(open) back to ordinary

[sparsity]

Who: mikazuki augus (sparsity) & various & you!
What: october plot - open prompts, closed starters.
When: various days in october.
Where: olympia & thesa.
Warning(s): violence, probably murder.

I. YOU'VE GROWN OUT OF US

[ All things considered, the events leading up to Olympia's current state are familiar in the way the lay of a skeleton is familiar, flesh stripped from bone, the impression of something once whole. Bare joints exposed, a working order, if not quite... right. Explosions rocking a populated area, terrified people, dubious claims opening up a chasm of blame for anyone free to explore. It leaves too much to people he doesn't trust. Too much like the colonies he saw falsely accused.

Years ago and yet fresh again, for all the subtleties he doesn't understand about it. All he knows is that people are ready to fight.

Mikazuki isn't really the vigilante sort, though he's moving through the streets of Olympia like he is, eyes trained and alert as he glances down alleyways he passes, storefronts and establishments a little too dark. He's most familiar with the marketplace, as much as he's a familiar face there too. All its corners have been thrown with smoke, illness, and shadow. Electricity is in the air, the same sort after the announcement. Mikazuki tastes it as he rounds the bars he knows, looking no where near old enough to enter one and now not marked by Ashti's stone or uniform to signify he's patrolling them, instead dressed in somber neutrals.

His pace only slows when he comes across one of the posters strewn about the city, wide things pasted sideways to the front of a building. Broad daylight, people around, hunters, accomplices. None of that matters. Only the face on it matters, a boy no older than himself, blocky angles and friendly eyes.

Reaching up, he scrapes his nails across its topmost edge and tears it off, crumpling the pieces in his palms. To anyone within earshot that may have stopped in light of his display, he passes a glance to. ]

What?

[ Polite, as always. ]

II. AND YOU'VE BEEN DYING TO GO

[ Every so often, the liveliness of Olympia drives Mikazuki to space. Not because of the noise, but because the conflict this time isn't his noise. It's not Tekkadan, not their conflict, save for those here with him now in the crossfire again. That's the only loyalty he owes, the only allegiance he has. Except this one thing.

Show us we can trust you.

Those words shadow his footsteps as he makes his way through Thesa and into the hangar, the chilly smell of alloy and fuel stinging pleasantly in his nose. He knows his way by heart now, just like he knows his way by heart through the stasis units on Alria to the one he visits day after day. It's quiet up here, compared to the surface below. There's an odd shuttle that takes off or docks in a whir of hydraulics, the natural shift and boom of metal, even at rest. But it's not any of the mass produced training machines that he's focused on as his footsteps thud across the catwalk lining the hangar perimeter, secured in front of the mobile suits. No, it's farther down that he focuses on, where the makes of suits starts to shift. Eventually, he slows next to a hulking white machine, crowned and clawed in gold. ]

Sleeping like usual. [ With no one else around him, he's actually addressing the suit. Hands in pockets, his gaze travels up and up, settling on its clean, quiet face plate. Repaired from that moment he was brought, breathing, to Thesa. ] I wonder what you'd want to do about this, too.

[ ...if there was any doubt that he's legitimately talking to a robot. ]

(ooc. closed starters below, if you'd like something specific feel free to hit me up here, rivalry, or axia#4656!)

Comments

[maipokerface]

... You don't know what cursed means?

[Dragon she could kind of get. Not everyone had heard of dragons she imagined, not with the myriad of worlds people hailed from here. Cursed seemed to be a universal idea though - or so she thought. She tilts her head a little, sighing out.]

Cursed is usually something that most people think can harm you in some way just by existing. It's a stupid idea but you get a lot of people saying this thing is cursed or this person is cursed as some sort of excuse to not deal with it.

[She thinks back to the Kemurikage. That was something like a curse too and one she had acutely feared as a child. And there had been a bit where she had almost feared it was true after Tom-Tom's abduction. Now? She can decry the idea with a good bit of bitterness toward Azula and her gang to color her tone.]

[sparsity]

[ As the man continues to weave his tale, gesturing to embellish a battle fought long ago, Mikazuki hums quietly, attention split between listening to him and listening to Mai. Though he's a skeptic by the virtue of his reality, devoid of things that are common on this planet, he can't help but quietly compare her description to the life he's lead. Just by existing... ]

So that's it. It sounds [ fake ] like something out of a story. Or like magic.

[ Which wasn't fake, but also not in abundance where he came from, alongside things that had a more supernatural-sounding origin. ]

Then do you think it's true?

[ About the cove. ]

[maipokerface]

[What could be the truth? Mai listens to the man a moment more, his tale full of tragedy and woe. It wasn't a bad story by any means but generally stories were embellished. The Fire Nation had done plenty of that, so she had learned since the end of the war.]

There's probably some truth to it. All stories have at least a little bit of it, even if they are stories about curses.

[sparsity]

[ All of the stories he'd heard that had any amount of truth to them were sparse and dire. Things told out of necessity rather than as a means to forewarn, or to frighten. Anything that felt too grandeur lost his attention quickly, because he's not good at parsing the conflated pieces from bones the truth left behind, no more than a skeleton. Or the image of one.

Then again, all of this — the Natha, Olympia, Wyver... it had a lot of unknowns to it even without pretty words, for him. ]

I see. Then... maybe it's worth taking a look at.

[maipokerface]

... Think so?

[To be honest, Mai's been curious ever since the first rumors started floating by. Dragons were little more than memories at home -- or had been before the Darkness swallowed all of it up in the end. The idea of spilling a dragon's blood could bring a curse down... well, if that were true, the Fire Nation had been drowning in a curse for ages.

... Maybe there was some truth to it.]

We could give it a try.

[Mai might be more amiable now than she was as a teenager but she still wasn't the sort to surround herself with friends. And she wasn't about to go venturing into supposedly cursed land alone. This guy seems brazen enough -- or maybe just stupid enough, who knew -- to give it a try.]

[sparsity]

We won't know until we see it ourselves.

[ A practicality he keeps with him no matter what he faces, man or machine or dragon. Likewise, if he has to go somewhere unfamiliar, having someone along who knew the nature of the warnings would be an asset. A dispassionate way of looking at things, maybe, but he also has his grievances with closeness, with calling someone an ally too quickly. There was a way to work with people beyond that though, and for his demeanor, Mikazuki's never been terribly bad at it.

With a nod, he tucks his wares away into a bag crossed over his shoulder. All of it would keep long enough for a trek outside of the city. ]

It was to the south of the city, I think.