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 Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 3:52 pm
Quote: Starfish Scares (13) : Starfish live in the sea. They do not live in freshwater rivers, lakes, or reservoirs with no connection to the ocean. Starfish are also not social creatures. And yet, here they are–in hoards. They can be found near any water source–and far from it. These starfish seem to be a unique species that are eager to travel and don’t seem quite bound to water, though they will seek it out. The starfish will latch onto just about anything they can to hitch a ride, even though they’re fast. They secrete an itchy, oozy slime after they’ve latched onto something, and though it seems as though they can absorb nutrients from any living creature, these starfish have an odd penchant for blood. You might as well have a colorful leech stuck to you as soon as you think one of these things crawling your way. Their bites are sharp and will leave the nearby skin itchy and painful. They are a bit difficult to remove but they can be killed; as soon as they have perished, they will rapidly dry out and crumble. However, it’s far more likely that they’ll escape before you can get your hands on them. Be vigilant; these things are pests–and smart enough to cling to people and vehicles alike if it means getting to where they want to go.
Given how well the season lent itself to large hoards of people being outside at any given time, Rakovanite was hardly shocked to find the areas he usually frequented in the evenings to be a little more disordered than he typically saw. It was no great consequence to him one way or another- the curse of living in a large city was that no amount of cleaning really made the most densely populated areas more aesthetic. It was just a bit worse when everyone was encouraged to be outside and interacting (maybe it was also spiritually worse that the 'holiday' was one encouraging peace and well being, but it somehow ended with more litter than it had started with- Rakovanite didn't dwell on it).
He ambled alone down the sidewalk. For all the activity during the day, there was not a single soul present now, which made it a particularly uninteresting area for him to patrol as well- though he was not as offended by 'uninteresting' as some people.
On the contrary, Rakovanite actually found it morbidly interesting to see the destruction just normal people caused on a daily basis when they were excited. For every individual who tried to remedy the situation, there was surely their match in someone who did not care what travesties they inflicted, and when enough of those individuals were together... Well, this sort of mess happened, didn't it?
The sidewalk he tread had a line of shops to one side: food boutiques, tee-shirt stalls, the like. Windows all darkened from the late hour. The other side of the path was an outdoor amphitheater. Utilized frequently enough, he suspected, if the surrounding garbage was anything to go by. There was the usual fast food packaging, drink bottles, a stray scrap of fabric every now and then, a shoe, charms from elsewhere in the city, plastic bags, cans- everything. Literally everything one might expect.
And then several great piles of things one might not expect, that Rakovanite could not immediately identify at a glance.
A toy? Memorabilia from some sort of outdoor concert or something? Why were there hundreds of them in every color imaginable? Piled up in corners and stuck to light posts and curled up around bits of trash. They were notably less in his path than the rest of the garbage, but that didn't mean there were none. Rakovanite hovered over one such pile, staring down and still not really understanding what he was seeing. Little... bean bag starfishes?
He nudged one with his boot, and the uncomfortable squiiick of his foot colliding with something noticeably wetter than he'd expected had a tremor running up the length of Rakovanite's spine. He blinked down at the thing, still in a state of mild disgust.
But even that sensation quickly became secondary. He couldn't explain it, but all at once it felt like there was a lot of unwanted attention on him. Like that creature (because Rakovanite did realize that it was some kind of animal), hundreds of that creature had taken note of his presence. And didn't ******** like it, apparently. The one he'd nudged sprang up his pantleg, and Rakovanite lurched back with a soft little gasp of shock. It- bit? shocked? stung?????- his shin, earning another aggressive shake of the General's foot-
And then a great wave of mottled colors seemed to surge in his direction from all corners of the path, earning just the faintest tinge of regret that Rakovanite had happened to be here right now.
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Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2025 4:22 pm
Remarque had many mirrors hidden throughout the city, which was a necessity when some people liked to run around breaking any that they found. Maybe it was just teenagers or troublemakers but he suspected, with great annoyance, that it was probably just some Senshi and Knights thinking they were doing the right thing.
What a pain in the a**, like carrying a full length mirror was easy? Like these things were just lying around, ripe for the picking?
He was buying hundreds of these ******** things, and he couldn’t even mark it as a tax deduction. The fewer paper trails, the better.
Remarque was going to have to replace the one on the roof soon, thankfully at least because it was just wearing out and not because someone had found it. The glass was scuffed a bit and being exposed to the elements as it was, it was only a matter of time before the mirror got too foggy to step through.
Doing his rounds, he supposed he could maybe put this one off for another month or so but it was just another task on a never ending list of them.
What was supposed to be a quick in and out trip turned into a little more.
When he’d stepped out of the mirror as an Eternal Senshi he’d been aware of the General’s energy signature but he hadn’t felt any need to act on it. If the Negaverse wasn’t going to bother him, he wasn’t going to bother them.
And yet.
There was something strange in the air. He wasn’t sure if it was a sound or a smell or just something, but before he decided to slip back into the mirror and carry on with his night, he moved to the edge of the building and–
Oh, what the hell was that?
Realistically, he knew that a Negaverse agent–especially a General–could teleport, but this one looked a little overwhelmed right now.
Remarque infrequently used his magic, but it came second nature to him now.
Strings descended on Rakovanite’s joints, inspiring Remarque to look up at the sky and wonder how fall the strings might stretch. Far enough that he could reach them from where he stood on the roof, at least. He grabbed a fistfull of them and began to foist the General up, lifting him from the sea of–whatever the ******** those things were.
The movement wasn’t necessarily clean; Remarque wasn’t rough, but he wasn’t gentle, either. The strings weren’t so hard that the General couldn’t have broken them if he wanted. Remarque thought it was better this way than buried alive by what he’d now identified as some sort of starfish, but what did he know? Maybe the Negaverse was into stuff like that.
The strings didn’t break when he handled them, and it took seconds, or less, to pull Rakovanite from the ground to the building’s edge, and Remarque held out a hand as if he meant to help him onto solid ground. He held the strings up with one hand, but it wasn’t like Rakovanite even felt heavy; the strings were doing most of the work. He just needed to manipulate them.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked, eyeing the waves of furious starfish crashing in a pile on the ground.
…They probably weren’t going to be able to stay here for long, especially if these things could stick to walls like they stuck to Rakovanite.
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Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2025 8:28 am
Perhaps it was just that proud and stubborn part of him that insisted Rakovanite would not be chased away by a bunch of- starfish- in the middle of the street. They did not even belong here, and why were there a million of them, and why could they bite. He had a lot of questions, no resolutions, and, perhaps most importantly, no way to eliminate them all at once. Because 'for the good of the city,' getting rid of them was surely necessary.
They were remarkably fast, seeming to tumble over themselves as they moved toward him, piling at his legs and pushing him back despite Rakovanite's desire to surrender no ground to these lesser invertebrates.
There was surely a Youma somewhere he could summon to simply bake them with a giant fireball. It existed. He knew it did. Thinking of it hard enough to get it here was another issue, exacerbated by the issue that he was about to be drowned in starfish bodies. The creatures pressed him back a step, and he was aware that the most rational thing was to leave... He didn't enjoy taking on problems that he actually had nothing to do with, and he could absolutely leave this here for literally anyone else (and he only felt marginally slighted by their existence).
But the choice was taken from him entirely. Something pinched at his joints, plucking control of his own appendages away from him and lifting Rakovanite from the street with some sort of cosmic power. The creatures still squirmed on the ground below. A few of them had managed to attach themselves to his clothes before he was pulled away, and he venomously kicked a foot to send one plopping to the cement with a dull 'thump'. ...Much farther below than he would've expected.
If he had thought he should leave before, the feeling was only escalated in the seconds before he was tugged to eye level with-
"...Remarque." Rakovanite eyed the Eternal and the extended hand. A part of him wondered if this mess was somehow the Mirror's fault if Remarque was here to witness it, but the thought barely even fully formed before he dismissed it. What would be the point of- whatever that was on the street below- now lurching toward the building they stood on, by the way.
Rakovanite took the offered hand, pulling himself out of Remarque's strings and stepping onto the building's ledge. "That will not happen twice," he muttered stiffly. And then because it felt like it couldn't be simple happenstance that they were both in the same place at the same time (because as far as Rakovanite understood it, that had only happened during... intense occurrences): "what are you doing here?"
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