• Graded • The Risen

[Kasoria]

21st Trial, Ymiden, Arc 718
South Etzos
8th break

He didn't get many days when he could pretend he was someone else. He wasn't one to entertain such a notion, anyway. He'd long since come to terms with what he did, what he was, the damage he'd wrought and the lives he'd changed and ruined and, more often than not, ended. You could pretend you were something else as much as you wanted, but those ghosts and memories remained when the fantasy ended.

Maybe it was the memory of his son, still so fresh and potent, infecting his normal routine like some sort of poison. Usually it took a season for the lingering touch of those small, eager hands to dissipate from his mind. The hope and possibility that there was a life for him beyond the smoke and stones of Etzos. But that time had not yet come, and he remembered his son ever-more brightly, ever-more clearly.

Maybe it was just the fact the bacon was starting to smell... untrustworthy.

"Not that you fucking care, eh?"

Bella did not look up from the scrap of questionable meat that she was busy devouring. Tail wrapped around her paws as she dined, tattered tip twitching at her side, she clearly had other dietary concerns. A couple of other cats - notably the larger ones - were likewise enjoying the scraps of meat Kasoria had tossed down to the floor. The bulk of it was, of course, busy sizzling in the pan atop his stove.

The assassin poked a rasher with a wooden spatula. He turned it over when one side was almost black, and laid the last, glistening strip next to it. His nostrils twitched and quivered. Nothing quite like the smell of frying bacon. A minor luxury in this part of the Outer Perimeter, but an acceptable one, his disciplined mind had concluded. Besides, it was all part of a balanced diet. A man couldn't live on oats and bread and vegetables alone.

Well, you could, but...

"Exactly," he murmured to himself, smiling under his beard as he slid the rashers onto a plate. A layer of burning grease sloshed gently in the iron skillet. "'But'."

Etzos wasn't so much waking beyond his home, as it had been awake for a few breaks and was grumbling at work like it was nursing a hangover. It always sounded that way in the morning: half a break at the dawn, maybe, when the relative silence of the night gave away to the start of the day, and then a city of millions lurched into reluctant-if-determined life. Kasoria was one of those that woke early, often with the paling of the sky.

Which was earlier and earlier, given the cycle they were in. Barely six breaks into the day and the suns' rays stabbed through his windows and onto his sleeping face like daggers. The little man had blinked awake and risen without trying to get back to sleep. He had a full day ahead, after all. Food. Training. Work.

Food was definitely a priority now, though.

He cracked a couple of eggs and let each one ooze its bounty from between a shattered shell, straight into the sizzling grease. Two rough circles of white fluid soon hardened, little hills of yolk in the middle of them. The grease was making the edges look dirty, almost burnt, and Kasoria licked his hair-lapped lips as he turned them over. Scrambled was nice and quick, but he liked fried, too. You just had to wait until the whites were solid enough to flip them. He did, and they stayed solid... perfect.

"Don't whine at me," he growled a few bits later. "You either got yours, or you were late. Either way, y'ain't getting mine."

He knew that was a lie even as he slid onto his seat. It just depended on the feline. One of the newcomers, and they could go whistle for the eggs, bacon, and hunk of bread on his plate. Bella or Stitch or Diamond... well, he may be amenable. But for the moment, his concern was his own belly. His jaw worked steadily as he munched down the warm, crackling bacon. Scooped in mouthfuls of egg. Mopped up his plate with the bread and was about to clear that last smear of yoke completely off-

-when he heard that querrelous mewl emanating between his legs. He looked down, and the little scar-faced ball of street shit was looking up at him. Stitch was a tenacious one. Ballsy enough to rear up and place his front paws right on the chair. Kasoria sighed and rolled his eyes, crunching down that last morsel of bread without anything soaked into it.

"Fine," he said as he set down the plate, hungry mouths already crowding it before it even settled. "Enjoy."

There was one thing left to do. Not the washing, which would come after his exercise. He walked back to the cooling stove and found the skillet still warm, and the grease turning white and half-solid. But the "half" part of that was telling. It meant it could still be collected. Kasoria saw a flash of his mother as he reached up and grabbed the earthen jar from the shelf over the stove. Bacon grease, chicken grease, any kind of grease... she hadn't wasted it. You could stir it into stew or porridge, give it some back and texture, or just re-use it to grill something else.

Kasoria had learned a lot from her, when it came to filling his belly. He silently thanked her as he tipped up the skillet and watched the fat dribble and drop into the jar. Then it went into the wash basin and he made a note not to leave it too long. He didn't want to come back and find a cohort of cats where he washed his dishes, all licking at whatever food-encrusted items he'd left behind.

But before that...

No. Not 'But'. More of an 'And'.

The little man flexed his arms as he walked, bully full and limbs still eager, walking towards the square of fresh light in his backyard.

Thanks to Rumor for the template

[Kasoria]

He'd not spent nearly as much time in a cell as the law would like, but that didn't mean he'd never been in one. Quite the opposite, in fact. Kasoria had been in and out of them his entire life. It was just never for very long. Trials, weeks, maybe nearly a season... but he was always out again. Etzos was a place of laws, after all. A crime was only a crime when it had evidence and testimony to prove it as such. But if there was none, no scrap of telling nor voice brave enough to be heard, then it was just rumors.

Sometimes it took trials, weeks, maybe nearly a season... but he was always out again. Except for that one time.

Two seasons in the darkness under the Hall of Justice. Two seasons listening to the madmen in the forgotten cells, carved out of caves and caverns and stones unseen since the base and nameless forces of nature made the world. There were prisoners who had not seen the suns in decades. They'd almost forgotten about such phantasmagorical things like women, or meat, or wine, or gold. There was only stone and straw and trays always shhkkk-shkkk, sliding in and out from under iron doors.

Men stayed there so long, punished by this civilized and lawful and erudite culture, that they could no longer leave, even if their doors were left open.

They would stand blinking at the strange aperture, then shrink away from it. From the unfamiliar and the unknown, as such things like freedom and memory had become. They'd make small, tight balls of rags and bone in the corner of their cell, cackling and talking and arguing and singing and Kasoria heard all of this. For two seasons. After... what happened.

The man himself closed his eyes, and breathed out the memory with the empty air. Twenty-five arcs and it would never fully heal, but it could be borne. He found ways to keep himself busy in the cell he called home for a respectable chunk of an arc. He regimented his body and his mind. Kept both trained and straining and moving, didn't let them pass to stagnancy. But the cell was small, and so he had to be creative.

So he invented the Toad-Bird.

He guessed it was called something else, and he didn't so much "invent" as "discover" what others had before him. But all the same, it was useful. He looked around the backyard, bare save for his two training dummies, cats on the walls like soldiers patrolling battlements. Bigger than his cell. By quite some margin. He went to his knees. Rested his palms on the ground, next to his head. Legs together, as if about to do a push-up. Which he did-

-but instead of going back down once his arms were straight-

-his feet hopped underneath him, knees tucked into his chest-

-and he rocketed upwards, arms outstretched as if he would seize the suns-

-only to fall back down-

-landing on nimble feet, knees folding to absorb the impact-

Hands palm-down. Feet hopping backward, legs straightening. Just as he'd begun.

That's one.

As he disinterested felines looked on, Kasoria repeated the strange, explosive movement. Over and over. Until his knees were creaking and his stomach muscles were striated and taut. Sweat ran down the definition of his musculature, from brow, down his bare chest, into the hem of his breeches. Every leap into the sky, every attempt at solar theft, was another scream from his legs. Soon even his arms were aching, constant push-ups taking their toll.

The little man's eyes were wide and open, but not seeing the moment. Just like his flesh was not feeling the strain. He was back in that cell. He was surrounded by darkness. Just him and a straw mattress barely covered by a blanket. Every day, he punished his body this way. The hallway he was imprisoned echoes with the slap-slap-grunt of his Toad-Bird exercises. First a few dozen, then a few score, then hundreds a day. Because there was naught else to do.

Naught but stare into the abyss, and wait for it to start talking to you.

Fuck that.

He was up to fifty when he finally decided he'd done enough. Tottering on unsteady feet, feeling his age, raining down sweat like a fleshy thunderstorm as he let himself stagger back against the wall. Even with the suns starting to rise, he felt the chill on the stone. The same chill that never left his cell, all those arcs ago. When he looked up, through hair made lank by perspiration, it was the sun he felt warming him. Cresting the close, huddled roofs around the backyard.

He remembered how it had felt, that heat so unnatural and stinging him, when he'd finally been released. Copper skin turned pale, muscles tight and firm but with little else on his frame.

"Never again..."

Some of the cats turned at the noise. It sounded like the human was talking. But he was moving again before the echo had faded, for the doorway and the thing he'd left just inside it.

That was the easy part. The warm up. Just to shake his muscles awake and limber up his frame. The real exercise was on the way. With muscle and bone and thick wood... and sharp steel.

Continued here

[Tristan Venora]

Kasoria:

Knowledge:
Cooking: Crispy Bacon and Fried Eggs
Cooking: Saving Bacon Grease for Future Meals
Discipline: Not Going Back To Prison
Endurance: Completing a Grueling Exercise
Meditation: Your Mind in One Place, Your Body in Another
Strength: The "Toad-Bird" Exercise

Etzos: The Forgotten Cells, Hall of Rule and Reprimand

Loot: N/A
Injuries: N/A
Renown: N/A
Magic XP: N/A

Points: 10

- - -

Comments: This was another great thread from you.

I could find absolutely nothing wrong with it. It was a pleasure to review it!

I especially liked the part where he thought about his son. That was really powerful!

And then the cats. His interaction with them makes him seem more human.

I’m going to read the sequel now.

Enjoy your rewards!

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