"One could argue your entire life is garbage." -my organic chemistry professor
7
likes
7 yrs ago
my life is a sitcom. and not one with very good dialogue
6
likes
8 yrs ago
you people are feeding my problem XD
6
likes
8 yrs ago
I've got this obsession of having all the statuses on my profile page with more than 2 likes. I know that when the wailing winds of darkness come for me, these thumbs up will keep them away!
...Grabbing Lauren's ass to show Ben how it was done would have to wait, unfortunately, for a more opportune time. Preferably one once all the parents had left. Come to think of it, maybe some training was in order...
On the other hand, maybe she should let him maintain his purity. Half the fun was seeing Lauren run circles around him with this.
She was hanging back, a little, at the entrance to the dormitory. She'd let Lauren and Ben get jumped by the other of the elder Negasi's, since they were the tankier members of the team, then swoop in and regain the advantage--Wait, why was she approaching this like a combat scenario? Surely he wasn't that bad... Right?
Riiiight?
...The silence in her head was deafening.
She leaned against the doorframe in an easy stance, forcing herself to relax, making sure to move over enough to the side that Costa and Sangue could still get by her. The one thing she wasn't going to do was check where she knew Lauren kept her stuff, since that would tip her father off if he didn't know where it was already.
At any rate, hopefully the attack vector wouldn't be through the door. That'd take out an innocent bystander or 6, given the people in the hallway. This did offer a promising escape for her though, considering she'd eaten all the candy Lauren had mentioned earlier.
Amy gave Lauren a quizzical look as she looked down her cleavage, then tapped nervously away at her phone. It was fairly obvious the brawler wasn't looking for a candy bar, really--otherwise she wouldn't have to consult her phone about it--and one would have melted between Amy's breasts anyway. Not that she hadn't had that happen before, but she figured Lauren would have known as much from her propensity to store things there on her own body.
So that meant she was likely worrying about something from the night before. Some pressing concern, since she was immediately consumed by it, so… She’d probably lost something that didn’t belong to her.
At least Amy wasn’t the one who had to be worried about having her clothes flayed, for once.
She checked the pockets, then shook her head, feathers rising slightly as she did. “No dice. Sorry, honey, nothing in here.
So… Either Pope Benjamin III was going to be right, or bad times were going to occur.
She’d never wanted a holy man to be correct before.
@Kouki Sweet! Should we go ahead and put our characters in the characters tab? And I presume we should wait on some sort of initializer post before we do anything IC XD
It would have taken a particularly oblivious brick to miss the shift in Lauren's attitude. And Amy may have been built like a house made of them, but she sure as hell wasn't quite that dull.
Her hand twitched at her side.
In all of her expectations for how Parent's Day would go, she'd somehow forgotten to plan for this particular eventuality. She'd thought one of the sets of parents coming might not have liked one of them--hell, she was fairly certain most of them wouldn't approved of her at first or Lauren after seeing her antics--but that would have been easy to deal with. Survive the day, let everything return to equilibrium as soon as they left. Parental opinions be damned.
What she hadn't expected was that their presence would cause some kind of break in Bastille itself, not through any fault of their own but through something one of her teammates said.
...For heaven's sake, she was wearing Costa's daughter's jacket.
And it hurt, for what it was worth. Not deep, but just a dull ache of knowing it'd take a bit to get back to how things had been. Ben was her oldest friend in this new life and Lauren was... Lauren. And she couldn't do anything about it, not right now. Not with her mother around, not while it still felt like something she was watching rather than something she was involved in.
Things would go back to normal, though. After a while.
She walked quickly to catch up with Ben and Lauren. For the moment, she had a somewhat self-involved but definitely critical and pressing concern.
"Um..." There was a long pause as she thought, then decided to push through. She'd already used it once, she may as well try it again. "Lorena? Is your father as... Accepting as Costa is or should I be concerned that your jacket is going to get flayed off of me?"
I had one, forever ago. I killed it. Then it got recreated by someone else without my permission being asked and things went downhill for various reasons, though I just left the "stolen" version be.
She normally has a cloak that looks like bat wings. Her wardrobe, while not near as scanty as that of Blair's, doesn't exactly let you forget that she's nearly a full-grown woman.
Abilities: Shapechange: Technically speaking, Kiora has three forms. Humanoid, her animal form, and her weapon form. This ability allows her to transform between the three, swapping out the abilities and skills of one for those of the other. Her human form can manifest parts of itself as a simple shortbow, allowing her to fight, her animal form (that of a bat) can fly, and her weapon form is that of a longbow, suitable for a Meister to wield. She can only use her magic in human or animal form.
Vision Check: Kiora can close her eyes, shifting from ordinary vision to echolocation. Its range is limited to 30 feet, and it cannot discern colors. Visual illusions/paintings and the like are invisible. While wielding her, the Meister gains the same skill.
Point-Blank-Bashing: Kiora's forward edge is bladed, allowing for combat in melee that's at least as effective as using a scythe to fight.
Magic: Sonic While not quite as magically able as Blair, Kiora's magic falls into the domain of sonic and sound manipulation.
Sing-Song Skies The sonogenetic is a good singer. Go figure.
Ataraxia Kiora's positivity gives her a uniquely strong, madness resistant soul. Emotional trauma can drop this resistance.
Techniques/Magic: Just Keep Firing: HAIL OF ARROWS! Kiora's wielder nocks 6 energy arrows at once, firing them into the air. They burst outward, targeting everyone close by.
Back Off: SUPERSONIC PULSE! After yelling the incantation, Kiora slams her hand forward, sending out a blast of unfocused sonic energy. It won't do much damage, but it will stagger the strong and send the weak flying backward. Her Meister can use this technique as well as a form of alterate fire.
Why Can't Anyone Aim? Homing Arrow! For the accuracy impaired Meister, Kiora's arrows can home after a target with sufficient focus. There are some important limitations: Only one arrow can be fired at a time, the Meister must be free of madness, and no other technique can be used while it's active.
Soul Resonance: Dependent on Meister
Equipment: Since she needs to be able to shapeshift, she doesn't really carry that much gear, nor does she wear much armor, relying on her magic to keep her safe. That being said, she carries a basic field kit including first aid gear.
Personality: "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. That'd suck." Full of joie de vivre and just happy to be here, Kiora's all about enjoying life. She's always got a smile on her face and a song in her words, her attitude one of definite Epicureanism. Life's full of pleasures, and refusing to enjoy them is a greater sin to her than most others. That being said, she's not a total hedonist: you've got to stay inside your limits and keep yourself healthy, or you won't be able to have a good time later. Nothing ruins a Saturday like a hangover from Friday night, or having a headache because you didn't get enough sleep.
She's a little too young to have reached the meditative peace most Epicureans strive for, but she's definitely no worrier.
History: "Welcome to Deathbucks! Please try the Shinigami Roast, we've got a positively killer deal on it right now!" Where exactly monster animals like Blair and Kiora come from isn't exactly known, and Kiora's not likely to be a help with it anytime soon-she tends to find talking about her past overly much to be useless, and the fact that she was unintentionally adopted by two human parents means she doesn't really know about it anyway. In any event, her childhood was as ordinary as can be expected for a girl who flows between two forms as easily as water poured from a square glass into a round one. Which is to say, not ordinary at all--but after several angry calls to the adoption agency, her parents tried their best despite being totally unprepared for the trials of a monster child, including but not limited to: transforming a closet into a bat roost, taking their ten year old daughter to swamps so she could catch mosquitos, and changing their sleep schedule nearly daily until she managed to get her shapechanging fully under control.
Maybe it was this love, despite the effort, that led to her positive outlook on life.
In comparison to her turning out to be a bat mage, her puberty-unlocked weapon form seemed positively normal, the only comment from her father being a deadpan "As long as we don't have to build a target range, I'm fine with this." If anything, they seemed happy that their daughter actually had something to do other than work at Deathbucks or attempt to convince a normal college to build a bat roost. She tested into the EAT class, and has been schooled at the academy ever since.
Supporting Characters: James Trennor: Her father and chief deadpan snarker, Kiora's father hasn't always known how to deal with his teenage daughter. But he's her eternal ally and there's no doubt that he loves her. Elizabeth Trennor: When she first stepped into the adoption agency, Kiora's soon-to-be mother didn't exactly expect her only daughter to turn into a bat a week later. But she's adapted, and now their family would seem wrong without the weirdness. That Agency Bitch: TAB is a reticent, bureaucratic woman Kiora's dealt with multiple times in her search for her true origins. As of yet, she's never succeeded in getting a straight answer out of her.
To be plain, the order was wrong. The woman glaring at her wasn't having any of her excuses, either. Kiora had her best Employee of the Month smile on, adjusting the apron she'd put on over her uniform to avoid getting it dirty as she listened to "Madeline Smith" berate her for everything that had gone wrong. She seized the opportunity of the other woman taking a breath to attempt to ameliorate the situation.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, allow me to replace your order," she said, still smiling. "I'll speak to my manager--"
"--AND MOREOVER, your apron and visor don't match the professional, positively adorable attire I'm used to from Deathbucks--"
No good, it seemed. As the woman moved on from criticism of her abilities as a barista to personal attacks, all of the mental pathways not currently consumed with keeping her eyes bright and smile set began moving back through the sequence of events that had led up to this moment. It was a method she'd learned a long time ago to deal with frustrations and learn from the experience, rather than getting angry and lashing out at whoever was irritating her in the moment. She wasn't really an angry person, but her abilities had a tendency to reflexively activate--and going all bat right now wouldn't likely help the situation.
To be fair to herself, the espresso machine was broken. She'd probably not helped matters by attempting to distill ordinary coffee to a more extreme concentration--but she'd been trying to help. From the beginning, it seemed like Madeline needed a cup of spookily good coffee--well, the caffeine that came with it, more like--and it hadn't seemed wise to tell her the machine wasn't working with the kind of mood she was obviously in.
In retrospect, she should have realized that concentrating coffee to the point she did was either going to make it bitter beyond belief or just into dregs, neither of which was going to be good... But dammit, she'd tried, and the idea was somewhat alright in theory--shut up, internal head demon, SOMEWHAT. So what if Kiora's Bat Crazy Blend wasn't going to be offered as a mainstream roast at Deathbucks? She'd still tried, and whatever she did wasn't worth the amount of abuse she was receiving, but... At least this was just for this immediate moment. Sooner or later Ms. Smith would realize that she had something better to do than yell at a Deathbucks employee and walk on out.
"AND YOUR RESTAURANT SMELLS SOUR!"
"I am sorry you feel that way, ma'am. It would be my pleasure to give you a gift card as compensation--"
Evidently, that would be sooner. Ms. Smith huffed, spinned on the ball of her foot--wasn't a good idea to do so on a heel as narrow as her stilettos--and marched out. Like magic, the rest of the Deathbucks employees reappeared out of storage, the side dining room, and every nook and cranny the store had. She couldn't blame them, she'd have done the same thing if Barry was getting berated.
"You alright, Cashier Employee Kiora?" her shuddering manager asked, stepping out of the walk in refrigerator with a frown of sympathy on his blue face.
Her smile grew, genuine joy at being done with the situation fueling its appearance. "Of course, sir! There's nothing a Deathbucks Cashier can't handle."
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Forsythe
Krein
