lazybox | soup but it tastes bad

soup but it tastes bad

The forest is quiet, and almost trackless - who needs a trail, after all, when the only person who ever passes this way is a single flesh eater, coming and going from the tower in the distance?

(But this story does not begin with Kratos Aurion was a blade.)

It begins, instead, with two blades in a remote forest, the same way another one ended, in the distant past. A blade of justice, and a flesh eater driver, seeking audience with the Aegis who is rumored to reside in the tower. And the story starts, just as the other ended, before they ever reach the tower.

Ether flows through the air - light-aspected, with hints of water and wind - and converges on a point. The crystalline structure doesn't look so different from the trees and underbrush that surround it, save for the fact that it glows white with a brilliance that's visible even in the direct light of the sun.

(The last story began, Van Grants was a blade.)

(It was not a happy story.)

Near the 'roots' of the tree, there is another core crystal to be found. Although it seems broken, it pulses with a dull red glow, indicative of the blade inside being ready (perhaps more than ready) to manifest again. Equally clearly, it has not been disturbed in a very long time - only the glow separates it visually from the natural stones around it, moss and dirt breaking up the too-square outline.

To those who can sense ether, however, it is practically a beacon. And to those who can see the threads of fate...

(This isn't the story of the Aegis. But there's a thread tied here, nonetheless, that hasn't disappeared.)

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It starts like this: they're on the path, such as it is. Someone's kept the forest from encroaching on it to the point of impassability, but that's about all Mythra can say for it.

(But still: someone must be maintaining it, so they're still on the right track. That's a good sign, right?)

Foresight's been quiet, since they got into the forest - a ping here and there for a fallen branch big enough to be annoying, nothing more. And then--

"Hey, hold on," she says to Jade, stopping, head tilted like it'll help her hold onto the image better. "There's something--"

She can't pin it down, whatever it is. Foresight whispers an answer, but won't tell her to what. Typical. Mythra shakes her head hard, pushing her way into the brush at the side of the narrow 'path'. She doesn't bother to look back; Jade will follow.

Without the maintenance that had been done on the path, the forest gets hard to navigate quick. A little light ether takes care of that. The glow is the first thing that catches her eye, bright and impossible to miss even through the trees, and Mythra scowls, blasting her way through the last few bushes. That must be it, right? It's pretty (it's breathtaking - she's never seen solid ether chunks this big outside of Valak Mountain, and the ambient ether levels aren't high enough to maintain anything like those even if the air almost feels like it wants to sing about the Aegis), but she can't imagine why Foresight would lead her here.

And then her eyes are drawn to its roots, and what lies cradled in them.

So, a core crystal out in the middle of nowhere? Not that uncommon, all things considered. Things happen, out in the wilderness - drivers die, and their blades' crystals can't exactly be retrieved if no one knows where it happened. Jade and Mythra haven't stumbled on any personally, but it's worth keeping an ear out for the tug of ether reaching out, travelling like this.

But they're typically almost forgotten, half buried in the dirt, not -- this. (What's more, they probably don't also make Foresight fire with so many impossible-to-track possibilities Mythra can feel a headache threatening to come on.)

What the fuck?

"Jade?" she calls, like he could possibly have fucking missed this. Scoots to the side, just to be sure he can see that core crystal, though this close its ether is audible under the hum of the tree. "What do you think? Foresight's..." She trails off, not sure how to finish the thought, but the emotional bleed conveys some uncertainty.

They can't just leave a blade here, right? Mythra can't say she's excited to add someone else to their resonance, but...

Edited 2020-05-16 10:56 (UTC)

Jade doesn't even blink or question when Mythra changes direction. Of course he doesn't. He's used to Foresight doing things like this, so all does is follow after her. Closely, of course, so that he can simply tread the crude path she's blasted through the underbrush. Less work, that way. Sure, Jade can borrow Mythra's light long enough to blast his own way through -- and he does, once or twice, where Mythra's been sloppy -- but otherwise it makes more sense to just let Mythra at it.

The tree she finds is... Well, unlike anything Jade's ever seen, for one. He stares at it longer than Mythra does, lacking Foresight's nudge to draw his attention immediately to the roots. Mentally, Jade makes note to come investigate the tree a little better, later. To have never even known something like this could exist bothers him. Was the knowledge lost with countless of his other memories? Or is he not the only one who's never seen something like this before? Mythra seems as bewildered by its existence as he is, so that's some small comfort.

But clearly the tree isn't what Foresight brought Mythra here to see. Instead she gestures to a core crystal cradled by the trees roots.

"Well then," Jade says, to start with. He knows what's on Mythra's mind even if she didn't say it aloud -- but it's not that hard for them to be on the same wavelength, not anymore. Strange place for a blade to die. Stranger still, the tree. But he knows Mythra won't want to leave the blade here. And he knows Foresight brought her to this spot for a reason. Foresight's never lead them wrong before.

"At the very least, we can take them back to the others," Jade offers. "Though, I'd almost hate to move them. This spot looks as if it were made for them specifically."

He jokes, but he bends down to pick the core crystal up, anyway.

Once he has, he's glad he did. "Would you look at that," he says, showing the crystal to Mythra. That's not a normal shape at all. Jade would think it broken, except -- while it certainly seems to have been split, perhaps -- there's still more than a seemingly whole core crystal here. And its ether feels alright. Jade knows well enough what broken core crystals actually feel like.

Curiosity gets the better of him. He pings the core crystal.

Edited 2020-05-17 01:25 (UTC)

The ether is certainly enough for an entire blade and then some, and it doesn't feel cracked the way a broken blade might -

Ping.

For a moment, nothing. Nothing overt, anyway, as a layer of sub routines fires off, faster than a neuro impulse and carrying a message back just as quickly.

Ping? responds the crystal in Jade's hand, a questioning echo before it begins to gather and solidify ether into a form. Both acknowledgement and question, as the core crystal glows red, shimmers red, the last bits of dirt flaking off and floating free of the reforming blade.

The first thing projected into the resonance is questioning, ave the second is suspicion. Wariness. Fine, I'll get up, but don't expect me to trust you. It's a suitable enough emotion, as the ether takes on a lean towards a dark aspectation, though visually one might never guess that, based on the fade from gold to red to finally the colors of a body that it goes through.

The blade forming is humanoid, and then increasingly clearly one of the blades that could almost pass for human. Ether lines form (forked, not circles, as though there were any doubt of the strangeness of this blade) before clothes snap into being, covering them. He has red hair that would look impressive next to any blade but Mythra, and a severity to his face that almost erases how young he looks.

And then his eyes snap open and oh, that's more than suspicion in the emotional bleed. That's surprise and just shy of fighting, a threat as much as if he had appeared sword in hand. With narrowed green eyes, the blade says, "What the hell are you doing here?"

You, with his eyes locked firmly on Jade, with clear recognition.

"I've never seen anything like this," Mythra says, the uncertainty not abating entirely when Jade picks the core crystal up. She squints at it with a frown as he holds it out, before Jade apparently makes the decision all on his own to try resonating. (Good - he really is getting better about being more spontaneous. Having that decision made calms Foresight just a little, though there are still a whole mess of potential futures swirling around.)

She'd been around when her siblings had first resonated with their drivers, but watching that is different from feeling it. The way the blade's ether (what element is that?) hooks into first Jade's, then her own, the resonance shifting to accommodate them, is something she's not sure she could describe to someone else. But's not until he takes form (and okay, everything about that had been weird; she'd thought for a moment that maybe normal blades just looked like that on awakening, except for the part where Jade's side of the emotional bleed hadn't felt like he knew what was going on any more than she did) that things get--

Mythra's never really had to worry about protecting her driver from physical threats - watching his back in a fight, sure, but Jade's more than capable of taking care of himself. Still, the way the emotional bleed feels for that moment, before it's pulled back out of reach, sets her on edge, has her wedging herself into the space between Jade and this new blade protectively. Just in case.

What he says, then, is more confusing than threatening.

"Do you... know him?" she asks, with an uncertain glance back at Jade just in case he knows how the fuck that's possible. This can't be an Aegis, right? Sure, they're close to the tower, and one of them has been missing-presumed-dead for hundreds of years, but... How else would this blade remember?

Jade has several questions. The core crystal. The ether lines. The fact that he seems to have resonated with a blade that is aspected to several elements at once. In fact, the latter might be cause for more than idle curiosity under different circumstances. Jade certainly would like to get acquainted with the fact he has apparent access to all eight elements now.

Instead Jade has to deal with this blade that appears to recognize him, for some Architect-forsaken reason. The blade doesn't look happy, either. Did he murder this one, too?

"Not that I'm aware of," Jade answers Mythra, sharp, as he kills the sickness that bubbles up in his throat and stashes it away out of reach. No matter how many times it happens, he still hates it more and more when someone recognizes him and he can't remember them. The emotion bleed hasn't felt this tight and sick since--

Well. Best not think about that pathetic excuse of a driver.

"Have we met?" Jade asks of his new blade. "Because I certainly don't have the pleasure of remembering such a meeting, as you appear to."

...Right, of course. As powerful as Jade is, he's still only a normal blade.

(Malkuth would surely have allowed him to continue keeping a journal, but who knows how long it's been since then. How many lifetimes? Many, he can just guess, with his gut.)

"...Once," he says carefully, warily still. Ether flickers along the resonance, almost probing, but the initial near violent suspicion has at least died back to something more normal.

But it rankles his sense of fairness, to keep it hidden. Dark blades are still just, just not in the straightforward way that light blades are.

"You offered me a way out of a bad situation with my last driver, and I didn't take you up on it," he continues. A pause, and then -

(Ice is a new kind of truth, hard and cold and almost sterile. He finds he can trust it more easily than light.)

"...Considering that my last driver was also a flesh eater, it's the main reason I didn't gut you where you stand."

Could he have taken Jade of the Crimson Snow? With the element of surprise like that, probably. "Immediately attacking their new driver" is not something anyone would expect a blade to do, and Jade is still close enough to him, even with the other blade in the way, that he wouldn't have had to move much.

And now that Jade is forewarned, the chance that he would win has plummeted nearly to zero, and he knows it. All he can hope is that the blade that offered him a way out of Van's hands, and seemed to respect him all the more for not taking it, is still the same man at his core.

"I... see," Jade says, slowly, as he digests all that. The picture is pretty clear, though. Of course, a driver can be bad in any number of ways, and those ways probably don't involve continuous murder, but a bad driver is a bad driver, full stop.

He loosens his chokehold on the emotion bleed, though he still doesn't feel great, and adjusts his glasses. For all the reasons he's been recognized, though, he supposes this is perhaps the most favorable one.

"I must have left quite an impression on you," Jade comments, lightly, as if the situation this blade has just described could do anything but. Jade's pretty sure if he would be unlikely to forget someone who offered him an out. (There's a reason he's held onto the note Galea wrote him, about flesh eaters, even though he definitely doesn't need it anymore.) "After all, if I'd been you, I likely wouldn't have hesitated."

Well. Mythra's plenty familiar with Jade's idea of a way out. That explains... a lot of things. She doesn't move, but a little of the tension ebbs out of the way she's holding herself - Foresight would warn her if he was planning to attack, anyway.

"He hasn't changed," she tells him, and a hint of something reassuring sneaks its way into the emotional bleed. For Jade? This new blade? She's not really sure, but. It's not like anyone in this resonance can fault him for being on edge, if his last driver had been bad enough for Jade to offer that.

"There was someone I couldn't leave behind," is all he offers in the way of explanation. Someone he couldn't abandon, back then.

Like hell is he going to explain right now, though. His blade may protest that Jade hasn't changed, but Asch is too suspicious by nature (even if his intuition must agree with her, if he accepted the resonance in the first place).

Wait and watch and then judge. That's the smart thing to do.

He sighs, then flicks his attention directly to Mythra. "Assuming Jade needs no further introduction... Asch. And you are?"

That... makes sense, and Mythra nods. It's not like she needed a reminder that the reason they'd been in this forest was a good one, but there's something like pity in her core, or at least understanding.

"Mythra," she says, with a little half wave. "It's... nice to meet you." Even if these are some of the strangest circumstances she can think of to meet anyone under! At least things are a little less tense.

And then, because there are a lot of questions about those circumstances she has the tact not to ask right away but they're still burning at her core, she picks one of the probably-safer ones and asks, "Hey, that thing we found you under... you don't know anything about what it is, do you?"

... Oh, right. Forgive him his single-mindedness there, Mythra, he's still having a very interesting day.

As Asch turns to regard the 'tree,' something other than suspicion and wariness finally creeps into the emotional bleed from him - confusion, at first, and then a mild but growing wonder. There's still something bitter and angry buried at the bottom. Outwardly, Asch regards it with a curious eye, but inwardly, there's another of those quiet almost-pings, likely beneath Jade's notice but Foresight a different story.

Asch trails his hand through the air around the crystalline tree, not bothering to hide his own careful manipulation of the light ether leaving a glowing afterimage of the tips of his fingers. Being in resonance makes it pretty hard to hide what his aspectation actually is, if either of them cares to look, and Jade certainly already has.

"What it is, no," he says finally. He has a suspicion, an inkling, but not enough to confirm even if his gut agrees. "But what it was is almost certainly my last driver's core crystal. After I destroyed it, it must have become this... He was light-aspected, too."

It's reasonably clear where that ore of bitterness comes from, considering how it flares as he talks about his last driver.

He needs no introduction, hm? Well, that's fine. Jade's just happy to know the name of his new blade-- and he's glad Asch's wariness has abated, at least some. Not that he can blame Asch for the wariness. Jade knows he is not the kindest of people, nor is he exactly the best of drivers.

He's grateful Mythra asks about the tree, too. It was going to drive him bonkers. He's also quite pleased to discover Asch is also somewhat clueless on the matter. Maybe it is an anomaly, and not something Jade's just forgotten. That would be nice.

He tucks away the knowledge Asch has presented -- a driver, dead, a core crystal, destroyed. Laughably small puzzle pieces, all things considered, but the understanding Jade has of Asch becomes a little clearer, nonetheless.

(If Citan had had a core crystal to smash, Jade would have in an instant.

He supposes eating the heart is just as thorough, though.)

"I had no idea core crystals could even become such a thing," Jade comments, still itching for more information. He steps towards the crystalline tree to consider it closer, examining it with a touch of his own ether. It's not very enlightening without any context, but he tucks the readings away for later. "Though if you have no idea how or why it became like this, I suppose there's no reason to stand around staring at it all day. We can always ask the others if they've seen anything like this, when we return home."

Jade cannot proclaim to read Asch's thoughts -- not yet, anyway, and perhaps not for a long time -- but he would understand if Asch didn't want to remain long by such a reminder of his previous driver, considering.

Edited 2020-05-17 06:59 (UTC)

That bitterness flares, and suddenly Mythra's a little more glad that Jade beat her to trying to resonate with Asch's core crystal. She watches him mess with the tree's ether, rather than say anything about it, even if she really wants to know how he's doing any of this. At least he should get a little more time to acclimate before either of them pester him about it.

"I bet they haven't, either," she says, perking up a bit at the mention of home. "None of them get out often enough. But..." She tucks that idea away quickly, before more than a wisp of her grief can hit the emotional bleed.

(It might be nice, though, to have a physical memorial of some kind for Poppi. Maybe she'll talk to Myyah and Anna about it, when they do get home.)

"We could keep going," she says, instead of thinking about it, but it's more of a question directed at Jade. This... doesn't call for a change to their plans, right? If Mythra has to walk that excuse for a path again without anything actually coming of it, she might scream. And they do need the Aegis's help, for any of this to work.

He's largely indifferent to their plans, though that doesn't mean that Asch isn't listening. His attention to them is keen, enough to be felt in the emotional bleed, as he all too gladly moves away from the 'tree' and out to the edge of the clearing around it.

Mythra's not wrong that he needs to get his bearings. There's a small informational ping across the resonance that neither of them should really object to - just a measure of their ether levels - and he goes through the process of stretching out his shoulders as he goes through the data. Mythra's easily Fende-class, probably Curtiss-class, and Jade was Curtiss-class when he was just a normal blade.

The ether in this resonance could probably destroy a small town without breaking too much of a sweat. The one good thing about having a flesh eater for a driver is that he's never going to have to worry about overwhelming a human driver and triggering ether poisoning if he goes all out.

(He never has gone all out, doesn't really know where his own power stops and where he would have to start drawing off Jade. Van had a destructive mindset, but he was too subtle to need literal destruction most of the time Asch can actually remember.)

"What's the date?" he throws over his shoulder. As far as getting his bearings goes, that's a pretty damn important starting place.

soup! soup! soup! soup!

tastes a bit shit

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(frozen comment) mithos this wasnt even the problem we wanted you hear to solve

(frozen comment) whoops!!!

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backstory discussions round 2 go

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sneaks in two months later

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