstep that Pyrrhus didn’t enjoy sudden, abrupt touching. But still, he came closer and without thinking, only following what felt right to do (inasmuch as he could tell right now, with a tidal wave of emotion washing over him), Thalassa dropped to one knee before his friend and bowed his head.
“Pyrrhus,” he said, breathless and trembling. “I’m so sorry.…”“Oh!” Kaifeng……still didn’t entirely understand what was going on here? But Pyrrhus and the new friend (Thalassa? Had that been what Pyrrhus said?) recognized each other, apparently. Getting down on one knee to apologize was a bit weird but maybe there was just some history here that Kaifeng didn’t know about? But maybe he could help keep things relatively non-awkward…… “Hi, Friend of Pyrrhus! You must have come a long way to get here, I’m Kaifeng of Saturn—”“I didn’t ask you.” Following his people’s own customs for apologies as serious as this, Thalassa hadn’t planned to look up until Pyrrhus had asked for it or given him leave to do so. But the Saturn nuisance was speaking to him, which required Thalassa to lift his gaze and glance around Pyrrhus at the human. “Remarkable feat, a Kaifeng who doesn’t smell like a distillery. But if I take you at your word: shush, Kaifeng. Pyrrhus and I are busy, and Helene would be better served by your mouth than I am.”
Not that Thalassa knew what had happened to Helene after all this time. For all he knew, the senshi of inhibition had managed to die and reincarnate as Kaifeng had clearly done. If so, they’d probably found each other all over again and Thalassa could only hope that these versions were less stupid than Xingyi Kurogane and Huanxi Xin had been.
But it also didn’t sound like Thalassa’s problem. Focusing on his own business, he bowed his head once more.
“For what I said to you……the last time, I…” Thalassa shivered. “Whether it was true or not, it was the exact wrong time. Storming out on you after like that—it wasn’t right. And I……I’m sorry, Pyrrhus.”
Thalassa had practiced this apology in his head for centuries but now, with Pyrrhus right in front of him, he found himself fumbling over words in ways that he hadn’t accounted for. As long as the intention came across, though, it didn’t matter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 12:41 am
Thalassa was so thin.
It was wrong, seeing him like that. Pyrrhus was used to him being much rounder, much fuller--not awful and gaunt like this. But it was still his face, his eyes, his voice. This was still his friend, still alive after all of these centuries.
If Pyrrhus teared up a little, it was probably the only natural reaction that could possibly exist.
It felt strange, wrong, to have Thalassa kneeling and bowing before him like this--but the way they'd parted before....it would have been impossible for Pyrrhus to truly hold that against him, not for so many years, not when this was one of his only friends, not when....
He couldn't help but snort at Thalassa's acerbic little jab Kaifeng's way.
"I see you haven't changed too much, old friend," he said, and then he knelt in front of Thalassa, threw his arms around his shoulders, and gathered him into a hug.
"You're forgiven. I'm just glad that you're here, and alive."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Oct 23, 2024 3:50 pm
Pyrrhus’s arms took Thalassa by surprise. Being gathered up like so made him freeze for a moment. How long had it been since he’d embraced someone else? But he yielded quickly, wrapping his own arms around his friend, half-uncertain what to do with gentleness and touch from another after so long and half-desperate to just have this. Crash landing on an entirely new Earth and almost immediately finding Pyrrhus? It almost felt too good to be true.
“Likewise for yourself,” Thalassa said softly, brushing a hand down the back of Pyrrhus’s head. “I tried to reach you, to apologize. Don’t know if it was your world’s Chaos or mine that kept me from doing that. Maybe it was both.” With a gentleness that he largely didn’t afford to anyone, not unless they were very special, he squeezed Pyrrhus in his arms. “Without knowing whether you had survived or not……I hoped. Tried to dress it up in logic, but it was just hope that you wouldn’t be completely gone.”
Thalassa sighed. “……I don’t know what happened to Troilus. After I stormed out on you, we managed to communicate for a bit. Not very long, though. Think the last thing I managed to ask him was how the wolf-bear cub we picked out for Seiche was adjusting to their world.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2024 11:44 am
Pyrrhus had not prayed to his gods in a very, very long time. And in any case, Bhael and Araush were not exactly the kinds of gods to give gentle blessings. They put your enemies before your blade and ensured that your pots wove faster than your foes', they didn't give you back one of your dearest friends after a millennium of dark, cold loneliness.
But someone, some force, had brought Thalassa back to him, and Pyrrhus said a quick prayer of thanks in his own heart to whichever deity or...whatever had done so.
"After everything broke, we...couldn't reach offworld, so it could have been both," he sighed.
Something squeezed in his chest at the mention of Troilus. His cousin, the only family he had who mattered--was there a chance? Might he, too, have made it?
(Taran and Seiche would not have. But perhaps, Imnolu....)
"It's enough that you're here. One friend--one member of my family--returned is more than I thought to have."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
