ic The Fate of All Great Souls

[Gizmo]

"O-oh! It's not a very exciting story..." Kimber admitted, surprised by both the specific question and to hear Tarva speak at all after the long silence. She bobbed in the air, looking surreptitiously at the sorceress' reflection. "You know how I'm from Thunder Bay? That's in Canada, north of here, it's really nice! I actually have to go back there sometime to, um, a-anyway, I could see if you're allowed to come along if you wanted to see more of Earth?" She paused for a moment, turning her chin to face away from Tarva and looking at nothing in particular before remembering the original query. "But it gets pretty cold there, sometimes, and I was in the woods and got lost and I was all by myself and then I froze to death! So!" Her voice raised almost a full octave between the beginning of the sentence and the end, full of forced cheer and levity. She wondered if that had anything to do with how much she liked being around people, feeling close to them. She hoped not; after hearing about the lengths Tarva had gone to to survive the story of her death felt pathetic enough without adding any more baggage.

[Avenger Assembled]

Tarva was visibly 'layering up' as Kimber watched, her shadows growing in intensity even as a sultry, fiery persona seemed to settle on her very bones. "Oh, my friend, if I could have been there to warm you!" She actually beat her breast. "To die alone, to know the true touch of the cold darkness of Creation - a fate I have seen inflicted upon countless thousands. What a tragedy each and every lost soul was!" It wasn't as if her lamentations were false, really, but the careful layers of emotion packed around her words, like sandbags around a breached dam, seemed to function as insulation against the true horror that had been exposed to Kimber back in the park. And then, a single crack in that armor. "What-what was it like?" 

[Gizmo]

Kimber floated a good foot away from Tarva at as she began, the poltergeist's lips compressing into a thin line. She was generous enough to assume the Terminus refugee wasn't toying with her intentionally but she found she had considerably less patience for Tarva's 'on stage' persona just then. "Stop it, you don't have to--" At the carefully calculated wailing, however, she turned to look at the sorceress directly again, something too cold to be called irritation flashing is eyes gone from seawater blue to near-white flecks of ice. It took Tarva a moment to realize that the ghost was looking past her, listening to something hanging just past her shoulder and she could have sworn the elevator rattled a bit in its shaft. The intense look faded and Kimber looked away again, raising a hand in a vague wave, her voice hurried and distant. "Forget it. I don't remember. I mean, I'd have to forget, eh? How could you ever be happy again remembering something like that? I'd have to be a whole different person."

[Avenger Assembled]

The door behind Tarva's eyes slammed shut. "Oh, of course," she said, all 'business' now. "I'm so sorry, Ghost Girl, that was a wounding question. I shouldn't have asked. Why, I've practically vomited my old feelings out today," she said with a little laugh, "I shouldn't try and spread my little virus of loose speech around!" She clapped her hands together as the elevator doors opened, and stepped outside. "Thank you again for saving me today - even if that freedrone was not the foe you thought he was." Her hands twitched, as if she was forcing herself to stay in one place and finish the conversation. "I...you were willing to put yourself between me and my just fate. And you know what that is - more than anyone else of this world." She looked at Kimber for a moment, then turned and headed for her room. 

[Gizmo]

Kimber froze in the elevator as Tarva exited, playing back the last exchange in her head and trying to figure out how to rewind the conversation. She belated flew out into hall, the door closing through the fluttering tail of he cloak as she watched the Nihilor expatriate walk quickly away with her mouth hanging partially open, trying to come up with a way to call for Tarva to stop and talk to her without it sounding like an order. By the time Tarva had rounded the corner and moved out of view, the phantom was still wracking his mind to no avail.

 

Slapping her palms over her eyes and spinning in a tight circle, she made a strained sound between gritted teeth. Finally passing her threshold for repression, she stuck her head through the closed elevator doors so that she was inside the empty shaft up to her shoulders and let out a keening wail of bottled frustration the echoes down throughout the entire skyscraper, unearthly and blood-chilling. Pulling back into the hall she let her shoulders slump and her immaterial form fade from view before floating off to find some secluded corner of the castle conducive to being properly miserable.