Scene #8919: Ice Palace Extension

Owner	Pose
Xion	The Sleepywillows Mall & Ice Rink is located across from nothing important, a dead end that had as its most notable event of the week being the most interesting food court gathering and ice rink business featuring some of the Multiverse's most powerful and notable Elites. Last week was the Magic the Gathering release draft for the new set, and the week before that, the Vampire coven and the local mall ghosts had restarted their ephemera feud for the umpteenth time. Normal mall activities in nowhere America, really. The evening had spun to a resolution, the ice rink had shut down for the night, the uncursed rental shoes had been returned, and the food had been cleared aggressively by people making just enough over minimum wage to ask nicely before bussing the plates and not offering to-go boxes. Xion had offered airy grins towards the gang as they had left, given some hugs and then mentioned she was going to stick around a bit and 'finish her lemonade'. She still had with her the melted-ice and room temperature green Hotdog On A Stick lemonade with her, and when the impromptu wake for a living girl's interred memories had finished she had headed up the dome's outside metal, climbing and hopping up the massive ''play structure'' set with glass panes and dirty windows in the dark. At the top, it's not too hard to walk, and even a good amount of weight can be placed upon the resilient metal structure, if not the more delicate glass paning. Xion walks until she reaches the centerpiece, a solid metal triangle layered with tension cables running down the lines. Crouching down, the Nobody squints out over the dappling of uncertain and flickering lights near the horizon, and the perpetual floods by the gas station just across. The Post Office has been closed for hours now, but a dozen mail trucks rest in dirty whites in a gated lot. Big rig trucks make their quiet twilit congress with the rest stop. There isn't a special reason to follow Xion up to the top, And she didn't really invite anyone. But someone was asked a question, weren't they? Could they be good for a while? Then, what would they like to get back to?
Petra Soroka	The day that Petra both arrives and leaves a social gathering in a normal way will be a new dawn for the multiverse, but that day is not today. Too much fumbling and tumbling and bratting around the ice rink eventually leads her to be assigned more... something, from Lilian. Clearly a punishment, but it's hard to exactly interpret what it is: laps, maybe? She wraps up to leave, pointlessly stacking her own dishes for the employees to take, making sure to thank Haru for the reservation before heading outside, when-- "Seriously? That's what you were-- with Xion?? C-come on, you.... Whatever, whatever, sure, you know where to find me later. I swear to god." And so Petra somehow manages to leave the event with both Lilian and Xion. Xion waits a little longer than she might have expected before hearing the eager approach of a second person. Qetra isn't as athletic as Petra, so her ascent of the prefab dome isn't particularly graceful or effortless. It's an embarrassing minute of scrabbling and heaving upwards until she reaches the approximate plateau of the dome, enabling herself to stand up and walk, and all that trouble doesn't seem to dim her mood at all. She's identical to Petra in every way that barely matters, different enough in the ways that do that they could plausibly be sisters rather than clones. Petra seems to have given her bomber jacket back, which Qetra tied around her waist despite the sundown chill. Skin and jacket nylon both unscarred, hair highlighted with metallic purple, she's decorated with the baubles of the people Petra holds-- or held-- closest: it's easy to recognize Lilian's collar and Hibiki's hairclips, and the Eggman-sourced welding goggles on her forehead, harder to place why her eyes look that particular way, or why she has those bracelets on her wrist, but every ornament is presented and honored with near-reverent display. There doesn't seem to be any signifier of Xion, maybe surprisingly. "Hi~iiii! Waiting for someone~?" Qetra instantly locks on Xion once she's in sight and beeline-bounces her way over, without an ounce of care for the creaking glass beneath her feet. She crouches down beside her and then flops, knee tucked haphazardly beneath her and the other leg sticking straight out, head turned to follow Xion's gaze over to the asphalt highwayside nest only for a moment before staring at her instead. Even at this close distance, she can't quite make eye contact properly: obsessively fixated on Xion's face, but her eyes roam vaguely around the approximate area rather than focusing on anything. "I was good, right? Just like you asked? I barely even said anything at all, you know, to really keep my chances high, ahaha!~"
Xion	Moving the liquid in her condensation-soggy lemonade big gulp around, Xion's eyes reflect the man-made starfield of far-off bulbs and the nebulas cast by old and dirty floodlights. She has spent long enough on the summit to lose herself to thinking, buoying her mood with the false-apple syrup sugaring the already-sweet lemonade. It had been a wonderful night, as a memory, but the wind-down still came out of her deeply and left empty inner reserves. Sad parties were the worst kinds of parties, and Xion already didn't really like parties in the first place. She had sent out the invites anyway, and lingered still for one last party girl. At a squat, a gargoyle perch, Xion looks down at -- and then swiftly up at, with her approach -- Qetra. The noirette blinks, adjusting her far-off gaze across to Petra Player Two, and smiles out of the corner of her mouth. "Waiting for you, and seeing if you brought anyone." Qetra looks back to Xion from the nightscape of the far across-the-street and the nearby evening-closed mall, and their eyes joust as they pass - Xion ending looking back at the gas station while Qetra lingers on her. "Seeing if anyone came." Xion adds, and takes a sip of her lemonade, still crouched at the peak while the mirror-self settles down. "You did. You gave Kamen Rider-" Haru, of course. "-some grief, but maybe it was what Love needed to hear. Both, your support of her letting out pained cries, and his support of a gentle regulation. It's never as easy as just cutting loose, because, you're cutting. It's never as easy as letting go, because, things slip so easily, and then what are you to hold onto?" Xion exhales, and sits back, sprawling one leg out on the glass and one knee up. Reclined slightly, her right hand holds the top of her beverage in a vertical claw, straw held in the web of her hand between thumb and forefinger. "You did pretty good, Qetra." Xion agrees, musing. Toying with the words, like she doesn't really want to give up the hook that easily, because then she won't have anything, and... "And I put the heat on you even though we've barely talked, so, if that was too much..." The noirette trails off, and then, using her hand to push up, slightly adjusts to tilt away//towards Qetra. So she's looking more at her evening companion and not the emptiness of Nowhere America. "What did you want to talk about?"
Petra Soroka	Xion's faint smile in Qetra's direction is reflected tenfold back, easy and unrestrained. "Oh, should I have brought Petra too?" Qetra's ability to mentally model that alternative option is pretty clearly limited; when she closes her eyes to think, the creases of heavy thoughtfulness smooth out to relaxation moments later. "I don't think she'd let me... she'd get too shy, ahaha!" Her head wobbles to a silent, irregular tune, as Xion talks-- maybe just to the sound of Xion's voice, from the glassily attentive way she listens. At her question, Qetra barely hesitates before conceding with a hum and a carefree shrug, draped forwards over her knee rather than reclining. "Oh, I don't really know anything, haha. I'm kind of stupid, you know. We've barely ever talked, but you know Petra enough to know that!" She gets one fractional degree more serious, gaze slipping down to look through the glass below them, rather than at the highwayscape or at Xion. Like unsteady first steps, supported by rehabilitation handrails on either side, Qetra's words come a little bit slower and less airily. "I... like, Love, though. Which is kind of weird, since I don't even..." Qetra sweeps a hand vaguely around her face, at all the little bits of representation of other people decorating it. After piecing that thought together, her smile flickers back on, returning to just-below-normal like a sigh after physical exertion. "She just makes sense, I think! And, you know, there's actually an Abnormality just like me now, so maybe I'm just like her after all, ahaha~" "So I meant to give her good advice, but I don't really know the right or wrong answers. So I don't mind being corrected, at, all." When emphasizing her words, Qetra does an incomprehensible gesture, rapping her finger across the knuckles on her other hand. Is that one of the nonsensical fidgets Petra does when overstimulated, or is she pantomiming getting caned? The 'humu' at Xion admitting that she did good is practically audible. Qetra smugly grins and flips over, rolling to the side to be propped up on her hands and splayed hips, turned around to face back at Xion. Then she pauses, confused. "... Talk?" The bare unrestrained expression and yearning Qetra is familiar with isn't subtle enough for subtext-- she said what she meant, and it takes her an awkward few seconds before she can catch up to the conversational paradigm. "Oh, I'm no good at talking, really! The only things I ever have worth saying are just things other people said, you know. That's why I just like listening instead. Petra's the one who has to talk." A thought occurs to her, though, and she narrows her eyes and announces cheerfully as if she got one over on Xion in some vague way. "Oh! I want to hear more about the... 'para-selves', though. I like hearing you talk about me. And you have to, since I was so good."
Xion	Xion, settled into her recline, shakes her head a little at the idea of getting Petra now - or if Qetra should have. "I don't know what she'd like. To stay, to go, to watch, to sit up here and be with us, to be the one here with me. It could go any way at all, but... you being here means she could be here." Xion resists laying back on uneven metal and dirty glass, resists scooting forward on gravity and position, and so mostly looks out into the darkness, or slides her gaze on Qetra. "We've barely even talked and you don't have any bit of flair for me, but you ran right after me, up to me, did all sorts of things just to get to know me better, didn't you?" Xion interrogates lightly, curious, catching some of the meaning of Qetra's facial-gesture, knowing a little but also not knowing at all. Xion lifts her lemonade for a sip. Dire? Dour? In need of a splash of sugar, the big gulp drips beads of condensate onto the Nobody's lap, but she seems far more interested in following something else Qetra asks - somewhere else the mirror-self goes. "How do you gain your... Marks?" Xion asks, curious. Lifting her left hand, Xion turns her palm over and shows a length of keychain spooled loosely there. At the end is the iconic empty gold star of Starlight, and the silver chain whispers in a particular soft sussuration as her palm's balance shifts. "I can reach out, and close my hand around these beams of light I see cast from people, bend them into charms and chains," Fingers closing and palm turning, Xion's legerdemain reveals a red and white medallion with a blue-lensed racer imaged on it. "And hold those lights in pretty things. When I started, each of them was so defining, so precious, my whole look changed with each one." Xion rolls the Mach medallion through her knuckles smoothly. "I even changed my name, let those titles represent me. But eventually, even though I held every token closely,"
Xion	The noirette spreads wide her hands and medals of every color and kind begin to tumble from her, fountains of tchotchkes rolling down the glass and bouncing off the metal bars and falling from her - a clattering rain that bounces down into the mall before and forest behind. Xion doesn't seem to mind, as most become oddly glittering stardusting in the dark distance. The rain dims, and Xion resumes with a bit of a guilty grin-grimace at the din her foolishness caused. "-and the precious memories they represented, I kept on making them and making them, and the chain of those memories, the quilt of those starbeams..." She waves to the medallion-scattered night. "Let me take all those little things I learned, and find feelings of my own within them. Like glass, like lenses, I could understand myself by lining up the tone of each part in a row." Settling again, Xion reaches over again for her lemonade, just to hold something. "I started out a couple of years ago, and I was barely there. Just a blade that wanted to help, a thing that wanted - wanted to live - and I could be taught or shaped or shown. And then years of marks and medallions and moments later, I realized what I had been making, what had made itself in me. But the whole time I had been finding people, others like me, and couldn't help but feel something, want to share something, want to bear something I couldn't speak to. Maybe I'm just lining up all the things in me to try and orrey into you. Like a big telescope." Xion hangs her head. "Sorry. That's not really about para-selves, is it? It's just littering." Blue eyes gaze at silver-dappled dark. "I don't really think I'm that good at talking either, I just know what to say - what people want to hear, sometimes, and... want to talk." The Nobody's fingers arch around her almost-emptied lemonade's clear plastic lid. Dissatisfied with... herself.
Petra Soroka	"We've barely even talked and you don't have any bit of flair for me, but you ran right after me, up to me, did all sorts of things just to get to know me better, didn't you?" "Mmm, but it feels like I should, right?" Qetra's fingers twist her heart hairclip, slipping down her hair and cheek and then drifting vaguely off her chin, feeling for something that isn't there. "It doesn't... feel like I don't have one, it's just also not there? It's weird, but I know Petra totally feels 'that way' about you, so there should be one." Rocking backwards so she doesn't fall forwards, Qetra shifts around to put her weight on just one hand, legs folded and spilling on the dome beneath her. She lays her finger on her collarbone, tracing an indistinct shape around the center of her chest. "I think it is there, but the body part isn't? Haha, that doesn't really make sense. It probably just feels that way because she hasn't done 'it' in a while, I think. She's kind of going through a dry spell~" "Soo~oooo..." Qetra sways seated, leaning towards Xion, then a little away, then towards, then a little way, then towards, rocking ever closer until her leans take her nearly horizontal at Xion, beaming passively. "Sooo, I'm here because I want to be. And I want to want to be. And I want to want to want to be. And I want to know you. Haha, I think I love you?" After that sparklingly freely-given confession, the grin falls off her face for Xion's next question. Rather than leaving her with a frown, her expression is guilelessly intense, staring straight through Xion. "They just happen." She's not being avoidant; that's her answer. "That's the thing I am. A reflection of the girl who really has to fight for that devotion." The distant squeal-crunch distortion accompanying the word is familiar-but-different to the whining undercurrent that warps Exigent Serenity's, if Xion has ever heard it. The similarity is intentional, insofar as anything about her is. "She does all the bleeding, all the... interpreting, and searching for it, and after all that work, the light that stains her patterns me. It's... crepuscular rays, for me." Qetra's directionless smile eases back onto her face, a little smug as if to say 'See? I can use big words sometimes'. Her other expressions are harder to read, though; the enraptured, breathless silence at watching the keychains tumble away being one of the only times Qetra takes her attention off of Xion herself. "Mmm... but does it have to stop? Is changing how I look every time... 'immature', somehow? Ahah, I can't even think about how it happens, really. It's not there one day, and then the next day it is, and I'm changed, and I can't imagine ever ever not feeling that way, and imagining at all is like dying. I don't like the idea of not being... marked every time. I want to be marked. I want everyone to see that they change me."
Petra Soroka	Qetra flattens herself out on the rooftop, inched around so that her body is in the opposite orientation of Xion's, staring up at her face and the stars beyond as if they were a continuous tapestry. Qetra drinks it in, intoxicated, spilling out every tangential thought and feeling and desire as they enter her head. "I almost lost Hibiki before, mhm... and I hated that. But then she saw... she saw the hairpins, and then she couldn't, no matter how much she wanted to, because she knew absolutely totally that I needed her, and I couldn't live right without her." "Mmmm..." Qetra folds her arms behind her head to prop it up, then immediately becomes dissatisfied with this position, and curls her core without shifting her arms to inch closer to Xion until Qetra's head is on the rooftop beside her thigh, cheek almost touching. "I think it's a little nice to be barely there. I'd like to be a sword. Petra does her best to be, even when stuff about herself still gets in the way. I feel selfish, for how easy I have it when Petra doesn't. It's nice to 'be swung'. It's nice to 'move in tandem'. 'I' is only worth anything as long as it gets a little closer to 'you', right?" Despite lowering her voice with a touch more insistent pressure behind it, rather than meandering ideation, it doesn't feel quite like Qetra is trying to reassure Xion about the dissatisfaction she intuits out of her little motions. Instead, it feels like bearing down, with her patterned grey eyes unmoving from Xion's face, only escalating in their abstract 'hunger' at the shift in mood. "I like hearing you talk. I want to hear you talk. Anything you'd want to talk about, I'd want to hear. I want to hear your thoughts and your language and your feelings and everything. I want a lot, ahaha... probably more than anyone ever should."