The Fireflies (6) : In the warm summer nights, little glowing lights begin to bob and dart through the city. Fireflies are mating, so this isn't uncommon in itself; in the past few days you've probably seen hundreds of fireflies. What makes these lights so unique is that they seem to change color; you might see a blue one, a green one, a red one. They flicker randomly, and something just seems off with them. If you come into contact with one, you will find yourself with a strange electric jolt. They cannot be caught, and will flicker away if you pursue too aggressively. This isn't the first time they've appeared in Destiny City, but no one's been able to tell where they came from or where they're going. No matter how quickly you chase them, they always seem to disappear before you can find any answers.
Malory was out again. Gone to get his collection of energy from the bored teenagers of the world looking for their personal brands of self-destruction. Probably going between flirting and ******** and giving people the mildest sense of unease, because anything more required effort. Or maybe he found a way to sucker them into feeling sorry for him. No, that couldn't be right; nothing had hit his face lately. Oh well.
It left Eles time enough to go about on his own. Of all that was available to him, he thought he'd make a little more money. He got off to a tenuous start with the new job, but after learning some apparently common sense social mores and working on his short-term memory some, he'd at least achieved the rank of mediocre server. He could do well enough to be forgettable instead of infamous, which earned him the invitation to come back and shadow a server who actually knew what she was doing. It was supposed to be an eye-opening learning experience, and while Eles could give a s**t about making small talk or walking around with more than two drinks in his possession, it was kind of fun. Kept his nights interesting.
And the more he was around being perfectly mediocre, the more Jean talked about banning his human interaction privileges and putting him up on one of those stages. As far as he was concerned, that was where the real money was. The other servers only called it degrading because they were jealous.
While Malory got him a phone, he hadn't figured out how to use it; even if it didn't track his data and purchase history, Eles wouldn't be able to call an Uber for himself. And while it was a longer walk to make his way to Starlight, it was walkable. Perhaps more so if he kept to alleyways and side streets that bypassed the din of the festival in the city's epicenter. Besides, he found it a darkly beautiful walk, where he was greeted by the sights of derelict or condemned buildings that were overrun by nature. Sprawls of ivy spidering down from windowsills like veins, or great trees growing their boughs into a building's busted corner. The streets were often darker, sometimes entirely devoid of polluting street lamps.
And in the summertime, the nights stayed warm. Humid, even; he felt the moisture in the air cling to his skin as he strode down yet another abandoned alley. As he stepped around potholes, he caught sight of the familiar flicker that flashed and sputtered out — fireflies, he knew. They weren't orange, but his passive enjoyment for them had evaporated since their brush with that youma. Giving them a wide berth, he ducked into another side street that took him farther away from the festivities.
amor remanet
seiana_zi
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:40 pm
Summer hadn’t provided Preston with a “break” in a couple years. Ever since Dr. Gatti had dumped Dr. Sturm, basically.
Although things hadn’t exactly been wonderful between them before the divorce, as soon as she’d left, part of being Dr. Sturm’s TA had quickly become trying to ensure that the man did not completely fall apart. During the summer, that meant reaching out to him in ways that did not come naturally to Preston. Making up excuses to talk, even if exclusively through email or texts, because it felt like failure to do so would have meant allowing Dr. Sturm to utterly collapse in on himself, which in turn would have meant endless amounts of tedious paperwork, trying to fix his academic career.
Being fair, the divorce had only happened in 2023. Unfortunately for Preston, that had been more than enough time for him to form a habit. Wake up, hit the gym, email Dr. Sturm, work a shift at Lavender Haze, text Dr. Sturm, spend some time at the library on campus, go to Dr. Sturm’s appointment if he hadn’t been replying or it had been a few days since last seeing him, improvise from there.
Whatever had turned around for Dr. Sturm since Cryptomelane had (temporarily! one could even say therapeutically!) starseeded him, things had gotten better for him. Not perfect by any means, but somewhat fewer incidents of making excuses for him to other faculty while he was hungover, or dealing with him while he drank on campus. Significantly fewer messes for Preston to clean up this time. Still, the habit of checking in on Dr. Sturm over the summer proved difficult to break. On the positive side of things, though, going out to check in on Dr. Sturm put Preston away from the apartment and away from the library. Perfect opportunity to power up and get some patrolling in, then.
Easily, he found his way to an alley, relatively out of the way—off from a little side-street—and relatively dark, or so he thought. Safe enough to power up in, yes, but without enough shadows to properly hide. The fireflies didn’t help, either. Lighting up this place in all sorts of pinks, and blues, and greens as though Cryptomelane had even remotely asked. As if the little rainbow star charm he’d found earlier was an invitation for the fireflies to invade his space.
Unfortunately, with the fireflies came people. The sort of people full of wild-eyed wonder that best belonged with children, not adults who were grown enough to buy their own alcohol. The pair of people who’d paused on the side-street, blocking the exit that Cryptomelane meant to use himself, seemed largely inoffensive, apart from the fact that: 1. they were in his way; and 2. they had only paused like this in order to drink and trade gossip. Clear glass bottles in-hand, with one of them carrying the flimsy cardboard six-pack. Honestly, he could have scrambled up one of the buildings—there had to be a fire escape around here somewhere—or turned and gone the other way……but the quickest route to Lucette’s place went this way, and honestly, Cryptomelane had starseeded people for far less reason.
He moved quickly, but it almost didn’t feel necessary. The two of them might have had more to drink than Cryptomelane knew. Once he had the first starseed in hand, he had the second before the first’s corpse had hit the pavement. Only when both of them were down did Cryptomelane allow himself a moment to linger over his handiwork. Smirk at the success, even though it wasn’t much, in the grand scheme of things. Still, the power to snuff out a life so easily was worth something.
He started to reach for his subspace when his ears pricked up. Footsteps—dammit, he’d waited too long. Stupid, stupid, stupid, he should have known better. Pocketing the starseeds rather than putting them into his subspace, he turned in the direction of whoever thought to approach. No other auras around yet, not that he could feel. Didn’t mean that the boy coming his way wasn’t someone powered. But he could prove that or disprove it for himself.
Soon enough, the boy would notice the bodies blocking his path. Would see the Captain who stood above them, staring him down and waiting to see what choices he’d make. Any wrong moves from him, though, and Cryptomelane would leave here with three starseeds tonight.
His thoughts were on the fireflies he dodged, on their spectrum of colors. They were all fairly spaced apart, unlike the fireflies he'd encountered with Hybris. They glowed differently from one another, too, though he doubted something so simple as that would defeat the strange creature that attacked him that eve. He paid no heed to the end of the alley until he heard glass shattering on the pockmarked macadam.
Someone stood among two people — one down, the other downing. Lying there like discarded dolls. In his hand, two glowing gems — starseeds. Rather, what that goth cheerleader described starseeds to be. Full of light and color. Nothing like Hybris's starseed.
Suddenly interested, he approached the figure. Must be one of the Negaverse's own at work, then. He walked on at his usual clip, only starting to sign when he was close enough for the agent to reasonably see it. May I look at one of those? It'd be rather nice to have a point of comparison.
As for the people at his feet? Well, he'd put those starseeds back if he wanted. Or he wouldn't, and they would have their hours-to-days of being comatose and unreachable until their bodies died. Life was brief, delicate, and ephemeral; people could no more choose to get killed by the Negaverse than they could choose to die of a massive electrical event while running a marathon. Their choices got them that far; chance handled the rest.
Eles felt no fear approaching the man, fireflies now all but forgotten. Perhaps he should have, knowing they could pluck souls like cherries and make off with them with little hassle. Still, he trusted his instincts. They hadn't led him wrong yet.
amor remanet
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2025 4:48 pm
Watching the boy approach him, Cryptomelane went cold. About the only thing that didn’t strike him as inherently troublesome were the movements of the boy’s hands as he closed in. ASL, yes, but Cryptomelane had no idea what the motions meant. He’d satisfied his program’s foreign language requirements with Latin (unfortunately too important to the history of institutional Catholicism to be ignored, and Preston had studied it somewhat in his youth) and Russian (it had felt like something different and interesting). To him, the particular swoops of fingers and shifting of palms meant as much as Sumerian cuneiform.
But the boy continued his advance. He saw two corpses at Cryptomelane’s feet. Saw the two starseeds as well, and did not stare at them with the awe and confusion that Cryptomelane would have expected to see in an ordinary civilian. Yet, he moved forward all the same, untroubled, moving his hands in a way that could have been innocent, but just as easily could have conveyed a threat.
Curling his hand tight around the starseeds, Cryptomelane took a half-step back from the boy. Jaw set and eyes narrowed, he pocketed those precious gems, unwilling to give them up to someone who might have done any number of things with them. His jacket wasn’t the safest place, but it was safer than leaving them out where someone could steal them. Never surrender—Brother Horace had taught him that, while trying to teach him the exact opposite lesson. Never yield, never back down, never surrender. Especially not in the face of someone who knew no fear. Those were the worst kind of people. Their lack of fetters made them unpredictable, dangerous.
At least Cryptomelane had the advantage.
Pushing off from his back foot, he darted forward to meet the boy. His hand punctured the boy’s chest like tissue paper, and Cryptomelane allowed himself the slightest of smirks as he curled his fingers around the boy’s starseed. His hand exited the boy’s chest as easily as it had gone in. Same as ever, but the rush had yet to wear off for him.
The fireflies had lost something of their magic after seeing them year after year.
Encke's love of magical color especially in this season had lost its appeal when he had learned the other things that happened behind it. There was too much magic, too many things that impacted people in ways that they did not realize until it was too late. To some degree, they were distracting. And they were distracting just the right way for the Negaverse to take action.
In this case? They took action on just the wrong person.
Or, perhaps, the wrong several people. Encke hadn't missed the way the agent’s hand slipped into his pocket, suspecting that he was perhaps holding something else he would need to retrieve. But something else took priority over simply retrieving the others that he would have to return.
There was an immediate living being in front of him. One he recognized.
s**t.
Encke lept into action the moment he could, moving one arm in an attempt to sweep Eles from falling harshly when the loss of the starseed pulled him into unconsciousness, and the other arm? Well, he pointed his magic right where he needed it, the air heating up around the agent in an attempt to get him to immediately drop everything he was doing.
“Give. Those. Back.”
Amor Remnant
Strickenized
Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 8:19 pm
It was like a sentence he heard but hadn't understood. A set of sounds that hadn't yet been assigned their meaning.
Eles watched this stranger approach with the same dull lack of comprehension. The sentence of the man — all the consonants and vowels of his motion, an uncanny quickness that Eles couldn't follow with his eyes, and a shock of pain in his chest. But Eles's attention was still on the man's face, on understanding the expression that moved so expediently as to blur. Then —
Nothing. A sentence delivered absent meaning.
The boy was gone, but the body collapsed. The body collapsed on itself, boneless in its graceless plummet, and was caught like an errant vase. No boy made home in that body.
Strickenized
Only when Cryptomelane had the starseed in hand did he notice that another aura had flared up nearby, all oppressively bright, like bleach or staring into the sun. He barely had time to appreciate the unique color of this most recent acquisition. No matter how much Ympe had chastised him for keeping starseeds in subspace for too long, Cryptomelane felt a sense of awe, however brief, about this starseed. Something about it—or maybe just about the boy’s nerve and fearlessness—made Cryptomelane want to save it for something special, like a nice bottle of wine.
As the boy’s body collapsed and some Order senshi swooped in from who-cares-where to rescue him, Cryptomelane openly rolled his eyes. Always with the meddling interlopers, sticking their noses into things that were not their business. Offhand, Cryptomelane couldn’t identify this one. He might or might not have read a database entry on them, but they hadn’t crossed paths before—and they didn’t need to do that. Couldn’t Order senshi all run away back to their homeworlds and leave the Negaverse alone? Go heat up the atmosphere on whatever extraterrestrial rocks they shackled themselves to for power, while leaving Earth for people who actually wanted to be here?
Or could they at least stay out of Cryptomelane’s way? He didn’t deserve this.
At being commanded by someone with no authority to give him orders, Cryptomelane met the senshi with a flat, unimpressed expression. Big tough guy, whoever they were, little white wings fixed to their lower back and glowing, purple-pink marks all over their face, neck, and arms—the marks of a transcended senshi. They wielded those marks as status symbols, obviously, expecting deference because they had a bit more sparkle to them than the average senshi. From some perspectives, they deserved it……but not from Cryptomelane’s.
“No,” he told the interloper, his tone simple and unadorned as he let the boy’s starseed slip into the jacket pocket he hadn’t used for the other two. Pointedly unbothered as though it did anything to stop his heart from racing. Calling his flail to his left hand, with the right one, he retrieved one of the other starseeds, the ones whose shine had felt distinctly less miraculous and special. He held it up as though admiring it under the streetlamps. “No, I don’t think I will.”
By way of emphasizing that point, Cryptomelane crunched that starseed between his teeth.
He threw himself at the senshi, then. Moving quickly, before the rush of power from the starseed waned. Putting everything he could into the attack, he swung his flail’s little jack-o-lantern ball at his enemy.
Quote:
Being hit with Cryptomelane’s pumpkin ball creates brief hallucinations. For about 10 seconds, affected enemies will hear ghostly wails that seem to come to nowhere. These wails can induce fear and be very unsettling, but they cause no damage. This effect works once per target, per battle.
Encke's mouth twitched almost imperceptibly as he heard the crunch of a soul being destroyed forever between the teeth of someone unafraid to embrace being a monster.
It was the skill of someone who had resisted even showing he was linked to his husband when Faustite had almost murdered him. It was the wherewithal of someone who had known too many agents who had done the same in front of him. It was the determination to make sure that there would never ******** be another.
As the agent swung his flail, Encke ducked down, in part to set down Eles gently before he threw himself into this wholeheartedly. Best to make sure that the young artist didn't wake up even more injured or lost than he probably would already. The rest could be taken care of later.
Encke's priorities swung in two directions in these situations. When lives were more obviously in the balance, sometimes the answer was to keep them talking, keep them distracted. There was a part of Encke that wanted to keep the captain talking about how he didn't think he would.
The other part?
There were already dead bodies. The lives were hanging in the balance, and one was already gone. The other two–or more, perhaps–could soon join the first. Encke had no patience for back and forth games in situations like this.
And so, no games would be played. Let the captain try to wail on him if he wanted to. Encke had been dealt worse.
Much, much worse.
The first thing he called was his static aura. The second? Wordlessly, he summoned the magic that he gained at his highest ascension, letting electricity and heat fill the air in a way that neither his first nor second level could manage. The third was a sweeping kick in an attempt to knock the captain down if the shockwaves hadn't done that for him.
“I don't think you understood me,” finally spoke Encke, flatly, standing above the captain.
“Give. Those. Back.”
Amor Remnant
Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 11:05 pm
Oh, Cryptomelane caught himself thinking as the senshi seemed unfazed by his attack. Sparks flared in the air around them, bringing with it a feeling of life that almost matched the rush coursing through him from the starseed. He got a similar feeling as he pushed himself into a second attack, pushed himself to do better this time, pushed himself to fight more, fight harder. Keep going. Keep fighting. Don’t give an inch to those who would dominate you. Never look back. Never surrender.
If not for their irreconcilable differences of opinion, Cryptomelane almost could have found it in him to like this senshi.
Even when the senshi filled the air with heat, a broad grin spilled over Cryptomelane’s features. Twisted up his mouth. Exposed all his teeth. How could Cryptomelane not smile? With so much on the line? And the stakes so high?
This is pain, some rational part of his mind managed to say through the rush of everything else going on inside him. Endorphins flood the body, trying to dull it out.
Hurt me all you want, you son of a whore. Cryptomelane’s grin dug so fiercely into his cheeks that they ached. His grip tightened around the handle of his flail. The more you hurt me, the less I’ll feel the pain. The less I feel it, the more I can fight back!
(Under other circumstances, he might have noticed the flaw in such thinking. But not right now.)
Eyes bright, Cryptomelane looked around as if he could see the magic itself in the air. True, he couldn’t, the raw power of it made his breaths stick in his throat. As the force of the magic slammed into him, shockwaves full of heat and crackling with electricity, Cryptomelane let a laugh burst out of him. The first came out rough, closer to a snarl. But even as the attack increasingly knocked him off-balance—even as the force of it tore his jacket, down on his bicep and the side of the chest, and even as the heat seared his skin—he kept laughing. He couldn’t ready another attack with his flail, but the laughter grew wild. Fighting to plant his feet and stay on them, it challenged him like few things did.
And it made him vulnerable to the senshi’s kick. Too slow to dodge it. Attempting left him less secure. The kick swept at his ankles. Only his back hitting the pavement gave pause to Cryptomelane’s laughter. Cut it off with an oof!—only for him to start back up laughing soon thereafter.
Sprawled on his back. Sweat trailing down his neck and forehead. Skin starting to tingle—he didn’t want to look at it to see how badly it had gotten seared. Erratic breathing between all the laughter. Tears in his jacket that might have revealed the serpent-shaped scars he’d gotten in the battle with the Calamitous Hollow. With an eternal senshi standing over him, making demands like they thought they’d won.……
Maybe they would, but not without as much fight as Cryptomelane had to give.
“I didn’t misunderstand, you filth,” Cryptomelane bit out in the midst of his laughter. He didn’t look away from his enemy. Never give them that satisfaction. Even if they earned it, never give it up. “I understood you perfectly, and I refused!”
Apparently, people who’d never been held under heel didn’t understand such nuances.
Dimly, it occurred to Cryptomelane to teleport out with the goods before he sustained too much damage.
But he dismissed the notion, kicking as hard as he could at the senshi’s knee. He delivered a smaller shot at the senshi’s shin. Teleporting out was tantamount to surrender. So help him, Cryptomelane refused to give this senshi the satisfaction. Pain didn’t matter. Injury didn’t matter. Trembling as he moved didn’t matter as long as Cryptomelane got back on his feet and kept fighting.
Laughter, increasingly manic, echoed through the street as he tried to push himself back up.
To say that the kick at their knee didn't hurt would've been a lie, but to Encke, it didn't register, not really. Their priorities were different. There were still at least two starseeds to save from the maw of this captain. Encke had suffered worse.
Encke had suffered a lot worse.
The maniacal laughter would've drawn a laugh from Encke if they were capable. Instead, it drew suspicion and mental notes–the power of eating souls had gone to this Captain's head, and he was wild for it. It would have been concerning if Encke had the ability to be concerned for those who swore themselves to Metallia. The response might've too, perfectly fit for a cinematic moment if Encke had the ability to fully pull himself out of the situation.
But he didn't, not really. Not when people would die.
Forever.
Encke's eyes started wandering the Captain's outfit, scanning specifically for the pockets where he knew starseeds were hiding. It reminded him of when he and Stillwaterite regularly met, to some degree. Before they could talk, make her empty her pockets. This was a bit more forceful, though, as Encke pushed his shoulder into the captain to force him to stay down.
If that succeeded, Encke used his new angle to reach for one of the pockets and grab at what truly mattered to him – the starseeds.
Everything else could wait.
“You refused,” replied Encke, slowly, careful to avoid falling trap to a monologue while working to free the souls from death, “and you'll pay for it.”
It was an interesting contrast, the laughter that echoed in his ears and his own voice cutting through the middle. The contrast of young wild desire for power and … the desire for this all to settle and end. This was his life now, though. This had been his life for years.
It didn't have to be the life of these.
Amor Remnant
Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 11:07 pm
Oh, Cryptomelane hated this. Knocked back and pinned to the ground by someone not that much taller than he was, but heavier enough to make a difference. And the burst of power from the starseed he’d already eaten was starting to wane.
That wasn’t unexpected—used this way, starseeds’ potency so often came on hard and fast, then fading regardless of whether or not you still needed it—but Cryptomelane snarled in frustration regardless. Pushing his shoulders back against the hand holding him down. Flailing his legs. Trying to break free from this getting nowhere slowly. It felt like the most that Cryptomelane could do, struggling to bat the senshi’s hand away from his pockets. Even that, Cryptomelane failed to pull off in his own defense. Outclassed, both in power and ********. He’d known that he was going up against someone he likely couldn’t beat, but faced with the reality of it now, Cryptomelane knew that he needed something more behind him.
The senshi’s hand managed to get into one pocket, managed to pull out the starseed that had come from one of the first two civilians. But that still left the one that Cryptomelane had wanted to save. Inhaling sharply, Cryptomelane unpocketed that starseed. Better to use it now and save himself than suffer further humiliation because he wouldn’t bother taking necessary risks. Another manic grin lit up Cryptomelane’s features as he looked up at the senshi, holding up the starseed. He had plenty of ideas for how to gloat about this. Words waiting just on the tip of his tongue for Cryptomelane to spit them out, and make it known that he’d rather win than savor one of these gutter souls that the senshi took so ******** seriously.
But struggling while holding something so fragile soon disappointed him. Cryptomelane’s hold on the starseed slipped. He flailed his arm the wrong way—just the exact wrong way—and he lost the starseed. Thrown free, it didn’t even have the decency to land on the pavement by his hip. Instead, Cryptomelane paled as the special starseed flew back toward the boy he’d stolen it from.
A swift breath and the barest groan of muddily perceived pain. The underside of a boot angled with its toe resting on dirtied asphalt. Trash swirled and caught in the corners of the alley. A baseball bat — no, a leg, young and pale, exited that boot. It belonged to someone who wasn't moving.
Eles's chest ached terribly. He shut his eyes, pulled in another breath. With careful fingers, he pressed against his sternum, then counted each of his ribs, one by one, until he was certain that they were all intact. That teething pain hadn't been exacerbated, nor had it relented. He hadn't missed the sounds of struggle — the groaning, the shift of fabric, exertion as one body tried to fight off another.
Keeping his eyes shut, Eles wondered how many bodies there would be tonight. He'd expected nothing more than to go to work, and yet, he'd nearly died. Would have died. Should have died, he supposed, though he knew nothing of the circumstances that resulted in him being spared. Whoever scuffled near him; he let them be.
Better to seem dead now and escape with his life than try to slip away and sign his own death warrant.
The struggling and flailing was perhaps expected when someone was pinned down, when someone was being pickpocketed in the most moral sense. As much as the flailing came with some injury, Encke seemed unbothered by it. Once he got one of the starseeds in his hand (the other from this pocket had been consumed, he was fairly sure. He wasn't sure how he'd explain this one to that civilian) he moved to try and get to the other.
Only for the captain to pull Eles’ starseed out himself and lift it up into the air.
Encke's eyes narrowed as he calculated how to lunge at it, but perhaps that would end up unnecessary. The starseed bounced in a way that initially alarmed him and then amused him. Of all the damn things-
The Captain's show had accidentally done Encke's job for him.
“Not gonna let you go for that again, if that's what you're thinking.” Was Eles awake? Encke glanced toward Eles once more, careful to not show he knew him just in case that made the reaction worse. He didn't need the captain making another attempt just for petty vengeance, considering he seemed like he might've been the type.
Encke, for now, tucked the starseed he had managed to recover into subspace. Better that the Captain not have the opportunity to go for it while Encke tried to return a soul. “Leave.” He positioned his body in such a way to assuredly block the captain from charging at his mistake.
Well. Not without going through him first or teleporting, unfortunately.
