Chaos Precip

The routine was ingrained in everyone. Chaos storm coming, batten down the hatches, all hands to their beds. The city, with a days warning, started shutting down the evening before. Food stalls and vendors secured their goods, tucked their tables away and went home to cuddle with their families. Inside the Org Tower was little different.

In fact, Chaos Storms days were almost a holiday. People took the next day off, they stayed home, they did something simple and easy for meals like sandwiches or leftovers. And then everyone took to their beds, some with the aid of sleepy medicines, others without, and they slept the sleep of the Just.

That was barring the adepts of course. The adepts had a different routine.

It was impossible for them to sleep through a storm, the energies were too enticing, their bodies too aligned...

And so for the adepts a schedule was drawn up. Coats, gloves, masks, all were checked and secured for the day. All the adepts on the schedules were gathered in the children's wing, there to tell stories, entertain, and watch over the children as the storm raged around the tower. They would lose no younglings to the raging energies outside. None.

For Larxene the storms were a wistful, tempting pleasure. She took to her rooms as the storm drew nearer, trusting to her people to do as they'd been assigned. She flitted from furniture, to window, to desk and back, pacing through the moments as the clouds roiled and seethed in the distance. With a nearly-guilty smile she slipped off her gloves and her mask, tucking them safely away in a pocket...

...but the coat stayed. The coat always stayed. She'd never wear anything else. But her hands, her face, her hair, those she could risk to the winds as long as her heart was wrapped in moogle made material. When the clouds swept over the outer walls of the city she tripped lightly up the stairs to the roof, a dark flag in the growing winds that tore the laughter from her lips and swirled it away into the morass.

The roof, and the area just above the roof was as close as she ever got to the storms now. It was against the rules, it was against sense, but she needed to do this for her city even more than she needed to stay safe and avoid temptation. As someone who had been there, as Lightning, she lifted her bare hands to the sky as a rainbow of twisting energies rolled over the tower in a roar.

She lifted her hands and she pulled.

Larxene could never explain it to anyone, how she just knew how to take from the storms. She'd ridden them, been unraveling in them, and parts of her had not come back. She simply knew how to tease and cajole and tempt the energy she could grasp out of the clouds as they had once tempted her in. It wrapped around her arms in snakes and coils of blinding heat, it turned her hair into waving, dancing light, and she Laughed, a pure and joyous sound to combat the screaming around her.

She laughed because it felt right, even if she was only grasping a little part, even if she was only touching the edges of a storm, she felt whole sometimes when she pulled that light downward and fed it into the New York power grid.

Some newcomers to New York often asked how the city was powered. This was the answer, not one lightning adept, no, even an adept might burn out trying. But a Lightning Adept who could touch the storms? Now that was a different creature and it gave the population sleeping safe in their beds a sense of hope and security because the lights didn't go out at night. The lights never went out in New York unless people wished some dark in their homes.

And it burned to draw on such strength. It ached through her ribs and echoed in her heart, trying to pry her away from her tower, her roof, and her duty. There were whispers in the wind that promised quiet, solace, peace, and Power, always power...

...and she remembered the first storm, the pain of being pressed into a coat and grounded harshly back to earth. She remembered, and she cried, but who could tell in the rain that spattered against her and the hail that danced as well? Who was there to hear her when the storm raged? Who was there to worry? It was safe to yearn up there on the roof, as long as she never gave in.

Through the pain and the wild, teeming hours, she never gave in. Not once in the years since she'd come to New York. She didn't now either. Her feet, which had left the rooftop at some point touched back down as the storm faded, diminished and grumbling. Her knees, far too weak after such turmoil to hold her, gave out but the rooftop was a place she knew, she didn't mind laying on it until the light had faded from her hair and her skin barely even arced any longer.

She didn't mind at all.

And when she could move again she wiped the tears from her eyes and covered her smile with the mask she should have been wearing. The gloves were next, armor against the world. In time she'd manage the stairs or someone would come up to fuss at her but for now...for now she could be quiet, and still, for a time.