[OPEN] I don't like to think ahead

[frontlinetitties]

Who: Gideon and YOU!
When: April
Where: Cadens & Horizon
What: Post-event catch-all for April!
Warnings: TBD, I'll update as needed, but probably some trauma related to recent in-game events







((OOC: both closed starters and some open prompts will go below! Hit me up at brightflowers or PM if you want me to write you a starter, or feel free to tag into an open prompt/wildcard me! I'm good with brackets or prose so pick your poison and I'll follow your lead!))

Comments

OPEN - Horizon

[frontlinetitties]

She spends more time than usual in the Horizon during her convalescence, and throughout the month that follows. Her domain is still stark and imposing as it has ever been - a carbon copy of a Cohort outpost she'd once seen in a comic - although it now has the benefit of the beginnings of greenery crawling up its sun-bleached walls. Small, fragrant flowers bloom from these clinging vines, a touch of softness left behind by a friend - one she can only assume has vanished - who'd attempted to help her decorate.

She can often be found in the training room, running through drill, the feel of her standard issue two-hander a cold and solid comfort after weeks with no sword at all. Whilst most of the building is bleak and unforgiving, it now also sports a somewhat incongruous bathing area, where she can also be found, quietly submerged and staring out at the craggy yellow rockface beyond it.

She's just as likely to be found wandering through the domains of others, though, and if she catches sight of the owner she'll be quick to offer a guilty wave or an "oops, my bad!" kind of shrug. Whilst she will apologise for the intrusion, she won't show any indication of wanting to leave. Maybe she's looking to be invited in?

[beloyaltome]

Lenore's domain is a welcoming place. Overgrown paths riotous with flowers lead in toward the little castle at the center, whose doors stand open, and an encouraging breeze tugs visitors inside. A few rooms are clearly labeled with "Private, thank you" in gold lettering and beautiful script, but those forthright signs make it more clear that anything unlabeled is welcome to be treated as public.

Lenore herself can be found curled up with a book in an alcove just off of her library, in a gown that makes it quite clear that she's learned that Horizon fashion doesn't need to be constrained by practicality. Brightening happily at the sight of Gideon meandering into her library, Lenore watches for a moment, expression pleased as she takes in the sight of Gideon seeing the dazzling room. With so much to look at, it might take a few seconds for Gideon to notice Lenore lounging cozily to one side, so Lenore doesn't do anything to draw attention to herself--though she is hard to miss for long, with her banner of red hair and her glittering dress (which keeps wafting butterflies of fabric and light which dissolve into sparkles once they drift a few inches away from the gown).

[frontlinetitties]

It does take her a moment. The whole place exudes luxury in a way that Gideon has never so much as imagined. It surpasses the grandeur of castle Thorne, and whilst the ball in Nocwich had been the very height of glamour, it had none of the airy femininity that this place possesses. Even now, after so long spent in Abraxas, she's always quietly floored by the implications of exorbitant wealth that comes - for her - with so many paper books. She couldn't feel more out of place standing here in her dusty Ninth House cavalier's garb, unwilling to touch anything lest she leave it smeared and sullied.

Just as Lenore suspects, though, it’s not long before the shimmer of diaphanous fabric catches at her attention. She turns then, blinking like someone who has stepped out into dazzling light for the first time in a long time, and her gaze falls on Lenore. Immediately her quiet astonishment gives out onto a genuine grin.

"Oh, hey! This place is yours? It's fucking beautiful," she says, as she strides across the distance between them, stopping only when she's standing before Lenore who is - quite frankly - the most resplendent aspect of this excessively sparkling room. "You look totally banging, by the way."

She's a veritable poet.

[beloyaltome]

"I assume that's your way of saying exceptionally attractive," Lenore comments, setting her book properly aside and rising to greet Gideon. She lifts a half foot off the ground as she does so, which brings her up to a more comfortable kissing level, though she doesn't yet initiate any kisses.

For now, she slides her arms lightly around Gideon's shoulders, leaning into her comfortably in order to make sure Gideon knows that she's very welcome and desired here. "Are you hungry? Do you want food? Or sex? Or something else, I suppose, but those things seem like the important priorities."

[frontlinetitties]

She's glad to see Lenore. Thrilled, even. Their brief tryst in Nocwich had been one to remember with immense joy and just a touch of amazement, feelings which solidified into ride or die friendship when Lenore had come to her aid in the pit. But being greeted like this - casual and immediate offers of food and sex, two of her very favourite things! - leaves her head reeling. Her face radiates heat, quite abruptly. Her hands flutter light and tenuous as butterflies to Lenore's waist.

"An 'it's nice to see you Gideon' was honestly all I was hoping for, but that greeting was like, eleven out of ten," she says, still blinking in starry-eyed surprise over the rims of her mirrored glasses, “Wheeew!”

[beloyaltome]

"It's nice to see you, Gideon," Lenore purrs in echo, dipping each word in sensuality so that the polite inanities sound downright vulgar. Leaving one arm draped over Gideon's shoulder, Lenore retracts the other one enough so that she can gently steal Gideon's glasses. Sliding them onto her own face, Lenore gives Gideon a playful and sultry look over the top of them, which is made easier by the way that they immediately start slipping down her nose trying to escape since her head is smaller than Gideon's. "Are you going to answer any of those questions?"

[frontlinetitties]

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. The lithesome way she moves has Gideon's heart leaping hard into her throat, and it's endearing beyond all reason to watch her snatch her glasses, slide them onto her own face. Gideon grins stupidly, feeling flustered, and somewhere in the back of her mind is relief that she can still give herself over to such feelings after the hell of the last few weeks. Its been hard to forget the nightmare of the pit, harder than she'd willingly admit to. It's harder still, though, to allow one's thoughts to remain dark and bleak and ugly when a hot babe is oozing lasciviousness at you. Trust her on this one.

"You're serious?" she says, one brow raised, more stunned than incredulous, "I mean, hungry and horny are my middle names, I pretty much always want those things. And like...I'm really glad to see you. Under better circumstances than the last time, I mean. I guess I could show you how glad..."

[beloyaltome]

"Mm, noted, I'll be sure to call you by your full name from now on, Gideon H. H. Nav." Lenore smiles warm and happy at Gideon's assurances, at the knowledge that Gideon's glad to see her, and she takes an extra moment to fondly study Gideon's face, but then the glasses slip entirely off the tip of her nose and she has to catch them before they fall.

"Show me," Lenore insists, returning the glasses back to Gideon's face but pushing them up onto her hair rather than letting them get in the way of potential kisses.

[frontlinetitties]

It's a response that draws a laugh from her, even if it's silenced only moments later by the way Lenore's gaze lingers on her face. After all her time spent bemoaning it and hating the way it clogged up her pores, she now kind of longs for face paint. it'd be so much easier to pull off sexy and confident if her skin was hidden beneath the facade of some shitty skull. Instead, her face is nude and openly on display, the flush to her cheeks burningly obvious. She's just gonna have to own it.

Owning it, she flashes Lenore a self-deprecating, slanted smile and as her glasses are pushes up into her hair, she's already acting. This is, as it transpires, one of those rare occasions where Gideon doesn't need to be given an order twice.

“Yes, Ma’am,” she murmurs, and with one hand at the indent of Lenore's waist and the other sliding along the back of her neck to curl into her hair, Gideon leans in. Kisses the vampire full on the mouth with all the tenderness and ardency she can muster.

[beloyaltome]

Lenore groans happily into the kiss, tangling her own hands into Gideon's hair with eager, possessive desire. She pulls her in harder, tongue sliding into Gideon's mouth with a groan, flicking against the edges of her lips and then retreating again, tempting and playful.

After a couple of moments, her gown shimmers, shifting into something shorter so that she can hop up, legs hooking around Gideon's waist, pulling herself close in order to physically insist upon being carried.

[frontlinetitties]

It hasn't always been easy for her to reach the Horizon. The focus needed, the clearing away of mental clutter to slide into something cool and deep as a meditative state-- she's ill-suited to it. It's hard to get why people linger here when the world they've been thrown into is so full of real places to explore, but right now, in this moment? She's beginning to see the appeal. Lenore's dress melts away into something altogether more revealing, and before she has a chance to miss the feel of lips on her lips or the playful flick of tongue, she has an armful of god-damned gorgeous.

A touch breathless, spine still tingling from the delicious feel of Lenore's hand pulling hard at her hair, she nonetheless moves instinctively to support the vampire's negligible weight. With Lenore held securely in her arms, their bodies now cleaved together, she bends at the waist in a slow, steady sweep that tips Lenore backwards. Again, her lips find Lenore's lips, tongue licking slow into the heat of her mouth as she aims - this time - for languorous indulgence.

She pulls back just enough to slant a crooked grin a few moments later, eyes hot and hungry on Lenore's face. "You know, this is the kinda greeting a girl could get used to."

BATH

[nomnoms]

A friend in Solvunn has taught Nanaue how to get to the secret special place. He doesn't stay very long, but he loves to explore! So many new places. He especially likes the gas station and its convenience store. Everything is free!

Which is how, whenever Gideon next tries to go to her bath, she will be greeted with the upper body of a shark with arms spread out, multiple plastic sunglasses balanced on the top of his large, wide head, seemingly enjoying the relaxation of warm water.

Even if most of that warm water has been displaced onto the floor...

yessss

[frontlinetitties]

Gideon has been in Abraxas for coming up on two years now, and in this time she's learnt a whole bunch of stuff. Sharks though? Never seen one before. Huge man-shark-things with jealousy-inducing biceps and a pile of sunglasses lounging in her bath? Absolutely fucking not.

She is, for one rare and out of character moment, shocked silent as she steps into her bathing room and is immediately faced with this bizarre sight. People so rarely wander into her domain that she has to wonder if she dreamed this up? An uncomfortably swole fish-person does seem like the sort of thing her imagination might bring into being, but she has zero memory of doing it. Some kind of monster, maybe? Should she be trying to kick his...her...their? Ass?? Instead, what she does is stares, and then asks very eloquently:

"...the fuck??"

Re: yessss

[nomnoms]

The uncomfortably swole fish-person does not seem nearly as bothered or confused as the person who entered the room. But upon her arrival he does sit up, angling his head (causing the tower of sunglasses to fall INTO the water) and blinks a pair of dark, beady eyes at her.

One massive hand raises up, and gives a wave.

"Hel-lo."

[frontlinetitties]

Okay so those tiny, dark little eyes and the way they glint at her are decidedly unnerving, but paired with the wave and comical sight of the sunglasses-tower tipping from fish-guy's head into the water, Gideon is already leaning toward 'not a threat'. At the very least, the unusual being in her bath doesn’t seem to be immediately volatile.

"Yo," she says, and waves back. She doesn't come any closer - not yet - but nor does she display any signs of reaching for her sword or running the fuck away. "Where uh...where did you come from?"

[nomnoms]

"Solvuuuuuun."

This time he remembers. Last time, he did not. And tried to eat Michael.

His head bobs up and down in a nod.

"Me property owner!"

It seems he is very proud of this.

(It's also not true).

But hmmm. He sniffs the air through his nose holes, his gills fluttering as he speaks.

"This you magic special place?"

Her domain. He's trying to ask if this is her domain.

[frontlinetitties]

Geez, this guy has a lot of teeth. Like, why would anyone need that many teeth? There are questions right there on the tip of her tongue, urgent ones, such as what's the toughest thing you've ever bitten through? Impossible to know whether or not she'd be committing some kind of social faux pas though; she has, after all, never met a fish-guy before.

Both his answer and his question establish that he must be one of the Summoned though...which opens up a whole new realm of questions regarding what kind of world a fish-guy comes from inside her head, but that too can wait a minute.

"Oh, yeah? Well you're doing better than I am, dude. I just rent a place in the Free Cities. Fuck knows how much it'd cost to buy somewhere," she shrugs, takes a tentative step closer, "and yeah it's my magic special place. It's kinda lame, though. All that concentrating and manifesting and shit gives me a headache. I'm Gideon, by the way."

[nomnoms]

His house didn't cost money. His new Solvunn friends must like him so much.

"Nanaue."

So many people ask his name now. After a second he lifts himself out of the bath - she might be relieved to find that his lower body is covered by golf shorts - or maybe she's disappointed that he doesn't have a tail. Either way, he's getting out of the bath.

"Lame?" He glances over at the bath he just removed himself from. He likes the bath. Maybe when he makes his own special magic place he'll add one to it too. Or will people think it is lame?

[frontlinetitties]

So he's got a name. Cool, cool. All of this is going very well. She even manages not to scoot back when he emerges from the bath, only watches him with ever-deepening curiosity. It's rude to stare, so she tries her very best not to...but there's a half-fish, half-dude standing in her special magic place and now the initial shock has passed it actually seems pretty cool. Maybe he's a mermaid? Merman? Aren't they half-fish, half-person? Sooooo many questions.

"Huh," she says though, when he poses his own question. Considers it like he's just said something far more profound, "I guess you've got a point. The bath is pretty damn sweet, but I kinda added that in later. The rest needs a bit of work maybe but like, I didn't have much to go on when I first got here, you know? I can show you around though, if you want."

There's a pause as she eyes his buff as fuck arms, the unusual webbed hands. He's not quite built for it overall, but she's gotta ask-- "Do you like swords?"

[nomnoms]

Do you like swords? gets a blank look. For what may be very obvious reasons, he's never had to use a weapon in his entire life, so he doesn't really know how to answer that.

But -

"You show?"

He does want a tour of her magic special place, swords included. As he approaches she might notice all the little nicks and scars across his thick skin.

[frontlinetitties]

Hmmmm, that looks like a nope to her. There's a kind of sense in that, she supposes. Something she decides to voice aloud as he draws closer, her eyes sliding sidelong over his unusual form.

"You probably don't need weapons huh, what with all those teeth?" she gestures for him to follow her and leads them out of the bathing room into the far more utilitarian hallway beyond. It looks as one might expect a military base on some far-flung, desolate planet to look; stark, a little rough-hewn. Kinda creepy.

"Cool scars, by the way," because of course she notices something like that-- gnarly battle injuries always incite her jealousy. She has a a fair few herself, though few of her stories are as badass as she'd like them to be. "Are you like, some kind of warrior, where you're from?"

She ought to give him a moment to process one question at a time, she's sure. But look, he's intriguing, don't judge.

field trip

[techmaturgy]

He spends a bit less time in his own domain, now that he's not in recovery and he's completed (and subsequently destroyed) a major project that required testing in the mind-scape, but the advantages of the Horizon mean that he's never away from it for too long. Now that he's freed up his schedule, more or less, he has a long list of projects he wants to complete, and testing in his domain expedites things.

Viktor mostly knows Gideon in passing, of course, as he does most Summoned in the Free Cities, and he's heard a bit about her from Caitlyn, at this point, but most of his prior interaction involved her commissioning him for sunglasses, of all things. That, however, is enough for him to perk up as she enters the lab, even though she seems apologetic about it.

"No, don't apologize. I'm glad you're here." He motions for her to come in, though just what he's up to seems to be unclear. There are machines of indiscriminate purpose, thick cables that snake around the stone floor, and the distinct feeling that something might explode. "Can you give me a hand with this?"

This meaning some kind of ominous-looking crank mechanism. Don't worry, it's all safe. Probably.

[frontlinetitties]

She ought to be used to this by now, but something inside her still sparks into life on hearing him say he's glad she's there. She blinks, a touch surprised, but she's already moving further inside the workspace now that permission has been granted.

"Yeah, sure," she says, eyes scanning the collection of strange machinery as she closes the distance between them, careful to step over the cables that drape dangerously over the floor. Someone really ought to tell the guy about trip hazards, but she's just been invited in and asked for help so it sure as shit isn't going to be her.

"You just need me to crank it?" she says, moving to grasp the handle in both of her calloused hands, eyeing the thing with only mild suspicion. And then quickly, before he can get an answer in for her first question, "What is all this, anyway?"

[techmaturgy]

If Viktor realizes this entire lab is a trip hazard, he doesn't show it--which is kind of strange, considering he's more prone to trip hazards than most people. No obstacles in the way of scientific progress, it seems. When she accepts his request to assist, he brightens a bit, his expression just the slightest bit manic at the thought of having an accomplice.

"Yes, slowly. When I tell you."

He raises a hand, as a cue, though of course he'll answer her question first.

"I'm working on a hydroponics system. Something to cycle water and nutrients to plants grown in a substrate."

It all looks...suspiciously steampunk.

no worries if this is too old and you'd rather stick with new things!

[frontlinetitties]

"Dude, I understood like, two of those words," she says with the arch of one brow toward her hairline, though the tone of her voice conveys amusement rather than rancour. It's hardly a new experience; one would think that with her closest peer being both a scientist and an academic some of it might have brushed off on her. The truth is though, that she's quite deliberately nurtured her ignorance to irritate said peer.

"Something about bringing water to plants?" is what she's taken from it. And, "ready when you are."