spellbinders | [DECEMBER INTRO LOG

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[DECEMBER INTRO LOG | WORLD TWO]

Who: All coven members, especially new folk!
Where: In and around the new world’s apartment building where the coven is staying, as well as the rest of Shehui
When: Day 160
Open/Closed: Open to All

How did you get into this building? This apartment room? What the fuck is going on? Let's refer back to this page for a semi in-depth, wow so detailed, explanation of your current situation.

Are you up to speed? Great.

Now, here's the question of the hour: what are you going to do about it?

your

New coven members showing up today are in luck. This week, Shehui is celebrating a Keep the Community Clean event. It's rare that they force jobs on people, but there has been an influx of new citizens and the population growth is leading to more trash. Fulfill your assignment and you'll be rewarded 1,000 credits. Don't? Be fined 500.

Everyone has been sent a job to their ID, be it collecting trash, cleaning their apartment building or holding up signs/handing out literature about recycling. Sweeping, bagging...it's dirty work, but someone has to do it.

not

Speaking of snow! Most businesses and buildings in Shehui have paid to have snow falling every other hour, which coats the city areas in a fine, powdery dust of snowflakes. You may be familiar with snow, or maybe you've never seen it in your entire life! It's unavoidable either way, so you're going to have to deal with it.

snow paintball

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[ an altercation it had been, but to what purpose or reasons Mikazuki wasn't entirely convinced.

It had been part of the game, the paint standing out starkly green on his shoulder, streaks and spatters over his jaw like particularly sickly, otherworldly blood. It goes well with the edges of the bruise starting to make itself visible around the hollow of his eye and the cheekbone, purplered mottling under the skin.

It started as a game, maybe, partially so, but there was some sort of particular viciousness to her reaction, some kind of visceral knife to gut that he couldn't place from the small, singular (insignificant almost) incident that he remembers.

The complicated rules of interplanetary politics and powerplay wasn't something that Mikazuki paid any particular mind to, but even he knew something was fishy. An organisation as big as Gjallarhorn must have it's fissures and the fault lines of power groups colliding, that was no surprise. What makes him wonder are the differences he could see to what he remembers, like the raised lines of scar flesh, the hardbitter edges of words. The fact that he hasn't yet encountered them together at any place in this world or in the hub.

Orga has said that McGillis was their ally, now, that much Mikazuki understands, even though the scales seem far too much tilted. Just where does this man stand, then? In their way, or shunted to the side?

I don't know, he said.

Mikazuki meets the other's gaze calmly, like he isn't sitting under the tree with snow still clinging to his hair, sliding down the back of his shirt. There's blood on the back of his hand, matching the streak to his temple. Even then, it's nothing serious — he isn't that easily fazed. ]

No.

[ it's not an excuse, it's not some attempt to salvage his dignity; Mikazuki isn't that sort at all, to focus on anything apart from the cold hard reality of it all. Strange then, how he clings to the idealistic promise made a thousand thousand days ago. ]

Why are you here?

[ Purple and green, the latter drying, dry. The blood on his hand, on his temple, drying, dry.

It remains new, relatively, this experience. Mikazuki in person. Their first meeting the only one, before the island, where they stood without behemoth metal structures around them. His ire then, his disgust and deep-seated unease, what both warped into with defeat and the way he and Ein fed one another's grievances. The strange distance from such sentiment after McGillis, colored with fury only through that lens, that context.

But now, that context had further complicated, the passions stirred by that man layering, shifting. Changed and unchanged.

Walking Mikazuki through the mansion, the island locales, noting him here and there in this new world, Gaelio is sometimes struck by how young he looks. So diminutive a stature lends to the impression. Rat and sinner, child and soldier.

Snow in his hair. Nose and cheeks tinged red from the cold, or from exertion, or both.

The question he can expect, but the answer's not much different from another: in truth, Gaelio isn't sure why he stands here, bent beneath a branch. He isn't sure why he came here, to look on a young man no less difficult, or strange, to look at. Part of him doesn't want to know, but though the focus of his lifetime of analysis had been another man, Gaelio had rarely chosen ignorance, not consciously, whatever his disposition to it. To choose it would not fit his self-image of before, believing himself far more enlightened than he was. ]

I wonder?

[ Rather than answering. ]

Are you finished playing?

[ To think, Mikazuki playing. Red and greed and purple, and snow. ]

If so, you should get cleaned up.

[ to think of him playing. it's not a word often associated with someone like him — less than human, with all the animal wit and instinct but none of the intelligence, supposedly. the perception shifts, a subtle change in hue, images overlapping.

Mikazuki may seem young like this, snow melting into a cool trickle down the back of his neck. It's the difference of overlap, again; the moniker somehow too big for the small figure he cuts compared to the rest of them. The devil of Tekkadan, momentarily suspended, idle, inactive. An itch under his skin even from so little time spent alone without the usual guiding force directing him. A compass needle lost, directionless.

But he isn't a child. He's passed that a long time ago in the streets of Mars, weaknesses and the weak mercilessly stomped out — but maybe traces of it remain just buried out of sight. ]

Alright.

[ The agreement comes easily enough, his demeanour unchanged. Even without that person's orders to guide him, mikazuki still has the sort of presence about him, unruffled and serene, suddenly decisive.

Red snow, and green too. Blurring his vision, though it's real coldness that reddens his cheeks, the ice melting in his hand is real, not filtered through the link of Barbatos. ]

[ Two syllables, simple assent. Leaden assent, but nothing thereafter. Mikazuki has a unique knack of drawing an old, deadened sensation out of him. A consciousness of each second, of the stillness of the air, of the disruptions past them as paint and snow continue to spray at some distance. Mikazuki keeps seated beneath the tree, armed and one-armed, impressive in what he managed while hampered by a sling. It must have made the wound deeper for Julieta.

If he could do that much, surely he could see to himself without much trouble. It is neither Gaelio's interest nor place -- let McGillis dote on his favored hero. Though Gaelio knows too well that McGillis has only just begun his shift at the bakery, a double, leaving him occupied for another three and a half hours.

Straightening, Gaelio peers through the white weighted branches, a hand gone idle (and only ever needing movement, then to settle, around seemingly now two) pushed to his waist.

However young Mikazuki looks, however the sight lodges like splinters beneath his fingernails, he is not a child.

But he is, after all, human.

Gaelio shuts his eyes and imagines he hears a bird, above the laughter, but doesn't hear a bird. Not really. But his voice sounds as far as it might have been, had it sung that far. ]

Do you need a hand?

[ A deeper wound for her pride than on her person, necessarily. They both have got away with nothing more than scratches, some surface wounds that would heal thereafter. Nothing that won't heal with time.

Armed and one-armed. The gun still tucked in the crook of the arm, made useless through fault of his own, or maybe there really isn't anyone to blame. Something as little as that, his arm or his sight, he'd gladly give up that much. Orga has given him a lot more besides, his whole life -- at least, that's the impression it leaves Mikazuki. There isn't anything else before him, or after. Everything begins and ends with him.

So what the hell was he doing here? Thrown together with people he doesn't belong with, apart of those who does -- by no will of his own, decided by a complete stranger for her own benefit. They said it was to benefit all of them -- but how much of it is true?

He doesn't believe in fate, but it must rankle at him surely, to have someone else's will so unwillingly imposed upon him. Mikazuki only follows one voice, one order, one promise.

With the other's movement Mikazuki moves his head too, the assent given but not easily followed up still, keeping the other in sight out of his blind spot. Quiet and waiting, for his time or his chance, either or it's unclear. ]

Will you help, if I said yes?

[ not a yes or no - not an answer, but a question in return. A simple curiosity.

The snow seeps through, melting into water. It's freezing. ]

Yeah.

[ Simplicity for simplicity. Perhaps it would merit surprise, his own startling out of him, had he not understood the likely trajectory of this while listening for and past silence. Standing closer to the one he'd once chased, yet farther from that feeling, the distance of years and death stretching a gulf. Wider than a gulf, which permitted yet land at the edges. Instead, obliteration of the whole. Nothing but space. Nothing of substance remaining.

What surfaces for McGillis, keeps dust with Mikazuki. The new fires that stirred even as he two years scoured their attachment burned at the core of one name. Better learning of Chryse Guard Security, of surgeries, of the Turbines and Teiwaz, had assisted Gaelio in tracking and anticipating McGillis, but not understanding why he had selected them, him, as heroes.

But they had here agreed to extend their truce past a suspension of hostility. Voicing want, a determination to struggle, to work toward understanding. Though he would see McGillis struggle, though Gaelio has for two years, and for sixteen before it, he would not leave him alone in it.

In this chosen one, though Gaelio cannot swallow away the aftertaste, there must be something of understanding.

He extends his hand. ]

I'd explain, but...

[ Faint, faint, a twitch to his lips. ]

I would talk too much.

[ Understanding comes in many facets and layers, needing to know the sequence and the consequences of each and every point, overlaid like multicoloured paint, like sediments of soil that unearth themselves the deeper you dig. To understand, it's a long process. To understand, you have to commit.

With Mikazuki, things are much simpler than that - at least, from the perspective of someone looking from the outside inwards. Like the rings of a tree - no sign of changes on the outside surface with the passing of the seasons. To him, everything that is real is here and now. The past is something untouchable, of something dead and gone. There is nothing to be said about it. The only way is to move forward. Maybe that's the simple heart of the problem, that they look toward different directions from the same point, converging and verging away from each other on different trajectory of aim. A different focus, Mikazuki following always behind or besides --

But Gaelio is the same.

This point here and now, with only the distant laughter of a bird's call and the soft sound of snow falling to earth, their paths draw together. Hand outstretched toward him, extended invitation or offer. There's something of the truce in it, even though he had never explicitly discussed with them.

An ally of an ally. Your enemies will also be ours. ]

...

[ Mikazuki's chin tilts slightly upwards, following the line of hand extended wrist the arm up to the shoulder and rests his gaze on the other's face. The look, same as before, like he's trying to figure out words in a book that he hasn't learned yet. ]

Thanks.

[ That, at least, is given freely, though whether Mikazuki chooses to not comment on the lack of verbosity on the other's part this time, or whether he is truly disinterested, is hard to tell.

Blood on the back of his hand, smeared across the skin drying darkly, Mikazuki reaches up with his good hand as well, fingers grasping the other's wrist in a firm grip. ]

[ Can it begin with a hand, with their hands? Years of digging, of looking, of believing he'd reached. Understanding without understanding, as the metal crumpled around him, that blade breaking the cockpit and folding Kimaris to the ground. Understanding that his hand had only ever splashed against the reflection, the water's surface rippling only then, distorted by his tears. How shallow it must have been beneath, only a puddle, but enough for drowning.

More years of digging, of color in the Earth, though he'd gone colorblind, able only to see red. Committed in the past, committed to the past, committed for the past. Unable to see the present without that lens.

That he and Mikazuki perceive the present in fundamentally dissimilar ways would not surprise. That must have always been true, if the tenor of difference has since shifted. Look upon the same and share nothing in perception. Be cherished by the same man, be used by the same man, be discarded by the same man. Feel all and nothing.

It might have begun on that island with their hands. Those fingers that grasped as he withdrew, that closed as he extended, that reached again as the rain submerged them, and again on moon lost shores.

Mikazuki's hand is smaller than that man's, but larger than his height would suggest. More callused than any other he's felt, hardened so as to feel the thickness through his sleeve. A coat, but no gloves. Were they cold, fingertips numbing with it, or did such inured skin protect him from it?

The set of his eyes, as though seeking, discomforts. These sensations he feels, or only so acutely as to recognize them again, with this boy. Though he looks back, no less searching, and the root of it may be hypocritical. He would scratch something out of him, an answer, but thinks still too little of him to anticipate anything reciprocal. Too alien a creature, this breed of human.

Gaelio considers his hand, a beat then two longer than acceptable, then tugs. Quick and efficient, up to his feet. Release, his arm dropping back to his side. ]

Mm.

[ Manners enough for that word. His attention scans past the park, debating destination. An apartment, surely, but he doubts either have the kit. A stop over, then, at a pharmacy. A last glance, down, focusing, his fingers twitching at his side, toward palm. ]

Do you have gloves?

[ Not offering, idle curiosity, a question half over his shoulder as he begins to walk. ]

[ Manners enough, for a rat. Thoughts and feelings enough, but never human in their eyes. The machines running in his blood, injected into his spine, sets them apart from the others, the cursed nature of the ancient technology driving them apart simple difference of blood and bones and marrow. Less than human, they are, disposable and despicable to others who had never known what it is like to have that be the only choice left to them. To throw away their supposed humanity for survival, for food and shelter, for life.

Mikazuki doesn't spare a thought for those differences, the thoughts that may be running through the other man's head. He lives in this moment here and now, carving a place into the world that constantly tries to reject them like a foreign object, like a virus. Unapologetic and unforgiving but isn't that as an equal and just return for how the world treats them? Merciless in the name of some moral compass, some debate of what it means to be 'human', far off politics that Mikazuki neither knows nor cares for. What he cares for is -- the discarded remnants of those rules, the children fallen by the wayside, coming together.

Not for revenge, but maybe something close to it. A place to belong.

For all that, Mikazuki doesn't weigh altogether too much -- in this regard he aligns with the expectations coming from his small stature. When the tug comes he is pulled to his feet easily, finding his ground and holds it, as he always have and will. Dusts the snow off his pants, the paint-coloured snow from his person. ]

No. [ Gloves? Something that was probably necessary, in this weather. Strange to be feeling this again, the snow melting off his hands, his face, far more used to the controlled void of space, the dry heat blowing in from the deserts of Mars. ]

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[DECEMBER INTRO LOG | WORLD TWO]

I'm.......sorry............

my line stares at time

GATHERS YOU CLOSE

you'll get cooties!!!

ALREADY HAVE THEM, IT COOL NBD,

no subject

no subject

dis is disjointed trash i apologize

NEVER APOLOGISE