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Poultrygeist (10) : As Destiny City is a bustling metropolis, it’s not unexpected that there should be some strange animals running the streets. Sometimes it’s a tiger, sometimes a monkey, sometimes a chicken. Sometimes it’s something worse. Strange egg clusters have appeared in Destiny City’s parks and officials aren’t really sure what they are; these eggs have nothing inside of them. Though it’s an anomaly, they are chalking it up to teenaged pranks.

However, they have advised to just leave the eggs as they are. Nobody wants to say why, but if you’re out late at night, you’ll find out.

In the darkness, whispered between the sounds of the city: a guttural, rasping cluck. The creature stands on stilt-like legs, rooted to the ground with razor-sharp talons. It wears a cloak of long, oily feathers that drag on the ground with a sinister scraping. If you stare into the darkness, piercing red eyes stare back at you. That’s all it takes for a confrontation: a mangled bird, maybe a chicken in another life, comes barreling out at you. It stands easily as tall as a person, but the proportions are all wrong.

The smell of sulfur follows it as it lunges, pecking and screaming and scratching as it attempts to chase you away. Maybe, from the nests full of empty eggs. The battles are fierce, but fleeting; it will viciously try to chase you away but the effects are always the same: at some point, the eggs are crushed. As always, there’s nothing inside of them, but with one final wail, the bird will vanish into a plume of foul smoke.


Getting used to patrolling on his own……was taking time. Dunwich didn’t think that was terribly odd, though. A lot of his powered up time was spent with d’If, or with some of the Knight friends they’d been making: Kaifeng and Aokigahara of Saturn, plus Lanting and Selenga of Ida. Going about town with the guys had a sense of security, on one hand because all of them were at least up to Squire level. They had magic and more avenues for protecting themselves from anything getting hairy than Dunwich with his driftwood heart, his pluck and gumption, and that was kind of it.

Which was really his own fault for slacking off in the “being responsible for the water bottle of his own advancement as a Knight” department. Not trying to pass any unfair judgment on himself or anything, and definitely not trying to condemn himself for having a life outside of being Dunwich of Neptune. As cute as the very magically active partnered couples in town made it seem, living up to the ancient ideal of their magical lives being very present even in their civilian ones, it just wasn’t really a way of magical-mundane life balance that worked for Francis and by extension Dunwich. It was just a simple fact of the matter that Francis had, by Destiny City weird magical nonsense standards, kinda slacked off.

Unfortunately, only so much of that could get chalked up to some of the perfectly reasonable things in Dunwich’s civilian life that had distracted from his involvement in magical anything.

Sure, finishing a PhD was extremely intense, and doing all the research for it was more so (and extremely Not Helped by the fact that working with the Destiny City reservoir regularly involved contending with the lunatics who wanted to hunt whatever weird Creature From The Dark Greenish-Gray Lagoon they thought lived out there)”……but then, other people out and about in the life managed to stay involved in magical things despite having pretty demanding jobs of their own. Not that the ones in medical fields seemed particularly numerous, but Dunwich had even heard about one of the senshi princesses being a nurse in her civilian life. Probably left that princess more overworked than a PhD student (who had, by now, finished the PhD and moved into an actual teaching position of his own, one that he could only hope would eventually lead to the tenure track).

Then, it wasn’t as though anyone could argue with “my husband purified from the Negaverse under circumstances that could have attracted a lot of notice and we needed to lay low for a while to stay safe”……but by the same token, plenty of people purified and jumped right back into things without missing a beat. Murikabushi, Kaifeng’s extremely Fabulous~!!! senshi friend in the mile-long legs, had apparently done that pretty soon after leaving the Dark Mirror Court, something that not a lot of people did (which made Dunwich inclined to see it as an inherently high-risk thing, something that would by its very nature put a target on his back). Only his queerplatonic partner had gotten Muri to successfully take time to work on himself in his civilian life.

Really, the most unimpeachable reason had probably been the one that Francis had dealt with last summer, somewhat earlier than he’d expected: “recovering from top surgery is A Whole ******** Lot, and no, Francis didn’t specifically ask his doctor about the protocol for magical violence while recovering from a gender-affirming mastectomy, because he didn’t want to be taken for a lunatic and denied said surgery? But like, it also wasn’t that difficult to review the post-op guidelines and conclude that he should, like, avoid messing around with youma or Negaverse officers or Calamitous Hollow knock-on effects or whatever. Maybe a driftwood heart didn’t violate the guidelines about how much he was allowed to lift, but trying to weaponize it usually meant throwing, which meant moving his arms in ways that he hadn’t yet been authorized to do if he wanted his chest to heal properly.”

Therein sat the other reason why Dunwich liked to have The Other Guys around while patrolling: all of them were guys, Kaifeng and Lanting were guys with rather femme-leaning Knight uniforms, Kaifeng was genderfluid even if he was also happy not seeking any sort of medical intervention about that, and Lanting was a trans guy. Aside from the “strength in numbers” angle, Dunwich felt less likely to read as “flat-chested woman” while going among his fellow guy Knights who had femme-leaning uniforms.

When he had the group with him, he felt less acutely aware of how the tips of his top surgery scars were just visible enough on the sides of his uniform’s bodice.

Still, needs must, he figured. At least things had been mostly pretty quiet tonight. Some weird smells around the park, like sulfur, but Dunwich hadn’t found the source of them yet. He didn’t feel like the Dark Mirror aura he was following was likely to be that? While he didn’t know much about the Dark Mirror senshi, what he’d heard from Kaifeng’s friend in the legs made Dunwich feel more inclined to give them a chance than he felt with Negaverse operatives. But maybe the Dark Mirror senshi on the other side of the aura would have noticed something that Dunwich hadn’t?

When he found her, he had to pause a few paces off, just to let the concentrated force of Girl Pretty hit him in the face like a fifty-pound softball made of dark matter and concentrated Horny. (This, Dunwich had found, was an unexpected side-effect of embracing himself as he truly was: he’d always been bisexual, and he wasn’t going to do anything without d’If present to agree whether or not they both liked the Vibe of some hot person they’d seen from across the hypothetical bar. But the more the T settled into his life, the more Dunwich caught himself noticing Girl Pretty more intensely than he felt he would have done before. And with her curly pink ponytail and heart-shaped face, the Dark Mirror senshi was definitely very Girl Pretty.)

“Hey,” he called out to her in a pleasant tone, trying to keep his body language demure and non-threatening as he moved out from behind the shrubbery. Her aura said that she had the power advantage here, but Dunwich really didn’t want to come off like he was going to make any accusations about what she was doing or attack her or anything. “My name’s Dunwich, and I was just wondering if you’ve noticed anything weird out here tonight? I’ve found a few weird spots in the park, with these, like, big bird nests and the smell of sulfur? And it doesn’t seem like it’s your team or the Negaverse, so……I’m trying to suss out what’s going on, if I can?”

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