Kaithas

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Amaranth Desire: Hello, sister.

Now
there
was
this.

Amy's heartbeat had sped when she saw the two of them approaching, her Semblance ramping in lockstep to delay things, give her the chance to calm herself and come up with a response. Because of course Monday wouldn't stay in itself or let her process, it all had to come crashing forward into Tuesday.

Fact of the matter was, she knew who her father was now. If she'd been wanting to contact him instantly, she could have called him. She went to school with her half sister. There'd been ample opportunities this morning.

She shouldn't be unkind to her, the logical part of her brain was telling her. In all of this, Emerald was an innocent party. But her emotions weren’t having it. Petty jealousy was coming to the fore. She hadn’t had any semblance of a family after the age of 6, she’d bounced in and out of orphanages, she still bore the scars of thefts gone wrong, thefts she’d done to eat. Emerald had never really been broken growing up, she’d not been beaten or scathed. It wasn’t fair. They had the same father, they were both Faunus, why had Emerald been the lucky one?

She gritted her teeth slightly, but her blue eyes softened. Amy couldn't blame her half sister for exactly how terrible of a mother Wisteria Desree had been.

But she still couldn't deal with her right now, not in the middle of Armory.

“Hi, Em,” she said softly, looking away from what she'd been doing and up at her half sibling. “Can… you please give me some time to process?”

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Amaranth Desire: Fury Road

Amy just sighed, pulling the rest of the chain from Lauren's Tonfa delineated half of the desk, then loosened and removed the spool in the right arm gauntlet. Thankfully, the one that had actually taken the wear and abundant tear was by far the less complicated arm of the two. All she likely had to do was replace the tensioners in the mechanism and the rest would take care of itself.

Thankfully, Grimm didn't exactly leave gore behind, so it didn't need to be cleaned that badly. She still had leftover pieces from the Fury's construction, so a few seconds of digging in her bag later and she'd located the replacements, pulling the chain the rest of the way out of the engine and sliding the parts in at their default state. A cursory check of the engine's functionality later and a tap on the reset in the palm and it wound the chain back up without too much trouble, though it definitely didn't need to go through anything similarly strenuous anytime soon.

Right, no more decapitating things.

She missed Lauren's sage advice to Luke, but somehow she felt like it would have taken a lot more brainpower to understand than the resources she currently had available.

She could start work on her new project now, she supposed. Amy took a deep breath before speaking, calling up the calm of listening to the whirr of the clockwork that wound up her weapon.

"Thanks again for the glasses, Lorena," she said quietly, looking over a sketch for the armor she was planning. "They've already come in handy."

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Amaranth Desree - Wishing She'd Skill-Dumped Craft Weapon

It hadn’t been a good night.

Amy’d somehow managed to not sleep enough and simultaneously oversleep, waking up halfway through second period and feeling dreadful enough to not bother going to third. It wasn’t a headache this time--she honestly wished it was that, she’d actually bought Tylenol this time so it wouldn’t be that hard to deal with. No, this was the far more serious ailment of Wisteria-itis, caused by extremely unexpected overexposure to her mother. She was exactly the same as Amy remembered apart from being 15 years older, though Amy understood her far better now.

It did not, however, mean she liked her anymore than she had.

Her mother had ended up gushing about other relatives, who her father was, everything under the sun. She had a half-sister one who went to the school and shared a few classes with her, but that’d she’d never spoken to. Her father was a Hunter, too, evidently she’d inadvertently stumbled into the family business.

Well, the family business that didn’t involve one-night stands and dubious methods of protection, Mom.

Armory was generally therapeutic, though. The Fury needed to be cleaned and rethreaded--despite how robust its construction was, it wasn’t built to wholly decapitate a Manticore in one go, even with Ben’s sword having done over half the work. She might as well get started on integrating it with her new project, anyway, she’d finished calibrating the jump jets and it’d take some time to work the sleeves in with the armor. Any work she could do with her hands or math she could distract her brain with would be good.

So she’d managed to get herself out of bed, eat a quick lunch, then thunk down into the seat next to Lauren’s right as the bell rang and Chatsworth gave them their assignments. Or, rather, lack thereof. She pulled the sleeves of the Fury out of her backpack and put them on the bench, grabbing a screwdriver and opening up the side of the right sleeve.

There was a whine, a spark, and 20 feet of the chain geysered out of the side panel, going 3 feet in the air before piling itself in a tangle on the desk.

"Fan-####ing-tastic."

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Amaranth Desire: Going Full Paragon

There's something funny about confidence.

The most easily angered people in the world are not those who lack it entirely, nor are they the completely sure. The former tend to think getting mad is pointless because it doesn't matter in the end anyway, the latter tend to be aware of their own strengths and limitations enough to not be bothered by things they shouldn't be.

Amy wasn't entirely sure which of the two extremes she should currently be at regarding this situation, but she was utterly confident that she was at one of them.

Her semblance was still active, so her perception was moving a little faster than everyone else's--she heard the Survival instructor's introduction in slow motion, had time to let her heightened hearing absorb every dulcet detail of Estelle's Mistralese accent. Amy wasn't in survival, but that didn't really matter at the moment.

It put her at ease, actually.

Judging by the way Estelle held herself and the barely perceptible tick upwards in its intensity as she got closer, it wasn't supposed to. Her grip--which was never that tight to begin with, only leverage made it difficult to evade--slackened as she got closer, and by the time Ben tapped her on the wrist, Amy'd already let go, only still resting her hand there in thought until contact.

Making Lauren squirm was fun while it lasted, but the reasoning part of her mind came back into control and her feathers started to smooth down.

Regardless of how it all turned out, she and Estelle were radically different in terms of appearance, appeal, and demeanor. Any pissing contest here wouldn't be productive, nor would it mean anything.

They should move on.

She glanced over at the Lauren-Ben conglomerate, a slight smile falling on her lips. "I'm not quite sure Ben agrees that this is a safe space, Lorena. Well, not for him at least."

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Of course, the downside to staring down Ben as hard as Lauren's father was that it prevented him noticing something else. Namely, stripper Amaranth Desire skirting around the showdown to the girl bending over to search under her bed. As she approached, though, carefully, an alternative course of action presented itself.

She was still registering everything said, but speaking would have broken her cover.

Her Semblance ramped up to slowing everything ever so slightly, letting her mind target and process the changes in status of the three people she was most concerned about looking toward her as she moved. Ben was talking about the Manticore battle, so he was unlikely to look--besides, that death glare was likely consuming the small parts of his poor straight male brain that weren't absolutely blocked out with NOT LOOKING TOWARD THE BED anyway. Lauren's father was leveling the death glare at Ben, so he was somewhat distracted too. Costa was the real issue--for the moment, she seemed to be watching her husband delivering a staredown with not insignificant amusement, but Amy would still be in her line of sight once she got to the strained jeans sticking up from under the bed.

She hesitated, once she reached Lorena. Wasn't too late to back down. She could go back to her original plan, just make Ben's temptation worse rather than risking a trip out a window herself.

...



Her hand moved, in a blur of motion, and to her sensitive ears all hell seemed to break loose.

Sequentially:

1. Her hand hit Lauren's ass with a clap of palm on denim that, bless its threads, would likely need therapy later.
2. Estelle barged into the room, saying something about Lauren's lingerie.
3. The territorial part of Amy's brain registered a threat.
4. Her eyes locked with Estelle's, and she squeezed.
5. Stuff got awkward.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

...It dawned on Amy, as she watched one of her three closest friends dangle out the window from the arm of a man who could only be her ever elusive and still unnamed father, that this was only her second experience with a father and his daughter.

Huh.

S'a good thing she was prepared, in a way. Laur-err, Lorena wasn't exactly the Wonderbread kinda girl and judging by the way she'd been carrying on, she'd somewhat expected something like this too, if not being dangled out the window. Her feathers had started to rise at the occasion, her weight shifting from the doorframe to the balls of her feet, almost imperceptibly, just in case the younger Negasi's struggles accidentally knocked her loose from her father's grip. In the end, though, her father's hold seemed as ironclad as his physique.

She relaxed again, only momentarily tensing as his eyes fell on Lauren's jacket for an instant. In retrospect, maybe putting this jacket on was playing with a little more fire than she'd first realized. Too late now. A slight nod in response to his question, nodding again in affirmation of her captain's response.

"It's never boring," she said, laughing softly. "And we've enjoyed her a lot."

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Amy Desire, Because Father's Day is Overrated

...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.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

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.

Soul Eater: Dance Of Devils

@Maxwell we need to work on soul resonance then : P

Soul Eater: Dance Of Devils

Oh, I was under the impression we were accepted as teams. So we now get to fight over partners? Sweet.

In seriousness, I'm still good with sticking with Dorian.