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.

To wonder why Eve was carrying a big old clunky chest around the Org Tower, was indeed a relevant question. Not that she would tell you her true reasons for dragging it around like a big ol' fifty pound teddy bear. She had already told several people that she was busy helping ‘someone’, and explained to two others, not much younger than herself, that it had been a dare. In reality however, the opposite was true.

She had made sure to rescue the metallic chest from its hiding spot before dawn. Before even the birds stirred or the crickets took to resting, she fetched it from under a scurry of blankets and pillows and other secret things. Eve made sure to check the chests contents, twice, counting each treat saved and each lost little toy she managed to gather. The smile on her face grew wider and wider as she imagined what Raz would say. After all, she’d been collecting these things since the super hero in training arrived.

“Today, I become the best side kick ever!”

As night sailed into day, the chest was shut tight, secured with two ropes, sitting on either side of the two latches. Then, trying to be as quiet as she could, she began the long haul of dragging it to her partner in crimes room.

"Raz..." She whispered, rapping at the door tentatively, trying to fight the urge to giggle bubbling up inside.

"Raaaaaaz. It's me…. I have treaaaaaaaasure for you."

A young boy entered the city today. He wandered easily past the toiling earthlings, turned up his nose face at the attention he garnered and traveled on smartly. He was wearing UTTERLY NORMAL CLOTHING for a child his apparent age. A simple shirt, trousers, a cloth was draped over the pack on his back. On top of his head he wore a rather large, fuzzy black caterpillar (hair was normal) and he had found some clay paints earlier in his travels which afforded him white eyes and pupils now.

And yes, it hurt, but NO PAIN WAS TOO GREAT for the Irken Cause!

Behind him tromped a...dog. Or someone's idea of a dog. Gir had a skin on and big bay leaves for ears. Zim had even fashioned a lead and collar out of vines.

THERE WAS NOTHING ABNORMAL TO SEE HERE CITY!

Granted, he was lost, but would not the best place to assert his dominion be from teh tallest and best maintained building?

Naturally this led to one UTTERLY NORMAL little boy and his dog staring up at the Org Tower from the gardens.

And yes, the city guards were watching him from a distance. Just in case.

He has an office, of sorts, in the building. It is rimmed in windows, high up in the tower, and the windows are often open; causing high-speed winds to scream through fairly regularly. He doesn't have a chair, preferring to float above the floor crossed-legged as he works at the desk. Small notes, fastened with glue, or tape, or post-Solution variations on the same cover every available surface. They range from finish the Slug report to DID YOU EAT TODAY? in a variety of handwritings, including his own.

The door is always open if he is in there. Xaldin has developed a claustrophobia that must be experienced to believe. They do call air that doesn't move dead air, after all, and for all that he hurts and hates, he is not yet ready to die.

He was settled behind his desk, writing last thoughts on the Shibuya slug incident in a fine, beautiful hand that used paper as efficiently as possible. Mouseasaurous Rex, the small kitten he has most lately been carrying, played on the ground with a string of ribbon left by someone at some time.

"And all of them were murdered.  The entire household."

"They don't think it was for any reason either.  Nothing was stolen or anything like that."

"They're going to catch whoever did it, though.   I've heard they've already got a lead on who it was."

"As if we didn't have enough damned problems..."


The recurring conversation had trickled in and out of her earshot for nearly a year as she'd kept to her duties in the Denver clinic, caring for the sick and helping the wounded and recent mothers to heal.     For a time, that sort of talk had seemed to finally wither away as people found more current topics of gossip to take their interest.    Ones that were not focused on the wealthy family that had been killed, seemingly unprovoked, and the strange series of events that had played out following.

That was done with.   Mother had gone, and likewise had her sisters.   If not for the people keeping it alive by discussing it, the event itself could have been gone as well.   It was not that she felt guilt for what she'd taken part in, but that others seemed to believe that she should.   They were bad people.  They had hurt Beatrice.   She and the others had amended the problem as they'd been asked to.   As far as she was concerned, there was nothing to feel guilty for.  

...and yet, still, for some reason, Mother had abandoned them anyway.    That and the talking made her catch herself questioning whether it had really been all right after all. 

Belphegor was not an irrational woman.   She knew well that no one had any reason to suspect her involvement.   To the few that had come to know her, she, like many other orphans of The Solution, had seemed to crawl out of the woodwork from nothingness once she was the proper age to travel great distances on her own, seeking her place in this badly-savaged world.    She had told no one of Beatrice, Ronove, or any of her sisters, so, really, how COULD anyone have known?

And yet, all the same, it had grated on her to hear it dredged up from it's sleep again just a couple of weeks ago.    People were talking about it as if it had just happened yesterday, and the more she listened, the more she had realized that it never really would die.   It would keep haunting the place it happened for quite awhile...maybe forever.    There was no putting a stop to that, but she could, at the least, move beyond it's reach.  

A letter to the Org sent earlier in the week had preceded her arrival to New York this morning.   As she made her way down one of the sparsely-populated streets, footfall silent, seeming to shimmer in and out of existence as she went, Belphe gave the impression of a woman who wanted very much to reach her destination without incident.