kidding around

"I mean, sure, I guess I can, but that really doesn't mean I should, or even should try."

Addam lets his amazement at the restraint (or is it just indolence, really) inherent in this statement linger behind his disappointment, that Mythra should be so lackadaisically obstinate about the prospect of freeing Minoth from his currently-assigned Driver.

Haven't they all thought about it? Isn't it all anyone ever thinks about, in this world of tenuous and tenacious bonds, formed and forged beyond the realm(s) of conscious thought and intention?

Or maybe Addam's just projecting his insecurity. It's happened before. It'll happen again.

They don't exactly have anyone better to ask, and odds are on that they never will. It's now or never, in Addam's mind. Make of Minoth an honest man, with his own shoes on his own feet, shucking on his assless chaps one leg at a time, ready to face up to Malos without conflicts of interest at hand and heart.

And Minoth has remained more or less impassive about it, as far as he's willing to present. If there's an end, then let it come. That's alright. What a way to go, eh?

Somehow, apparently, it's Mythra who takes the initiative, and produces a spare Core Crystal from...somewhere? Azurda has assured them that, well, sometimes these do grow, in the womb center, but were that truly to be the case, would the Core just be...blank?

Jin has opinions on this, of course, but as always, he keeps them to himself. Mythra swears that the Core is blank, never been awakened. Minoth tongues his teeth and shrugs. Why not? If his own disk has been so corrupted.

And then Mythra takes a righteous hold of Minoth's chest-mounted Core Crystal, which he had always thought not to be something you could effectively grab through the armor, and rips something out of him, with all the grace of a scalpel five inches wide.

"There," she says. "That oughta do it."

Do...what? But Addam is too stunned to question, and just takes the object offered to him, stumbling a pace at the mismatch of perceived weight landed in his hand. Mythra grabs Minoth's hand, again through the armor, and palms it to the surface of the Core as well.

There's a pulse, then a flash, then nothing.

Addam remembers this from awakening Mythra - the immediacy of the sheer drop, the quietness of the birthing tomb. It's different, though; as if the Blade had climbed out of a pocket the size of his entire thigh, and knelt.

He blinks. There's someone there, kneeling, indeed. And Minoth is reeling like someone else has taken a massive breath for him, with his own lungs. The blood-color's been drained out of his cheeks. He stares whitely at the Blade.

When the Blade rises, Addam feels punched himself: there, in perfect duplication but for the sharper nose, is Minoth.

...is Minoth?

Is Minoth, in an odd sort of reflection across the origin, missing the scars but still with the worn, weathered face; it lacks a Blade's surreal, immaterial ever-freshness. As it should. Shouldn't it?

Without having to hesitate any further, Addam knows implicitly that this is not the endpoint of Mythra's laconic little gambit. It's something else. But not something else entirely...

The Blade, still with eyes lidded, unbends from its station and rises up to full height - this, the wayward cowlick atop crown only a scant few centimeters below the tops of the two men facing it.

It's impossible to tell where horsehair roancoat ends and where leather-hide boots begin (which is rather a morbid thought, then, but perhaps this is the happiest way it could be turned about). The skirt, tiered and pleated above unostentatious but still-scandalous garter belts, doesn't do much to cinch at a waist that's all withers, thick and solid.

"Is it a boy or a girl, do you think?" wonders Addam, posing the question to Minoth. Though he tries to ask it politely, reasonably, there's something patently stupid about the curiosity, and the just-born Blade knows this. "It's not."

There's only the slightest flicker, suggestion of a blinder's blinker, that cues Azzar's demonstrable awakeness, now that it's...well, been awakened. It nods to Addam, then to Minoth, rotating one stamping wrist and stabbing its spear-shaped staff into the ground as bluntly as a hoof.

No champing, yet. Azzar waits patiently.

"Its name?" Minoth asks, dry but quizzical, and Azzar provides it with a sardonic bow of head.

(Mythra, standing aside with arms dropped uncomfortably at her sides, finds something soul-stirring about the way Azzar embodies itself and refuses dehumanization. Of course Minoth would ask like that. Of course. Just the way it wanted.)

"Azzar... Minoth, don't we know a bard named Azzarn?"

"You think I had an affair with a goat? You've been reading the classics, my prince!"

One can't deny the facts, however: Azzar looks quite a bit like if Minoth had simply been de-anthropomorphized, into a bestial creature with brawn and bite, as canny as any scholar and twice as sharp as any citizen of plain-royal Torna.

It really doesn't bear all that much of Addam himself at all.

"Mythra..." Addam frowns, studies up his breath. "Do you have a better explanation for what's just come to pass than that?"

"Well, I was trying to make a carbon copy of Minoth," Mythra gestures, unimpressed, to the Flesh Eater standing bemused beside her, "for Addam to awaken, but it seems like I just...made a carbon copy of Minoth for Addam to awaken. To the left."

Azzar stamps its corresponding dominant hoof in acknowledgement. Mythra, observing this minor display of might, wisely stows any cracks about how she told them so - can, but shouldn't; couldn't, but would.

This, Addam likes. This, Addam believes. He crosses his own arms and now feints his gaze crafty. "Well, well...how serendipitous."

"Casualidad," Minoth remarks, rolling his eyes via quirk-ed brow, but as Mythra points out, "No, actually, that's you."

One of the things Minoth marvels at most about his...kin, such as it is, is the way Azzar stays so upright despite the minimal surface area of its hooves upon which to balance. Minoth himself has become practiced at slinging his center of gravity low, between firmly-planted hardly-pronated boots on the ground. But Azzar just...stands up. Just like that.

That's the real magic about Blades, isn't it? The fantastical stuff that can only occur when their conception has been brewed well beyond the Architect's predestination for their predisposition. Things that defy physics for the pure sake of semantics. After all, in the Architect's world...

It's in the course of studying this natural impossibility that Minoth discovers another of Azzar's equine traits: that it startles easily, and often. Harmless, he thinks, to stand behind the Blade and just take a gander, right?

But then he clears his throat and the hooves he'd just been squinting at come rising up into his face, immediamente.

There isn't time to think or speak - if he does, he's sure he might spit out a tooth. And he won't yell at Azzar, even in petty consternation, because that obviously wouldn't be helping his cause.

Azzar's sort of like Mythra, actually: it needs to be properly, vigorously stirred to action, or it just won't act at all.

Lora laughs and claps to see Azzar's asymmetrical, unattractive shag of a haircut. Haze beams to see the bright, ether-glowing bows. Brighid is interested in Azzar's mettle, and Aegaeon in its temperament. Jin is the only one with whom Azzar will trust the onerous duty of cleaning out the mud and guts from the bottoms of its chipped, dirt-encrusted hooves.

Milton, though he won't say it, is happy to see someone else with distinctive pointy ears, and Azzar's do make a mighty range of swivels between mounting points (maybe that's just nascent growing pains, though). Mikhail finds it trustworthy and appreciably reticent. Azurda just raises a nonexistent stony brow.

Sure, it's family. It's always family. It's indistinct, formless and fragile, yet the strongest and most galvanic thing of all.

It's not really parenthood. It's odder, looser than that. And if Azzar bends to Mythra like a bite to the bit, then it's been created three times over, or torn three separate ways.

Addam has a chuckle about it, of course. He's got nothing to lose and everything to gain, now, doesn't he? And what does Minoth have to lose, either? But the Flesh Eater remains careful, cautious, circumspect.

"It's well past the age where you put a child into extracurricular activities, now, isn't it? What ever will we do about that?"

"Show it to Azzarn," is Minoth's distracted reply. "Rikoko can teach it a thing or three about perseverance and commitment to refining your craft."

Oh, is that so? "And you can't?"

Minoth ignores his partner's - paramour's - incredulous retort. "Leo can teach it about the power of love, and histrionics, and messing up your life by making a string of stupid choices that only you could be unique enough to make. Kids need to know that stuff."

Only you? Only me? Only Addam, that is to say? He decides to avoid pretending offended.

But indeed, like its fathers, Azzar seems to have the makings of just such a romantic wanderer, humming fragments of rhythms and lines as it strikes with its staff at Antols and Aspars alike. It's not a silent sort, necessarily, but certainly pensive, moody, slow-offering of its thoughts.

Too, it spends rather a lot of time in the air, during battle. Jin does this, of course, playing off of Lora like two actors of a natural, self-contained gravity. But Azzar doesn't throw its weapon to anyone. Indeed, it makes a partner of the staff itself, balancing and throwing its weight around and through it.

Dependable, Azzar is. Straight-shot, but loyal to itself premier. The things it has to give, to share, fall in accordance with a script of its own logic, one which would likely make perfect sense to anyone similarly equine, decorated and dramatic, but doesn't have to be decoded in order to be appreciated.

It's handy with its hooves and its fingers both. Though it can't help Minoth dig, it helps Hugo excavate parts from old, broken-down machines. It sits and observes the emperor and the prince working their crafts, with one or two or three eyelids all closed. Skirt and garters, completely serious, unbothered by the familiar scars that wrap its arms.

Where Minoth might be coaxed into offering the boys piggy-back rides, and end up not-so-secretly enjoying it, goofy grin painted across his face, Azzar just accepts the assignment, goes and does.

There's a barely-tangible aura of satisfaction, though, when they all together find a job well done; when it's something Azzar's done that's helped them get there. It would never say so. It might even feign ignorance if asked. But it's there, just barely there.

When it does eventually agree to go to the sand gardens to meet Azzarn and Rikoko (Leo's presence not stipulated and notwithstanding), Azzarn readily sets the pivotal gauntlet: "Sure, you might like to sing here in the comfort of your own footprints, but are you willing to travel wherever there's music and people to listen to it?"

This is almost more important than whether Azzar's dry tenor range fits the timbre of the torigonda. Certainly more important than how Azzar's reserved nature will come along to blend with Rikoko's blossoms and Azzarn's drawl. Least of all might one consider compensation, if one's working for honest pay.

(Imagine what Azzar would have had to say about Leo, if Minoth already didn't like jokers.)

Azzar, not because it's unfeeling, doesn't even look back at Minoth and Addam to make its consideration. "That's what it means to be a bard, isn't it? I do what must be done."

This makes Mythra wonder, too. Why hadn't her resolve of independence been so simple, so resolute? Why hadn't she found just such a gracious way to be self-directed and stolid, staunch?

They do end up totally ignoring the original point of it all, to make some gains on Minoth's situation. It doesn't seem to matter as much, put into perspective. The old mongrel even seems to mellow a bit, seeing his own face and breadth of compassionate earth projected onto and into such an able vessel, twitchy-but-stable.

Is that what procreation's about? Is this whole thing even really just about procreation, and the passing of the farrier torch?

People are always making more people. Mythra's been alternately shocked and disgusted by the rampant expansion of the group - terrified, she is, of the tremendous overlap of the circle.

Azzar doesn't care for middlepon. Azzar doesn't show its cards, nor does it trust easily; not even as easily as does its resemblent father, though that won't seem to show in such an easygoing group as the traveling Tornans.

It's no joke. It's real life. It's fast-paced, and each lap keeps racing on.

"My bad," she says to Minoth, one night while folding dumplings. "I know you didn't ask for that...or, any of it."

Minoth nudges her nose with his - maybe because his hands are flour-covered, or maybe because he's getting vestiges from his own vestige. "I don't exactly remember anybody asking for you."

notes gathered from discord/design sheet:

Azzar (it/its) - luck! chance! pilfered core crystal! - (alguien tuvo suerte...) =)

- minoade fankid
- beast blade-ish
- earth element
- spear/staff user
- archaeology field skill
- (extra machine parts)
- much tall. very bitch
- HOOVES !!!
- bard type -_-
- lora rat tail
- haze ribbons/bows
- NPC Azzarn
- startles easily

- [pointing to top of head] ahoge perhaps
- [pointing to crunchy bang] opposite side of face
- [pointing to acromion scars] familiar shape...
- [pointing to mysterious ribboned tails] ether banners
- [pointing to hooves] some chips here

- got them withers
- are those ribbons tails or just flags like minoth has? much to ponder
- assless chaps -> garter belts
- fuzzy wuzzy was a. horse
- sort of a jellyfish shag going on there
- pointy nose like addam
- pointy ears like who even knows
- lidded eyes like brighid
- strange intimidating horse like aegaeon
- bows like haze, skirt like lora
- chipped hooves. it's bad at cleaning out the mud
- vestigial horsie ears? perhaps

just now realizing it never has its eyes open. horse blinders subversion and brighid reference ?!
they begin to wonder where the aegaeon reference is. they all turn to aegaeon. do you have hooves sir

honestly. the donkey kick special will have to be real
minoth: how is it keeping its balance like that...where is the center of gravity...OH SH--

my delicious quest :yum: