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 Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2025 7:40 pm
As Rowan prepared to end her evening, she couldn’t help but feel a bit of concern for her extraterrestrial roommate. Bacchus was obviously not lacking in survival skills on his own planet, but despite (and likely at least in part because of) his adventurous nature, she worried about his ability to navigate a living world. A living metropolis, no less. At least he always came home relatively safely from his many nocturnal escapades. She was fully aware of the absurdity of being a mother hen at a thousand year old alien, but knowing that fact did nothing to curb the impulse to do so. The door flew open with characteristic enthusiasm, “Heeeeeeyyyyy, I’m back and I brought a friend!” Fully expecting to meet another random park animal, Rowan was surprised to see another human woman alongside a glamoured Fin. “Oh, hello! I didn’t realize that Fin was bringing someone home or I would have had something ready. I’d also be wearing something other than pajamas.” She was keenly aware of her lack of makeup, the not particularly flattering fit of her clothes. “I’m Rowan.”
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2025 8:16 pm
Addy's face betrayed her anxiety as she stepped through the threshold with a wave. She quickly glanced around the apartment as if looking for anything else resembling the dice before resting her eyes on Rowan and offering a smile. The apartment seemed safe enough and she doubted Fin would have brought them somewhere likely to have a hell dimension in it. "No worries! Really. I'm imposing on you. I'm Adelinde. Call me Addy. I didn't realize he hadn't told you." Addy herself was no vision of beauty. Her hair was mussed and her makeup a little smeared. Raccoon eyes rimmed her lower lids from the tears that had escaped during her dog encounter. Her knee was scraped and had obviously bled from where she had fallen. Still, she carried herself like she always did, with her head up and her shoulders back. Rowan's appearance for the time of night didn't even cross her mind. "Do you like tacos? I grabbed some from this little hole in the wall before we came," she held out the bag, small grease stains on the bottom, like an offering before closing and locking the door behind her. "I really am sorry to show up so late, but um. Well. He's an alien and we just escaped some sort of Temu Jumanji and Fin said you would be able to explain what the ******** is going on in this town."
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2025 8:40 pm
Rowan grimaced sympathetically at the mention of “Temu Jumanji.” She certainly hadn’t enjoyed her own encounters with the gameboard, even with magical abilities to back her up. They hadn’t exactly been effective against intangible foes, not to mention things like the floor dropping out from under her or giant mud pits. At least everyone had made it out in one piece. “It’s nice to meet you, even if I’m sorry you got caught up in that, it’s definitely not a fun experience.” She gave her long red braid a few light tugs to adjust it, “Tacos do sound nice, thank you. But first I think we should do something about that scrape on your leg.” A golden compact mirror on a chain materialized in her right palm. “Please, have a seat. This won’t make it go away entirely, but it’ll close it up enough to stop the bleeding.” The young woman nodded as Addy requested an explanation. She’d definitely wanted plenty of them when she first encountered this stuff. Fin flopped down on the couch across from Rowan, long limbs sprawling outward before a slinky orange cat climbed upward to stretch across the alien’s chest. “So you know by now that things are…more than what should be scientifically possible.” She wasn’t quite as eloquent as she’d have liked to be, but it wasn’t as though she had a speech prepared on the subject. “What do you want to know?”
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Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2025 9:17 pm
Soft pink eyes widened a little as the compact appeared and she stared at it in awe for a moment before remembering to speak. "Oh, sure. Thank you. I would appreciate that." It certainly wasn't the strangest thing she'd seen lately, or even tonight, but it had been unexpected nonetheless. Still, she did as requested and took a seat on the couch next to Fin's absurdly long legs to let Rowan work. The appearance of a cat helped settle her nerves quite a bit. The animal seemed happy, calm, and most importantly, not scared. Safe. Animals always knew when it wasn't safe. "Yes, well, I've seen some things and had some encounters. I just want to make sense of them, you know? It all started with this...well, I'd call him a man, but that word does him too much credit. I was walking home late one night and found him in an alleyway with an unconscious girl. He was dressed in some sort of, I don't know, military attire? Nothing they use currently but some sort of dress outfit. I uh. Well I hit him in the face with a shoe and he wasn't particularly fond of that, so he attacked me. Ako said he drained my energy, but I was able to stop him with an elbow to the nose. Then Ako told him to leave, which just didn't sit right with me. Why would she let someone attacking two women just leave? But then she helped me get the girl to the hospital. The weird thing, well, the other weird thing, it was all weird, was that she had a...I don't know...Hole in her head and chest? And that was just the first thing. There was a shadow creature in the park that didn't seem to take any damage from my knife. If that guy with the shield hadn't shown up I don't know what I would have done. And then this stupid board game...And I thought this guy," she gestured to Fin with a mildly accusatory jab of her thumb, "was a method-acting cosplayer but it turns out I was getting s**t faced with an alien." The words tumbled out in a rushed jumble, Addy forgetting to take a breath as she spoke. She inhaled deeply once she was done. "Sorry, I know that was a lot. And Ako told me some things about Senshi and Order and Chaos, but I just didn't feel like I could trust her...I got what I could out of her but I don't know what's true and what's not. She angled it all like she was on the good side, but she let a violent man escape." Her brows knitted in frustration and she leaned back against the couch, her exhaustion catching up with her. "Nothing makes sense anymore."
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Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2025 3:30 pm
Rowan carefully angled the mirror so the light reflected onto Addy’s scrape, watching as the small wound closed. “It’s not super powerful, but I’m really glad to have it.” She offered the other woman a reassuring smile. “Last year I was where you are now. I started encountering these things and I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t meet any of the more…militarized ones until later but there’s a good chance you saved that woman’s life.” She paused briefly, knowing the weight of what she’d just said, that it was only going to get heavier. “I’ve met Ako, briefly before I awakened. She seems to want to do the right thing, but she still works with people who see lives other than their own as disposable. They call themselves the Negaverse. It’s not a name I would have picked, but that’s what they call it. The agent you found had probably drained the woman’s energy, and could have done much worse without intervention.” She grimaced slightly. “What I’m going to say sounds completely insane, but it’s the truth as far as I know it. Souls are real, so is reincarnation. I would never have believed it if I didn’t have memories of one of my past selves. Not just hallucinations or imaginings, real memories, confirmed by real evidence. And a lot of the time, what the Negaverse and its agents are after are starseeds. Physical manifestations of a person’s soul that they use to fuel their own power. I’ve heard of some who are addicted to personally consuming them.” Her hand wandered unconsciously to her own chest as she spoke. “And it destroys them. Completely. Everything about who they are or who they might be reborn as. It erases them from existence and if they’re like Bacchus and I, if they’re connected to a planet, it kills it. It destroys all possibility of life returning to that world.” Rowan swallowed hard, trying not to dwell too long on the implications of her statement. “Whatever Ako told you might not have been an outright lie, but I can’t imagine that it was the whole truth. I don’t know what exactly goes on in their organization beyond that, but even the ones who aren’t as openly murderous are complicit.” Bacchus broke in, his outrage stretched thin over something he was less willing to show. “It ******** ate my planet. Or made it eat itself. I don’t ******** know. Chaos did. The shithead thing they all bow to. Or suck off. Whatever it is they do.” He rolled onto his side until he faced the back of the couch, taking the surprisingly compliant cat with him before spitting out a few muffled words. “They’re a bunch of bootlicking shits.”Rowan sighed softly before continuing, “I’m sorry that I have to tell you all of this. I wish I didn’t have to, but it’s safer if you know. I know some of them…some of the Negaverse agents and senshi. Oh, senshi are what Bacchus and I are. But some of them didn’t volunteer. They forced Chaos into their starseeds and made them think they wanted to serve it. There is a way back, purification, but most of us don’t have the power to do that. And we can’t force them to want the Chaos out the way it can force them to want it in.” “Still some ******** bootlickers if they see what they’re doing and keep at it.” “Sorry, I know this is all a lot to take in, especially all at once.” Rowan leaned back slightly in her seat, guilt gnawing at her as she considered the fact that she’d made everything make even less sense.
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Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2025 8:50 pm
Addy watched with obvious fascination as the cut on her knee began to close. Once Rowan was done, she gently touched the area as if to test what she had seen was real. Sure enough, the scrape was truly gone. If not for the little bits of dried blood, she never would have known it existed. Sure, she had seen monsters and aliens, but this was different. This was something that existed purely to help. Her back straightened as the other woman got into the thick of what was going on. Rowan confirmed what she had suspected all along. That girl's life and her life were in danger that night. It reaffirmed that she had done the right thing, but also made her blood run cold. She had stumbled onto an agent of an evil, world ending entity. The Negaverse. No wonder Ako hadn't told her the name. Any way you said it didn't sound positive. If things had gone differently, she could have wound up in the morgue or maybe just missing. Another unsolved case in Destiny City. "Who named it, a thirteen year old My Chemical Romance enthusiast?" she muttered, her tone bitter. Something about the confirmation that she was right vindicated her, yes, but it also made her angry. Addy refocused on Rowan, listening more intently. Starseeds. Souls. Reincarnation. Planets. How many had the Negaverse already taken? How many worlds and lives had been destroyed in pursuit of power? Were lives really nothing but currency for them? Things to be taken and apparently eaten. That thought made her stomach flip. Some of them ate souls? Truly? It was all hard to believe and yet everything she had seen made her more open to accepting it. If aliens and magic hell dimensions and soul stealing Civil War reenactors were all real, why couldn't reincarnation be real? Soft pink eyes turned on Bacchus at his outburst. So he was a living victim of their machine. No wonder he was on earth. She grimaced as he faced the couch, wanting to reach out to him to comfort him but hesitating and ultimately deciding it was best to leave him be for now. He clearly wanted to shut the world out for a moment and who could blame him? His own planet was gone. A world full of plants and animals and surely people he loved. Addy knew she had no way to contemplate the sort of soul shattering grief that must bring him. The death of her aunt alone threatened to choke her into depressed, grief-stricken submission. That amplified to a planetary scale would be unbearable. It made her heart ache for him. He must have been so alone. Lost. The survivor's guilt alone had to be deadly. No wonder he drank. "So they trade worlds for power, or some I guess for pleasure, and what, churn out more of their kind? To what end? What could possibly justify ending even one world, let alone more? I just. I can't fathom how a person could look at themselves in the mirror and be okay with seeing that. Okay with bearing the mark of a dead world on their chest. I always knew there were bad people in the world but this...I don't think I could have imagined this." Her stomach dropped again as she turned to Rowan with a horrified look of recognition on her face, "And they want Earth too, don't they?"
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Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2025 9:57 pm
Rowan nodded, wishing she had some way, any way to soften what she’d just laid at this woman’s feet. It was more than any person could fathom as belonging to a sane reality. But unfortunately the truth was as cruel and mad as anything she could imagine and there was nothing that lying could do to improve that. “They do. And they’re more than willing to kill to have it. I don’t know exactly what they want with it, if they do manage to take it for themselves. From everything I’ve heard.” She glanced toward the alien pretending that this conversation wasn’t happening, “From everything I’ve heard this militarization is something unique to Earth. But enough worlds are uninhabitable that more and more people awaken on Earth. This might be one of the last planets with an actual population in the galaxy and that means more powerful starseeds come here.” She sighed, “But we can fight back. We are fighting back. From what I can tell we’ve been at a stalemate for a long time. On Earth, anyway. Other planets, the ones that still have starseeds, they still have a chance.” A slight smile crossed the young woman’s face, “There are animals on my world again. I saw giant birds a few weeks ago.” The excitement in her voice was undeniable as she spoke. “So, just because they’ve taken something doesn’t mean they get to keep it. Not always.”
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