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thenashira2025-11-03 12:09 am
nashiramods) wrote in thenashira2025-11-03 12:09 am
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Game Update: August I 2377
🎶 Recommended Listening: Midsummer Dance Hall - GO!GO!7188 〈lyrics〉 ♪
august i 2377
EPISODE 7: Let's Go to the Beach! Swim into a Summer Wonderland!
August 1 - August 7
Constellations: Two out of seven Constellations have been captured.
⭐︎ The Nova Knights possess the Dancer
⭐︎ The Harbingers possess the Three Sisters
Weather: Chalra City's hot hot summer continues! While August isn't quite as hot as it was last month, it's a good deal more humid and stickier. Whether it's a swimming pool or a beach, Chalra City residents are flocking to the water to cool off and relax. Sunbathing in the park is a popular activity on cooler days, and local shops and restaurants court young shoppers by offering special services and sales suited to the student wallet. The highs for the month average around 90°F/32C° with lows around 78°F/25C°.
Recap: Last month was kind of a mixed bag, huh! Despite some victories, the results leave them ringing a little hollow. The Wonder Junction Two-Day Video Game Rental turned out to be a two-fold trap by the Harbingers: one part energy-harvesting plot, one part trap to capture the Nova Knights. Even the monster guarding the stolen energy at the Wonder Junction Two-Day Video Game Rental was meant to trap the Nova Knights, and though they defeated Ludoreticula, the stolen energy was never recovered.
This month has left several Nova Knights in dire states; Harley and Kalim fell into eclipse after their disastrous game trial, and Dirk and Reese were captured and sent to the Abyss when they were exploring the Dark Ocean.
BY DAYLIGHT
⭐︎ It's summer break in Chalra City! The first half of August is a time full of freedom and opportunity if you're a teenager. If you're an adult, it's business as usual but there are way more kids and teens roaming the city at all hours of the day. Public pools and water gun contests are still a popular way to pass the time, but this time of year, many students flock to the nearby beaches to take advantage of their time off. Schools usually assign homework over the break, but who wants to think about homework when there's a whole world of summer fun to explore?
⭐︎ There are shuttle buses every other hour to Littleneck Beach, one of the larger and more popular beaches on the east coast of Atlace. The boardwalk along the beach is one of its major attractions, lined with shops, small arcades, snack bars and more! The biggest shop on the boardwalk is the Seafoam Five and Chime, a variety store that sells all kinds of beach paraphernalia at a budget price. Towels and trowels, sand buckets and boogie boards, sports drinks and sunscreen — the Seafoam Five and Chime has it all!
There's plenty to do on the beach without spending money, too! The water is a comfortable temperature with some pretty decent wave action most days, and lots of beachgoers like to just spend a day under the sun collecting seashells and having picnics on the sand.
⭐︎ The beach is where Chalra City's competitive side shows itself, and there's no shortage of competitive activities to participate in! Beach volleyball and sandcastle building are the two biggest and most popular competitions, but there are also contests for beach scavenging, watermelon eating, fishing, swimming, elaborate swimwear pageants, digging really deep holes, and more! There's something for every competitive spirit at Littleneck Beach.
⭐️ The annual trend wars over the summer's most popular sports drink are being waged once again! Every summer, brands of different sports and soft drinks launch intense marketing campaigns to win the public's loyalty. Nothing's for sure yet, but the classic brand Potari Sweet is enjoying a revival after falling into years of obscurity with a nostalgic ad campaign. New look, same great taste!
The deluge of summer singles have been hitting record stores at light speed, too — what started out as a marketing war between multimedia conglomerates Shinebow Arts and Four Clover Works has become a tradition of releasing sure-to-be-hit singles across the whole music industry. Outdoor concerts have become a summer staple in recent years, often featuring several musical acts with shorter sets comprised of only their latest music. Recent releases include Pastel*Palettes's Hot, Hot! Sunny Love☆Summer! and Afterglow's COMIC PANIC!!!.
BY STARLIGHT
⭐︎ Hope's Prophecy: In the early morning hours of August 2, Hope dreams a hazy premonition of Harbinger activity at the beach. It's not much to go on, but the sound of the surf is the strongest element.
⭐︎ Hideout Status: The massive Aquarium features four beautiful, lonely goldfish. Even mostly empty, the room is still somehow much more soothing than before.
⭐︎ Maomao's Garden: Regrowing ancient seed samples and testing their medicinal properties takes time, and Maomao has been wholly engrossed in her project. She seems to be bringing supplies from her father's pharmacy, but she's investigating the equipment in the Lab to see if it's of any use.
⭐︎ Nautis Updates: Nautis is just as worried as everyone else about Nova Pastos and Nova Justicar being trapped in the Abyss, and she's shoring up enough power to transmit another signal beam to hopefully help them escape before it's too late. In the meantime, though, she doesn't want everyone falling into despair!
> I've been watching a lot of Earth films lately, and I know just what we need: a team-building exercise ᕙ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )ᕗ
> I propose a day at the beach!
> Earth has such beautiful oceans. It's something to be treasured and appreciated.
> I know you all have limited memories of your past lives, but surely you remember how important the Ocean was to Hassaleh.
> The fate of our planet was sealed the moment that the Abyss consumed our Ocean. And somehow, I feel it would be the same for Earth.
> So take a bus and get in touch with your alien heritage! Bond with your comrades! Get sand in your shorts together!
> And hey, maybe visiting the beach will trigger more memories of your past lives ^_^
> But even if it doesn't, you could still build a sandcastle and then destroy it and describe to me what that feels like!
⭐︎ Intel: The Harbingers have begun to target the Nova Knights directly, which means they've acknowledged our magical heroes a real threat. This threat cuts both ways, however; while human identities are entirely disposable to the Harbingers, the same can't be said for the reincarnated Nova Knights, and if the Harbingers were to discover any of their real identities, it could put their loved ones in danger. Nautis now knows for sure that the Harbingers are holding the Three Sisters in the engine room of their ship, so though it seems to be closely guarded, there's still hope of recovering it.
⭐︎ Trapped in the Abyss: On July 31st, Nova Pastos and Nova Justicar infiltrated the Dark Ocean to gather information about the stolen Constellation, but they were caught by the Harbinger Mistiluxia and sent to the Abyss, where they'll remain for the entire first week of August.
Mistiluxia is an even more formidable opponent than Shellustria, and she doesn't give them much opportunity to fight back before they find themselves transported to an empty, howling wasteland steeped in eternal night. The moon hangs eerily low in the sky, and seems to loom ever closer as the week wears on, the only sign of the passage of time. It looks like no place they would recognize on Earth, but there is a vague, uneasy sense of familiarity to it all the same.
As Pastos and Justicar wander through the Abyss, they'll find that they can't come out of supernova — whatever magic that allows them to transform back to regular human form seems to be jammed here. They don't seem to need to eat during their time in the Abyss, but sleep is hard to come by; in fact, the endless night makes it increasingly difficult to tell how much time has even passed since they arrived here.
The Abyss seems utterly devoid of life, and yet, they may encounter twisted reflections of people they know, including other Nova Knights. It's also possible for Pastos and Justicar to become separated while in the Abyss...Sounds like a bad time!
(In other words: other characters can thread with Dirk and Reese while they're in the Abyss, but only as apparitions in the Abyss. Their real selves are still very much out in the world and not in contact with the Abyss.)
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It's kind of impossible not to notice, and normally that might actually be interesting instead of frustrating, but right now he's beyond simply tired and actually running on the fumes of competitive adrenaline and barely-regenerated energy from an entire week in the Abyss, so he's not super loving this experience, to say the least.
Nonetheless, he sticks with it, and with her--he does not interrupt her meanderings, does not approach her until she acknowledges him. Doing anything else would simply be admitting defeat in a contest he hadn't consciously agreed to but which he absolutely refuses to degrade himself by losing.
Finally, though, she turns--and recognises him, and then immediately accuses him of being both a fed and a racist, right in broad daylight on a public beach.
He has an extremely normal reaction to this.
"Not to make a big deal out of my extremely moderate personal star power, but most people don't react to discovering they've been noticed by a 'local celebrity' by immediately accusing that celebrity of being racist."
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Really, all of this strikes Natalia as extremely suspicious, but extremely suspicious in the way that she had hoped only existed in one person.
The idea that there might be two of them is, perhaps, hitting her a bit hard.
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"Don't bring sex or gender into this. I am on the public record as being emphatically disinterested in anything remotely resembling any kind of hetero bullshit. Least of all some predatory hetero bullshit."
He could go on--and if he wasn't here for an extremely non-public reason, he could make a whole scene of it. Alternatively, he could just turn around and leave. Yes, he is in fact that fucking bothered by the merest suggestive breath in that direction.
But he does neither, because he is tired, and here for a purpose, and that purpose does not actually involve elaborating on his sexual or romantic proclivities to another Nova Knight.
"What I want is to talk to you someplace at least vaguely private, or both of us around to sound completely deranged in about two minutes, and I can't guarantee someone won't notice." The exaggerated frown is gone now, but even though he's gone back to stonefaced stoicism, there's an uncommon antsiness to his energy. He shifts his weight, rolling his shoulders to adjust Cal--who just grins up at him. Eternally supportive.
"Is that cool with you, or do I need to get uncomfortably specific?"
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~ ~ ~
It's a short walk up the sands and around the back of the boardwalk to reach... Completely unsurprisingly, given Dirk's suspicions, a shrine. A full-ass shrine to some tutelary spirit of the beach. Dirk sure doesn't know, and Natalia isn't about to tell him, but since people don't usually come here outside of the yearly shrine visit or the Beach Festival, which is ending, and thus the place is deserted.
"We are unlikely to be overheard, here. What is this 'completely deranged' thing you have heard?"
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Then, without any warning--without really any preamble at all--he launches in a short, fast-paced, and vocabulary dense rap that does very little to clarify what the fuck he's talking about.
Unless she's listening closely, and catches onto the presence of mid-sentence rhymes like 'galactic' and 'praxis'--
Or just waits a minute and bears witness to the end goal of this bizarre response: the split-second, fanfare-free, transitionless switch from Dirk Strider (rapper, puppeteer, martial artist, tattooist, and celebrity heir) to Nova Pastos (?????).
Lil Cal, of course, also makes the appropriate change.
"Sup," says Nova Pastos.
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Well, no, that made a lot more sense than there being two of Nova Pastos. As much as she had hoped it wasn't true, regardless, the fact that he's just... Coming up and, in fact, declaring he is Nova Pastos is surprising.
"Uh. Hello. I'm not sure why you've decided to confide in me, but thank you for the confidence?" Her neutral expression belies the fact that she's looking around and reaching for her phone pocket.
Joykill Strider, they call him--
"I was stood right there during that embarrassing little identity denial dance you did with Chroma." He manages to fix his tone, at least: this comes out at the correct level of unimpressed, unaffected deadpan. "You playing dumb now is just embarrassing--for both of us."
Natalia's Little Jokes May Not Be Over
It's a very simple sort of phone charm. Little more than a marble orbited by two silver rings, which can spin independently of each other. It's more suited to a charm bracelet than a phone. Other than being able to spin on almost any axis, it otherwise appears unusual. "So. What do you need to speak of?"
Or is this his idea of playing along?
He just stares at her, as entertainable as a brick wall--and then, seemingly to call her bluff, he turns in the sand and begins to walk away.
It can be both.
There's some heated words in the language of the old country as she walks off, and she palms the phone charm. If Dirk knows the language, she's even talking about the presumed case of mistaken identity. "Just get over here. The beach! -- you know which beach! Yes, that one! You were just here, I know--."
In the meantime, she steps behind the carefully constructed wall. The charm sits in her hands, letting out a soft emerald light. It strips the pretense of her, exposing her nature. The rings spin of their own accord, and a little field lifts it from her cupped hands. "O ancient and present beacon..."
The little field around it cracks and shatters as she closes her hand on it. "shine forth."
Of a sudden, her hands and feet become clad in stone-steel, replacing her sandals and the little bracelet she'd gotten as a present. Her sundress and swimsuit vanish, replaced with a simple cuirass and skirt over a padded underweb. Her hat, such as it is, becomes a diadem, marked with her own symbol. Silvered trim surrounds each gem as it forms.
This process, in real-time, takes just long enough to see that there's a sequence to it-- a spreading light and warmth-- but not long enough for a camera to linger on each replacement in turn.
Now to find Pastos.
The plausible deniability is part of the bit
True, the pink-clad Knight--who, for the record, did not teach himself more than maybe five to ten words of Neos' native tongue and so really she could have said anything she wanted--seems to have vanished completely while she was transformning. That's not terribly surprising, though, right?
It shouldn't be.
Hopefully it's also not too surprising when he pulls his own strings to reappear directly behind her--sword in one hand,
CalContra in the other. If she turns in place, Contra's bright blue eyes will be almost close enough to touch her face.It IS part of the bit.
Besides, she's seen Cal around plenty! They were on missions together, it was nice.
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Also, he can't think of a sadder or more humiliatingly furtive course of action than seeing her in person, recognising her, spending multiple hours in her physical vicinity, and then sneaking away to text her in private, only to meet back up in Super Nova like some kind of tool.
Sure, it would have been the 'right' move from a base infosec standpoint, but he's seen enough anime to know that what he'd really be doing is setting himself up to have "Nova Pastos'" phone go off in his pocket within her range of hearing and sight, and then he'd have lost any pretense of control over the situation--the best he could hope for would be her willingness to play a new, even-more farcical round of names-and-places patty-cake with him.
No thanks.
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And he will continue to ignore the bit just as much as she continues to stick to it. That, too, is a bit.
But the time for bits is over; Pastos takes a deep breath, pushing all of that aside mentally, and levels his steely gaze on Neos through the impassive sheen of his sick-ass shades.
"I saw something weird in the Abyss, and it was wearing your armour," he says. He's had this exact phrasing locked and loaded since before he left his apartment, and now he fires it point blank. "Know anything about that?"
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She is dead serious about both of those things. "Would that I knew, but from what I heard of the Abyss, most apparitions are... manifestations of the place and your own psyche. I take it this was... Different."
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But in his heart, he thinks maybe she's right. On the one hand, why should he be so special and different as to experience a unique aspect of the Abyss, something more 'real' or less 'him' than any other Knight? To assume that would be arrogance of the highest calibre--and he would know.
So who's to say that isn't all that was? Why wouldn't it be? Would it be so unreasonable to believe that at worst, his psyche just looks--if not stranger and more twisted, at least weirder and more obscure than someone else's? It could almost be a comforting thing to believe--if he hadn't seen what he'd seen of himself, these past few weeks. If he hadn't felt what he'd felt--or not felt, in many ways.
And in that regard, what Neos suggests makes more sense, rather than less. Maybe he'd tapped into something, while there--something truer, or more real. Something different.
"...but don't write it off, either." He crosses his arms over his chest, his shoulders squared in a way that reads as imposing. Like he's passing judgment in the process of speaking, instead of simply ruminating or recounting.
"It wore your armour, but it wasn't you. It didn't look like you, or sound like you. It was some kind of serpent woman. Called itself Typhon. And it tried to cut a deal with me."
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"So this serpent woman, they offered something, and wanted something from you in return?" That actually is... Really unusual. "... Well, we know that the Abyss does make such offers; see the Harbingers for proof of that."
"What did it want?"
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At the mention of the Harbingers, though... his silence changes. Not in any overt way, obviously. Silence is silence, and Pastos is ever a man of his extremes when it comes to speech.
His head lowers in deeper thought, the muscle in the back of his jaw tightening.
He had not actually considered that possibility.
Where the Harbingers came from or how they came to be was not the highest priority on his mental list. Was that a mistake? That his focus had been on the greater forces at play (to the minor exclusion of smaller pieces) had been in large part due to his desire to distill those pieces into a comprehensible series of mechanics and motivations--but his own 'why' doesn't really absolve him of negligence, does it? He had understood that the Harbingers were serving their role voluntarily--but, as he now knew, not necessarily with full knowledge of what they served.
How does this information apply to him? It's hard for him to draw any conclusions, save that perhaps the Abyss wanted him. Not just anyone, but him specifically. Why? What was it about him that--
"Well," he starts, slowly. He is, on some level, feeling out the new, harder and more polished edges of his own understanding as he recalls the event. "It offered me power, in exchange for 'escape.'"
He tilts his head slightly. He's frowning now.
Why Neos? Not why him--he understands, intuitively, why it would be him. Of course it's him. There are so many more reasons it would be him, now that he's glimpsed some of them, he can't unknow every detail revealed to him in the process--
Unless it isn't him. Maybe it's just Neos the Abyss wants? No. No, that's wrong. Some mental or emotional instinct rejects that thought immediately. Like a string being pulled in the mechanism of his own heart or brain.
But what does Neos have to do with this? Was she just a convenient excuse? That doesn't make any sense. Why be so pointedly oblique about who the 'someone' was, unless there's a reason for that opaqueness?
"At first it was trying to make a point about how 'none of us are strong enough,'" which even Pastos can acknowledge was bait custom crafted to hook him specifically, "and how it wanted to give me a 'boon.' Which was a knife. It was trying to give me a knife to 'cut' an escape, and in return I was supposed to wait for some prophetic-scale storm and cut a path for it from this side." He pauses. "I say 'side' but I don't really know that the Abyss has sides, exactly. What it actually said was 'between worlds.' Which raises some questions. What constitutes a 'world?' Is the Abyss a separate one? Does its space overlap with ours in the material of reality, or is it somehow adjacent?"
These are not questions that he's asking Neos. But he wishes he fucking knew.
"It claimed its motive was that it needed to find someone outside of the Abyss. It used that word specifically. 'Needs.' It 'needs' that person. The only actual description I got was 'the one who has a shining pearl around the anger in her heart.'"
He takes a deep breath, trying to sort through the details for any kind of further clue--but so far the only clues have come from Neos herself, and the picture they're starting to form... he thinks he can see it, but he's not sure why it is what it is. He just... sees. Something. Something coming closer--something bearing down on him, coming out of the edge of his peripheral vision into the light. It has a shape, and it brings the darkness with it.
He's still talking.
"I'm assuming that's you. I don't know what that means, I don't know anything about your personal business--but with the armour connection, that was the only conclusion that made any goddamn sense. So here we are."
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There's a faint silver glow, as she activates Body-Temple Aspect, calmly places her hand to her chest, and winces a little as her chest starts to glow, to admit her hand.
Perhaps she should not do that!?
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Pastos has never really understood what it does Neos' Aspect is, or does. He's gathered broadly that it must have some kind of protective theme, and that this is somehow connected to some kind of offensive smite, but that's about it.
Which does make sense as a theme in connection to pearls--they are, after all, layers formed around an irritant to protect the body.
None of this knowledge--or approximate, potentially extremely incorrect knowledge--prepares him in any way for what Neos does now.
He doesn't even know how to react.
Correspondingly, he doesn't. He stands there, stone faced but fascinated, watching her make quite possibly a terrible decision--but it does not occur to him to stop her.
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And this includes, apparently, being able to search its deepest sanctuaries, even as she winces in pain, even as her hand sinks, gently, into what should be flesh.
What exists in her heart?
... A blast of cold, icy wind suffuses the area as her heart is opened to the world, freezing the water around them if there is any. Beaches do tend to have water as a rarity, aside from, you know. Way over there.
She can feel her hand numbing through the gauntlet.
The wind howls and picks up as she tries to sink it in deeper. She winces, shakes her head, pulls the gauntlet back, feels the portal close.
She sinks to her knees in a coughing fit. That was clearly a bad idea. "Can't. Reach it."
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Cal's limbs flap in the gale, the salt spray and sweat on Pastos' own body is like painful needles on his bare skin--
Then... she gives up.
How close did she get? How much farther did she have to go? What in the actual fuck was all that--
These are the questions that occupy Pastos' mind. Not 'are you okay?' or 'was that bad?'
Well, the second one is there, sort of. But he's not socially or emotionally conscious enough to ask the first, because whatever human element is required to think it is simply... not there.
"Holy shit," he says instead. "What even are you?"
In a fucked up way, this is a kind of compliment. Coming from Pastos, any kind of 'impressed' is high praise.
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But she considers the question, as the beach thaws and the heat begins to return. "... Just a girl, with a frozen heart."
Slowly, she rises to her hands and knees. "Not trying that again. Not without a better idea of how to avoid that happening. If we'd hurt someone..."
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Pastos' hand rises to his chin--he suppoprts that arm with his other hand, forming an almost trite picture of a man in deep thought.
Almost. You know, except for the spaghetti-limbed plush puppet hanging off of him, and the rest of his costume doing more than needed to dispel any impression of seriousness from the sight of him.
"The effect was pretty localised. I wonder if that's the storm the snake was talking about? Finding a remote place to try it again wouldn't be hard, but it would probably be smarter to go inland to avoid unintentional weather patterns forming. The bigger problem might be your stamina. I have an idea, but it would take some fresh magic--something new. I already know what it would look like, though. I've been thinking about it since before the Abyss, actually--but I held back. I shouldn't have, but never mind that now. Point is, it's possible, I'm pretty sure."
Neos' second mistake was suggesting she wanted to try again. Her third was naming solvable problems.
Her first, however, was doing this in front of Nova Pastos and not literally anyone else with common sense. Or brakes. Or a history of tearing their own self apart as a matter of daily mental living.
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DIRK--
NATALIA--
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A little psychosis, as a treat... but it's fine.
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I thought I'd sent this earlier, I'm so sorry!
Re: I thought I'd sent this earlier, I'm so sorry!
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Good night, sweet prince.
Re: Good night, sweet prince.