Cross Effects > Areas

Great Dojo

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Magery:

--- Quote from: YOLF on January 05, 2021, 12:39:41 PM ---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.

--- End quote ---

...Kakura Yuzu?

"Wonderful," says the dwarf lying supine on the floor, pressing her hands together as if offering prayers to a shrine. "Simply irresistable. Like lightning down your spine and fire blazing in your marrow. Oh, you've killed so many people, Mr. Orcus!"

She gets up and there's no shift, no blur, no cackling kaleidoscope, she's just—she's just always been Kakura Yuzu, or at least always had the shape of the thing that Orcus sees when he looks at Kakura Yuzu. The foxgirl is still twitching around the sword, tattoo weeping tears of ink and bare feet scrabbling against the wall she's pinned against; the witch is humming some sort of song as she dances with the dark-skinned giant, the two of them twirling around in hilarious contrast given one of his hands swallows the whole of her waist. Nobody else seems to have noticed there's anything amiss—some are even applauding Orcus' throw, as if he didn't just try to murder something beautiful.

"I really must know something, though." There are two swords sheathed on her hip, now, the tips of their glittering golden hilts painstakingly carved into the shapes of smiling foxes. But her hands are nowhere near them—they are clasped politely before her belly, the very picture of a patient petitioner. The perfect paint across her fingernails—a black so dark it swallows your eyes when you look too close—stands in stark contrast to the startlingly innocent white of her skin. The same jewellry the dwarf was never wearing is set across her hair until she sparkles beneath the warm light of the dojo's torches. "Why?"

She cocks her head to the side, quizzical as a baby bird upon spotting a delicious worm. Her ears perk up, curling proudly until they seem to be aping a devil's horns rather than a fox's ears.

"Why?" she repeats. "What dreadful purpose moves you, Mr. Orcus, that you bear such a marvellous thing?"

YOLF:
Orcus

The primal's eyes flirt with the madness that has revealed itself around him. His smile is no longer wide and loud, but cutting and appraising. Orcus does not bother to ask when her little play began. To some experiences, and some beings, there is no meaningful difference between reality and dream.

"Why, mmm." It tastes rather tart, the inquiry itself, but his brows become lighter in fascination. "To find what is worth refining, to sort that which is to be used, from that which justifies its own survival. Battle is the best way to do these things. I enjoy them, and so did someone I miss very much. I hope to see him again."

He chuckles into the back of his hand. "You're well acquainted with matters of questioning, aren't you, Yuzu?"

Magery:

--- Quote from: YOLF on January 08, 2021, 04:51:51 AM ---Orcus

The primal's eyes flirt with the madness that has revealed itself around him. His smile is no longer wide and loud, but cutting and appraising. Orcus does not bother to ask when her little play began. To some experiences, and some beings, there is no meaningful difference between reality and dream.

"Why, mmm." It tastes rather tart, the inquiry itself, but his brows become lighter in fascination. "To find what is worth refining, to sort that which is to be used, from that which justifies its own survival. Battle is the best way to do these things. I enjoy them, and so did someone I miss very much. I hope to see him again."

He chuckles into the back of his hand. "You're well acquainted with matters of questioning, aren't you, Yuzu?"

--- End quote ---

Kakura Yuzu

She frowns.

It is devastatingly lovely, like roses scattered across a grave: her eyes narrow, her lips press together, her ears droop, and each piece of the performance is enough to make angels weep in sympathy. She seems—not disappointed, exactly, something closer to the feeling where you weren't expecting something to happen and it doesn't happen and even so you can't help feeling a little betrayed. One perfect step back lets her meet his gaze without needing to raise her chin any longer, her neck no longer exposed in salacious invitation. But then the expression passes like fog before the morning sun of her smile and it's like she never frowned at all.

"I am but a humble maiden who sometimes presumes to offer advice in matters above her station, my lord." There's something strange about her voice, if you take a moment to really listen. She's speaking a language that's well-cut, tonal, all snare-drum syllables and easy shifts in inflection, and each word flows from her mouth as easily as they must have from the branches of the first apple tree. From her, it is beauty, but it doesn't mean anything. Or perhaps it may to some, but it is not some universal language of truth. Just the childhood tongue of a wandering girl. And yet, somehow, you know what she is saying. You know what she means, how she's shifted into a more formal, courtly register all the way down to the pecularities of the grammar. Don't worry—it's not a cause for concern. One should expect that a simple shrine maiden who meanders the countryside to offer succour to the suffering is able to speak to them. That's just how the story goes. "If I may request your forebearance for a moment, however, you have not answered my question."

The witch and the dancing giant twirl past her in a flurry of robes and she absent-mindedly hums along to a few bars of their song before seeming to realise her rudeness and pressing her palms together in apology (when did she move them from her belly to hang loosely at her hips?). Behind her, the twitching foxgirl still impaled like the butterfly she wears on her cheek has pulled out a shamisen and is strumming it in time to the drip-drip-drip rhythm of her ink-dark blood on the dojo's floor. Some of the other students are nodding along; others are clapping their hands; a few have stood up and are marvelling at the smooth lines of Orcus' sword and the obscene way it's plunged so deeply into the pale flesh of her neck.

"To find what is worth refining is what you are," Yuzu says, now waggling a finger at him—and isn't this hilarious, isn't this wonderful, that this moon-mad child thinks to know the Lord of Chaos better than he knows himself. "You have answered me as a sword would, my lord: I cut, therefore I am. But why do you cut? What hands lay upon your blade? What breath exults your lungs? What purpose has your destination—what destination has your purpose? Surely a star of your prominence has greater reason to shine than the fact it is a star."

In the background, the twang of the shamisen ripples across the shuffles of hands and feet and robes and cloth.

YOLF:
Orcus

He feels it as one feels the sun sink beneath the horizon in the dreary grasp of remorseless Autumn, even indoors. Tranquility slipping like a blade from a slick sheath, evidenced in the shift of Yuzu's tone, in the different form of address. But his expression is bright, the color of his face reflecting the flush of genial inspiration, as though he has seized a slippery piece of a rewarding but opaque puzzle.

Orcus flicks his wrist, as casually as it is confident, and his blade wrenches itself free of the foxgirl's neck, drawing a spray of ink through the air. It lands fondly into his hand, fingers wrapping around the grip, and he looks down on the edge while running a careful finger over the stained (preposterous, blasphemous, how could this irrational substance be that which is stained and not the liquid that has spilled on it?) not-steel.

Who could be certain of the way the clouds would turn? Who could forsee every whim of the wind as surely as the mood of a sibling by the curl of their brow? A person would sooner suffer the most absurd of deaths in human imagination before lightning fell at her feet to the demand. She would sooner predict rightly the day, hour and instant of her death than know ahead of time which meetings in this vast universe were inevitable and which were merely luck. Much the same was the truth beneath Orcus. Unverifiable, unfathomable, and undistinguishable from coincidence. But a few beings always exist of the kind that can wait for the collapse of fate to unravel its secrets.

"You are not easily driven astray, nor smitten by challenges," he says, eyes lidded contemplatively, lips pursed tight between breaths. Then he looks at her, through her, into the hall of cracked mirrors within. "So I shall confide in you a secret. The reason is that I wish to see a friend again."

Magery:

--- Quote from: YOLF on January 11, 2021, 08:34:32 PM ---Orcus

He feels it as one feels the sun sink beneath the horizon in the dreary grasp of remorseless Autumn, even indoors. Tranquility slipping like a blade from a slick sheath, evidenced in the shift of Yuzu's tone, in the different form of address. But his expression is bright, the color of his face reflecting the flush of genial inspiration, as though he has seized a slippery piece of a rewarding but opaque puzzle.

Orcus flicks his wrist, as casually as it is confident, and his blade wrenches itself free of the foxgirl's neck, drawing a spray of ink through the air. It lands fondly into his hand, fingers wrapping around the grip, and he looks down on the edge while running a careful finger over the stained (preposterous, blasphemous, how could this irrational substance be that which is stained and not the liquid that has spilled on it?) not-steel.

Who could be certain of the way the clouds would turn? Who could forsee every whim of the wind as surely as the mood of a sibling by the curl of their brow? A person would sooner suffer the most absurd of deaths in human imagination before lightning fell at her feet to the demand. She would sooner predict rightly the day, hour and instant of her death than know ahead of time which meetings in this vast universe were inevitable and which were merely luck. Much the same was the truth beneath Orcus. Unverifiable, unfathomable, and undistinguishable from coincidence. But a few beings always exist of the kind that can wait for the collapse of fate to unravel its secrets.

"You are not easily driven astray, nor smitten by challenges," he says, eyes lidded contemplatively, lips pursed tight between breaths. Then he looks at her, through her, into the hall of cracked mirrors within. "So I shall confide in you a secret. The reason is that I wish to see a friend again."

--- End quote ---

"Oh, my lord, you shouldn't have."

Behold the very picture of a bashful maiden, hiding her face behind a glittering, gilt-and-pearl fan. Her eyes are downcast, shy as a shadow before the sun, her shoulders set demurely so that the whole of her body seems smaller than usual as if she's embarrassed simply to be seen. Behind her, even the dancers have stilled, the giant setting the witch gently on the floor so that they can press their palms together and bow to Orcus as if giving thanks to the gods themselves. The shamisen still warbles out, sharp as a lover's nails against the ear, but the foxgirl is presently being pampered by the crush of students, hands with three and seven and no fingers at all carefully stitching her head back onto her neck. A scene straight out of any faerie's mad revel, something Orcus has seen ten thousand times before.

(No wonder, then, that it's her words that linger far longer than this vision of bacchanalia, sitting somewhere in the hollow of the chest the way prophecy does.)

"I do truly love secrets," she continues. "You honour me."

She snaps the fan away, and then she was never holding a fan at all—how old the trick, now, how boringly mundane, how commonly seen. But she must know that too, you can see it in the cracks in the corners of her eyes, so why does she keep doing it?—instead settling her hands behind her back and smiling up at Orcus' imposing jawline, well-framed by the brilliant, blooming cornfields of his impressively long hair.

"Would you tell me about your friend, Mr. Orcus? To have touched the heart of one of your kaleidoscopic radiance—oh, please, I simply must know who they are!"

(She says are, not were, are, like it's not even a question. An assumption? A kindness? A reflection? A truth? You must know by now that it is all of these at once.)

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