she gave the chains wrapped tight ‘round the handles to the set of front doors of a seedy looking warehouse another yank, for good measure. good to know no one had kept her joint running while she was gone, she thought. with a grumble through teeth grit so tight she bit through the edge of a fresh cigarette, she could only utter curses at her former employees. still. absence from the city or not, the property rights to these warehouses were still in her name.
nina was too far past her days as a pup to find herself upset enough to ignore another’s presence. still, focus tied to the chains keeping her from her former illicit business, she breathed the last plumes of smoke from her lungs, letting instead her hands burn black with flame.
melted and severed, the chains fell to her feet with a clang. whether or not such a metallic sound was her own laughter or the chains themselves was up to question.
▉ He looked at her and closed his eyes. Once more he was being sized up, likely because he looked strong. He’d give props to Medb for her wish’s handiwork, but in a setting where his goal wasn’t destruction and consumption, it was proving to be a pain. It was all meaningless in the end – people were either scared of him or wanted to fight him.
All he wanted to do was nap.
“If you’re lookin’ for a fight I don’t really feel like it. Not like this anyway. Come back when I’ve got some of my shit back.”
she gave him a quizzical glance, irises barely raising over the edge of her lower lashes, not wasting the effort of fully assessing the distance between them. she was never the best at reading airs. body language, sure, though his mixed between annoyance and confrontation, though she could only assume the latter was postural. she’d greeted him with a roll of the shoulders. and now, again, a soft shrug.
“ ain’t that a little judgy? i’m not a puppy here to jump at your throat. you’re just blockin’ the alley. damn. ”
it had been years, she thought; shy of a decade, at least, since she’d last heard the word uttered in such a context. doves, they’d whispered, with voices as fragile as the beats of a songbirds wings, soft as their lonely coos. doves. the ccg. a former threat to what had once been the most important thing to her in this life, in this city.
she had no reason to do anything other than sneer across the bar as he uttered the words. they were a force that certainly took less than kindly to inhuman existences, but she knew, especially, what a threat they could be to their chosen targets. would she make attempts to forge a safe haven here again? maybe, she thought, knocking back her glass of brandy, maybe.
nina eyed him over the edge of her glass, a crystal horizon line, with a man equally as attentive serving as her point of perspective. it was only a matter of who would break and speak first.
nina sarva’je, codename: rexcalibur. head of the avalon project.
her first trip to the city lasted six years. in that time, her last memories involved her first steps away from her pack, a moment of independence from the man she loved, from his ideologies, from the place for himself he built upon her strength. six years of personal development away from this man are what she remembers from the city. six years she, a woman now on an alternate timeline from the place she left, did not remember upon returning home. she remembers something parallel, an experiment between worlds conducted by the gods of a higher plane. this she doesn’t talk about.
in those six years, the woman left behind on an alpha timeline woke up from the dreamscape, spent years trying to fall back to sleep to that world again, regretting her choices and leaving the people she ‘loved’ behind. this is the woman who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, held trial for her crimes in a war that started eleven years previous. in unova, she was captured. in unova, her sire took responsibility for her life. in unova, she met her confidant, her beginning, and her end.
in unova nina met diancie. though her father saved her head from the chopping block, diancie saved nina from herself, giving her new purpose and her own path to follow. it is here that nina’s memories split. here that she remembers being pulled into the gods’ experiment. though, her alternate self continued to travel across the regions for the next six years, training, strengthening her body, learning of the higher world and what was supposedly her destiny.
how she was a weapon bred to bring her own world’s god down.
at the peak of those six years, nina remembers her life ending. she remembers willingly giving her body to her mentor, an immortal not native to their world, to grant him a foothold on her plane, as parasitic of an action as that was. she was gifted these memories, these six years, and those few moments that the world went black from diancie.
they were the first gift she received when diancie rescued nina from the alternate world three years later. though she did not believe her purpose, she continued to better herself as her predecessor had, turning to diancie’s battle research to push her body beyond mortal limits, with an aim to achieve not only mega evolution through the wholly artificial recreation of her ancestor’s caliburnite, but the shard of excalibrite she carried, as well.
it’s a feat she’s yet to attain for more than seconds at a time.
for the next two years nina and diancie conspired in secret, bringing together backers, funds, sponsors, and bright minds from around the dreamscape. in these years, she found an old flame once more, rekindled the love she had for him though she found her love for herself to be greater, and continued to push her body in preparation of the trials that were to come. she could not, however, prepare for the way she was torn open at the loss of her lover, at his sudden disappearance and lack of contact, nor would she know how the appearance of a wayward son from the future would fail to mend those wounds in the way she expected.
with bonds and plans beginning to form, nina surrendered to the negativity seeded inside of her in the experiments all those years ago. she did, however, fail, in taking her own life, achieving for a moment and a fragment only a true incarnation of an excalibur mega evolution, if only to rip out her own heart.
diancie couldn’t have that. she’s been in a hydrostasis tube for almost three years. imagine her surprise to wake up here again ...
( edgelords, antagonists, nonhumans or future sons (max four) like this post for a starter! four starters are going out but you can like past that, this is more of an interest check, i may be picky since getting my muse back into writing is a finicky process. feel free to drop an im if you want to plot! )
People find themselves asking the same questions over and over, so I will too. With her autonomy from the other people you used to roleplay with, how has Nina changed?
( nina’s had to say her goodbyes, of course. though in the last year, i’d have never expected it to have been with the characters that affected her the most.
still, out of character conflicts and your own growth lead you to say your own goodbyes, no matter how fresh the wounds remain and how hard it is to get over them. to this day i’ll probably say as far as character merit goes it’s the largest loss she’s suffered, and probably will suffer. nina’s always had her autonomy, she’s always been her own character, but what made her special to me was her interdevelopment with those she started with. now she doesn’t have that.
the brightest part of that is the fact that nina is a character that will be long lived, in her own lifespan. in terms of longevity, her character is five years old. four of those were spent writing her with another person who i, to this day, find talented and creative and clever, and her decisions and insights helped develop me as both a writer an artist. and to that person i’ll be forever grateful. to that person’s characters, well, nina’s going to be interwoven with them for a long time still, but touching upon them directly in development is something i’ll never be able to do.
i don’t regret leaving things the way i have. times changed and it came to be that any effort i made to reach out to this other person always were thrown into silence, attempts i know that touched, but … well, you know when you’ve overstayed your welcome. you know when it’s time to move on, and whether or not it’s begrudging or whether or not you hurt people or are hurt yourself, you have to. i had to. and though i’ll never feel the same with that rift i’m more adult for making that decision, she’s more of a robust character with that absence.
that’s a thing that you experience as a creator, you know? you win some and you lose some. there will be properties i can never touch upon again because they’re not my own, but that gives me the freedom to fill that rift with my own ideas, or invite other people in to collaborate.
that’s where her development bridges off now.
i would never say the group i created nina for was stifling, but for a young mind (i was around fourteen upon starting there), it was definitely negative, it was oppressive. a group of people stood out that were always too eager to put ideas too big for their boundaries down, and i find i’m a lot better off outside their walls.
would i like someone from those days to bounce ideas with? sure.
so where does that leave nina? far more cynical. she was created with thoughts of a hero in mind. the people around her filled her with ambition. she tried to build herself up to be that person. she wasn’t that person. when left to her own devices, it was amazing how one push could send her stumbling down. and once she hit rock bottom, she stayed there.
don’t get me wrong, nina isn’t happier this way, but she’s stronger for it. nina now isn’t the heroic type, she’s a leader, sure, but she isn’t the sort to follow societal norms or rules set by others, she won’t bow her head. she’s got endless horizons for how she can develop her powers, for what she can do in her life, and after she dies, how she’ll go out, what she’ll do.
left to her own devices, nina will probably be a tyrant, but she’s so much bigger because of it, and i guess i am too. )
“ i only save sentimentality for one person. but i wish you were here. i wish i didn’t know that someday you’ll take such a huge piece of me with you. i still don’t know why. but maybe i’ll find it in myself to forgive you. maybe i’ll find that in me as i’m draining the life from your throat. if you know me as i will be, you should have known ... not to cross me. maybe i wish you were here to drain you now. but i can definitely miss what we had. sure. i can miss that. i can be sentimental for you. that’s easy. forgiving you. that’s probably something even my future self won’t be strong enough to do. well. she won’t have the heart to do it. ”
“ you know the scientists love to fuck with you when they manage to override every attempt you make to block random mass text messages. every attempt. i don’t want to know what the newest human brat with a cell phone is doing, nor do i want to deal with the data charges that come with being sent a video of you setting the sixth sector on fire. thank you. ”
she was never the sort for quiet contemplation, yet, here she was. never the sort to settle herself on a concrete guard rail, or to let her legs dip over the edge of an unfinished overpass. free-hanging at the knee, she kicked her legs back and forth, stuck in the sort of stupor that left her world dead quiet, set in the middle of the din of the city. her world, as always, was black, hazed by the luminescence of fluorescent lighting, a night sky shaded still by the shadow of yet another highway interchange. the bridge’s supports shook and clanged menacingly as countless commuters passed over its joints, always obeying the knowledge that a city this large never slept.
she hadn’t slept.
she didn’t sit still and think quietly, was always aware, never let her eyes glaze over with a haze as thick and soupy as that what hung in the air she breathed. her hands never stopped moving, yet, they’d settled upon her thighs. she stared densely at the river ahead, eyes lost in the place where black water met shadowed storm walls, and all the industrial sector’s scenery blended to nothing.
nina was strong, solid, living steel, yet the pieces of memories that had rushed through the cracks in the past year had broken through her walls, had blown her over, knocked her weight out from under her knees. and yet, they’d never come in full, only flashes of herself. of her present, her past, once her future, once a long stretch of nothing, unknowing. she was solid, but she was shaken.
she’d never been so easy to affect, yet, she was a woman who supposedly knew herself to the core. she knew what she’d come to be in the city, at least, but never had the chance to know the life she’d left behind for all these years. those that left returned to the moment they’d been taken, yet those who returned always stepped into the city with new memories. some found their lost life hitting them like a well-sped wall.
why did her life come in fits of confusion and cliffhangers? she’d so little pieces, and so many blanks.
drowned by the sounds of the city, she let out a soft hum, two movements, a rise and fall of the chest. then, she returned to her silence, eyes never moving, thoughts still shaken. with everything gone, threads were something to grasp at, at least. at least.
( they say when you love something, set it free. if it really loves you in return, it will return to you of its own accord. that doesn’t account for a rift in that relationship, does it? a heartbreak? an anxiety? something that drives you apart, that breeds resentment in the cracks between the love.
you never got to set that free. it won’t return to you. not unless you try to mend the rifts.
sometimes you won’t. sometimes it’ll be too late before you realize you wanted to, and a far side that only drifted further away will just abruptly turn into nothing. that happened tonight, for a lot of people in the community. and for someone, a moderator, a fellow member, a friend, someone who is pulling herself up from hard times and grabbing life by the nails, let me say this: i care about you. those of us that may have had our differences, i still think about you, i still lose sleep over your wellbeing. i always will.
and let me say this, in any differences you’ve had with other people in life, they’ll think of you, in some way shape or form, a life touched by another life will always have an impact. you’ll always think back to it. they’ll always think back to you.
but sometimes it’s too late to do anything other than turn to your memories. sometimes that person will only ever be captured in thoughts.
so as a word of advice, reach out to what you lost, if you can, if you want to, if you feel guilt. for their sake and for yours.
it may not be the best place to place commentary. a friend is gone, and i hope she is in a better place now. she’s someone i haven’t spoken to in years, someone on the back of my mind, but not someone who i forgot. none of you will ever be. so know, if you’re feeling upset, if you’re losing hope, if you’re following that route: i’m here for you. if you’re missing here dearly, i’m here for you. if you don’t know what to do, i’m here for you.
i’ll always talk to you. i’ll always reach out.
and for the people i’ve spurned, i’m here for you. i’ll always want to talk, i’ll always want to try to work it out. i will. for the things i’ve done, i’m sorry. i’m still the same person that did those things, i’m entirely accountable for my actions, and i’m sorry.
but to those of you who were affected tonight, keep smiling. keep fighting. but if you find you’re losing strength, we’re all going to be here to pick you up. all you have to do is ask. )
“ so is half the city’s population still crying about our millionth televised murder? i need to know whether or not it’s safe to pull the earplugs out yet. ”
“Back in this shit hole again? Man, there’s a scientist out there who’s got a crush on me, I can feel it.” Cain cups his hands around his mouth. “I bet you just get off watching me take off my suit or something huh? If you wanted a show, you’re gonna have to start paying!”
“ well look, if it ain’t my favorite xenophile human. welcome back to the shithole. sure the scientists get a kick out of watching your lily white ass. ”
“ Then I guess we have a deal. ” It’s interesting; if any human dared speak to him in such a manner, he’d cut them down before their tongue finished flapping. Even the way she speaks rubs him the wrong way– but he’ll tolerate it. No point in spilling non-human blood, whether it be her’s or his own, when there’s no need of it.
As the stranger moves forward, shadows parting from her bladed frame, golden eyes widen ever so slightly in awe. Even he has to admit her form is impressive. He observes her as best he can whilst he continues, “ You’d be surprised. Humankind is too daft to fear what it should, unless they’re forced. ”
she knew his stare, but she also knew she was more than well equipped to smack him down before she’d even reached this level of her potential. nina held her head high and her shoulders straight, wearing her mega evolution proudly. it was a bravado nonetheless, but he’d know from the way she stood just how hard it was to take him seriously.
“ good enough. i’ll do my best to tolerate you. ”
she spoke as an older woman, as an adult well-settled into her alpha status. she gave a subtle half of a nod in response to the slight shift in reflection behind his mask. that was the reaction she deserved.
“ you’re really going to give me the spiel? that’s golden. ”
her political beliefs can be briefly summed up as ‘fuck the system, fuck the people that run it,’ since politics are mostly a human construct, the idea of government isn’t really something she really likes as a concept. in human terms she’d probably be anarchist. she wasn’t born into their society and doesn’t want to conform to it, she shouldn’t have to, their culture isn’t her own and the lines of species (especially the argument of civilized versus evolved in her world) divide her kind and humans. she has no want for their systems or laws to apply to her. going by their definitions, she’s entirely evil, after all (not that she isn’t, though).her aims and goals have always been seeded in tearing down the systems that cage her. at one point it was her trainer, humanity, their system and society. now, honestly, she wants the ruling gods of her world gone too. nina’s sort of leadership is pack-oriented. she’s an alpha before she’s a governor, but with somewhat royal blood, when she puts her feet on avalon in her future, the government she’ll run will probably be warlike, a dictatorship or a monarchy, or both.
18. What did they find abroad, and what did they remember?
this is one of those questions that requires you to have answered the previous one. yes. nina has traveled abroad, technically. she never really had a region in her world that she called home. she was hatched in unova and raised there, but her mother’s line comes from johto, her dad’s from kalos. she’s traveled to most of the regions, mostly during the war, but all she really saw there was death and bloodshed. they’re memories she kind of looks upon fondly.
27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality?
nina thinks she’s pretty hot. she prefers both form and function but lightweight armor will always be favored for her, usually in the form fitting carbon fiber variety. she’s never straight up worn a catsuit but she’d probably be the type. though her armor is usually pretty embellished she prefers it to be easy on, easy off. she’s got a lot of blades growing out of her body so something that’s pullover doesn’t really fly, zippers are her friend. she’ll blow a lot of money on a high quality piece, because i mean, armor is armor. for someone like her, it’s key.
36. Do they like to suffer? Like to see other people suffering?
she has no interest in letting others see her suffering, no. suffering is broken pride, in a way, she wouldn’t bow to something like that. while she wouldn’t let it get to her it’s not something she wants others to see, you know? that being said, she loves to see others suffer.
( skipping forty-five because that would be an essay i’m really not up to writing at the moment. )
