paixaorpg | "And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming..." [Completed]

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"And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming..." [Completed]

Character(s): Xellos, Raven, and ~~Miss~~ Tris!
Content: The evil, heartless monster Xellos stalks down Raven in the Promenade Terrace and drags her off to heal Tris on pain of death!!! Only much more light and fluffy, of course~♥
Setting: Promenade Terrace... area... thing.
Time: ... Later in the afternoon? After this thread thing some time. And after his MB post. Yes.
Warnings: Xellos is determined to make Tris spontaneously combust in embarrassment.

It was honestly rather disappointing that Xellos had received a response to his message board post so quickly, but that didn't mean he couldn't try and drag this out awhile longer. He could always say he had gotten lost, even with the map and ability to teleport he'd had so much fun startling her with. Who said he actually had to be competent? No one, that was who. Ending Tris's suffering just didn't rank high enough in his list of things to do for him to have to take it seriously.

... End her suffering by healing her, that is, but he supposed he could always try the other way too. Eventually.

He grinned cheerfully at nothing, in no rush at all to meet this Raven person and get things underway even though he had basically said the exact opposite in his message board post. A little white lie like that didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, so his conscience was clear. Or it would be, if he had a conscience.

He was looking forward to meeting her on some level, though-- her post about the city had been extremely helpful to him, and it was hard not to want to see someone else who could be immensely useful. If she could travel relatively quickly and heal like she had implied, all the more reason he should see her.

... which was why he was currently perched on the rooftop of one of the houses in the Promenade Terrace-- perched, and sat, and nothing more. He'd see her when she arrived.

[ooc: ... Apologies for the references to Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. D: I am a dork.]

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Raven never thought she'd be content at the thought of being able to teleport to places like was used to doing for so long now. It meant that her powers were at last working like they were supposed to. Though she would've preferred to have gone to meet Beast Boy, healing someone else's wounds would only keep her busy until she was able to contact him again. The bad part was that she would have to be around that annoying Xellos. Well, she wasn't planning on staying there for long anyways.

Raven had departed for Promenade Terrace shortly after leaving her last entry on his message board post. Go there, greet everybody, heal "Tris", and be on her way. That was all Raven intended to do. Or she would have if Xellos was at the designated meeting area. Maybe he didn't really think that she could've been there in only a couple of minutes?

Well whatever. If he didn't show up, then would walk around and try to find Tris by herself. Besides, it would mean that she actually have to be around Xellos that much.

... Well now, that was interesting. Raven's sudden arrival via teleportation of all things prompted Xellos to do something he rarely if ever did: open both his eyes. He was reasonably sure she was no Mazoku, otherwise he would have been able to sense it, but if she wasn't, that meant he was being faced with an entirely new form of... creature? person? that he had never encountered before.

How exciting.

Leaping down from the roof with a complete lack of ceremony (he had no reason to impress upon her some idea of his "importance," unlike how it had been with Lina, and besides which, he still didn't know what to make of her), he slowly approached her, his wooden staff tapping the ground every other step. "That was quite an entrance~!" he called, the light, teasing tone of his voice more habitual now than truly genuine. Raven had managed to put him on his guard, a feat few humans ever managed to do. If she was human, that is.

He kept his eyes open for just a moment longer before letting them slide closed again, still cautious but hiding it all the more because of it. "Would you be Raven? My name is Xellos, the Mysterious Priest!" He wagged his finger at her cheerfully, giving her his brightest smile. "You gave me quite a fright, appearing out of nowhere like that! Why, I had no idea there were more people who had that ability." Which was true, technically, and simplified things for him later if Tris ever thought to approach him about his rather abrupt disappearance. This hinged on just what exactly Raven was, though, so there was still a chance he'd have to stay vague or not answer at all. Oh well, at the worst he'd just have to rely on his favorite line, and that wasn't very bad at all~

Raven was hardly amused at his method of arrival and continued to stare at Xellos, who was even more annoying now that when he was limited to just typing out responses to her. "Uh, right. Nice to... meet you, I guess." That was all she really had to say about his introduction. She would've asked him to take her straight to Tris, but there was something about his words that caught her attention...

"More people? You mean you know about others who can do teleportation?" It would be interesting if there were. If only to keep track of what others could do while she staying here.

[OOC: Gah, sorry it's short.]

That didn't sound very sincere at all! Not that he was surprised, or even offended, but it was the principle of the thing. He simply endeavored to make his smile that much more annoyingly and infuriatingly cheerful, if that was even possible. "It's nice to meet you too!" he positively chirped, resisting the urge to snicker at what her reaction might be. She really was fun.

He raised an eyebrow at her question, replying thoughtfully, "Hmm~ yes, there are. Most of them aren't human, though, even if they look like it. Are you?" Ah, the direct approach. He was mostly sure she was by now, but if she wasn't, maybe this would prompt her to reveal her true nature.

[ooc: No worries~ ♥ |D]

Great, annoying and overly energetic... It just kept getting better and better. Well, as long as he didn't start telling horrible jokes, she could at least tolerate him for a while longer.

People who weren't human... Raven had seen more than her fair share of otherworldly creatures and apparitions in her brief life to keep herself from showing surprise whenever one was encountered. "That depends..." Raven lowered her hood, revealing her gray skin and violet hair to him. "On what you expect a human to be like."

There went his other eyebrow. Probably not a Mazoku, then, because they usually went through greater efforts to appear normal... most of the time. He merely shrugged at first, not quite sure how to express just what he meant by human. Not a terrible demon bent on worldwide destruction? Would that work? Probably, but it seemed just a tad too blunt for his taste.

"Well, I don't know, really! Two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears... one head..." He shrugged again. "It's a bit hard to tell where the lines are, isn't it? Once you start trying to define them." He opened one eye at her again, tapped his nose, then rather abruptly changed the subject. "So! You're going to be healing Miss Tris, right~? She's just over this way."

He began walking in the direction of Gayle's house, checking after just a few steps to see if Raven was following him before continuing again. He got the feeling she didn't want to dilly dally any longer than necessary, and besides which the sudden switch in gears was intended to make her wonder. Curious people tended to hang around longer and put up with more of his nonsense after all, and he needed her to stick around for the moment.

Not saying anything else, Raven followed Xellos as he led her to wherever Tris was staying. Maybe she was just being paranoid, but something about him felt... off. Keeping her eyes focused on him, Raven reminded herself to keep her guard up while around him.

As they walked, Raven contemplated about how many other people had been injured during the "Nobody" attack.

Though though she wasn't enjoying being stranded and cut off from most of her friend, that didn't mean she should just ignore those who were in need of medical attention. Even if her healing methods didn't really involve medicine...

[OOC: We should probably have Liz enter in Tris now?]

It didn't take long before they reached the doorstep to the house Tris was staying in, and Xellos had absolutely no problem with letting himself in uninvited again. He looked back towards Raven when he did, giving her an impish grin and holding one gloved finger up to his lips for a moment. He doubted she would really care that they were waltzing right into Gayle's house like this, but it was still fun!

"Miss Tris is over this way~" he told her, leading the way through the house and to the room where he had met the weather mage in the first place. He hoped she hadn't been too bored while he was away, but who knows? Maybe she'd been able to find some way to entertain herself.

Knocking on the door, he called cheerfully, "Miss Tris~! I've come back with a healer~!" He briefly considered tacking on a query about whether or not she was decent, but he felt that might be pushing it just a bit too much. Subtlety, subtlety! That was the key. Besides, he had already used his pet name for her and that would be quite enough. For now.

[ooc: Mmyep, she goes after this one. Needed to get them in the house first and all.]

Tris had been taking a nap, before someone had messaged her on that infernal journal. Tris was a light sleeper, and the noise it made was enough to wake the sleeping mage. Thankfully, she hadn't moved enough to pull any stitches or cause anything aside from minor discomfort.

The redhead set her journal aside- well, shoved it under a pillow and prayed to Mila that the person on the other end would get the point from her lack of chatter. That done, the mage sat up- slowly, though her arms hated her for it. Her face was red- did Xellos really have that bad of a memory? "Xellos, I thought I asked you to stop calling me that!"

Oooh, irritated Tris. Her hair had faint sparks dancing across it. That was probably the only part of Tris's appearance that was anywhere close to neat. She'd rebraided the bits she'd undone, and the rest of her hair was kept neat (if not clean) by the very forces they held inside. Well, aside from the lightning.

Oh, good. It seemed like the person messaging had gotten the point.

Following Xellos into the house, the two of them eventually made their way to the room where Raven's "patient" was being kept in. Once inside, she looked over her for a moment. The girl seemed normal enough, except for what was going on in her hair. Whatever the sparks meant, Raven was relieved to know that healing her wouldn't be that different than the time she had treated other humans.

"You must be Tris.” She headed straight for her bedside. "My name is Raven. Like Xellos already told you, I’m going to try and heal your back as much as I can."

The reminder was dismissed with a rather hurried wave of his hand after he opened the door for Raven to pass through, an uncomfortable, embarrassed (and completely fake, not that it showed) expression crossing his face as he stepped inside after her and shut the door behind them again. "My apologies, M-- Tris! I forgot~ it won't happen again!" He couldn't resist opening one eye to look at her, secretly laughing at the annoyed look he saw her wearing. What did she expect? She made it so easy.

Closing his eye once more, he drifted a little further inside the room, somehow managing to give the impression that he was hovering over the two of them nosily even while he made sure he wouldn't get in the way of... whatever way Raven was going to heal the wounded girl. "If you don't mind me asking~ how does your magic work? Would you mind terribly letting me know what you're doing while you're doing it? For research's sake, of course!"

It was almost painful, really. Xellos prided himself on knowing things that other people didn't, but here he was, playing up on his ignorance of other worlds in order to get people to tell him about them. It helped the impression that he was harmless, though, an people were always more willing to spill secrets to people they didn't think were threats. It still grated on him, though, not being the one to hold all the cards. But that would change.

Tris nodded, closing her eyes for a moment and taking as deep a breath as she could manage without causing herself pain. The sparks faded, and the weather-witch fixed a deceptively mild and placid expression on her face. She even ignored Xellos’s near-slip. She wasn’t sure how Raven’s healing worked, but if it was anything like the healers back home, it would serve her purposes well to keep her own magic under tight control. Opening one eye, she offered Raven a wry smile. She wouldn’t be in this position if her own stupidity hadn’t gotten the better of her, really. Tris could have remembered to move, could have not sent her brother away, not closed him off- the could-haves for that were endless and equally pointless. “Thank you,” she said, meaning it.

With that, the weather-witch closed her eyes again, falling into the familiar meditation breathing pattern that had been practically engraved in her brain, shallower than usual but still a defined pattern. She sank into the core of her magic, pulling the fine threads of her reserves in. Though she didn’t realize it, her eyebrows were knitting together in faint, mild annoyance. She was checking her bond to her siblings, and the way Sandry had reacted to her was not at all what she would have expected. That was something to talk to the stitch-witch about at a later date, possibly with Briar there for moral support. The thought of Briar providing moral support was ridiculous, of course.

For all intents and purposes, it seemed almost like Tris was sitting up asleep, though her breathing betrayed her status.

It was only fair to tell them exactly how she planned on healing Tris’ wound. However, Raven was seeing it more as, if it would keep Xellos from being annoying, then it was worth talking about.

“My ‘magic’ revolves around what you can call Dark Energy.” she stated, looking at Tris’s exposed back and the stitches that had been sewn into her. “Since I’m an empath, I can absorb her pain into my body, causing the injury to heal much faster than normal.” A simple enough explanation, though they would probably understand better once she was actually doing it.

“I can’t take too much into myself, but I should be able to relieve most of the discomfort she must be feeling.”

Placing her hands over Tris’ exposed back, Raven began to concentrate. A light blue glow began to envelop her hands, as she began the healing process…

... Well. Dark Energy? Absorbing her pain? If Xellos hadn't known any better, he would have thought... oh well. "An empath, hmm~?" he asked instead, carefully noting the blue glow and moving unobtrusively closer to get a better look. Hmm. Dark Energy. Where was that energy coming from? "So you can sense other people's emotions~? Unless I'm getting the definition wrong, of course!"

He tilted his head to one side, opening both of his eyes to mere slits and giving her a piercing look-- a mostly invisible one, since his eyes were hardly open, but still. "It's very helpful that you can absorb the pain, though, in whatever amount! Does doing so cause you to share her pain, and that's why you can't take too much, or does it do something else~?"

Of course he wasn't going to come right out and ask about the source of this Dark Energy (yet), but maybe she'd mention it while she was explaining about her empathy.

Tris's eyebrows twitched together- the healing didn't feel at all like the healers back home. Their magic often sped the body's natural healing process, or augmented that. Tris easily ignored the sounds of Xellos's chatter and Raven's explanation.

Curious but not rude, Tris slowly came free of the state of mind she achieved in meditation, more focused on the outside world than the inner world. She listened to what she could of Xellos's questioning, a nearly-invisible eyebrow raising at his comments.

"I can sense their emotions, yeah. But I usually prefer not to unless there's a good reason for me to do it." A very... "private" person, Raven always did her best at respecting other people's wishes for privacy, as well as never entering their mind without permission. For Xellos' other question however...

"That's not something you need to understand."

As was usual with her, there some things about Raven that nobody should ever know about.

Xellos frowned minutely at that, but soon shrugged and gave a very small laugh. "Fair enough! Most people have very complicated emotions after all, don't they? I imagine it would be a burden to sense them all all the time." Like he did, almost. At least neither of these two were little rays of sunshine, going on about how wonderful life was. Ick. With his luck, though, it probably wouldn't be much time at all before he ran into someone like that. Oh well, that was life.

At the claim that he didn't need to understand it, though, Xellos adopted an almost offended air, knitting his eyebrows together and saying in a "hurt" tone, "I don't? But I'm very interested! Ah, Miss Raven, you're too cruel~" He shrugged his shoulder after a few moments, though, sighing quietly as though he were making himself get over it. "In that case, is there anything else you can tell me about your abilities that I do need to understand?"

Tris made a face. "At least you don't have your siblings in your mind, and have them complaining when you shut them off," she added to the conversation. The fact that Briar was giving her the cold shoulder for what she did was starting to grate on her nerves ever-so-slightly.

The weather-witch quirked an eyebrow at Xellos's complaint. Why would he complain, if Raven just didn't want to explain? Tris knew the feeling of not wanting to share information about her abilities- hadn't mages treated her badly for doing something that was more rumor and myth than actual fact to them? The gray-eyed mage gave Xellos a mildly annoyed look.

"You'll get over it." Raven commented, focusing on repairing the damage done to Tris's body. "Now that mention it, yes, there's something else you should know." A brief pause before she closed her eyes. "They're dangerous." She kept quiet after that, taking in what Tris had said to her.

No, she didn't have siblings. What she did have, however, were personifications of the different aspects of her personality. They all needed to be kept under control, especially Anger. If not, then they could start affecting her on the outside, just like last time...

“The wound is healing well, it should only take me a couple of more minutes.”

Dangerous, hmm? But how, exactly? Obviously now it was doing some good (ugh), but how much bad was it capable of? Raven hadn't really given him much insight on that yet, directly or indirectly, and because the source of her power was so new to him... he honestly couldn't tell.

Xellos was tempted to ask more questions of her, but judging by how incredibly unhelpful she had been so far, perhaps it would be best not to pry anymore... for now. She might open up a bit more later (unlikely), or maybe he'd be able to glean an answer from by other means, but until then, he would have to rely on observation.

Tris raised an eyebrow, partially amused. Well, of course power was dangerous. Even something as workaday and simple as Sandry's thread-magic could be dangerous. She was interested in Raven's power, in a wholly academic way. She was curious about how things worked, with so many seemingly different people from so many places she'd never heard of...

Niko would love it here, Tris mused.

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"And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming..." [Completed]

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