EVENT: Battle Against the Kishin Adachi

[soul_mods]

Characters: Anyone who signed up for Mission 254
Location: Matsue City, Japan
Rating: PG13
Time: September 11th
Description: It's time to bring down the Kishin Adachi, once and for all!



Matsue was once a lovely city and a nice place for tourists to visit.

It is now a ghost town.

Some lucky citizens had managed to escape the city before things got really bad, but they are the minority. Even fewer still are those who stayed and are still alive.

Most of them are dead, or worse, they had been driven mad by the Madness the Kishin Adachi exuded and killed their fellow citizens and consumed their souls, becoming Kishin Eggs. To make matters worse, sometimes when you're fighting you'll hear the distant rattling of chains and some primal part of your soul knows, something wicked this way comes.

And then there's all the Yellow Fog...

Only those who persevere will make it to their final destination: the Adachi Art Museum where Adachi is.

It will not be an easy fight, but in order to prevent the fate of this city from befalling on another, everyone will need to try.

((OOC: Please indicate in the subject: Character || OPEN/CLOSED. There will be a separate thread for encountering Adachi. Event information is here.))

Comments

[vintage_magic]

Lily imagined the horror she felt at the revelations must have been akin to what Bluebeard's wife felt upon opening door of the forbidden room.

"...You were just using me?"

Was it really as she had worried about in the beginning after all? Why she had hesitated to get involved with him for so long. The idea that like that psychic back in Geneva, he might have just been interested in her for her powers and how it might benefit him, rather than for herself. After all they had been through, the idea hurt. She looked between the Shadow and the original, eyes sad with tears that it was impossible for a witch to shed.

Yet even after the Shadow's confessions of wrongdoing, she couldn't deny that she would have been sad if Lezard were to be sent away by that contraption, back to his ruined world, to his death.

But what was this...? He couldn't stand the idea of her hating him? Despite the Shadow's claim, she felt like a fool. Otherwise, she wouldn't have been in an alleyway surrounded by skeletal monsters and clinging to Lezard's sleeve, desperately hoping it was some nightmare and that things would be okay again. Why didn't she just run away, abandon him?

"Why should you care if I hate you? You seemed to care little of people, always hiding away with your books."

[lezard_valeth]

"I thought the same, at first. Lily Ivory is just another. Gather the souls, become a Deathscythe and continue research on the war and both sides with the power to protect myself from them all. I would merely watch as both sides destroyed each other, and then I would swoop down and take what knowledge they'd gathered. The knowledge of golems, what it is that births the Sway of Magic in young witches, makes them mad..."

"But rather than discard me or strike me as others have, you 'put up with me', as the saying goes. You showed me a patience I hadn't yet known, and as time passed, my resolve to use you lessened. I would instead work with you... protect you, as your partner. You were something I never could and still cannot understand. You wield great powers but fight to hide them rather than embrace them, live as a woman with no Sway. You've a passion for the past, of ones happier than your own, a rich culture that intrigues me. You're strange, Lily Ivory, with your idioms, and stranger still for becoming friends with me... even feeling the way you do - or perhaps in past tense now - for me."

"I woke up one morning, long ago, and realized that I adored the passion, the culture, the strangeness, the idioms and the stubbornness. When I transformed, when I pulled magic from my soul, it was to guard you rather than use you. Lenneth stopped crossing my mind completely as it had day after day. Instead it was you, a fact that perplexed and angered me at first. But, it grew into something I accepted."

The Shadow clutched his stomach as he laughed, his face bright red for once, flushed with the pleasure of the truth. "Ha ha ha ha! Lezard Valeth had fallen in love again, in another doomed world! And so I hid and I hid and I hid. A man with bloodied hands in the name of one failed love can't possibly start over again!"

Lezard stepped around to leave the scene, but was met with one of the Bone Warriors raising his blade and pressing it to his throat. The man sighed and shrugged with a devil-may-care manner. "You presume love pains me, that I'm weak."

"You ARE weak." The Shadow then began to thin, cheek bones sinking inward and his frame shrinking. He began to look malnourished, then almost deathly starved. The cloak, the fine clothes began to darken, build dust and tatter. The Shadow looked so much older now, haggard.

"You are vulnerable without your magic. It has left you susceptible to pain. To fear. You would once laugh in the face of gods themselves, at Hel herself, but you fear the end of the war. You fear the pain of the calamity claiming you. You fear the pain of Lily Ivory turning her back on you when she finds out just what you've done. You had always said you needed her... but the word 'need' can change in so many ways. Funny, how that works."

[vintage_magic]

"You were lonely, weren't you? I can understand that feeling." She had been shunned by so many back in her hometown, abandoned by her father, rejected even by her own mother. In that way, they were the same. "Maybe that's why I put up with you even though you irritated me and tried my patience in the beginning. I knew what it was like to be without friends."

So, he really had fallen in love with her for herself if the Shadow was to believed... Although she was torn on how to feel about it now that she had the details of his past. It was a heavy accusation but redemption wasn't necessarily impossible. He had protected her many times, fought the numerous demons plaguing this world. Even if they hadn't managed to rescue everyone in each case, they had prevented demons from adding to their lists of victims.

Lily let out a cry when the skeletal monster pressed the sword to his throat. "Lezard, stop! Are you trying to get yourself killed?!" She threw her arms around his waist from behind in an attempt to pull him back. The Shadow was beginning to distort as hers had in the foggy tunnel but this one seemed to be decaying, a gruesome approximation of what the sorcerer might look like as a corpse. "Kanji said if you deny your Shadow, it'll turn into a monster and attack you!"

"It's okay to be scared." Her voice trembled as did the arms around him. "I reckon I've been just as scared here, knowing the people here don't cotton to witches. Or worrying what my friends would think if they knew about the folks I accidentally killed in Jarod. People can change and even if you did something wrong in the past, I can't just hate you after everything that's happened between us."

[lezard_valeth]

"Fear is disallowed in Midgard. The cowards, those that shiver in the smallest corners they can fit their bodies into are the ones that die first, and those that doubt themselves."

But Lezard actually took a step back, feeling those arms straining around his middle. He looked back, his expression passive. Perhaps he didn't believe her, or he'd fought to keep everything in check when everything he'd guarded was spread out in the open. He couldn't 'no matter' this like he could back home.

"I've committed acts that mark me for death by the gods themselves. I've been branded the most dangerous mortal being in my world. To feel hate for me is natural, Miss Ivory."

[vintage_magic]

"But this isn't Midgard," she pointed out. "You've said yourself that world was destroyed."

"I won't say I'm not disappointed at the things you did in your world and hurt that you tried to hide those things from me." The witch frowned seeing that passive look—was he still trying to hide things from her?—but didn't let go.

"But if you realize now that you were wrong, doesn't that mean you can try to make amends? Or do you intend to just go on hating yourself for it? Because it sounds to me you don't like yourself very much right now."

[lezard_valeth]

"Murderers cannot make amends. They died for nothing, in the wake of Lenneth's failure to defeat Loki. I was foolish to presume she would succeed, a beacon against Loki's cowardice and anger." So there was some self-loathing, it seemed.

"Hate myself? Ha! Quite the opposite..."

"You hate yourself now because you are powerless, just as you were powerless to save Lenneth even at full strength. I'm you, after all. You are a husk of your former self. Your magic made you. Now it unmakes you."

"Then you suppose I'm disappointed in myself."

"Such gentle wording. Do you intend to deny me?"

"And turn you into a monstrosity? No. We've better things to do than fight my own personal 'demons'. Are you quite finished?"

The Shadow gave them what could only best be described as a Stink Eye. Lezard sighed, adjusting his glasses.

"How does one 'accept' their Shadow, Miss Ivory? Simply tell it, yes, you're right?"

[vintage_magic]

"No, I suppose you can't change the past, especially with your world gone. Nothing will bring back those you killed, just as nothing could bring back the townsfolk who died from the snakes in my world." She couldn't help thinking of what Kanji had told her back in the foggy tunnel. "But that doesn't mean you can't repent and try to move on and become a better person instead of continuing to hate and punish yourself."

She couldn't help a tiny flinch when the Shadow looked at them. It was already halfway to becoming a monstrosity with its withered form and worn clothes.

"I guess you have to acknowledge that what it says is true. That it really is part of you."

[lezard_valeth]

It sounded so simple. Perhaps he ought stop shuffling his feet on the matter.

"...Then I suppose you're right. I failed Lenneth and found no solution that would reverse what happened. My hard work, my research, all I've done was for naught and it left me in self-loathing; to succeed in so many things before, only to fail here. It was something I couldn't fathom. I feel I am weak here, and 'weakness' is a word I refuse to accept into my vocabulary. I have a strength here, a strength I gain with my partner. But I suppose 'partner' isn't quite accurate right now, is it? It feels inadequate."

Lezard shrugged. "Lily Ivory, I feel, is something like my other half. Through our butting heads, I've come to learn much from her, that someone like me can indeed find alternative strengths and rise above what is expected of those of my ilk. I've committed unspeakable crimes; I've failed because of them. I do not tolerate failure, much less of myself, and will bolster my knowledge and power through my own means. There is always the opportunity to find new methods to achieve the best results, rather than the archaic 'tried and true'."

The Shadow slackened, sighed, and seemed content. With a careless shrug, he dissolved into a blue light and was gone.

[vintage_magic]

Lezard's Shadow vanished and Lily let out a little sigh of her own, a mix between relieved and exasperated.

"Now, you're making it sound like we're married. It's nice to know you think of me that way but it would have helped if you admitted some of this earlier instead of waiting until you were being threatened with decapitation by your double's minions." Was he trying to give her gray hairs?

Although she could see why he'd hide his past. If he'd been forthcoming about it early on, she'd likely have wanted little more to do with him and turned from him as he feared. But instead, he'd managed to worm his way into her soul. She wouldn't abandon him now. Still...

"And I reckon we're going to have to have a talk after we're out of this fog." It was going to take a bit of time for things to sink in and for her to sort out her feelings.

But for now, they had to get back on track. She looked around, checking to see if the skeletal warriors that had accompanied the Shadow had disappeared too.

[lezard_valeth]

The warriors had bowed out, fading with the Shadow. What remained was just the two of them and the fog, thinner now than before.

And the rattle of chains.

"Understood." Lezard turned and began his transformation.

"I'll begin the detection for the souls of other pairs. The Shadow's interference clearing seems to have cleared some of the fog as well."

[vintage_magic]

"Land sakes. Not that chain rattling menace again." It looked like she had some more running to do. At least, the better visibility would help.

Book in hand again, she reached for his soul, whatever hesitation she might have felt chased away by the rattle of chains. Neither of them were going to go home with a bullet wound if she could help it. Not even waiting for the familiar bond to fully form again, Lily took off, moving away from the sound.