shimmering seven

Chapter 01: Spring Tide
Chapter 02: Black Down
Chapter 03: The Gateway
Chapter 04: The Ram
Chapter 05: Earthlight
Chapter 06: Neap Tide
Chapter 07: The Spirit of Gravity

There isn't anyone more full of spark than Eunie. If you heard her speak (squawk), you might well believe she invented the word, and all its most colorfully useful derivatives. Impatient, yet dangerously kind, and always willing to put her two feathers in for a more...sparkling outcome, Eunie surges forward on whirling wings.

I've been more than ready.

Doubt comes as easy as talking, and it always comes. But once you know what you're working with...makes it easier, yeah? That's the whole point of making fun of something, after all. Can't punch if you haven't got a target, and a target's no good if it's too big to see.

Carrying anger is all Lanz does. Others', his own, and that of the world, for putting him in this position - for making him "strong".

I'll do it for myself.

The notion of doing things for himself is, of course, a difficult one, for a Defender. Even if it's not so easy for a Healer, there's a big difference between dishing out heals and packing in hits that make your back crease and bend around the scars.

But does Lanz take the hits just to show others that he did it?

He doesn't, of course. It just feels good to know that now he's older, he really can just...shrug them off.

It didn't matter if Mio was and is just as much the leader of her own contingent; Noah gets the designation of team leader, from within and from without. His decisions weigh all their lives.

Not a terrible distinction, since he does take the issue of world undomination so seriously, but...

I'll tear it all down!

You have to be willing to. And Noah is willing - he'll make himself so, if he isn't. Self-determination is all they've got, and then again all they're missing. It's a rough go, but...well, this world only makes it rougher yet, and it was his own choices, long ago, that made his path as rocky.

Sena's slot is an easy one. The fun, spunky Attacker with a heart of...some color, indeterminate, but it doesn't really matter, anyway, she's so fun!

She's so fun.

But I'm gonna change.

Easy to say. Not so easy to do.

It's one thing to know that others want you to live for yourself - AS yourself, really - and to obsess over that charge like it's your life's purpose (and it is, isn't it, except...if it were really your life's purpose, wouldn't you know?), and quite another to do something - anything! - about it.

But, then again.

For someone like Sena, even acknowledging such a personal goal might be half the battle.

Among their whole work-in-progress group, so easily collectively fixated on this or that tarnished memory lost among the deepsea dive of the past, Taion might be the easiest to peg as an obsessive past-prone puzzler.

After all, it's to be expected that from battle to battle, colony to colony, comrades fall, in Aionios. Just not by...

Don't think too hard about it. Crouch down, and let the Mondo whirl.

If it were in my power, I would.

And you will. But each journey is composed of a million tiny steps, and you cannot possibly plan each one of them out when you've only the vantage of the first to charter by.

Of all the things Mio thought she'd get, when she agreed to sign on with the nebulous pact of Ouroboros, time to stop and consider wasn't one of them. When the eclipse comes, the distance between the moon and sun is least, and somehow, there's always a space for conclusions to be grasped, at and around occlusions; Mio can and does reach understanding.

I want to live.

She'd thought her life, more or less, over, and had made her peace with that. But in that huge, tiny space - a month of dying, all at once and stretched thin as gauze - her eyes for this world change.

Each moment yawns so wide.

Kevesi and Agnian soldiers don't have parents - don't have siblings, but make them out of fellow unit troops all the same. But the two trios do have tagalongs holding them together nonetheless, taking care of all those little things one needs to remember.

Riku and Manana don't...matter, necessarily, but they are there.

Maybe impossible for one Nopon, but not for two.

Maybe they never said anything much more meaningful than that, excepting a tasty bit or two about luck and dreams (and appetites for miracles), but isn't that all Nopon need do? A mysterious force, they are, yet somehow, incongruously, holding everything together...if in a somewhat inconsequential way, relatively.