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 Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 1:56 pm
Troilus crashed through the plant life, the plant life that seemed alive and yet decaying, he wasn't sure, but some leaves were green and others brown and that worried him, and he just hoped and prayed that there would be a person soon, someone who he could run into and have them explain everything to him and he could He could He didn't know. Start to build a new life? He didn't know, he didn't know, and all the not knowing was making him panic. "Hello? Is there anyone there?" he called out desperately, hoping against hope someone would answer.
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 2:33 pm
Patrols went easier with someone, as much as Thalassa didn’t want to admit it. It had the same sort of principle as a heist, he thought. Having backup made things safer, made you less likely to get caught off-guard because some unexpected trouble swooped in out of nowhere. Going with someone else meant that you could watch each other’s backs when trouble did manage to find you. On Earth specifically, having someone around who’d been here longer meant less of a chance to get lost and end up using a senshi phone to call Helene for help finding one’s way anywhere.
Not that that had happened to Thalassa more than a handful of times, but whatever, it wasn’t a matter of serious import.
In particular, going out to patrol with Pyrrhus made everything feel………so much less daunting. It also meant Thalassa was less likely to ask people possibly annoying questions about whether or not they knew the names he had once associated with Imnolu, with Bernard, with Seiche and his old Wonder—or at least less likely he was to get completely bogged down in those questions to the exclusion of all else. Sitting on the back of a park bench rather than on the bench itself, Thalassa squinted into the distance, into the dark alleyways that sprawled out around them, full of senshi and Knights and those non-Knight weirdos that the Negaverse had among their ranks. Someone around here had to know something.
“At least some of these Earthling senshi know how to treat their elders,” Heibing grumbled, looking away from the city to peer into the little brown box he had acquired. Made of cardboard, it contained ten chicken nuggets, neatly arranged in two little columns of five. Down on the bench, a bag sat between Thalassa’s calf and Pyrrhus, with a collection of different sauces that tonight’s benefactor had obtained for Pyrrhus and Thalassa so they could choose which ones to use more freely. “On top of that, the new Murikabushi is as eager to drop everything of his own and help people as his predecessor was, even if the story he hears isn’t real.”
Strictly speaking, Thalassa hadn’t entirely lied to Murikabushi. He had come from a functionally amphibious people and had an older brother.
Thalassa’s life just hadn’t involved any grand, dramatic tragedies of star-crossed lovers, long-held grudges, the burning lust for justice, political machinations and their effects on the course of true love, and no fewer than seven murders that were disguised as something else. Most of the details, he’d pulled from what he remembered of a play that he, Pyrrhus, Troilus, and Bernard had seen once after working a job on Murikabushi. Apparently, the new senshi had inherited his people’s spirit in spite of being born an Earthling human—arguably a major deficiency and a bad choice on Airan’s part about reincarnating—because he’d been completely taken in.
With a soft hmmm, Thalassa peered into the bag, at the collection of different dipping sauces. As he reached into his subspace, he felt another person’s aura flare up somewhere nearby, but they were both Order and no more powerful than Pyrrhus and Thalassa, so he didn’t think much of it. Some rummaging around, and then he pulled out a handful of little containers of jam and jelly he’d taken from empty tables at the diner where he and Liánlí had picked up group breakfast the other day. Nobody had stopped Heibing from doing that, so it was probably fine. Reading the words on the labels was still new to him—rather than proper words, they looked like fancy scribbles that sort of wanted to be words—but at least these labels had pictures on them.
“Do you want any jam for your nuggets,” he offered, opening a jam whose label’s pictures resembled a berry that the Tundra-Stalking Wolf-Bear tribe on Thalassa had once farmed quite successfully. Dewey—Stribor, another long-survivor senshi—liked them, kept them in the kitchen regularly. He called the Earthling version “strawberries.” “We’ve got, uh……well. I think these should be apple, peach, and grape? The little pictures look like the fruits in the kitchen back at home, anyway.”
His ears twitched when someone called out, though. In the middle of dipping one of his own nuggets in the strawberry jelly, Thalassa looked up and stared in the direction where the sound had come from.
“Pyrrhus, did you hear that?”
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 3:06 pm
Discovering new Earthling food was an adventure. Discovering it with Thalassa was more of one.
Pyrrhus eyes the jams and jellies a little skeptically, then let his attention drift back to the sauce in front of him. "I'm good, thanks," he said, "I like this spicy stuff. Buffalo, they called it?" Which he'd thought was an animal, but whatever. What did he know, really. "But I'm hoping we can keep deploying sob stories on Murikabushi to get free food, because that is a very good deal."
This all felt so....familiar. Sitting with Thalassa, enjoying a meal in each other's company, like they were preparing for a job and filling in the last details. Sure, there ought to be more people here--but it was still--
It was so much better than being so crushingly alone.
But there was a voice. And it twinged at something familiar.
Pyrrhus sat up, glanced down at his nuggets, and then shifted the sauce so it was on the bottom, and then closed it and set it aside.
"I'm gonna go investigate," he said, and he stood up, trusting Thalassa to decide to follow on his own (or to continue his chicken-based experiments because he trusted Pyrrhus to figure out his own s**t, one or the other.)
He moved towards the voice, stepping throguh a line of trees to see--
"T-Troilus? Thalassa!"
No more waiting. Thalassa needed to be here.
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 3:14 pm
Troilus broke through the tree line and finally, finally spotted someone. Two someones, in fact. Then the voice clicked and the blurred shape of a person reformed into into no No? yes Yesyesyyesyesyes The silhouette resolved into Pyrrhus and Troilus wanted to cry with relief. "Pyrrhus!" he cried out, forcing his legs to keep moving, keep running, until he ran straight into his cousin, the one he was sure was dead, and hugged him tightly, legs collapsing under him as the emotions pummeled him into the ground. His tail wouldn't stop wagging and he almost doubted it ever would. "Pyrr, Pyrr, Pyrr," he sobbed into Pyrrhus' shoulder, shaking almost violently. "Cousin, please tell me it's you and not some figment of my imagination. Oh, gods, it's really you? Please say so, I can't, I can't, I'm so—" he choked on any further words, everything starting to crumble and blur again.
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 3:34 pm
The strawberry jelly tasted good on the chicken nuggets, Thalassa decided, chewing on it while listening to Pyrrhus. A bit of a conflict in the flavors—salty and meaty-savory vs. very sweet—but he liked it. Good balance, in his opinion. He nodded again when Pyrrhus went to investigate, but also started packing things up in the bag, in case Pyrrhus wound up needing help.
Which, it seemed, he did.
As soon as Pyrrhus called him, Thalassa sprung off the bench and took off in the direction where his friend had gone. The bag rustled and crinkled as he ran, sounding his approach more clearly than the sound of his boots thumping into the grass and dirt, or crunching on twigs and leaves that had fallen off the trees. Finally catching up to Pyrrhus, Thalassa let slip a soft gasp. He knew that vibrant hair and wagging tail, that voice that deserved to be singing something.
“It’s really him, Troilus,” Thalassa said, getting closer to the both of them. “We’re both here. We’ve been looking for you, or for a new Troilus so we could know for sure if you made it or not, and…” Thalassa swallowed thickly. “…I’m sorry. So glad to have you back, but……Seiche. And Taran. Losing them to the Chaos infection like that…… I’m so sorry, Troilus. I’ve been looking for Knights with Seiche’s old Wonder, but any reincarnated Knight won’t be the Seiche you lost.”
Not that Thalassa had ever been particularly nice to Troilus’s husband. He had, on more than one occasion, deliberately antagonized Taran just because it had been really funny. But it wasn’t about Thalassa thinking it amusing to frustrate his friend’s spouse. Imnolu had loved Taran so deeply, with all his heart. Whether he’d been awake the whole time and known what had happened to his husband and son, or slipped into some kind of stasis and found out later, probably not too long ago even, it was a tragedy.
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 3:42 pm
His cousin was back. His cousin was alive. Pyrrhus had an armful of Troilus again, after all this time, after--
After being sure that he was going to die alone in the dark, paying for his own mistakes.
He let Troilus take them both down, sinking to his knees and burying his face into the hug, tears welling up in his eyes.
"It's me. I'm here. We're real. You made it, you're safe." Mostly. Earth had its dangers. But much less danger than a Chaos-poisoned planet full of who even knew what trying desperately to kill you at every turn.
"We don't....we don't know how many people may have reincarnated, and Bernard--" He stopped. He couldn't do this. Not now. "But you're here. And that means we can really start looking."
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 4:42 pm
Troilus's sobs began to slow again as his second crying jag of the day wound down, this time much quicker than the first. He didn't loosen his grip much on Pyrrhus—just enough to hold his cousin more firmly than desperately. "I can't believe you're both here," he whispered, finally looking up at Thalassa and grinning weakly. "I can't believe the three of us are here. I..." He swallowed heavily. Taran had only ever been a civilian. He would probably never find such a love as him again. Taran would likely never return to him. And Seiche... his baby boy... Thalassa was right. Even if Seiche had been reincarnated, his new self probably wouldn't care very much about a strange man who lost a son a thousand years ago. The thought made his heart clench, but he was too tired to cry again. "Yeah," he finally said. "Yeah, we can. We'll... we can find Bernard. Maybe he's like us. Just... still asleep, right now."
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 5:06 pm
……Oh. Oh, no, Imnolu.
Kneeling beside his friends, Thalassa openly winced at the mention of Bernard. Even through all the horror, tragedy, and loss, Troilus sounded……so hopeful, about the possibility of finding Bernard again. Or rather, of finding Bernard as himself. Pursing his lips uneasily, Thalassa glanced down and away, first looking at the grass and then at the bag he still had one hand crunched up around.
“Here,” he said with a sigh, pulling out a container of chicken nuggets that he and Pyrrhus hadn’t opened up yet (still closed, still fairly warm, absent either Pyrrhus’s spicy sauce or Thalassa’s strawberry jelly). Once he’d flipped the little cardboard container open, he held it out toward Troilus, waiting for his friend to take it. “How long has it been since you ate something? The new Murikabushi takes it upon himself to feed senshi like us. He bought us chicken nuggets tonight. And if you don’t like them, we can go back to where we’re staying. Helene’s there, and the new Knight of Kaifeng. He’s been taking a few nights off, so he’s at home, he’d probably love to cook for you.”
Which was rather a lot of things to say, yes. But part of Thalassa didn’t want to address the thing he would need to let Troilus down about. Another part of him felt like it was kicking him in the head, though, because leaving Pyrrhus to have to say it—leaving him to pick open that wound once more—felt cruel in a way that Thalassa didn’t want to show to one of his best friends.
“There is hope that whoever Seiche and Taran are in this life, they’ll want to know you,” Thalassa pointed out, starting with something……less bad. “Harder to actually find the latter, since he wasn’t a Knight or Senshi, but everyone’s starseed goes back to Cosmos eventually. He’ll likely be around here somewhere. And—you remember how Helene and Xingyi of Kaifeng always used to be just the worst to be around because they were madly in love and wouldn’t act on it already? Well……” A little quirk of the shoulders. “Helene and the new Kaifeng are regularly all over each other, this time. Just because Taran and Seiche are new people in these lives doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in getting to know you.
“As for Bernard……” Thalassa sighed. “……He might be somewhere in town. But he definitely isn’t like us. There—that visit you made to Thalassa, when we picked out the wolf-bear cub for Seiche? There was an accident on Pyrrhus after that. It……” As a thought occurred to him, Thalassa frowned. “Wait, you heard about that. I could still contact your world when Pyrrhus went dark, and something as big as what happened……I know we discussed it. I was an a** to Pyrrhus about it in the aftermath and then complained about him to you.”
Leaning forward, Thalassa gently pressed the back of his hand again Troilus’s forehead. “Do you feel alright? Did you hit your head when you got here or something?”
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Posted: Mon Nov 04, 2024 6:35 pm
"I can't believe it either," Pyrrhus said, softly. It was the best case scenario, wasn't it? Heibing and Imnolu returned to him. The people he loved that--that--
That hadn't died in front of him due to his own foolishness.
But he froze. Still and a little shaky. When Troilus brought up finding Bernard, him being like them. Had he not known? Had Troilus been snuffed out, that soon after Pyrrhus? But--Heibing was saying he'd told him, he....
"If you don't feel well," Pyrrhus said, "eat something, and we can...talk about it. But he's....he's gone. And we can get you somewhere safe to stay, I'm sure Helene and Kaifeng won't mind." And if they did, Pyrrhus would fight them. Or give up his own space, or--whatever it took, to make sure Imnolu was safe.
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2024 12:44 am
Troilus blinked at the both of them, then blushed, face turning a darker purple with horrified embarrassment. How could he have forgotten that conversation? "I... I totally forgot," he whispered, shell-shocked. "I suppose I just wanted to have some hope. I... I'm sorry. Maybe..." He swallowed, finally pulling out of the hug with Pyrrhus and taking the offered container of "chicken nuggets" from Thalassa and slowly chewing on one. It tasted... fine, he guessed? Maybe he just wasn't up to enjoying anything right now. At least it was food. "Yeah. Let's... go home. I..." He shivered. "I still can't believe this is real." He had no idea how Thalassa of all people was holding up the optimism about Seiche and Taran. Troilus was usually the one doing that. Just... not this time.
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