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Post by Jackie Clovis on Jan 12, 2017 0:19:28 GMT -6
It was a day like any other at Vytal academy. Perhaps a bit colder and wetter than normal, what with the unseasonable shower that had lingered around all morning and into the afternoon, but still not especially remarkable for all that. The main body of the campus lay deserted beneath the constant downpour, a fact that Jackie couldn't help but reflect upon. For all their aspirations towards rugged toughness, it seemed that even huntsman in training did not like to get wet. That suited her just fine, though. Any day where she could go multiple hours without seeing another student was a good day in her books, and today had been a very good day indeed. There had been the usual anxiety about going to class and fording the halls, ever watchful of anyone she might recognize, but it had proved unnecessary. There had been surprisingly few familiar faces, and even those she'd recognized hadn't taken much notice of her, as if somehow subdued by the gloomy weather. After class, there had also been the usual anxiety over crossing the campus to the library, but she'd neither seen nor heard anyone since leaving the main building. As though everyone had been dissolved in the rain, or swept away somewhere that they couldn't trouble her. That was all quite fine in Jackie's books, and books were just where she had chosen to focus her interests. Hard to say exactly how long she'd been sitting in the library, a notepad in her lap and textbook in her hands, reading to the steady staccato of rainfall on the window. If the number of notes she'd take and the steadily growing pile of books beside her was any indication, it had been quite some time. She'd chosen a spot near one of the library's large windows, one overlooking the courtyard before Vytal Hall, away from the study booths and reading corners that dotted the library; Even on such a desultory day, she didn't want to improve the chances of her running into somebody she knew. Thus, while her chosen spot sported a prime view of the quad, it was its singular isolation from the main body of the library which had most appealed to her. A small collection of books accompanied Jackie, who sat side-legged and head down, and none had come from the section she was in. Though surrounded by books with such creative titles as 'The Long Wait' and 'Song of the Lost', those crowded around the beanbag on which she sat, pilfered from one of the library's many reading corners, bore such uninspiring titles as 'A Treatise on Aura and its function' and 'Alloys: Metallurgic Infusions'. Indeed, the one in her hands at that very moment, titled simply 'Dust', was nearly a thousand pages describing dust combination in exhaustive, unnecessary detail. And Jackie was engrossed. She'd let her guard drop, in lieu of any interruptions to her study, and had managed to make remarkable headway in her research. And all without some random snake coming to interrupt her. lilywilde |
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Post by lilywilde on Jan 21, 2017 1:27:14 GMT -6
----- Never stop Running ----- tag: --- // words: --- // notes: --- Lily spent her days now quite a bit differently than she had in the weeks prior to the funeral. She had always tried to divide her time evenly between training and reading when she wasn't in classes, with the occasional hour here or there spent with a friend. Now however, she had retreated far further into her shell and decided to forgo even that occasional hour of free time. She also had spent perhaps half as much time in the training halls, and subsequently half again as much time in the library. She didn't train as often because each time she used her semblance, the feeling was a terrible, depressing thing. It was not the kind of atmosphere that she liked to train in. It made her focus unclear, and muddied her mind with thoughts that rendered meditation impossible.
Even with all of the extra time she'd spent in the library, she was nowhere near as productive. She could in theory choose to use her semblance and get done even more study than before, but using it was simply too unpleasant to do for trivial things such as study work and training. As a result, she got significantly less work done, and had to spend extra time reading at nights just to keep up with the rest of the class, or so she told herself.
To be quite frank, the main reason that Lily spent her time in the evenings reading, was because it was easier to delay sleep when there was a good book in her hands.
Lily had always suffered nightmares. She had seen horrible things, done horrible things out in the wilds, but not like these. They were so real, and so deeply personal, that Lily simply couldn't stomach it. It was because of this unwillingness to sleep and her excellent excuse making ability, that she burned the candle at both ends daily.
When one looked at Lily, they would likely not describe her as the healthiest looking of individuals. Even before the funeral Lily dealt with nasty sleep deprivation problems, and as they got worse it became more and more obvious. The rings around her eyes were now so dark, that some people had mistaken her for a raccoon faunus. It was due to all of these converging factors that, when Lily paused from her reading of "Light and Darkness, Rare Dust and their uses," to chew a particularly difficult thought in her mind, she succumbed to the inevitable dreamworld where horrors lurked around every corner and beneath every rock.
In this particular nightmare, she found herself flanked by friends. Her partner on one side of her, and her friend amber on the other. She turned to speak with the orange haired mechanically assisted fighter, only to notice that neither her nor her robot were present. She turned to her back, just to see her Oupis being hewn in two by the jaws of a massive dragon. Lily rushed in to pull her friend from the wreckage, but a might explosion rocked them and Lily was deposited in a heap next to Amber. She could see the princess' Legs as Lily pushed herself up to check on the young Amber, she found a particularly large and well armored nevermore pecking at her corpse. The upper half of it was already gone, bird food, and the lower half would soon follow as the bird tossed the legs into the air, before catching them in it's waiting maw. A second and third bird landed, boxing Lily in, and she screamed
She woke up with that scream, she was just about to be devoured when she was roused from her slumber. This dream couldn't have gone on for longer than twenty minutes judging by the time on her scroll. She covered her mouth, and looked around the room embarrassed as her face turned a bright red. Her eyes fell on a random girl who she was unfamiliar with. "I-I'm so very sorry, I hope that my outburst did not disturb you miss," she said as respectfully as she could. She all but prostrated herself before the unknown student, in hopes that she hadn't been too much of a nuisance.
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Post by Jackie Clovis on Jan 24, 2017 18:06:07 GMT -6
Jackie had just noted down a fascinating, but never replicated, interaction between fire and earth dust which had resulted in an exothermic reaction far greater than the sum of its parts. Her notepad was filled with similar instances where dust had done something bold and unexpected, under such circumstances that no one had yet repeated them. Ice dust that, counter-intuitively, had managed to set a living tree alight, earth dust that had produced a small explosion in the presence of ice crystals. An utterly inexplicable instance of fire dust igniting in a brilliant corona of light, yet without giving off any heat. In each case, modern science and conventional wisdom had failed to explain the end results, rendering replication little more than a pipe dream. Yet Jackie thought she could see a pattern, somewhere in the mess of unexpected and seemingly impossible reactions, and had made it her diversion to find it. What she could hope to see that hundreds, if not thousands, of far more qualified scientists and engineers had not, Jackie had chosen not to ask. The truth was that she hardly expected to find anything, and did not for a moment suspect that there might be a philosopher's stone hidden away in a municipally available text book, but she did hope to glean some greater insight from dust and its myriad interactions. Insight that, if not of so ground breaking a nature as to render iron into gold, might at least let her fine tune her own esoteric formulae. She had already stumbled across an instance where a very complex and fine tuned mixture of her own devising had been produced in nature, yet with effects that utterly eclipsed the artificial combination. If she could figure out how, she could amplify the efficacy of her own mixture by as much as tenfold. The only clue she had to go on, however, was the nearly ubiquitous presence of some metal or another in each instance where Dust had behaved inexplicably. It was hardly an exceptional observation, however, given that the connection was noted in the very book she was reading, but it suggested to her some promising avenues of research.
Moving her hand from her note pad and to the open tome of metallurgy waiting nearby, Jackie's fingers clawed spasmodically as a piercing shriek tore through the room. With a wail of her own, she snatched the open book from the floor and brought it up before her, interposed between herself and the source of the horrible exclamation. She sat like that, cringing behind her book and thinking how the dust book, with its thousand or so pages and leather cover, would have proved a far more sturdy shield, when a quiet voice, rendered raw by its shrieking, reached her from across the room. Lowering the book in tiny increments, until little more than her eyes were showing over its spine, Jackie peered pale facedly at the scream's source.
"N-no..." She said quietly, half trembling, with noticeable irony in her tone, "Didn't disturb me at all."
Jackie stared guardedly at the unfamiliar girl, a faunus if she wasn't wholly mistaken, and decided that she definitely did not recognize her. Lowering her book the rest of the way, the taller girl breathed in an unsteady breath that proved inadequate to still her hammering heart. Placing a hand over her heart, she felt it pounding through her practical blouse, and grimaced at the extremity of her cowardice. Nevermind that she had fully expected the shriek to be some precursor to a violent assault, her craven reaction still sickened her. If the sad looking faunus girl had been attacker, Jackie would be, in all likelihood, have been getting kicked in the chin right about then. A fat lot of a good a book would have done. Gritting her teeth, Jackie pushed the offensive tome aggressively from her lap before refocusing on the strange faunus girl. Just was her problem then, and why hadn't Jackie noticed her when she came in? Thinking back, the answer presented itself to the dark haired woman. She had made note of a small, disheveled bundle in the corner, but hadn't paid it much mind. That bundle, as it turned out, was a fellow student. Good job it wasn't a student that meant her harm, Jackie thought dismally. Then she noticed the pleading and apologetic look in the faunus girl's eyes, and felt some half measure of the embarrassment she must have felt for such an outburst. Her sourness abated slightly, and she became very conscious of the supine pose the faunus girl had adopted, and suddenly found herself wishing this strange girl wouldn't make such a big deal out of it...
Embarrassed by proxy, Jackie averted her dull, hazel eyes and coughed abashedly into one hand.
"Uh... Are you okay?" She asked quietly, raising her hand beside her face to serve as a blinder between herself and the embarrassingly apologetic girl.
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