onepassingnight | Our planet found peace through death

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Our planet found peace through death

The desert is hot, a dry heat begging for relief, at least a drink. The world is turned to sand and dust, broken only by the dim, hazy horizon. Dust even coats the objects carefully uncovered and laid out, almost as quickly as they're brushed off. Even this deep pit, dug too well to be natural, provides scant shelter.

Lethe's scarves and veils keep her from breathing dust, even if they result in the eerie impression of a shroud. She works carefully at one corner of the dig, where she's patiently unearthing a small object. When it's free, she meticulously brushes away the dust and dirt.

"Come closer," she invites, "And see something from a place that was lost."

(ooc: not quite evented, though bad luck may show as things go wrong at the dig. feel free to find artifacts not just from her world, but from the other character's world as well.)

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"Understood." There's no more to say, and no love lost between them. Lethe focuses her attacks on the drones, but though they provide an impressive blast, the things keep coming. Too quickly. Even with the power from Galaxia's bracelets behind her, she isn't destroying them quickly, as she'd hoped.

"Galactica Myosotis Alpestris!"

She has a cold feeling down her neck.

The Watchers attempt to fly to the back of the group upon reading the senshi's growing energy signature, leaving the Knights shieldless -- and vulnerable to their attacks.

The Spartan's rounds pierce the head of one of them. It falls and dematerializes -- and its' companion bolts forward. The Master Chief grapples the arm of the machine and hurls it to the ground, firing against it. He turns.

One is coming toward Lethe. He tries firing against the threat before it reaches her.

He- was protecting her? Even briefly, even for all the obvious practical reasons, it surprises her that he would do it.

Before she can say anything, though, another of the group bolts towards her. Unlike the Spartan, she doesn't have the strength to grapple with them. Light flares and flashes as she fires off her attacks at every opportunity, but she's becoming exhausted. There are tears along the hem of her dress, and they show the broken skin of her injuries.

The Spartan attempts to bolt towards Lethe, driven by an instinct to protect his teammates, former enemies or no. He attempts to continue his fire to drop its' personal shields and destroy it.

John hated her. But if someone was on his side, he protected her.

The massive figure blurs several meters away -- And flanks him along with the other one.

Atop Lethe, the Spartan holds the blaster in his left hand, and the light rifle on his right, staring at both of them. He doesn't look down to Lethe, but the need is evident.

Stand up. Or we're both dead.

But she doesn't stand up. The wounds make her stagger, and she misses her aim- and then it's all over, with a sudden searing pain that leaves a shocked expression on her face as her whole body stiffens in its suffering.

She gives a terrible gurgle, a hoarse cry that takes no shape or form, and then falls back to the ground, dizzily, shakily, barely breathing.

It feels... as though it ripped right through her body, clean through to the other side.

Lethe's vitals flatline. The Master Chief looks at the red silhouettes of his enemies behind his HUD. He was running low on munitions.

They were surrounding him. One of them was enough trouble as it, but two of them wasn't a fight he thought he could win. They were too fast, and too armed to fight them effectively.

He readies... But they freeze in place.

With their purpose accomplished, the lights in their shapes vanish into sterility. The orange glow of their eyes and limbs disappears, and slowly kneel back to their inert, sleeping existence.

The giant sphere's edges give a stronger glow. Its' humming shakes even the sands several kilometers around them... And the glow slowly turns into a familiar shade of blue.

It slowly opens. The Spartan aims... and lowers his weapon.

Mercury steps forward. She does not seem horrified by the blasted body, the broken frame of a fallen soldier. She barely spares a look for the scene of carnage, and equally ignores the man still present. Rather than any of this, she has eyes only for a small object left in the dust: a glimmering crystal.

As she straightens up with the prize in her hand, the sun glints off a golden bracer on her wrist. Then, her eyes finally fall on John. Almost as though taunting him for the loss of the girl who'd been here a moment before, she praises him.

"Galaxia-sama will appreciate your gift."

Edited 2012-06-29 11:39 (UTC)

It takes the Spartan too long to tighten back the hold of his weapon. John refuses to believe what he is seeing. Between the body that was taken, the corpse of Lethe, and the evidence of the Star Seeds he had heard from Nehelenia... Anger takes over.

Galaxia corrupted her. Took over her like the Gravemind.

He takes a stance. His eyes take note of the new item. The golden bracer. What worries him the most is the aura around Mercury.

It's even blacker than usual. The watery sight of it resembles oil -- polluted water. He had some trouble coming close to Mercury after he developed a sense for the supernatural. But now he feels an unnatural shiver when he's close to her.

Mercury is lost.

"You told me you would kill her."

The hand at her side makes a fist, clenching the crystal safely, and Mercury tilts her head. The air is cold and frigid now, as though the desert of Lethe is nothing but a distant memory.

"I will bring the sailor crystal to her," she says simply, at once negating any idea that she might ever have said such a thing as a vow to see Galaxia dead. The suggestion that it had been otherwise is brushed aside easily, in her current state.

Edited 2012-06-29 12:01 (UTC)

"You told me." He presses. "You would kill her."

It's not the fact he vowed to kill her regardless of how out of league she was against the entity, but that she would oppose Galaxia until the very end. This is not Mercury.

"You vowed to stop her."

"I'll be leaving first."

There's no pause, not even so much as a flicker of recognition or doubt. Instead, as if his protests are no more than a monotonous tedium, leaving no impression, Mercury begins to walk away. She already has what she must have come for, the precious crystal, and John has none for her to take.

She has no memory of such words at all. She has no memory before awakening as a newly reborn senshi calling upon Galaxia with powers usurped from Mercury. She is Galaxia's mud puppet.

Her eyes do see the aftermath of the earlier battles, all the signs of chaos and death, but once again she treats them impassively, deliberately stepping over the debris in her path without even glancing downward. Once, she steps over a fallen body.

The Spartan continues to watch, knowing the aura, and the motions are far from those of the girl he knew. The one that gave her life fighting Galaxia.

She doesn't recognize him. She is no longer Mercury. She is no longer Ami. Any semblance to what she was is now lost. The definition becomes immediately clear to him. She is a servant of Galaxia. An enemy.

Threat.

SPARTAN-117 sets the sights of the light rifle on her. And fires.

Mercury, the true Mercury, would have stepped boldly, confidently, straight to her goal and to the point. She would not have had this dullness, this impassive lethargy behind the movements.

She turns quickly enough, as John raises the rifle. Without missing a beat, without batting an eyelash, she fires, too, at nearly the same time:

"Mercury Galactic Rhapsody!" The chord is abrasive, somehow dissonant despite being played with perfect fingering. It sounds strangled. Water streams from the harp she uses as her focus, and the hum of energy saturating the air.

Edited 2012-07-01 05:31 (UTC)

He bolts at the same time as Mercury. Light and water cross paths.

The torrent still bashes him as he tries bolting to his side -- doing away with his shields. The strength of the current had as much momentum as the bash of a Hunter's shield. He recovers his stance as soon as his feet reach the sands.

The bar representing his shields beeps with red. Time runs too slowly in the time it will take for his suit to recharge them.

The Maser Chief bolts to his side, at first running as he fires, then leaping meters up to hold on to the sleek onyx pillars to gain distance away from her -- and have a better way to move before having to face her up close.

By the will of the thing calling itself Mercury, the water chases after the Master Chief, ready to snap at him, to bite and freeze and break him. It turns as he does, waving and wavering only to find the shortest way to its target.

As it nears the pillar, it's ready to careen upwards.

"Let's keep going!"

The Spartan leaps up from it, his visor still staring at the current that moved too fast towards him. He would have to change his strategy.

He fires both Light Rifle and blaster towards the current, trying to evaporate them over spread shots -- superheated light and plasma to try to diminish its' strength.

He spots the darker aura. He tries landing up close, and jolts towards her. He turns up to see if his weapons had succeeded.

The water and ice dissipate, thwarted. Cheated of her prey, the Mercury creature makes a furious face, but she doesn't have long before the Master Chief is coming at her, and she has to prepare for him. She takes a stronger stance, and raises her hand to lash out at him with a blow of energy that makes the very air between them hum with its dark threat. The action seems reflexive, but is designed to at the very least cut off his progress and his advance.

The Spartan turns and rolls as soon as he notices the black energy focusing in her hand and firing against him -- The bolt feels too close when it almost cooks his armor. It had the same energetic power as a Hunter's plasma beam.

Without his shields, he would've taken the brunt of the impact beyond what titanium could resist... And his interface warns him of plates that almost melted by the rush of energy.

He comes close to his target. He draws a pair of knives, and moves to strike.

Once he's maneuvered himself so close, she has far fewer options. And while her body is stronger now, it does not match the speed and strength of the Spartan. She struggles, and strikes out at him at every opportunity, but before long she he gains the upper hand. The knife catches her arm first, drawing a line of red beneath the torn sleeve it leaves behind.

He has forty years of experience in the arts of war, against the millennial experience of the senshi, and in spite of how swift she is -how she blurs almost as a Spartan, and cutting through titanium with her icy blade-, they're still matched. He has to continuously move, whirl, change his stance, and feint in order to get her to approach.

One of his knives draw blood from the senshi's arm.

He bolts a kick in an attempt to throw her away, and eliminate the threat.

The wound doesn't slow her much. She's always been good at putting the pain aside when she has a mission in front of her, and right now her mission is twofold: return to Galaxia, bringing the star seed of Sailor Lethe. She does not mourn the dead senshi.

The kick isn't enough; though it hits her, and she staggers back from the force, she does not even make so much as a sound; she simply redoubles her efforts. She fights until she has the space to bring out her own weapon, a sword. It glitters as though made of ice.

Edited 2012-07-07 08:33 (UTC)

Too resistant. He remembers Mercury having withheld similar strikes from Covenant Elites.

As soon as the cold blade takes shape in his opponent's hand, the Spartan has to jerk back from instant to instant to dodge the weapon -- which still gets to slash his chestplate with the same sharp as the machines he fought moments ago.

His knives attempts to parry her movements, lowering his stance to get himself even with Mercury -- until he comes close for a grapple, and moves an arm up for a stab.

It's quickly apparent that despite her abilities, she's losing ground now that the fight is in this close, letting the Master Chief bring his size into play. Though she tries to maneuver herself into a better position, he gives no ground and she finds herself caught instead.

This time, the blow strikes the Mercury puppet in the shoulder, numbing her arm. A dark stain shows against the white body suit of the senshi uniform, and the wound bleeds freely down her arm.

The Spartan's arm whirls to lock on his opponent's able arm, set a foot to break her stance -- and direct a knife to the center of her chest.

The motions are cold, machine-like, and done against dozens of alien enemies, meant to cut through the windpipe and the heart. His entire body stays locked to stare at her and wait for reactions, too still as he waits. To see if the movement was enough to bring her down.

To see if Ami was in there. If she remained.

Though she'd have said she was a reborn Mercury, she is so alien to Ami that she doesn't even use the name to plead with him; there are no tricks or appeals as a comrade. Ami would not have made any, either; but in her, it would have been from pride and doubt. Here, the idea is simply foreign.

The knife cuts her, and like any human body, hers starts to shut down. She can't get breath, the blood can't move through her. She makes a sickening gurgle as she tries for a breath, and she crumples.

As her motionless body sinks towards the ground, a shimmering crystal with a blue aura, a twin of the one taken from Lethe, rises into the air above it.

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one_one_se7en - 2012-07-09 09:45 (UTC) - Expand

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