thestormishere: (across the way)
October 2nd, House 41, tl;dr )

Later October 2nd, voice, filtered to Noel )

October 4th, Voice
[ It's been since before her disappearance and then almost immediate return that Lightning's made any sort of widely public, intentional post, but today apparently she's got something heavy enough on her mind to warrant attempting to soothe her curiosity.

It doesn't bother her so much though, and even those who have only seen or met her in passing should be able to tell that there's something subtly different about her- in a way that surpasses the fact that she's apparently sustained a haircut, and those wings fanned out slightly behind her are different colors than before, once-red wing turned white, once-white turned to silver and gold. She regards the journal thoughtfully a moment before speaking, her voice deliberately even. ]


If I remember correctly, the viewpoints over what happens to us after death... are as varied here as the worlds we're pulled in from. Reward and punishment, returning to where our spirits belonged in the first place... simply fading into oblivion....

[ She pauses, and a clock fixed to the wall behind her - an antique-looking, wooden piece of work - fills the air with steady ticks and tocks as she takes in a breath or two, looking up and over past the 'camera.' ]

When we die here, we return but a week later... although missing a piece of who we were before. [ Another breath. Tick, tock. ] What do you suppose happens, in the meantime?

Do you believe it is different than 'home?'

[ Sure, she knows this sort of thing's been brought up before, but... if it's ever been in these exact words, she definitely isn't going to waste her time digging through years of others' entries looking for it. ]
thestormishere: (before you break)
[ Lightning surprises herself with how upsetting it is to come back from the draft and see the village torn to pieces like this, not repairing itself like usual. The general destruction is bad enough, but when she gets to house #41... well, chalk up one more emotionally affected by the flood damage to the town's vegetation- the storm has not been kind to the yard-- to Aerith's flowers, which are all but washed away now. When she first sees it, it actually takes a few minutes before she's able to move past it, touching the leafless, lifeless remains of a something-or-another that she's forgotten the name of, her expression unreadable...

- And after she's assessed the damage to the building itself, worked the last couple of days just to make it livable again and helped out with the worst of the destruction throughout the village, the yard of her house right off the town's center is where she is again, walking along the perimeter of the destroyed fence there.

It's not until she's yanked and pulled at a section to try and right it again that she notices something else: beneath it is a rosebush, but despite it too missing its flowers and a good deal of leaves, half-turned over out of its placed in the ground... it's obviously still growing. Still alive. The fallen barrier must have protected it, somehow.

Without a word, she simply shoves the wrecked fence out of the way... and starts trying to upright the abused shrubbery instead.

- A little while later, she wanders back into town, a lot muddier than she usually is. She means to go somewhere else, but funnily enough, she ends up getting distracted by visiting Good Spirits instead, then the smithy, which is all but flattened to the ground. Not a very good place to be if you didn't feel like sustaining some sort of injury due to the high number of unlucky weapons that had been there.

Considering there's nothing to do there too, she's just about to move on when she suddenly pauses, her brow furrowing as she looks at the wreckage; call it yet another case of inexplicable l'Cie intuition, but something stops her. She takes another look.

... There, in the mud and half-hidden by a hunk of twisted metal, is something she's pretty sure she recognizes. With a sudden, obvious sense of urgency, she starts pulling things aside, trying to get closer. ]
thestormishere: (the hero will drown)
[ For Lightning, because of the circumstances at the end of the last time she'd been drafted, this is actually the first time since her arrival she's ever had to go and try to readjust back to 'normal' life so suddenly- to go from experiencing days of battle and worry, thinking critically, ready to kill or order to kill at a moment's notice... to sleeping in a bed she's used to, eating breakfast in the morning, running for exercise, trying to figure out what else to do for the day...

The village might just be getting started on a whole new New Feather cycle, but Lightning doesn't really find it easy to care that much. She pays attention but mostly ignores what doesn't concern her-- aside from even more random strangers wandering through her yard, that is. Apparently that's just the price of living at house #41, so close to the plaza.

... Of course, something is still pretty off, too. Regardless of somehow managing to do a passable job before, she'd really rather not be having to go out and water the flowers around the house again-- Aerith's flowers. Especially since, like it or not, the guilt over not keeping an eye on the other woman that last day of the draft continues to plague her. She still doesn't know what happened to her, aside from the fact that she suddenly disappeared and just never came back... and yet she does know that others will probably be wondering where she is anyway. In a weird way, the l'Cie kind of considers handling it her duty... even if she'll still be eyeing anyone who gets near with obvious suspicion.

Unless your name happens to be Hope or Zack, of course, the former which has an upcoming birthday laying on her mind, and the other which... she needs to... kind of figure things out with. After that conversation right before everyone was sent off. Ohhhh boy.

If she's not caught in her yard, eventually she does leave her own territory, though, restless and looking for something to do. And after some time, she turns to the journals with a dry, vaguely annoyed-sounding inquiry: ]


Just... out of curiosity, who all is even looking after these fruit trees north of the village? [ A short pause, and she's clearly looking off, studying something a little bit overhead. Unsurprisingly, she's standing right alongside an apple tree, bearing a prodigious load of readying round fruit. ] Look about ready to harvest, out here...
thestormishere: (no one else here will save you)
[ After the whole fiasco with having to take down Jack Horner's dragon form, Lightning's been thinking a lot lately-- namely, about her own trouble with maintaining a human form and fallout from failing against her will several months ago- both things which, frankly, she's been trying to avoid.

However, she can't just keep ignoring it forever, can she? Especially considering that ever since then, even if she's continued to grow slowly stronger and is currently safe from the ramifications of an active l'Cie Brand... the 'penalty' she was saddled with makes using her powers a lot harder than how it used to be.

And so she practices, attempting to get a handle on the magic that's there but no longer instinctive like it once was. Healing magic is fairly easy to figure out, the weaker elemental things like Thunder and Water are simple enough if difficult to aim now, but as for the more complicated spells...?

As for learning new ones...?

She can be found alternately in the battle dome and outside near the edges of town quite a bit during these last few days, with and without her gunblade and various other weapons from before and during her time spent here. She's not really doing much actual fighting, though; it's obvious she's trying to do something, concentrating for sometimes minutes at a time, before casting something that just seems to flicker in the air around her, or light up the edges of her weapons with bright-colored energy.

After some time and a lot of deliberation, she turns to the journals. ]


Filtered to her housemates. )
thestormishere: (not a question of can or can't)
[ With the latest experiment screeching into an abrupt-as-always end, Lightning is, unsurprisingly, furious at everything because of it. Finding herself out in the middle of town, middle of the night, completely blindsided with the realization that everything she thought for the last week was a lie... that was not in her overall game-plan. The dreams were true. Her "family" was an elaborate, baffling fabrication. Ergo, Lightning is pissed.

However...

Making her way home would be much, much easier if the woman wasn't completely smashed on the alcohol her alternate apparently decided would be a good stand-in for sleep... and if her body wasn't trying desperately to go and expel not only that but apparently everything she's eaten in the last week. The taste of too-strong booze and-- and cigarettes is in her mouth, choking her, and it's only by a show of tremendously formidable will that she manages to stumble home, to make it to the right building at all...

Just to burst inelegantly through community housing 4's front door, smack into a wall bodily, and then promptly get lost in the semi-darkness as she tries to make her way to her apartment. Not so easy, when her intoxication-ruined grace has her tripping on the stairs, cursing not-so-quietly under her breath....

Feel free to run into her at any point between town and apartment. Anywhere, really. 8| ]
thestormishere: ALL ICONS BY <user name="redemption"> ARE -NOT- FOR SHARING, please do not be a jerk by taking them (swiftly took me away)
[ Okay, so thanks to Luceti, Lightning has now accomplished the impossible: not only coming back from the dead, but coming back after becoming a Cie'th- something that is not supposed to happen under any circumstances. Despite that, however, everything is not as peachy as you'd think. Now? She's left in the aftermath, trying to sort things out without suffering some kind of breakdown in the process.

This is Lightning, though- she's not okay, but she is better than she was at first. Fortunately, her memories of the whole incident and leading directly up to it are relatively fuzzy-- or depending on your viewpoint, unfortunately, considering she feels like she should try and figure it out... and yet doesn't want to think about it too much due to the sheer level of awful being in that state felt like.

On top of that, her main problem now is actually not her l'Cie Brand that has burned its way to completion... but its sibling set onto Hope's arm that is very likely working its way into doing the same. She needs to do something about him, before it's too late.

But to avoid or put off her other 'obligations' at this point could seem cowardly, and Lightning is not a coward. Therefore, as soon as she's reasonably alright, she kicks herself into action, searching out those she knows and 'needs' to see, trolling around community housing building #4 and the village in general.

... She may or may not actually hunt down Zack, Aerith, and possibly Raine specifically-- at their work places, even, just in time for their shifts to end. Yes, she's just that stalker enough to have figured that sort of thing out.

In addition, she soon turns to the journals as well, making this short message aimed at the last draftees- the filter is not particularly strong, save for locking it away from Hope as well as she can manage: ]


Anyone who saw this on the battlefield... I need to talk to you.

[ A picture is pressed into the journal directly afterward: a crude rendition of two wings- one non-colored, the other filled in with blood-red marker. There's a short pause and then a sigh in the background, but Lightning withholds further comment until responses - if any - come in.

And to avoid the headache of figuring it all out... each piece of this is backdated to just whenever this stuff would have happened. Seriously: any time. And if anything's been missed, just make something up. ]

January 2013

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