[open] ability testing

[shri]

CHARACTERS: Lakshmi Bai & YOU
WHERE: Hyrypia - Anywhere you feel like.
WHEN: DAY :016 - DAY :0
SUMMARY: Lakshmi is testing out her symbiotic abilities on some suspecting/willing test subjects/unknowing ppl. Also, backdated to hell.
WARNINGS/OTHER: Nothingness. Also Lakshmi's extra everything? Didn't talk to her the first time and still want to join in? No problems. Come get some sweet, sweet extra emotions. If there is a particular emotion you would like to have your character go through, please let me know.

I. I NEED NOISE.

Her testing isn't direct on anyone to begin with - simply she wants to try it without comment. To that she takes anyone who said they might wish to be part of it and see it for themselves, measuring it for herself. She cannot be sure with a host exactly, the way they all bleed through each other's bandages. So she instead looks to mix it between them. Not to engage directly with oh, a group of gossiping staff, a set of seconds drinking and talking about the results of the hunting races, whoever seems a good and unknowing target, as she sets herself near to them with a Host to accompany her, she gets to sit next to her.

Knows that what she'll need in particular is a host to limit any conversation she has with another, when she slips to the deep waters of that cool dark nothingness.

( Ready? )

II. I NEED THE CRACK OF A WHIP.

Once she can be sure of it, sure it's weight, it's flex, how it feels in her own skin to take all that is outside of her and push it out - it's then that she finds another host to know the exactness of how it feels. How it flows, of how it might react on those nearest to her. To peel away those bandages and let it drip, drip, drip.

So in the privacy of a tent, she settles herself in a the set of her skirts and the push back of her veil

"You're quite sure you want to... feel this?"

Last chance, jump from the ship, that way she can be sure she is ever a summer fire racing across empty grass fields, consumptive, she never leaves much else behind her but ash. Even animals knew to flee that.

III. I NEED BLOOD IN THE CUT.

After a few tries, she no longer is half so unsure, she turns it out to what it is, a tool. She steps out, she finds oh, groups of Seconds, whispering servants, drunk off duty guards, she fills herself with easy laughter and like a spiked drink, she finds them to give it to them a laughing word to build a picture of herself of someone, removed, perhaps, not inclined to touch, not liking to discuss herself or her group, but well - she is clever, isn't she? Always likely to make others laugh.

Now she knows her timing, though, now she knows to step herself out of any conversation before it wears off, to put herself back to the confines of the tents. It's there she sits, like this - where she so normally fire, now she sits a empty wine dark sea. Cool, removed, it takes and gives nothing back.

To find her then however, she is not idle, she is only a process of movements. A series of calculations that come without merit. Instead: she has taken out her knives. Lays them out by length, a stair case set of longest to shortest. Of their ceremonial blade, hers - Sir Bors, what remained of her husband's shamsher melded together as one - a shorter woman's knife for cutting thread and snapping away unwanted snags.

It's there, she begins to sharpen them. Because they must be sharp, is the only burgeoning thought of soon to be her own emotion again. But for now: it is only that they must be sharp. Tools have only purpose, after all.

Comments

[ryohji]

She's right. What makes him think his control matters at all? Much like her heart, nothing. Nothing but purpose drives this delusion of grandeur; he has his share of those too. And she is proof of purpose existing in the face of nothingness, as paradoxical as it sounds.

Maybe that's the better question. How that even coheres.

So Kaji keeps on as though she never asked. But his expression tells of a man caught in his own web of contradiction: busted yet unjustifiably proud of the rat's nest he's webbed himself into.

"It's more serious than you know." He can be, on occasion, more serious than anyone cares to know. "If I asked, would you really kill me with this knife after all? Or is this just a moment's caprice?"

[shri]

She can think of no better answer than to act, proof of it. She snaps forward, the blackwater cool, smooth in her limbs, that dark water that lives in her limbs, pushing up in her body to her knees. Into him the knife in his hand taken into her as she swiftly disarms.

But when it is pressed to his throat - it is no more than a punctuation mark. A comma and full stop to the memory that makes up the sentence of response to him. Clear - sharp - she is a younger woman, though the face is the same, as she draws him down into that water with her. Held up like a looking glass, ( or perhaps, a mirror, at this surface. )

( The room is hot with the desert heat, and the little girl is shaking - there is blood, so much blood, over the walls, over the low laying straw beds that the poorest slept on. That once the Queen of Jhansi had slept on. Her clothes are fine, cotton that was so threaded with gold to the perfect linen white that the girl's hands desperately reach to ball up in. Staining it like the paintings her boys made. Sobs peaking to something hysterical, the ache that sets in her teeth that can only come from hearing a child so distressed.

"Rani, Rani, where is my papa-ji? Where is he? Why is there - ? I didn't mean too."

It is there in the details of course: the blood around the child's mouth. Her ripped apart clothes hanging on her from strips. The ugly, ugly bite mark on the child's leg. The sheer destruction of the too small room. A monster had done this. But there was nothing left but a child, when it was done.

"Hush, hush, little one." Lakshmi's hand sweeps over her hair, and draws the girl to press into her chest. Letting her sob, and something goes empty in her eyes, Lakshmi begins to realise, she does not think she will much ever be able to cry again after this. "You will see him soon, I promise."

Outside, there are soldiers. Outside, her men are holding their breath. She had sent them out of the room - how could she ask any of them to do this? How could she ask any of them to give themselves up in this way?

Simply, she could not. Simply, that she never learned how to ever ask.

She rocks the little girl into her chest. She lifts the knife, and to the size of so little a girl, it was a long blade. Ample enough to the task of lining up against the back of her neck. "Hush, I have you. I promise it will be over soon." She pushes the girl's face up to look at her. Kisses her like she kissed her own son ( son -s buried one, took another, and now felt them all stolen out of her hands ) goodnight, soft on her brow. Listening to her sobs dull little by little.

Her eyes were already glassed empty in the silence of sliced skin - when Lakshmi pulls up. )

The knife pricks in as she slides, hand against his chest, over the heart that she places her palm. "What do you think any of you could ask - " the hand goes from soft, to snapping into his hair and yanking back into his hair, arching him up into her with an impossible strength that calls him for what he is - dust and blood and aching. " - that I have not already paid?"

[ryohji]

The advance would stop his heart dead if it wasn't already a cold and useless thing. Kaji might not strike a terrifying figure with scant military experience and none of Lakshmi's sturdy resolve, but his eyes glint as though he could, at any lazy moment, deflect the knife at his throat as though merely being offered a distasteful food, rather than a terminal beheading.

He's bleeding. It breaks the surface of his skin like pairs of bailey's beads, razor thin and precise.

"Are you saying -" It's with appreciable effort Kaji remains still enough to eye-crinkle a smile for Lakshmi - the best he could do without quivering himself into the point end of the blade. His voice cheers in an approximation of innocence. " - I'm not your only one? I guess it can't be helped..."

Cold and useless nonetheless, he still has a heart that worked. It drums in his throat and ears, growing louder and louder the longer he locks eyes with his accuser and - her, his - knife just like how he locked eyes with the soldier and his gun. It pangs at the memory of the girl and her dirt and destruction. The feeling was unforgettable, and so is she. And in a dazzling moment, his own memory surges screaming to the mirror: darting images of a young boy, dirty and mud-stained, commanding the view of a soldier, blonde and grizzly. A chorus of boys, all dead. Their blood pools at Kaji's ankles. There is no Lakshmi around to kiss him or console him. Maybe there's one to kill him, now.

"Lakshmi," The steely hand that grips the wrist that presses the knife to his throat. So even capable of emotion, she's capable of killing children. That's good to know. "You're not the only one who's suffering."

[shri]

Her fingers do not loosen, his hand does not still her. Out of him, like this, she will draw it all. The things he has done seep into that dark water, into the depths of it, taking without giving: judgment or benediction. It just shimmers, wet like crystal glimmering, and then sinks away to that cool, cool lack of anything tangible that she reaches these fingers out from the depths of.

"Do you not understand now? I am Jhansi ki Rani."

The knife curls, her fingers in his hair hold fast and in his lap she pushes up that little more on her knees. The tilt of her head is an empty intimacy as her nose traces his ear and her voice stays without inflection to the heat of her breath. "- I will give, I will always give."

Her breath in is worse than soft, worse than sure - it is kind.

"You need only ask."