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 Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2025 11:25 pm
There was a faint moisture in the air, soon followed by deep and continuous thunder, greatly muted by stone walls, but Grieve knew it for what it was. The Blistered Steppe was in the midst of its brief, but devastating, season of storm. If not for the situation that brought her here, she'd go out and enjoy the show of lightning, filling the sky and violently slashing across the plains. But for now, there was something a bit more important. With a sigh, Grieve laid the limp body of Murikabushi across the thick, layered furs spread out across the throne room's floor. Some would like right at home in a cabin on Earth, others had fantastical, if greatly faded, markings and pale hints at hues that more resembled Grieve, herself. Pulling the starseed out of her piece of space, she felt a little sad that Muri wouldn't get a chance to see this part of himself. For a moment she considered taking a picture of it for him, but decided the better for it. Earth cameras were deceitful. The more you wanted to capture something naturally beautiful, the more they said <******** you and everything you have ever loved. If Muri though his starseed wasn't suitably beautiful, he'd probably take it as some kind of shortcoming. Like Cosmos personally deciding he was dusty. It slid right down and into his chest, and Grieve found herself watching with baited breath. This was the first time she'd put a starseed back to where it came from, after all. And then she staggered, the need to fight was gone. The need to escape was gone. The need to stand went away as well, and Grieve stumbled to sit down on the floor next to Murikabushi, who was beginning to gain color and life once more. "<******** your moon," she cursed and groaned. Instinctively she knew she'd overdrawn the magic feather, and in turn forced it to still draw on her own power for the trip. It wasn't long enough since her last visit for that and her head felt like she'd drunk half a tavern and smoked all the pipes, regardless what was in them.
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Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2025 3:29 pm
This was the second time Murikabushi had temporarily lost his starseed and the first time he’d felt reasonably confident that he’d get it back. While he hadn’t expected to feel Faustite’s hand plunging into him like that, when it had happened, Muri had experienced the briefest flash of trust before everything went black. He might not have known what Faustite would actually do with his starseed, especially not in light of how hard Muri had gone on playing the part of a hostage.
But eating the starseed or crushing it to dust would have deprived Faustite of a Boy.
An Order Boy, yes. An Order Boy who had been incredibly troublesome even before he’d worn white out while patrolling, yes. An Order Boy who didn’t want to join the Negaverse and put a lot of trust in Faustite about not forcing any of the Chaos that powered him and his team into Murikabushi’s starseed, yes. But all the same, Murikabushi remained a Boy and destroying Muri’s starseed would have meant one less Boy to be around Faustite.
As Murikabushi blinked awake beneath an unfamiliar ceiling, he allowed himself a small smile. Maybe he didn’t deserve to do that right this second, but still: he’d been right to trust that his status as A Boy Who Liked Faustite would largely protect him. Groaning softly, he felt around at wherever he was, whatever floor he’d woken up on. Soft. Probably old, but still, there was a sort of luxurious feeling to them. Murikabushi twisted himself around as though his fuku wasn’t any sort of encumbrance at all, even with its many layers of skirt and massive sleeves.
Lifting his head, he first blinked up at a throne, then over at the long, yellow senshi seated nearby, who must have brought him here. Visually, the shapes of Grieve all came together for him, but even so, it took Muri’s brain a moment to catch up and remember that he knew her. “Hey, some moons are pretty good,” Murikabushi protested without any actual energy, much less vitriol, behind it. “Kerberos is a really nice moon.… And I dunno, I’ve heard nice things about Helene.”
Grieve probably meant Earth’s moon, which made the attempted sass possibly a bit silly. Respectively, Kerberos and Helene were moons of Pluto and Saturn, and they certainly hadn’t been the seat of imperial political power for any Silver Millennium such-and-such a thousand years ago. But sass was one of the most reliable ways of indicating that Murikabushi would be okay, so Grieve was met with it anyway.
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Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2025 10:57 pm
"Don't ruin a perfectly good curse with your s**t need to be nice to everyone," Grieve, a beneficiary of this need, groused. Clutching at her head, she went on, "You alright? Besides whatever gross break up feelings or he meant well bullshit you're about to be on, are you okay?" The throne was made of polished bones, it's details lined in teeth. It didn't look particularly comfortable, but there was a worn air about it. On the opposite side of the room, barely visibly in its cavernous darkness, were bunches. Human sized figures dotting the seats. Nothing else moved beside the dim lighting filtering down from somewhere. The tall, alien senshi gritted her teeth against the pounding inside her head. "Shoulda just killed that guy the day they found him."
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Posted: Tue Feb 04, 2025 1:21 pm
“Would you believe it’s not my worst experience with having my starseed ripped out or would I have to cite my sources on that?”
From his position on his side, Murikabushi had an easier time pushing himself up to sitting. No matter how much he wanted to pretend otherwise—no matter how much his fuku respected him by feeling relatively non-encumbering most of the time—the aftermath of getting your starseed torn out wasn’t fun, nor should it have been. He winced, a pang like broken glass and fireworks flaring up behind his forehead as he did. But once he felt a bit more stable about sitting, the pain receded as quickly as it had started.
“The other time had a bunch of ******** up robots involved,” he explained without waiting for Grieve to confirm whether or not she actually wanted to hear the story. As he spoke, Muri kept his tone not quite bright, exactly, but the sort of pointedly upbeat that had no desire to admit if or when anything had left it reeling. “Wanted to become flesh and blood people and enter the reincarnation cycle. One of them—came from Murikabushi That Was, think he was friends with Airan? He ripped out my starseed with metal claws, which felt distinctly more surgical and far less personal than Faustite doing it with half-youma claws.”
Said in a tone of voice that distinctly preferred the personal approach, rather than the cold, depersonalized one.
“Anyway, you’re probably talking up at the fine line of what most Order these days will try to get away with,” Muri pointed out, dropping into a more serious tone as he pushed himself into a more properly seated position. “As I understand, Faustite was recruited young. Not quite ‘literally in elementary school’ young like chibi senshi? But the Negaverse still got their hooks in real early and most Order folks these days aren’t into the idea of murdering teenagers who got lied to and manipulated.”
Muri himself among that number, but that probably went without saying.
Now that he was sitting up and his head wasn’t reeling quite as much, though, Murikabushi could take a better look around at wherever Grieve had taken them. It being her home-world made sense (Order senshi couldn’t teleport anywhere but their home-worlds, after all, and something about the place felt like it had Grieve’s unique je ne sais quoi). Tilting his head at the bone throne, he said, “Y’know, I don’t know what I expected? But I like it. Or is saying that I like it still evidence of my s**t need to be nice?”
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Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2025 9:46 pm
Listening to her friend, Grieve shot him a wry smile, "It's a lot ********' nicer with everything else on it dead." Some of the remaining plant life was still pretty hostile, but there wasn't much of it left. "And I've had worse isn't a ******** answer, it's just an excuse to pretend that guy isn't so bad, right?" She rolled her eyes, "You're always so soft on the worst people, even while they're stabbing you and telling you it's your fault." Grieve thought back to the General King, the series of expressions and the lashing out. "He was ********' annoying as Eion." And it was definitely Velvet, the former knight, even underneath all the trappings chaos had tossed on him. Moved the same, even if she didn't hear him talk, the body language, the posture and movement, the delicate lines and faint sense of alienation. "But now...well, you'll probably have a nice ******** love mark on your back from where he kicked you after yanking out your ********' soul." She grunted and then went on, "But no, I meant the guy that got taken up. They should've just killed him when it was clear he wasn't interested in voluntarily ******** his existence. Flush him down Cosmos' toilet instead of making future problems." For a moment her expression shifted, and Grieve finally let out, "Sorry you got caught up in it. Not your ********' fight." Honestly she didn't know what this Murikabushi's fight was. In the past she'd always considered him best at dealing with the bigger picture across space, the movements of culture and politics and all the other s**t Grieve didn't want to touch. But Earth offered not big theatre for senshi, instead forcing them to scurry about their work in secret like rats. For someone like him, maybe it was just navigating whatever the ******** was in front of him. It was a pity of sorts, to have him at this level. Her level.
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Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2025 6:44 pm
Sometimes—and tonight definitely seemed to be one of those times—talking to Grieve reminded Murikabushi very conclusively that he and his friend had a few irreconcilable differences in their approaches to handling Problems and Situations. Their differences in opinion and approaches didn’t strike Murikabushi as any kind of problem. If any one approach to dealing with Chaos actually worked, then he figured Order would’ve united around it by now because it (hypothetically) ******** worked, so, like, obviously? Disorganized though they were, objectively proven results were objectively proven results—or would have been, if any actually existed, which they didn’t.
Thus ergo therefore (at least in his mind), you needed all kinds of people to fight this war on different fronts. Both the Grieves, who could be harsh and firm as necessary (and more than a little bit bloodthirsty, but mostly it was funny when she did that), and the Murikabushis, who came at problems more in terms of mercy, forgiveness, second and third and fifteenth chances, and being ready to get their hearts torn out again and again and again, just in case someone else made the choice to do better this time.
All silent pondering aside, though, Murikabushi couldn’t dispute any of Grieve’s claims, so for a moment, all he did was shrug. “I didn’t entirely mean it as ‘Faustite isn’t so bad,’” he said, “but just as a statement that it was significantly worse with Kimadesir, the courtier droid. Like, no shade on Kima or anything? He’d gotten lied to by some other robot and my starseed being trapped in the Chaotic Mirrorcoating straitjacket at the time freaked him out anyway. But as far as assailants on my starseed go? I’d much rather deal with the guy who’s more open about his nature and his intentions than the one who’s being sweet and sympathetic and acting like he could be my ******** friend until, out of nowhere, there are metal claws plunging into my chest.”
Incidentally, it was the same sort of rationale that led Murikabushi to let Grieve get away with some of the things he looked the other way about. Some people with Order would talk about slaughtering all the Chaos or torturing people until they purified or whatever as though they had any kind of moral high-ground. Whatever Earth Knight and Cybele Squire had planned the whole op of kidnapping Heliodor, Murikabushi didn’t doubt that they thought themselves morally superior to certainly the Negaverse and probably the rest of Order because, oooooh, they were willing to make the hard choices or whatever edgelord bullshit they told themselves so they could look in the mirror and ******** like themselves.
Not Grieve, though. Yes, she wanted to slaughter Chaos, but she didn’t get on some Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe or The Dark Knight Returns ******** where she acted like she was the more moral party here because of it. Rabies wasn’t a moral judgment, only a disease to be cured or purged. So it was, in her mind, with Chaos. She wasn’t a fake b***h, pretending she didn’t just enjoy violence for its own sake even without Chaos being the target. Besides, she was ******** hilarious—and for the moment, Murikabushi restricted himself to a warm smile so he didn’t ruin the moment with his s**t need to be nice? But still, he was glad to have her as a friend.
“Anyway, the fact that you want them to have killed Heliodor isn’t gonna go over any better with some Order crowds these days,” Muri explained. “Not that there aren’t people who’d agree with you, because I know there are. But he’s got a sob story, too, and plenty of people would prefer to try and prove his basic assumptions wrong as part of saving him or whatever two-faced patronizing s**t they’re on. He told me the whole sordid tale when I was still a Dark Mirror. Corrupted against his will, pretty traumatically. Nobody he ever knew from Order went looking for him or tried to get him back, so he feels like our side abandoned him and his only family is with the Negaverse. Like, he has been making the active choice to stay with Chaos for years and that’s a valid counterpoint, but a big factor in why he’s made that choice is that he feels like Order doesn’t and would never care about him.”
An impression that wasn’t going to be helped by tonight’s absolute ********, Murikabushi felt pretty certain.
“Y’know, despite my personal disinterest in bloodshed, I don’t ******** with that ‘oooh-wooo-ooooh, I’m so sweet and innocent and I’m going to save all the little Negaversies who obviously don’t know any better’ s**t either. At least killing them is a complete plan. But all the woobie-eyed wannabe saviors on our side fail to account for really basic, practical s**t that they need to account for in dealing with a purification. ‘I take them to a princess and she does the thing’ is not a complete plan. It’s a really good way to leave people feeling lost, without any kind of support network. That’s gonna make them more vulnerable to Chaos seducing them back in. And a lot of them don’t even really care about s**t like ‘The ******** is this Nega gonna do about health insurance on the other side of purifying’ or looking out for the people they allegedly want to save so badly. They only care about jerking off their own egos by dragging some a*****e to the purification altar.”
With a sigh, Murikabushi pushed his glasses up, then reflexively squinted as the world before him went all blurry. “As for whether or not I’m okay……” He shrugged again, rubbing the heel of his palm against one eye and making a throaty, noncommittal noise to go with it. “Not really, but not for any reasons to do with Faustite, if that makes sense?” At least, none he much wanted to discuss with anybody, since he expected that wanting to apologize for upsetting Faustite so badly would not go over well. “Two questions for you, though: one, are you okay? You were more involved in the actual fight than my damsel in distress a** was.
“And two………Eion?” Letting his glasses drop back into place, Muri tilted his head. Something about the name felt so familiar but he couldn’t figure out why. Felt like whenever he tried to remember who Hybris and Acubens-oneesan were out of their senshi geish, honestly. Just a big wall of nothing that refused to let him think his way around it. “Where’d you pull that name out of and why did you stick it on Faustite?”
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Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2025 7:23 pm
Despite the space hangover, Grieve managed to not throw-up while Muri talked, in some ways to her but in some ways it sounded like he was navigating his feelings on something, maybe a few things. The mention of the Dark Mirror summoned up a grimace. They were something weird. A stranger form of chaos than she had experience with. The grimace grew an extra layer of disgust over the repeated mention of Airan's shitty ******** droid. That the thing had survived its master pissed her off, and unless it showed up in front of her, there was nothing Grieve could do about it. Murikabushi talking about the aftermath of purifications gave her a pause. And it was less that it wasn't something that she'd bothered to consider, because she didn't exactly care anyway, and more that is was something that deeply reminded her of Airan and reminded her that the man in front of her wasn't just a pale, immature echo of a past friend. Even without the massive, interstellar scale to his stage, he'd still find a way to concern himself further and deeper with any given problem. "I'm fine," she sighed, because of course he'd ask that. "Headache hard as Cosmos' flat a**, but guessing it's just traveling in a battle. Gonna have a bounty on my head again, but it'll be fine. Won't let it get back to you n'yours." She'd ******** off if attention moved too close to home. "Eion," she sneered, "...as in the Eion Knight of Pluto. Was a nosey ******** with a hair fetish, liked to steal other people's rightful property." She'd gotten those bodies fair n'square. What was the earth phrase? They were organic, free-range bodies she'd put in the ground herself. "But even that's better than what he's become: an actual ********' dumpster fire." The she gave Murikabushi was a habitual one. You really want that d**k? That gross on-fire d**k?
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