protector. (INDEFINITE HIATUS)

               ❛   Huh ??  What’s that ??  Betcha feel stupid  NOW  for not thinkin’ about it first, doncha !!  I mean, think about it — doggy style, the galloping horse, cowgirl, the dragonfly — there’s plenty !  I bet a couple thousand Dust that that’s exactly what it is !   ❜

“D--hhhuh.”

Okay. There’s a good option for a topic change in there.

               ❛   No — !  A  sex position  , dumbass !  If one can be named after a dog, why can’t it be named after a panther ?  I bet they’re pretty sexual. … More than a dog, at least.   ❜

“Oh, well, that -- you know, I --”

Idiot. Idiot idiot idiot.

“I don’t -- I feel as if that likely isn’t what was being talked about. Nor have I -- thought about the names of --”

              ❛   HEY  — it coulda been a lot of things !  A drink, a mascot, a position — whatever !!   ❜

“A position? For what?”

              ❛   … The fuck is a pink panther ?   ❜

“... probably a panther...”

      █ ✶ Frankly, he didn’t want to put too much thought into what’s currently happening. Not out of willingness to try and remain ignorant but rather, not to further overwhelm the Flame Pillar’s mind. 

     So much has happened within such a short amount of time that while Kyoujurou keeps a smile on his face (even in this body), internally he has been suffering quite a bit. So as he races throughout the city in efforts to try and gather what is currently going on, he soon finds himself within a small crowd of people. It is only when he hears a familiar voice that he perks up and whips his thin frame around.

      ❝ Ah, so that’s where my body went…! ❞ he utters the realization now, quick to close the distance between the two of them. It’s a little strange, seeing his own body from an outside perspective like this… And even stranger that smiling in this current body is somewhat painful.

     Is this guy not used to smiling ever…?

      ❝ Well, I see that you’ve been taking care of it… Thank you! Be sure to keep doing so until we can switch back! ❞ he hopes they can.

Oh, he's boisterous, isn’t he. All Tensa can do was stare in silence, though his instincts seem to compel him to not just stare in silence, for whatever reason. At least he manages to resist them, this time. No need to go shouting Oho! again or whatever. Once was, in fact, quite more than enough.

“Hm.”

He keeps staring, maybe a beat too long, though the sensation of a frown on his face in this body feels just as weird as the sight of a smile on his actual body looks. He purses his lips instead, then once again, Tensa tries talking.

“I haven’t really had a choice! Why would I want to harm it?”

Again the words come out a bit too loud and boisterous and as if it’s going to do anything, Tensa takes a step backwards. Right. Can’t exactly step away from himself, can he.

“But I. Okay. I will.”

Maybe it’s something about the whole situation. Tensa swears he’s never been quite this agreeable, even when he’s at his most overwhelmed. In fact, that would usually make him less agreeable. Instead he raises a hand and claps it down onto his body’s shoulder with a little too much force.

Starter | @protectyou

After finishing her food (no snacks allowed… hmph) Alydia finally entered in through the front doors of Owl’s Books, big empty backpack ready to fill with as many books as she could afford.

She was surprised by how many books this place actually had, looking around, because of how small it seemed on the outside. Really maximizing the space, here. It looked organized, so she was sure she could find what she wanted pretty easily… but she thought any employee here might be able to help her even more.

So she found the first employee she could and worked up the courage to bother them, as if it’s not literally part of their job description.

“Heyyyy, sorry, do you mind if I ask you for something?” she said, keeping her volume low as book stores typically demand. “If I gave you a genre, would you be able to recommend me any good books in it?”

People had a tendency to apologize for pestering him at work, as if that wasn’t literally part of his job description. If Tensa didn’t want to do his job properly he wouldn’t have bothered applying. It does, unfortunately, cause him to nearly reply instantly with a deadpan ‘yes I do’, but he catches himself stopping the sarcastic quip before it can even start.

Retail voice, Tensa. Retail voice. He just nodded, instead. Retail voice required a little bit of gathering time.

“Yes.” Good job, Tensa. You did it. “I can’t say that I’ve read everything in this shop, but I should be able to recommend a fair amount.”

There were -- a lot of books in the store, after all, and he was only one person, even if he did have a fair amount of free time in the city. The variety drew all sorts of customers in, and Tensa's own world had its fair share of non-humans, so while anyone else might have been intrigued by the concept of some sort of really tall humanoid shark, Tensa just --

-- seemed very ready to. Give his recommendations.

     // @protectyou  |  Starter Call

          “– You have to earn internet access? Who thought up of these rules??”

     No map on hand, no way to pull up directions on his phone… Guess he’s gonna have to learn this city the old fashioned way. Great. He’s sticking to Cotes for today, keeping his jacket zipped up to hold back the cold. He’s sure this place is suppose to retain a Japanese aesthetic, but the snow is keeping a lot of stuff covered.

     The city will need more time to dedicate the layout to memory, so for now he’s heading over to a place called the Lake of the Koi. From what he’s heard, the lake itself has frozen over– but they’ve somehow managed to keep it maintained where you can still see the fish below, the ice safe enough to traverse. Once the youth arrived, he could see that there wasn’t much of a crowd– must be a low point of activity. He kept getting closer to see if the fuss was true about the fish… yet once he got to the edge of the water, his feet came to a halt.

          ”Huh…? It can’t be–”

     Another familiar spiritual presence, one not nearly as overbearing as the last. This one was a bit harder to detect, as if the source was used to keeping their presence as down as possible. Yet Ichigo knows this feeling all too well… There’s no mistaking it. But how could he be here…?

The trips he took to the lake never varied much. Only once or twice had he encountered anyone of note, and while conversations with strangers were much more common in this city than Tensa was comfortable with -- such was the way of living in a proper, populated city, he knew; didn’t mean he wouldn’t complain -- it was rare that it wasn’t a stranger.

He never expected it. Expected much of anyone from his world. They seemed to be few and far between, though not impossible. Never anyone he wanted it to be. A few faces better than others, sure, but they came and went. Tensa had given up believing months ago that Ichigo would ever be pulled away to Spirale like he had been.

He... wasn’t expecting it. He wasn’t expecting the sudden awareness he had, his gaze shooting up from where it had been staring down through the ice to across the lake. Tensa would know that presence anywhere. He’d know him anywhere.

There was no hesitation. Even with his limited use of Shunpo, Tensa wasted no time shooting himself across the lake, with little care for the ice, his feet barely even touching the ground --

-- and when he saw him, he froze.

“... I...”

It took him a beat too long to be able to find his voice, and in that time Tensa was convinced that every time he blinked Ichigo would disappear from in front of him. But he stayed there, obvious as anything, and it was all Tensa could do to pretend there weren’t tears stinging at his eyes.

     ✶ Well… That was much easier than anticipated! Either this man doesn’t care or is simply easy-going. Either way, Panne doesn’t mind; it just makes everything less complicated, after all. 

     ❝ Oh? ❞

     ❝ That is interesting… I wonder if it is because it harbours a vegetable many do not like? ❞ the Taguel wonders aloud, soon hopping onto all fours once more.

     ❝ Would you show me? We do not have to even walk too close to it. Should there be anything laying underneath the snow, I will be able to smell it, ❞

A vegetable many don’t like?

“...br...ussels sprouts?” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but Tensa just gives a shake of his head to try to act like he definitely had been planning to question what vegetable it was from the get-go but had decided on the spot that it no longer mattered what the answer was.

Still, without another word, he turns and gestures for her to follow him, heading back the way he came. It doesn’t take him too long to pause in his walking, turning back to look at her.

“Right here. You can see that there isn’t much snow. It could be worth investigating.”

Tensa slips his hands into his pockets.

@protectyou​​ liked for a starter

💎 On his way to the apartment building, Timothy stops in front of a cute little bakery. His eyes start sparkling as he looks at all the sweets on the front display. He’s really hungry. His stomach makes loud growling noises since he arrived. He starts rummaging in his pockets. All of them. But he only got that apartment key and this weird cellphone with him. Nothing else.

No money.

“WAAAAHH!! I GONNA STARVE HERE!!”

Tensa liked kids, but never really quite knew how to react around them. It was a mismatch of personalities, so he -- just tended to leave them doing their own things. Mostly. Mostly. Today... seems like he needs to do something otherwise.

Because, as he stops to mull over if he wants to buy anything at this bakery, a boy outside with him starts wailing about starving. Tensa glances down at the boy and hesitates for a moment before placing his hand on the kid’s head in some sort of probably-not-as-reassuring-as-he-hopes-it-is gesture.

“Did you just arrive in the city?”

He could explain how to pay for things, probably, assuming the boy hasn’t already figured money out and wasted it all, but --

Tensa had considered himself lucky, up until that point.

It hadn’t been hard to figure out what was going on -- if the screaming cat from months prior coming back hadn’t been enough of a dead giveaway -- but he’d found himself relatively unscarred when it came to, well, actually being affected by things this time around.

So far.

Maybe, in retrospect, he shouldn’t have considered himself lucky until he knew for certain that the chaos was over. Tensa wasn’t particularly one to believe in luck, or karma (unless it benefited him.), and yet he had still caught himself thinking well, maybe-- just a moment too late.

Because, as he passed through a crowd, his perception of things very suddenly changed.

The crowd had otherwise dispersed, but Tensa turned and could see... well, himself... his body, or something... which was certainly not the strangest thing this city had done, but--

You, he’d wanted to say. That’s my body.

He did say it. But instead of how he’d meant it, he--

“Oho! You!”

“That’s my body!”