take a look inside me crawling out
Chapter 01: 🦖
Chapter 02: 👢
Chapter 03: 🥨
Chapter 04: 🍓
Chapter 05: 🐷
Chapter 06: 🐼
Chapter 07: 🧃
Chapter 08: 🍒
Chapter 09: 🍩
Minoth won't flatter himself prescient, but he will allow himself the distinction of being one who saw Jin's disillusionment blooming in coronets, taking root in the soil of the sinking Dannagh sands.
Anyone would turn to destruction and nihilism, if not literal calculated anarchy, if they were faced with the loss of such an idyllic world.
Smiles didn't adorn that frigid face, but were instead chipped into it, worn away by years and warmth. Creases and calluses on his lean, muscular hands had been chosen for the exertion of exactly this life, exactly these occurrences.
How could anyone bear to have their own last share of mundanity be the very end, and not draw themselves out to the end of it all?
Breaking rules...indeed, Lora's always done it, and she'll always continue to do so. Minoth can see that without having to squint.
He doesn't like breaking her rules, though; invading her routines, upsetting her delicate balance.
Ha! As if Lora could ever be anything like delicate.
He lets her take the initiative, make the first move, and pin her body to his rather than the other way around, when she's glad to see him.
"You can put your arm around me, you know," she teases as she grabs for the offending appendage caught guilty of doing absolutely nothing.
Yeah? So Minoth knows. That doesn't mean he's brave enough to do it.
"Oh, I'd bow for Lord Hugo any day."
Hugo stops cold when he hears it, befuddled. Not only is the sentiment an odd one to need be expressed out in the plain light of day, but Minoth's never called him Lord once! Frankly, Hugo had gotten well used to the familiar level of address - either just his first name, as he'd requested, or Young Master, since he liked that too.
As he finishes rounding the bend that guarded away the wind for their campsite, Hugo is none too surprised to see Minoth flourishing a deep sweep of his hand and brow, greeting the little emperor like he'd been born to do it.
Maybe a bet? Some action Hugo would do well to see.
Haze is the kind of maiden late sophists wrote sonnets about, you know. The type of late-spring fair and early-fall wistful that inspired generations to just sit on their balconies and sigh, sigh, sigh.
Even if Haze wasn't also the first person to request a private-public reading of all of Minoth's latest masterpieces in training, the playwright of 3564 isn't quite sure he's one up to the task.
To capture the whistle of the wind...
To cup your cheek around the tenderest ripened bud...
Cup your hand around the cheek of, et cetera... See, he knows that any author earlier than he must simply have been superhuman, to be immune to this much beautful distraction!
Sometimes Minoth wishes Flora - that is, Dr. Hentisane - would be just a bit less serious as she examines him. His body, which is no longer his, recycled and reconnected into a cyborg of dubious usefulness, must be inspected approximately monthly, or else risk breakdown and disrepair.
Dío-707. He much prefers to be Minoth. Flora knows this. Ergo, the irritation.
"The 707 unit is holding up well. He can be safely dispatched to aid the rest of the itinerant party at this time," she records voice notes into his charts.
Minoth stares at her, eyes flatter than a mere frown.
"I know who you are," she replies primly. "That's why I don't want to have to let you go."
There's a certain chronic clumsiness in Aegaeon's speech that, in Minoth's humble estimation, might well have a hand in making him locomote just as awkwardly. A Machina with poor elocution, by any facet, is one lacking in some grace, observably.
But that's the thing - even if he's awkward, Aegaeon is the most well-spoken of any Machina Minoth's ever met. He's thoughtful and eloquent, well-compulsed toward justice. He could be a firecracker researcher, if that were ever his aim.
Oh, Minoth would like to know how to be that transparently perfect, that infinitely and hundred-handedly fine.
"I think we're both lucky I'm not your Driver, Mythra," Minoth says, apropos of nothing in an astonishingly rare moment of attention seizure.
"Not that I don't agree, but what makes you say that?"
Mythra maintains form and keeps jogging as she advances Minoth's dialogue further a node.
"No doubt you wouldn't be as effective, is all."
(The Flesh Eater's stride is only a stroll.)
"Not as effective as the Aegis is still pret-ty powerful," Mythra points out.
"I'm sure, but then I'd be the only one who still thinks you're perfect."
Brighid, Brighid, Brighid...
She's so like Miang, and Minoth's sure Krelian has become aware of this himself, but still he can't help feeling like it's a baseless assumption to connect purple hair and a quiet, belenoment smile to the ageless mother of all creation.
Ageless? Check. Infinite? Double-check.
She's got nothing to do with it. She's just a Gebler higher-up too elite for even the Elements. Surely that doesn't mean anything, can't mean anything.
Anyway, Minoth has more bog-standard reasons for telling himself to snap out of his fixation, and cosmo-ontological suspicions are only the half.
"Will you ever leave the Shoulder, now?"
Pretty stiff irony in Addam asking Minoth about deserting his own hermit's perch.
"And go back to what?" Minoth answers with a question. "Mechonis is desolate. Bionis has no place for me. This is the only place I have left to go."
It's the same for Addam, of course. Usually, he doesn't deny it.
"I feel guilty, having trapped you here."
"I can leave, Prince," Minoth reminds him. Copperhead is a sturdy statue, behind the cottage. "And if I wanted to, I would have a long time ago."
Always a soldier. Never a grunt.
Poetry emerges from behind armamented doors, gates that both are and aren't meant for beauty to be able to pass through.
Every encounter a thresholding stanza.