Cross Effects > Areas
Great Dojo
YOLF:
Orcus
He raises his eyebrows at her, and his hood doesn't hide the cautious wonder. He vanished it before sparring, so they could look upon his face and know his will unclouded. But polish a blade well enough, and it might show your own face, and only you control what picture it forms. Put a mirror in front of a mirror, though, and what do they show?
"An unusual course," Orcus says, twirling the blunt practice sword. The primal peers down at her, lips curling. "People do not traditionally seek heroes. Heroes come to answer their need. You can call me Orcus, Yuzu."
The young ones - and the old, but young in potential - raise their heads in their direction, one by one, glimmering with curiosity.
(Orcus counts them.)
Magery:
--- Quote from: YOLF on January 03, 2021, 03:22:12 PM ---Orcus
He raises his eyebrows at her, and his hood doesn't hide the cautious wonder. He vanished it before sparring, so they could look upon his face and know his will unclouded. But polish a blade well enough, and it might show your own face, and only you control what picture it forms. Put a mirror in front of a mirror, though, and what do they show?
"An unusual course," Orcus says, twirling the blunt practice sword. The primal peers down at her, lips curling. "People do not traditionally seek heroes. Heroes come to answer their need. You can call me Orcus, Yuzu."
The young ones - and the old, but young in potential - raise their heads in their direction, one by one, glimmering with curiosity.
(Orcus counts them.)
--- End quote ---
Kakura Yuzu
"Well, that's just silly," she says, pouting up at Orcus with ingénue innocence (and isn't that interesting, doesn't that say something, when a girl stands before chaos looking so perfectly poised for plundering, like Red Riding Hood before the Wolf). Her long white sleeves rustle pleasantly as she tosses a couple of jaunty waves at a student here and there; a giant of a man with thighs thicker than her waist and a ruddy-cheeked dwarf whose beard is spun through with a king's ransom in jewellery. They wave back, a little hesitantly at first as if they had to be startled into familiarity, but it's clear they recognise her in the end: perhaps they'd just needed to be reminded by the shape of her smile. "Any villain worth their salt knows that the hero is coming—that it's best to seek them out and establish the rules of the game before somebody has an unfortunate accident—and is not villainy the second-oldest tradition in the world?"
(The oldest, of course, is something far too uncouth for such a youthful flower to discuss in the company of a stranger).
Then she blushes in embarrassment, her cheeks flushed red like poppies—ah, so that's the sweet scent drifting faintly from her hair, how familiar.
"N-Not that I'm saying I'm a villain, it was just an example, oh, how frightful!" She hides her face in her palms, slender fingers arrayed across her skin like the legs of a porcelain spider—no, just like a shy girl who's made a fool of herself, a spider is much too sinister to describe this Kakura Yuzu. "Please forgive me, Mr. Orcus. I'm being quite silly. I wanted to come here and see what all the fuss was about, but I happened to catch a glimpse of your sword and it was so impressive I had to ask if I could feel it for myself!"
A pause.
One of the students—the foxgirl with the tattoo—giggles behind her hand.
Kakura Yuzu turns from a girl wearing a blush to a blush wearing a girl as she stutters and stumbles over her words, hands flailing almost hypnotically as she nearly whacks Orcus on the nose with her wooden switch. "No I didn't mean it like that please stop laughing!"
Naturally, this only makes their audience laugh even harder until even the high, flat wooden roof above is trembling with the sound of their joy.
(How terribly embarrassing).
YOLF:
Orcus
The smell of poppies... seems strangely an old home (not one's own), and freshly made bread. It is evocative, but not intimate. Can one feel nostalgia for the things one has never taken the time to appreciate, long for remembered images of sweet times that never happened, and ache as though it was their own past on display in a beautiful case? Kakura Yuzu seems to think so.
Orcus likes poppies, possibly. He did not come back for poppies. An unnameable eon fighting through innumerable spawns of chaos with no true company but yourself places some things in perspective.
"Clever and funny," Orcus says, smiling in good nature and content bemusement. "If not a villain, it seems I have the pleasure of meeting a rare and lovable flower. And no villain would stumble at such a decisive time, of course. There's no need to apologize."
He holds out his hand, and instead of a vulgar, forgettable practice sword, a devilish blade coalesces from a bleak trail of mist. The warrior wets his lips. "Is this the sword you would like to hold?"
The handle fits perfectly between Yuzu's fingers, and the weight settles, like a perfectly balanced lump of steel. The whole weapon is black and polished, but she cannot see her face on it. It is clouded on the inside, like the other face of a thin glass separating a warm hearth from the wind of Winter. The gloom roves and rolls like a living thing, damascus patterns slithering. It is every metal that ever was, and none of them. It should not exist.
Magery:
--- Quote from: YOLF on January 05, 2021, 01:14:58 AM ---Orcus
The smell of poppies... seems strangely an old home (not one's own), and freshly made bread. It is evocative, but not intimate. Can one feel nostalgia for the things one has never taken the time to appreciate, long for remembered images of sweet times that never happened, and ache as though it was their own past on display in a beautiful case? Karura Yuzu seems to think so.
Orcus likes poppies, possibly. He did not come back for poppies. An unnameable eon fighting through innumerable spawns chaos with no true company but yourself places some things in perspective.
"Clever and funny," Orcus says, smiling in good nature and content bemusement. "If not a villain, it seems I have the pleasure of meeting a rare and lovable flower. And no villain would stumble at such a decisive time, of course. There's no need to apologize."
He holds out his hand, and instead of a vulgar, forgettable practice sword, a devilish blade coalesces from a bleak trail of mist. The warrior wets his lips. "Is this the sword you would like to hold?"
The handle fits perfectly between Yuzu's fingers, and the weight settles, like a perfectly balanced lump of steel. The whole weapon is black and polished, but she cannot see her face on it. It is clouded on the inside, like the other face of a thin glass separating a warm hearth from the wind of Winter. The gloom roves and rolls like a living thing, damascus patterns slithering. It is every metal that ever was, and none of them. It should not exist.
--- End quote ---
Kakura Yuzu
Her eyes sparkle like sapphires cast in sunlight, and for a moment she actually bounces in place, the lovely silver mandala hanging on a cord around her neck swaying with the rhythm of her joy. If you look closely, you might notice that the shadow it casts never actually seems to move—a dark, bruiselike thing flat above her sternum—but no doubt that's just a trick of the light, or maybe an awkward girl's best attempt at a practical joke. Either way, it's much less important than the way she peers with childlike curiosity at Orcus' blade, head turning this way and that way like a sparrow darting between piles of seed as she studies the... well, let's call it steel just to make things easier.
(She's not much less reserved than their audience, either, who seem to split between expressions of amazement, gasps of amazement, and in the dwarf's case an eyes-rolling-back fall into unconscious amazement).
"It's so pretty!" From somewhere, she pulls out a blank paper tag and starts scribbling notes in what is either a complex code or a foreign language, stroke after stroke forming things that are not quite pictograms but not quite letters either. How she is doing this with one hand while also holding the sword with the other is not important—don't worry about it! "This is the least real thing I've seen in years—oh, how truly wonderful!"
For a little while there is no other sound other than the floorboards creaking beneath her as she vibrates with excitement, flitting around the sword (which is now hanging suspended in the air like an awkward question) and covering tag after tag with that same lovely, flowing script. Occasionally her eyes flick to Orcus as if to reassure herself he's still humouring her, her mouth too busy to ask (too busy to smile!) as she chatters on and on about her latest fascination: the sevenfold curves of the hilt, the twelve different blades, the samsara script decorating the "steel", and all the other things that it does not have and are not true.
Eventually, she stops, shaking out her left hand as if chasing away writing cramps, and looks up at Orcus the same way a grandmother might when asking a grandson for help disentangling these horribly overcomplicated newfangled computers.
"Mr. Orcus, you have a truly wonderful lie here," and note how she no longer calls it a sword, that's important, pay attention, "so could you please kill me with it? I really have to know what that feels like!"
YOLF:
Orcus
He studies her as she studies it, rubbing his chin. Orcus scans every single character she writes, and how they come together, flow from one to the other in unreal metric and grammar. He pauses at the shine in her eyes, mouth thinning, and something unwinds. A spark of disbelief lights a flame of recognition.
The sword looks different from how he pulled it out. It doesn't matter. His eyes have narrowed into slits in the time it took for her to finish, when she poses her request.
Orcus contemplates Yuzu's face perhaps like one contemplates a senile grandmother, and then he cracks, laughing like a child from the pit of his belly. His olympian shoulders shake ungracefully as he tosses his head back through the delighted sound. Everyone else holds breathlessly in astonishment. As he winds down at last, some seconds or maybe minutes later, still holding his stomach while a grin splits his face, he raises a finger to a milimeter from her lips and speaks.
"On one condition. You must tell me everything about it."
He takes up Chaosbringer, and it is only an instant. It is raised, glinting at the lie in front of him, and then it is no longer there. A black streak darts past the small crowd, and a brutal crunch skewers the neck of the butterfly-tattooed foxgirl.
There's no sound in the aftermath, and no blood spraying from the wound, only ink and vapor. "How is it?" Orcus asks, lowering his throwing arm.
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