[F21 - PP] Black and White

[Koga 0]

A flash of concern crossed his face. Brows furrowed, eyes searching her face for even the slightest sign of some kind of emotion. But there was nothing as she swiped through her menus. Just...a void.

She summoned a small bento, nothing but rice. Not even furikake or seaweed flakes. What the poor and homeless ate when they had nothing else, just to sustain themselves. Koga felt guilty, but he suddenly pitied the girl. Alone, and hardened against the world. No one should live like that.

"Will you sit with me a moment?" the man inquired lowering himself down to the ground, and crossing his legs beneath him. Regardless of what she said or what she did, he'd ask her a question anyways. "Do you really believe your guildmates wouldn't mourn you?" Although Koga didn't know much about guilds, having never joined one, he had always been lead to believe they were places for camaraderie, fellowship, and brotherhood. He had a hard time believing that there was no one in her guild who cared for her. No one to miss her if she was gone.

[Setsuna 0]

Peeling a bit of rice out and cramming it into her lips, before she uncorks a small bottle. A pungent stink comes out of it, and she peels free the tweezers and clutches the katana's hilt. Drawing it out casts a dry ice fog that rolls out from her. Skin pale white and getting just that much whiter. Eventually it disperses, and reveals a silverish blue edge that frost begins to coagulate on it. Dragging a cotton swab down the length before eating more rice, and moving to a stone. "I suppose." The girl remarks, paying careful mind honing the edge.  "They would not and should not. I am no longer living." She turns to look at him, and she looked like a ghost. An ode to the rumor regarding her on floor 4. "I died long ago, when everything was taken away from me in an instant." Her face sours just a bit, as if there was more, but it is forced down and gone without issue. Practiced and careful. "Who would mourn you? That would die as I have if you were gone?" The question was worded as if a trade, non-negotiable.

[Koga 0]

Surprisingly, the girl sat down beside Koga as she slowly began to eat. A shiver crawled up Koga's spine though, the hairs on his neck standing upright as she drew her sword. Apprehension, or an instinctive reaction to the icy fog rolling out of the scabbard, he didn't know.

"You look pretty alive to me," Koga said to the girl, ignoring her question, ignoring the true meaning of her words. "You lost someone, right?" he asked bluntly. A rhetorical question. That was what people usually meant when they said everything had been taken from them. The man thought for a moment, resting his hands in his lap, cupping one in the other as he watched her. His brain churned, trying to find the best way to convey his thoughts. "You know, there's always a chance to start again, if you're willing to take it." He'd known the kind of loss she had experienced. More than once. But this wasn't about him at the moment. He kept his emotions in check, as few traces as possible leaking through the cracks. She still had her life, and the choice to live it as best she could, or let her loss consume her. What Koga saw before him now was the remnants of the latter, or at least, that was what he suspected.

[Setsuna 0]

"Do I, well, looks can be deceiving." The girl was a walking epiphany of it, maybe 120 lbs. wet, and she could fell even the largest opponent. "I did, three someone's. They died right in front of me. During my earning a living, no less." It was no secret. "So, your loved one, I understand your reluctance. But the absence of an answer proves there is someone you have in mind. Imagine that person, being incapacitated in front of you. Paralyzed and slowly dismembered, just outside your reach. Being too weak to save them, and another player does the deed. I died then, there is no starting over. Everything was taken from me in an instant." Horrors cast a grim look over her face as she eyed that mirrored steel. The array of three names still haunted every night, in the twilight when activity was at a lull. Messages she could send, but would never be received. A life that could have been cut short by a knife, and since such an edge had done her in, it would do the same to that which had stolen it from her.

[Koga 0]

Koga's gaze drifted from the girl as she gave him her story, as short as it was. He hadn't had the displeasure of having to watch that kind of torment. Their death's had not been swift, but not tortuous either. He couldn't pretend to know what it was like to watch that.

Koga tried to put Kasumi, NIGHT, Yukiro, his sister in the place of the girl's loved ones, himself in hers. The kind of scars that would leave behind. He closed his eyes and breathed slowly, reminding himself that those terrors were no more than figments. That whatever facsimile of anguish he'd been able to conjure was but a tiny fraction of the girl's.

But Koga still refused to believe that there wasn't another chance for another life. "Not starting over," he said opening his eyes again, and looking at the girl again. "Rebuilding. It could never be the same but..." Koga paused, knowing that what he was about to say was something he still struggled with, "do you think those you've lost would like what you've become?"

[Setsuna 0]

The blade gleams as the whetstone passes down and back, and she twists it, peering down its length. A bit more rice, plain and standard. "What is the point, if like before it can all be stripped away. Rebuild a whole new life, manufactured and fake, just to attempt to make myself feel better. Force it to happen for simply the sake of doing it." The edge still had a single knick, having caught on a bit of armor, and it couldn't afford to have it. "Or I can use what I have left to make sure that it never happens to anyone else. That is real, relevant and solves the problem." Reversing the grip on her katana and slowly sliding it back into its saya, an audible click as it snaps shut. The second question catches her a bit off guard, and she turns to look at him and locking sights with Koga. Setsuna's resolve painted on her face. "They wouldn't be proud of what I am, they wouldn't even recognize what I have become." But there was no sorrow, no waver in her tone. Acceptance.

[Koga 0]

The soft rasping of steel on stone filled the air. Slow, methodical, almost rhythmic. The longer pauses between strokes for the girl to eat a few grains of rice only adding to the beat of the task. "It's not like you can't do both," Koga pointed out to the girl. "And besides, I'm not saying 'force' it. You can't force that kinda stuff anyways, but its not gonna happen if you don't let it either. Its not just about feeling better, its about moving on. Closure." Closure. What a funny concept. The word itself implied closing the door behind you, so as to not open it again, but perhaps for a short visit.

The ghost returned her weapon to the saya on her back, and the gaze that she fixed on him was resolute. Her voice, still and calm as a silent lake on a windless day. He wanted to say that they'd want more for her, that they wouldn't want her to lock herself in the past. But she knew that already. That steady gaze told him as much. "And you're ok with that." A statement. Koga sighed once more. This ghost had resigned herself to her fate long ago. It was a sad sight. Was there any way for someone to resurrect a ghost? Koga knew of only one, but it was not his place to play that role for her.

"I hope you have a change of heart one day," he told her, "Or that you at least find someone who can change it for you."

[Setsuna 0]

Resting the katana across her lap, looking down into her bento. "True, but each require a devotion of time. Likewise, what I do isn't safe. If I were to use what time I had, assuming that I could somehow operate at full capacity doing both. And I were to fade away, then I would only be repeating the problem. Attachment leads to the potential for pain, unless it can be protected. Not everyone has the luxury of such safety. Closure happens when the wrong has been corrected, safety comes after my task." Legs folded beneath her, rice still in a half-eaten clump in one side of that little box.

"There are many ways to seek closure, either through repairing or rebuilding. Or destroying every remnant of what once was." Staring straight forward, her look peering for miles. A thousand yard stare. "I am not 'ok' with it, I'll never be 'ok' with it. But I can haunt those that had done it to me. I can make them feel what I felt that day. What it means to be weak and powerless. Know this, Marutaro, if a blade would ever find your back. Another player were to try and exploit you or your loved ones. It will be the thought of if I might be watching that will stay their hands." A circumstance, victory through fear.

[Koga 0]

Koga nearly let out a huge sigh of relief at hearing the ghost's words. Everything up till this point had lead him to believe she'd killed every part of her that would have made her human. Everything that made up a person. But no, it was just buried. Deep inside her, waiting.

Whoever she was before, she wasn't gone just yet.

"I hear you," the man said with a nod, knowing what it was like to fear being hurt. Not being ready for it, and shying away. Some retreated inwards, like the ghost, others pushed everyone else away, like he did. "Its...scary," he almost felt like a child, putting it that way, but sometimes the simplest explanation was the truest. "I don't know when you'll feel ready to, ya know, expose yourself, or whatever," terrible word choice Koga, "but when you are, come find me. I'd like to get to know the part of you you've kept hidden all this time."

There were of course more questions. Was killing those who hurt her friends really going to being closure? Would she ever really feel as if her task was done? What the hell did Marutaro mean? All questions for another day.

[Setsuna 0]

Echoes in the distance, as the floor would slowly begin to welcome a morning. Shutters on door frames slide open to greet morning air. "It is a question of 'if' as is all things. If it is relevant, or if it will ever happen. I focus on facts, cold hard truths. I leave others to do the dreaming, I do not have the luxury. Marotaru can continue to dream for me, hope for me. But do not mourn me when your dreams fail, keep that heart to yourself. Place it somewhere else, I do not want it." Watching the people as they moved, drifting a bit with eyes that were heavy and yet would never close. "I do rather find it interesting, if it is your world or mine that will become real." The soured perspective, the twisted outlook, still lingered on her thoughts.

Everything that could go wrong, everything that simply wouldn't work out. A million tiny variables that could alter the course, and with it sweep the lives of many. Like a blackened cloud that would blot out the sun. Carrying with it orphans that she'd protected with her life.

[Koga 0]

The sound of the floor slowly awaking drew Koga's eyes to the distant town, unseen behind the forest's dense wall of leaves and branches. But the sounds came through so clearly, one could almost imagine it all with perfect clarity. The farmhands tiredly getting out of their beds, preparing for the day whilst rubbing their eyes free of sleep's sweet embrace. The mother's trying to quietly tend to their morning duties before the children awoke. The player's most content to sleep for a while longer, others, eager for progress. The birds looking for their morning meal, and the creatures of the night preparing for a day's rest. It was enough to make one almost forget that this place wasn't real.

Koga looked back to the ghost in that moment and nodded. A silent promise to her. Although she said 'if', he'd forever say 'when'. He'd dream, aspire for her. And when the time came, he'd smile for her. There was only one promise he would not make.

"Ok," he said, "but the only thing I won't abide by is your last request. Everyone deserves to have someone mourn them when they're gone. Someone to remember them. So should that come to pass," Koga's slow and careful tone was soft, calm, but firm. She could argue if she wished, but this was his resolve, "I will mourn you, your friends, and remember you."

A solemn vow.

The man turned back towards the village, breathing deep of the world's slow wakefulness. "We'll have to find out," he answered back. Whichever world it was, one of them had to be there to witness it. "Tell me something. What's your name?" he asked quite suddenly. "I can't remember someone who's name I don't know."

[Setsuna 0]

"Then you prove me right." She spoke to her words prior, that there were two types of people. Those that could kill, and those that could not. It came down to perspectives, and a question of if someone was redeemable. Koga would have tried to change them, protect them. To have a change of heart. Sliding a lid to a box and watching it vanish into a pocket dimension, she slides her katana back to the space on her back. An intense stare as she peers back at him, as if still stuck in the night before. "We shall see. My name is Setsuna. You are one of the few who know it, consider yourself lucky. If it were anyone else, I would have to kill you. Maybe I still will."

A prompt pops up that breaks the silence, and she gestures open her inventory screen. Tapping it opens it larger, and she reaches to a mask on her throat. "Watch your back Marutaro, never know who might be watching." Eyes flash bright, like glass frosted over. Her shape becomes translucent, flickering as she draws a sliver of her steel. Billowing white fog cascades out from her. The girl turns on her heel and leaps, and disperses like smoke from a cigarette.

One vow against another, one of death and another of life. In conflict? or Harmony?

Thread Closure:

6817/30=227*5=1135

Koga:
1135*7=7945 EXP
7945*.15=1591 Col (Includes Thread Closure)

Setsuna:
1135*8=9080 EXP

Simmone (Guild Treasurer):
9080*.15=1362 Col

Edited February 8, 2022 by Setsuna