Scientists have been hard at work trying to understand the strange, glowing qualities of the luminescent caterpillars found in the caves by the reservoir. The caterpillars still shrivel up if they are taken out of the caves but their glowing secretions have been processed into an organic paste that can withstand the outside world. The city is selling paper lanterns infused with various seeds. The glow paste is full of minerals to support healthy plant growth without risking damage to the environment; all lantern purchases come with a small packet of activating power that will heat the paste up enough to mimic the effects of a candle without the concerns of flammability. When the glow paste loses its heat, the lantern will return to the Earth and upon the first rain (or any contact with water) the paper will dissolve and the seeds may begin to grow. All proceeds from the lanterns are put right back into the community to support local conservation and environmental protection efforts.
***
The sound of metallic insects skittering the walls added character to the otherwise tight and dingy space, echos climbing above the sound of a freshly lit blaze. The alleyway was full of life, light, the writhing form of an overlarge youma. The creature head’n shoulders above what was growing from a treacle of halloween orange sparks, into roaring greens swallowing blues, there was some kind of colorant added to the bin, obviously.
Some incendiary rubbish that made the hues shift, piles and piles of rapidly burning paper lanterns gotten from who knows where for they weren’t in the sky, but their crumpled forms and emptied innards lined the dumpster like wrapping delicate wrapping the morning after christmas was done—
The oddness of it all only intensified as the sight of a roaming tentacle spray painting splashes of words and numbers across heating metal, concrete walls, came similarly into view. The twist of flesh, messy and delicate all at once. Entwined and moving like it could’ve been a human arm and hand behind workmanship? Except for how it wasn’t – was it? Couldn’t’ve been, right!?
Albite cackled, low, the smile bright, rictus. He appeared to be admiring his newest piece in all its glory beneath the guise of a confusing (even by auric levels) form! A banana with horns and a face scrawled in messy black-on-yellows next to an actual, physical banana peel; rotted, old, and nailed into the wall.
By the sight of other bananas that had failed to take hold, their peels similarly in ruins around the place, it seemed that the final masterpiece had not been a product of luck at first try, no, but was instead the product of practice making perfect art!
The creature (Albite) certainly seemed happy for it!!
***
This seemed like Bad News.
It actually seemed like even worse than Bad News, in that she was not exactly sure what it was that she was looking at. She remembered that Negaverse agent during the storms, who had seemed like both a youma and a human; she even remembered that when she had first met Grieve, she had chalked her up as some sort of youma as well, at first.
Which is how Grieve happened to be in her thoughts, at the moment that her Order signature sparked up. She was more than usually inclined to be ready to ******** book it, which made approaching a narrow space even less appealing than it normally was, but there was nothing for it. She was getting better at mentally judging the range of her power, and found it to be woefully necessary to indulge close quarters.
And she was not, this time, going to balk on deploying it. Best to act fast: unfamiliar with what it even was that she was approaching, unsettled by the Disneyworld Animatronics Show atmosphere of the scene, and thinking about Grieve with that little artistic endeavor scrawled on the wall motivated her to avoid hesitating.
The crack rang out nearly the second her energy signature did: a gunshot sound in the darkness, followed instantly by an eruption of flowering vines that coursed in riotous verdure away from the Earth Knight’s spurred feet and towards the whatever-it-was, spilling out their perfumed compulsion to please - a variety of ornamented magic that seemed well suited to a woman who looked much more like a queen than a knight.
***
Too slow— Albite’s magic answered before the youmafied visage of his head could begin to turn: whipping round at the sound, striking out like a snared wyrm. His own echoing lash coming up short, marring only burning metal and concrete before fizzling out entirely. The attack seemed almost angry without a target to maim (as if magic could have feelings separate from the host it coiled back into), petulant even. The way it appeared tentacle-like for a moment more, before fading into something akin to normal. The flare of binds sliding home as ink-spills patterned over dark muscles. The glamor draped over his powered form shimmering for a brief moment, before peeling away entirely.
Leaving the Eternal existing beneath it looking entirely himself again, in an owl eyed and utterly perplexed way— it felt like getting caught with his pants down, truly, or maybe that was just the vines snaring up his feet like they needed his immediate attention.
If only it was so easy to split himself that way — to decide whether to focus on the pretty threat nipping his heels, or the one who’d clearly cast it! Just as pretty, potentially more dangerous — if she had backup? If she wasn’t alone?
And here I’d thought all the noise would be a deterrent! Especially for a Lady Knight with a decidedly Uppercase-K level of Knighthood—
How interesting—-
She didn’t look like one he knew, like one he was looking for; dressed to kill instead of dressed like a killer. He thought the woman before him lacked distinctive glowing properties. Had the kind of assets that, in his opinion? Put Hy-brasil’s to shame—
Of course, everything about Hy-brasil was a shame to him.
“Nice colors,” He grimaced, trying to nonchalantly offer compliments as he blinked, clocked the insignia, struggled like a hobbled veal calf. It was soooo undignified!! Which, hell, any other circumstance that would’ve been fine! But those kind of nights in those kind of alleys didn’t usually start like *********>” d**k and balls and all that crawls, and he was cursing under his breath at the smell that seemed to suffuse everything in an overwhelming to his senses way. He didn’t like it, the sweet cloy, like a passive suggestion. A girl flirting with only her eyes — a boy flashing a smile across a dimly lit room — the parts of him that had been so intent on finishing his work snarled about being stalled up by clingy yard work and their viney mistress.
“Earthy?”
***
She couldn't pretend that she wasn't relieved by the abrupt shift that took place before her, nor by the lack of an immediate attempt at retaliation. But it certainly complicated her decision-making, and put her on the back foot as she was now utterly confused about who or what she was even confronting, which was an even worse situation to be in.
Nothing for it to move briskly, before the magic could run itself out, which it was already dangerously close to doing. She spoke in a clipped tone, therefore, which suited her usual delivery: one of easy, expectant command, like a woman who was accustomed, when she spoke, to be both listened to and heeded.
"Tell me what you're doing," she said, not without a certain purring element to the words that always came out instinctively whether she meant for it to or not.
***
“Really, not even a ‘Hi, my name is!’ ? We’re just movin’ straight to brass facts—“ He tsk’d, near pouting about not having anything to call her yet. About not even being asked his own name! It didn’t help that being given orders by someone who wasn’t in charge; not of him, not here, not without his ******** say so! How that normally would've put his hackles up.
Had the delivery been different?
He might’ve done more than cross his arms over his chest while looking at her expectantly, absorbing the details, wanting more, getting less and settling the Hell down about it. Because her tone was enticing — because she wasn’t asking him to do anything he didn’t already want to do — was she?
“But since you asked so nicely?”
It was fine then, like this, to lean his heeled boots into the clutch of vines and gesture at their surroundings.
“I’m working on an art piece—- It’s kinda like a citywide installation, yeah? Just— c’mere kay, won’t bite’chu, even if it’s in my name, n’nature to do so? I can be a good boy.” He blinked as though he’d missed a step or two quite suddenly, and hit the ground floor first when there should’ve been something else before that. He shook his head and the metal that tipped his dreads was almost musical where it scraped the dirty ground.
“That is — also — I’m looking for someone…someone’s? It’s a multitude of plurals…And scrawling ‘for a good time call’ works as well in a stall as it does here…across the side of a trash fire…and the walls…and I got the caricatures damn near right…” He shrugged as if any of it made sense, flashed her a grin that was less ‘******** you’ and more ‘oops all crazy’ in a much softer way.
***
She was running out of time, and for the sake of making it look like she was doing it by choice, dropped the vines a few seconds early and with a casual air, trying to squeeze in a final bit of suggestion in the hopes that it might stick even if the compulsion didn’t, and accordingly amping up that purring quality in her voice. He seemed - unfortunate in much the same way that that damn maid had - to be naturally susceptible, and maybe it’d carry over. Or maybe it wouldn’t, and she’d figure out how fast she could really run now that she’d gotten a little more power. “Chat with me a while.”
A creeping horror had snuck over her, Grieve being in her thoughts and that yellow figure on the wall, and she felt it might be best to draw the conversation out and see if her instincts were correct rather than antagonize him right away. So she wound the whip gently up in one hand, as if to demonstrate that she wasn’t going to try any funny business without being asked to. When she rested her chin on the other hand, it was probably not entirely a coincidence that she rested her elbow on the arm crossed across her ribs, which served to sort of… frame the goods, as it were. She might have been pissed about acquiring chain mail, but the juxtaposition between dull hammered metal and her general soft milkmaidliness certainly was a Thing.
“Looking for someone? You’re too pretty to resort to drawing up your personal ads in an alley, surely.”
***
Already he was nodding, agreeable, caught. Because, Hell? An invitation to talk!! As if he needed one, as if his mind wasn’t chomping at the bit to verbally kick every stray thought out into the air at all hours, even in his sleep! Yearning for variants of conversations long finished, for notes to hum while he painted the town quite literally bloody, bold and vibrant!
He leapt at the suggestion like it was tailor made for him. The din of ‘do not enter’ insects dying down, down, down until the walls of the place were only buzzing with his own eagerness and the Earth Knights authoritative lilt.
“That should be my line for you—“ Pleased, coy, his gaze hanging on the whip for a few seconds, enraptured by her familiarity with the motion. The way it looked practiced, like she’d used it before, would use it again. A Knight with some umph to her, but just outta range to return favors…
N’less he wanted to get demanding with it? But why ruin a good time when he could just scrape the remnants of withdrawn vines off his heels and go on like he hadn’t abruptly switched tracks between one sentence and the next! He didn’t need to pout over it anyhow, being very decidedly not the one in charge; this was no spaghetti western full of maidens fair, and dragon hunts across the prairie.
Her line, her space, her questions—
His chance to preen for the compliment without lobbing one in return.
‘She knows she’s pretty, I ******** bet.’
“But since you’re asking nice!!” He made a point, spoke with his hands, tapped at the vibrant pink horns atop his nailed banana display. A mix of mediums wild and smelly. “She’s ********’ handsy, didja know? Always thrown’ my friend Mira over her shoulder like a trash-sack…or…idunno…a pillowcase fulla gold? I wasn’t worried about her before….she was jus’ kinda around? Like a new flavor of skittles in a pack, n’candy’s candy so who the hell was I t’pay notice so long as she was just that…empty calories…a light touch…yellow noise in my periphery…” He growled at his own ineptitude, his liaise fair’ness when it came to picking fights with people who didn’t seem worth fighting.
“I don’t wanna kill her—” His grin full of growl, “But I like things fair…I believe in Retribution, yanno? Maybe not eyes for eyes, but only cause I want her to see what I’ve done *after* the fact. N’she put her shitty, diseased teeth all over what’s mine–” He tried not to think of Cass’s scars, of the way the former dancer hid them, of the slash on his love's confidence! High collared shirts, more makeup than necessary. It pissed him the ******** off. Thinking of how his boy was taken, dug into, marked wrong. He wanted to spit out the sour taste it left in his mind, except that was rude to do in front of any lady! Especially a lady like this!!
“N’she might know th’other one m’lookin for, since they were t’gether?” A pause as he rubbed still wet paint between thumb and forefinger, devoting his gaze back to…wow..he didn’t ******** know her name did he? But whatever, she was now Guinevere, looked the part. High braids, high chest, high cheekbones. Like something outta a medieval times restaurant brochure… N’less she was lancelot? The lady of the mists? All the same to him, really, knowing himself well enough to *know* he’d never remember her name even if she told him.
So! Guinevere of Earth Knights, the upper case Knight it was!!
“Hell…chances are that you might know the other one m’looking for too? Hy-basil? Brazil? ********, she’s less feral, more dangerous, in that she wants ‘us’ dead…me n’mine and like…idunno her beef?” He didn’t know, he didn’t care, and whether all Earth Knights knowing each other was a mistake to assume on his part? He was assuming! Asking. Making headway towards info on parties that seemed partial to such knowledge. If this one knew Hy-brasly? If another? If some distant cousin of an ex of a friend could get the message across and give him a line to follow like red string across the desert…
A thought! Ooh, he had a thought, a whole thought, an idea of a thought and it happened like a flashbulb going off in the dark all over his face.
“But I’d be willing t’pay for that…I’d be willing to make a deal…dunno if banana breath’s the kind that values anything? But she seemed t’care a helluva lot for her life…yeh? Most people do….” He purred, finally turning away from his masterpiece of a calling card. A beg for any and everything to play a guess at his picasso’s and hit him up with a fine hello about them! “And the stars are all dead n’dying…n’the Earth isn’t nearly so big as people like t’think…”
Careful with how he stepped towards her, babystep small, catwalk crossheels, hands behind his back as if that would somehow make him *less* of a threat and more demure ‘what can I really do with no hands?! I’m totally harmless!’ in some way.
“Especially since Senshi are eternal, dija know? Not immortal – or invulnerable – but –” He shrugged, wondering how long each incarnation of himself could hold a grudge if he penned the memory down into his own subconscious hard enough? ********, what if half the feuds between any one of them were like that? Hardwired into the DNA of their existence? If it went deeper than chaos—
Only the one way to find out, he supposed.
***
She had to think a bit more quickly than she generally liked to, especially since she was going to have to lie. This was not an area in which she excelled, but sincerity was a little easier to fake when you were secretly scared shitless.
She had not met many people that she'd gotten the name of. The fact that she'd met both of the ones he was looking for - and in fact considered one of them to be something in the shape, vaguely, of a friend, sort of, in the right light - made her blood run a bit cold. Felt a little too fated, a little too coincidental, a little too awful, as things often did for her nowadays.
So she ignored the one, and turned her attention to the other. It did not feel good to take her eyes off of him and his prowling little approach, but she did it as if unconcerned by him, turning them instead with an almost leisurely air towards his graffiti.
"I don't know either of them," she lied, "but I've seen that one around." She gestured at the drawing - no crude pointing of fingers, but a gracious and queenly sort of sweep of her arm. And then, drily: "She's kind of hard to forget, you know?"
She pretended that she was returning her glance to him with comfortable confidence that she did not need to hurry it along, and resisted the urge to back away a little with every step he took towards her, standing her ground with outward unconcern. "I like a man who knows where a man's hands ought to go even without the help of a rope," she said, eyeing the way he had them folded behind his back. Almost docile, if she'd trusted him an inch - which she didn't. "If I see her again," she said, "who should I tell her is looking for her?"
***
Oh, he knew. That one, Grieve, was about as hard to miss as an exploding school bus in the late end-stages of Michael Bays directing career; would’ve had to have been blind, deaf, and deceased to miss all that color-stained noise on large screen display. Still! He was glad for the recognition of his art as being near enough to spot on! At least, in his own mind, the image was the spitting encapsulation of the Super from when last he’d seen her…
‘I should maybe start nailing a blue wig overtop it all? Something from one of those auctioned off party cities warehouses…yeah! That'd be the stuff!’
He mused to himself as her words caught him like the shiniest sort of flashbang ever thrown, her offer to help a snare that tugged him forwards; from one step into another. From where he had been in idle motion, to three feet from her face. The displacement of air and fwoomp as he teleported the only give away that he’d moved before he simply *was*. Up close, personal, excited enough that his magic writhed back round his body like a wild rorschach done-up over dark skin.
Smiling like an enraptured mastiff the whole while.
“Praxidike,” He was a good boy, right? No! A good man, a likeable one! And gods did he like to be liked! It stroked the right kind of nerve in him to know he’d done well by someone else's standards. With the simple act of keeping his hands where they were meant to be the whole entire time! (No ropes required!) Mostly because he didn’t want to stain her pretty dress with all the paint on his palms, or the stench of his art. To muss up her furs unnecessarily, or–
And it all looked pretty expensive to him, even if it was glamour only? It was the sort that made it seem like she put effort into keeping everything supple, soft, clean. The perfect kind of clothing to kneel on in a garden, or put your head into the lap of for a nap. Besides? What remained within her chest was hers and he was *fine* with that so long as she was dandy with passing his message along! “Of Retribution.”
She wasn’t his enemy here, not even indirectly, not tonight.
“Y’can give that name, n’this trinket, to the banana bong, kay?” His hands did finally move, only enough to unclasp and let him show off the trinket he’d been holding in subspace; an emerald kite pin emblazoned with a symbol. “Tell Grieve, that if she thinks hard enough on it…she’ll know where t’find me….when’ver she’s ready?” He knelt then, to place it at her sandaled feet like an offering. Auburn eyes cast up under heavy lashes as his mouth ran on, searching for the right words the same way he searched her face; to memorize it, to offer a more plush, less hungry smile.
“N’if you ever do get to meet your sister from another mister in arms? Tell her that Faustites…no…” A second to fix his words, a shanked thought spun sideways as he quickly course corrected. Because while one was true? It didn’t quite matter as much as the statement piece he intended to make. Not when his aim was to put a body six feet deep and under. To make sure she *knew* why she was there. The same way he knew there could be no other way between them – not him and Hy-brasyl… “ that Heliodore’s husband? Says *Hi*--” His art still glowingly on fire in the background, his task feeling done.
“You have a good night, Lady Guinevere.”
Albite moved, kneeling up, before tilting back and sideways, bamphing out from the alley entirely. Leaving not an iota of aura behind him. Only rampant vandalism and the gifted trinket as proof he’d been there.