2020-07-07: Light in the Depths of Shadow
- Log: Light in the Depths of Shadow
- Cast: Pearl, Jean
- Where: Cardon Forest
- Date: July 07, 2020
- Summary: Jean is summoned to the forest outside Kattlelox for a conversation with someone finally ready to listen.
==============================<* Cardon Forest *>=============================== The thick and lush Cardon Forest exists to the south of Kattelox City's walls. Unlike many other forests that dot FIlgaia's landscape, the Cardon Forest is peaceful and quiet, relatively free of any monsters or Fiends that often plague the world. Sometimes, you can see children playing here in the meadows, or a couple out for a picnic. But beware of the Digger's Guild warning -- for a structure exists far down south of the Forest, a mysterious Ruin whose entranceway remains sealed to this day. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hW_K2fSVQc
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
It started with a simple message, relayed by a teenage girl to a certain green haired dancer. It was not a polite message. It was conveyed in hushed tones, with a small hand drawn map presented with it. The messaqge was thus:
"There's a clearing in Cardon Forest. The map shows you where. You're expected in three hours, alone. There's only going to be violence if you don't turn up."
The girl then vanished into the crowd, in a practiced and familiar manner, telling easily who the mesage was from.
Now, a young womn waits in a clearing, waiting. She has silver hair, and far too many scars. She has a canteen at her side, and there is a crumpled paper bag with hints of pastry crmbs on the outside.
For now, she waits, watching the entrance to the clearing.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
A simple message, but it's true that there's little polite about this. Jean didn't do anything to the messenger but watch her. Then, she considered the clearing, and the map. She left a message for her friends, and...
Three hours later, here Jean is. She steps to the entrance of the clearing in a dancing outfit, apparently relaxed and comfortable, but Pearl is probably not fooled by the idea that Jean isn't paying attention. Quite the opposite--Jean turns to look at her, looks between canteen, bag, and woman.
"I'm here," Jean says simply. She does not carry a weapon save for the fans at her side.
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
Pearl, for once, is not dressed in either her guard clothes or her Shadow Dragon gi. Instead she wears a grey button up shirt, and a blue skirt, long socks and sensible boots. She stands when Jean enters the clearing, and looks at her in her dancers outfit. "I see that." She gives Jean a once over, and then nods. "Good."
Pearl pauses, and casts a look around, stops, and focuses on something, but then turns back to Jean. Jean, paying attention, can probably get an idea of what Pearl's looking at: There's someone, near invisible, positioned on a tree a short distance away. They are indistinct, but there.
"I recommend we keep our voices low and calm. Filgaia may be out of his reach, but I am still followed by someone who seeks her own advancement. I do not think she is foolish enough to speak of this, but she also felt she was strong enough to face me at this point." Pearl is... almost conversational? It's a tone she's unused to having, but she is trying anyway.
"I felt it is past time we spoke. I have not given you the opportunity apart fromk heated exchanges as we tried to kill each other." There's no humour in her voice. "I want to know something. I want to know why you ran, and as importantly, what made you think you could?"
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Ordinary attire--clothes suitable for blending in, maybe. Jean looks over Pearl in this outfit herself, and wonders for a moment what it means. For her part--Jean looks much as she ever does. The old scars are hard to spot when the eye is more easily drawn other places, like the bright colors of her clothes.
Jean absolutely notices the other person--she was looking exactly for signs of an ambush, after all.
"...All right," Jean answers about keeping her voice calm, and considers it. "I don't mind if she shows herself. I see her regardless." But Jean was brought here under threat, so she doesn't make demands of the girl. It is... not strange, to Jean, to just talk to someone.
But she knows it's strange to Pearl.
"That's true. You're actually willing to listen?" Jean crosses her arms, looking up and down Pearl again thoughtfully. "That's all? Just an easy question," she says, a little wry. "All right."
"I left because I realized our Master had been lying to us. He wasn't teaching us an art of strength or power at all--it was just death and cruelty. A false 'strength' based on nothing but fear and brutality."
"...The second question I can't really answer," she says with a shrg, uncrossing her arms and walking further into the clearing, to conversational distance. She remains wary, but looks relaxed. "...I didn't think about it that way. I knew what the right thing to do was, and that I had to do it. 'Could' was never part of it."
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
"Very well." Pearl says, and looks up. "If you're going to listen in, Amy, you may as well do it up close." She speaks louder than the conversational tone, and the shimmering light that hides their spy falls away. She quickly closes the distance with a grapnel.
"What's even the point of this?" Amy asks snidely. "If this is your hard core runaway, she doesn't look like much. I could probably take her out, bring her back to the master." Pearl shoots her a glance, and Amy steps that back a bit. "I mean..."
"She is not as she was, but you are a fool to underestimate her. Jean was once the strongest of us. Our brief ray of hope." Pearls tone remains conversational, but there is conflicted emotion in her voice. And a hint of idolization, for who Jean was.
Pearl looks back to Jean. "Even if it is just to satisfy my curiousity, I would know your reasons." And then Pearl listens. She listens intently. She waits for a moment, to gaher her thoughts. "He can only inflict such cruelty because he has power. Power enough to control and kill. Even if you say it is a false power, it is real enough for him to use." She doesn't DENY that it's death and cruelty. Indeed, she seems to nod in agreement. "And in so doing, we become deadly and cruel, I take it." There's a pause. "I... cannot argue that." She looks down at her hands. "But it is not a power any of us could wield and hope to defeat him. Any of us but you."
She looks at Jean, and pauses. "The right thing to do, hm?" She can't help but sneer a little. "Could you have not waited even a few years? You could have killed him and disappeared. You could have ended it. You were almost strong enough." Peal seems to take effort to keep her tone calm and collected, but emotion is seeping in. Her anger, her despair. Deep down, a part of her is still that girl she was four or five years ago, shattered by the loss of hope.
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Don't try it," Jean advises Amy. "I don't want to hurt you." Amy, her name is. Jean will remember that. She must've been too young, back then--but Jean didn't know all of the kids either. Just enough of them.
But a brief ray of hope... Jean looks down, presses her lips together, and looks back up again.
"But that's not strength," Jean answers, impassioned. "It's..." She stops, nd then nods. "Pearl..."
Jean is quiet for a few moments before she shakes her head. "...I couldn't. I couldn't do it for another minute. I couldn't be a part of it anymore." She looks to Pearl's eyes. "He was powerful. ...I didn't know how to make you or any of us see--he'd broken all of us so badly that I barely understood anything myself. I just knew I had to be out of there, had to be doing anything but what I was doing."
"...I don't know if I could've ended it. Not as I was. But the stain of that past won't wash out just with excuses."
"I will end it," Jean says, eyes sharpening. "I will face the past. I was too weak to think of everyone else back then. But now--We could do it together, Pearl."
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
"Ugh, fine, I guess I'll just sit to one side while you to spend ages talking to each other." Amy is remarkably flippant and forward for someone in the cult. It's way too easy to get the crap kicked out of you for flippance. But she is regardless. She takes off her mask, leans against a tree, and starts... eating candies?? Pearl doesn't even TRY to stop her.
"Maybe it isn't strength. But it was power." Her face hardens. "And you could have used that power for whatever you wished, and only the fools would have resisted. Surely you knew that."
When Jean locks eyes with her, Pearl doesn't look away, those cold grey eyes of hers staring back. But she listens, or at least attempts to. "...Maybe you couldn't. But he took it out on all of us. Things became ever more brutal for one of us daring to run away." But her eyes suddenly break contact. "...If we were broken at that pont, he sought to shatter us completely, so that none would dare oppose him."
And then Pearl looks genuinely surprised at what Jean says next. "You will?" She seems simultaneously angry and scared at the situation. "If you were weak then, what are you now?" That comes out more heated. "You can't even best me as you are, how am I supposed to believe you'll kill him?!" Her hands are shaking, slightly. "As you are, there's no way you can kill him and there's no way I can kill him, yet somehow two of us against an entire cult martial artists and him is going to lead to victory? We both need more power, and you need more than I do." She pauses, catching her breath, and trying to reompose herself. "It may not matter much longer soon anyway."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Yep!" Jean tells Amy, and if anything appreciates how much life there seems to be in her, despite her presence in the Cult. She doesn't really want to discourage that. But the fact that Pearl isn't says a lot on its own.
"At what cost?" Jean asks of the use of that power. "The people I hurt were the ones who would have to pay that price. I won't live that way."
Took it out on all of them... Jean can believe it. But when she surprises Pearl, Pearl doesn't in turn surprise her so much. Her heated words, her anger--Jean accepts both. She just waits--until Pearl catches her breath, recomposes herself, and speaks up.
"I will," she says again simply. "And we could be stronger together than apart. But... why won't it matter?"
Jean is concerned at that prasing.
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
Amy continues to lounge about eating delicious candy. Occasionally when she thinks Pearl and Jean aren't looking, she makes little movements with her hands like they were talking, and whispers 'blah blah blah' under her breath. Is this really what Pearl does with a protege? The queen of death and cruelty?
"What about the cost already paid?" The silver haired woman says, anger still in her voice. She reachs up and removes her silvered fang, revealing a gap where three teeth should, next to a fourth damaged one. "You did this to me, four years after I was brought in. You crushed them, utterly." She replaces the silvered fang in her mouth.
She points to the the three scars above her left eye. "You scored this with an inverse clour two and a half years in." The burn marks across her right arm are next. "7 year in. The corrosive ki from your kick burnt away my flesh, so potent it was. Countless of these are your doing. And what of Marco or Alana or Rio? You inflicted as much on them."
And then she unbuttons her shirt. Her torso is still very scarred, but there is what looks like a blast mark just above and to the right of the belly button. "And the last time I saw you." She turns around, to show a matching scar on her back. "An otherwise perfect Shadow Dragon Palm, excepting that you missed my spine." She pauses. "Or was that on purpose too?" She starts buttoning up again. "One of the few times the healers saw to me, but only to ensure I didn't immediately die."
She takes a few seconds. To one side, Amy has stopped eating and is paying very close attention. "Do you know how I could sleep those nights? Even with the pain? Because I knew it was making you stronger. That eventually you'd be strong enough and we'd be free to follow you instead." There's the slightest hint of a tear in her eye, as much as she tries to suppress them. "And then you 'died'. And it was all for nothing. And then years later, you turn up alive. And weak. What did you expect?"
"Maybe we could. But it wouldn't be enough. It may never be enough. He is as strong as he ever wars." And then there's a weary smile. "I have been given a target and a time limit, and despite multiple attempts, he lives, and my time runs short. It is even harder when I am not on a world where the target exists." She pauses again. "Or Amy could get lucky and kill me and secure her promotion. If she still thinks it's worth it."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
It's dangerous, in its way. But it's an opening, in another, a little ray of light. So many of those taken by the Cult have such dead eyes...
Jean does not flinch back from this anger, or from the explanations and showings of the scars. She looks over each, and remembers well--not in her mind but in her bones, in her hands and feet. And the others...
Jean can think of many others--and she doesn't answer whether that last scar was on purpose.
"I can't undo what I've done," Jean says, shaking her head. "I live with that shame. But we can say, no more."
"..."
"To follow... me?" Jean wonders, staring for a moment as if she's seeing Pearl all over again for the first time. She notices that sense of emotion, and then... all of that.
"..." She seems to decide something, and it changes in her posture. She stands up a little straighter. "Then I won't ask you to join me. You're right. It isn't enough, if I drag you in to fix my mistake. I have to do this myself."
"I don't think Amy will do that, from what I see of her already. And I think you do see what I saw. He's not worth following--he's just a monster stealing childrens' lives."
Jean shakes her head. "...This is why I have to go to Pentagulia. I know... that there I can find what I need." She stops, and looks back between Amy, and then Pearl. "...Run. You can go. It doesn't have to be your responsibility--you're a whole world away. He claims his reach goes forever, but he claimed I'd pay with my life, too, and I'm alive now."
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
Pearl is quiet and contemplative as Jean speaks, as if she's trying to process what's being said. She waits to hear all the other woman has to say. Amy's eyes are darting back and forward between the two, paying rapt attention.
Pearl's eyes widen as Jean proposes her plan. "Are you insane?!" Amy interjects, with incredulity. "Were you listening when she said you'd die!? The Master is unkillable, you're both nuts." Amy shakes her head. "And I totally would! Just because you're soft doesn't mean I am."
Pearl holds up a finger to quiet her student/fellow assassin. "You are soft. I do not know what that sect was doing, but you weren't trained as Jean and I were. You have thrived in the dojo, but you are arrogant and do not know your limits." Pearl is uncompromisingly brutal in her assessment of Amy, but she gives an assessment instead of a punch to the throat. "Also you have been given surprising leeway." She looks back at Jean. "...What is it you hope to find in Pentagulia?" She is cautious, and doesn't necessarily expect an honest answer. She doesn't comment on Jean's plan to fight him alone.
"That is not an option." Pearl says, with anger creeping back. "I thought I was free her too. And then we were whisked to Spira by some magic, and the Shadow Dragon clan was already there, waiting." It's the anger of someone who had their chance ripped away from them again. "And he won't allow someone else to escape. Our deaths would be slow, painful, and used as an example for years to come. I cannot do as you have done. If such a magical effect happens again, we WILL be found. I can merely do all I can to grow stronger, so that when the time comes I can at least wound him grievously. Perhaps that's going to be the grand point to my life." She sounds angry and defeated all at once.
"Are you seriously planning to kill the Master in front of me? What's wrong with you?" Amy shakes her head. "I could just tell him everything, you know."
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
Amy's incredulous response receives only a very serious look from Jean. She doesn't so much as blink at the way Amy speaks or what she says as she does. Instead, she looks to Pearl for a moment, thoughtfully.
"You have more life in you than I'm used to, for a child of the Shadow Dragon," Jean agrees(?) with Pearl. "I hope you don't lose it."
But Pentagulia? "Originally," Jean says, "I wanted to meet with Blue Master Lunn. The greatest martial artist in the world... if anyone would know best what to do, it would've been him. But that didn't go as I planned it. But I know... I'm sure, that when Lucia meets Althena... I'll find what I'm looking for."
Not an option. "...No," Jean says. "It won't. I will defeat him."
She turns to look at Amy again. "You can tell him all you want about me. But isn't it exactly how you were taught? To consider power above all else. I don't think you want to report in on what Pearl's been saying... And I don't think you want to go back to living the way you must have when you were there."
"...I know it's not just him--he has other teachers who have become like he is. I was supposed to, too."
"But you..."
"You wanted to know 'why.' And that's something that someone with nothing left in their heart wouldn't think to ask. And maybe one day... That'll burn brighter than your fear does."
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
Amy just sort of blinks at the rapid assessment from both of them. "You two are waaaaay too casual about this whole thing. Fine, whatever. I'll keep quiet or whatever." The redhead lets out a sigh. "I knew Pearl was weird, but you are too, lady." She wanders back to where she was sitting, and those candies come out again.
"I see. The man who has once already driven the cult underground. Perhaps he could be of use." She muses, before shaking her head. "But he has also failed to drive us out completely. Still, if what you are looking for aids you in your plan, then I must hope for your success while likely being placed to cause your failure. Perhaps on two fronts." There isn't malice in this, just sort of acceptance. "Indeed, I do not suspect we will meet anywhere but the battlefield for quite some time. You have my thanks for responding, but I feel you had little choice.
She pauses at the talk of the other teachers. "...True. They must not be allowed to escape their complicity." She says, glossing over Jean's potential role as one of them. "...But most of us are just as complicit." She starts to step backwards.
"Hm." She scowls, at the thought of something there in her heart. She's not sure that she can respond to that thought. Finally, she speaks. "We should end this. You'll not be followed, and Amy and I shall make a different route back to the city."
She pauses. "...A friend of yours told me that she thought I was jealous of you, and your friends, and the life you lead." She looks to Amy, and starts slipping on her grapnel. "It pains me to say it, but she is correct. Even the faintest taste of it makes me want more." She aims into the trees. Amy stands up and does the same. ""Just ensure that you do what you say you will. Perhaps then I can experience it again."
She fires, and launches off into the treeline, disappearing rapidly.
[OOC] Pearl says, "blu-ray remove second copy of that pose"
<Pose Tracker> Jean has posed.
"Trust me," Jean says, "I'm anything but casual about it." Jean nods, though, and then looks back to Pearl.
"It's likely," Jean says. "And... I'm not going to say 'you're welcome' when you made threats to get me to show up--but I don't regret coming out here, either. You've helped me with what I have to do."
"...We are."
"We should," Jean agrees about ending it. She won't be followed, huh? They'll take a different route... But it's really what Pearl says after the pause that strikes her. A friend of hers...
Jean nods, seriously, once before Pearl goes. She continues to watch where she disappeared for a long few moments.
"...I will," Jean promises. "For you, too."