freshprints | IC Inbox

Why would I keep something on hand that I wouldn't use? I don't know how to cook with produce. I eat takeaway.

[And, y'know, coffee. Like the half-dozen bags of it stacked in the cupboards that are otherwise devoid of normal human cooking ingredients.

But — oh. Hm. It's weirdly intimate, being shown the back of a long-haired boy's neck like this. It feels strange. Or maybe that's just the leftover trauma — that's got to be it. It's just the leftover trauma.]

I see. That's how he makes himself into puddles or ribbons.

[...]

Why does he need a mask?

He has a mouth. Which is itself entirely unnecessary, because he doesn't breathe, eat or talk. The mask keeps anything from entering it. And he likes how it looks.

[ He'll just count his blessings that she can't ask about the rest of Hierophant's 'clothing'.

He rearranges his jacket and turns back while each cupboard door carefully closes, none of them making a sound as they do. What the fuck. At least it's takeout and she's not living on instant ramen. ]

His body hardens into a glasslike substance if part of it is separated from him. The colour makes it difficult to distinguish from emerald, if you can see it.

Ah. You like to look cool, don't you, Hierophant-kun? I understand. It's fine to look the way that makes you feel satisfied, even if no one will ever see it but yourself. Girls paint their toenails even if they're only ever going to keep them in their shoes, so I think you should wear a mask if you like it.

[Not that she gets any say whatsoever in how he looks or otherwise, but she's trying to offer amends for scaring him earlier, so...maybe being supportive of the invisible green eldritch creature (in a mask) is the right way to go.]

Is that why you would up with an emerald gemstone, do you think? Because of Hierophant's color?

It's possible. I hadn't considered it in too much depth. But it is convenient that they match. It means that I can disguise him as the later stages of crystallisation to test people for the ability to see him.

[ Meanwhile, Hierophant is just delighted that someone thought his mask was cool. This time when his head moves it's more deliberate-looking. The paper nods, then falls off his face with the force of the movement. It stops in mid air, moving back up to where his head presumably is. ]

He's glad you like it.

Here, like this.

[She steps over to him deliberately, hopping a little to gently snatch the paper away from where it's floating in midair, and turns it over in her hands to find the right shape and angle before efficiently folding it into an unfortunately smallish paper hat.

It's mostly just a square cone with a brim, but nobody's going to judge her after giving her PTSD over a White Day present, so it's fine.]

There. It's a hat.

[She explains, offering it up to the expanse of nothingness in front of her.]

[ Ah. Hierophant knows how one is meant to operate a hat.

Which means that instead of putting it on his head after taking it, he holds it so the brim is over his eyes. Or over one eye, it being so small. This is what one does with a hat.

He can't help it. He laughs. It's still ugly but- less desperate. Less mad. He isn't burning anymore, rocks are just funny. ]

Sorry- sorry, you can't see. [ He explains, after a moment. Gets his breath back. Wipes his eyes, and he's not sure when they started to water. ] He's playing with it. Wear it properly.

[ The hat floats up to sit about where the top of the paper was before. ]

Don't laugh at him. He can play with it if he wants to.

[It feels a little weird to be defending a person's green eldritch abomination familiar ("Stand") from, y'know, themselves, but Hierophant seems to like the praise, and Noriaki Kakyoin seems considerably more capable of dealing with rudeness than his shyer, more skittish counterpart.]

What was he doing that was so funny?

He's imitating someone he knows.

[ The hat lowers itself again, tilting itself forward like something's hiding behind it. That's it. That's the only trick he knows and he's delighted by it. Hit hat on head, lower hat to cover one eye. Return hat to head. Lower it again. It's not quite as funny by the third time, but it's still- an odd shared sensation for Hierophant to be so entirely delighted by something. It feels like he's drunk too much soda, like it's bubbling inside him

The paper rose floats upward. The base of it twists a little tighter, so there's a part that can be tucked into the top of Kirigiri's braid and held in place by her hair ribbon. ]

...he thinks that's funny, too.

What a flirt you are, Hierophant-kun.

[She has no way of measuring the reaction, of course, except by the speed at which the things Hierophant is manipulating move around, and the apparent enthusiasm that comes attached to it. But still, there are ways she can follow along. It's not unlike cold reading someone, in a way; she just has to watch for whatever clues she can glean, and tailor her own responses accordingly to it.

Such as, for example, reaching up to secure the paper rose behind her braid, tightening the ribbon just so to help hold it in place.]

Does he imitate everyone he knows?

[ The paper hat jumps a good two inches higher into the air at that, in a sudden way that implies that the wearer moved, rather than lifting it. The fidgeting begins again, the hat turning from one side to the other in the air before it lowers again. Ah. That’s what the hat is for. It’s a hiding place.

This is embarrassing. Why is his stand a dork. ]

This is the first time he’s done it. But he’s never had a hat before.

[perhaps it is because HE ALSO IS A DORK]

You should give him things more often, then. He clearly likes them. Doesn't he have toys, or...something to exercise with?

[she says, as though hierophant green is in fact a puppy and not a manifestation of a human being's fighting spirit]

That seems like it would be important. Healthy stimulation.

He’s not a pet.

[ The hat remains in place, a collection of incredibly embarrassed tentacles hiding behind it. And then, without a hint of irony- ]

He has one of those hamster play areas.

...

[That's her cue to just kind of stare at the only one of them she can actually see, which happens to be Kakyoin. Not that she would stare blankly at Hierophant, anyway, even if she were able to see him. He's able to see her, after all, and he's far too good of a weird eldritch creature buddy to be stared at so callously.]

Does he fit in a hamster play area? Even elongated to fit through the spaces, there still must be a...lot of him.

[ To his credit, he catches himself before launching into an explanation of how a human-sized thing can have its parts rearranged to fit into a box-shaped thing. ]

It's best to disregard commonly understood wisdom about the conservation of mass when dealing with stands. He's not really made up of atoms, so many of the rules as we understand them don't apply to him. He'll reduce his total mass if he needs to fit inside someone smaller than he is.

[ Something. He probably meant something. Probably. ]

The smallest he's managed to become was around the size of a red blood cell.

Did you use him to fight off a cold?

[That would be a white blood cell, Kirigiri. Or I suppose in Hierophant's case a green-and-white blood cell. BUT YOU KNOW.]

I had no idea "Stands" were so versatile. I was under the impression that they were useful in one particular way, not in a variety of them.

Mm, that was the gist of it.

[ Not even gonna give Steely Dan the dignity of calling Lovers a stand attack. But that next thing she says is suspicious. His voice doesn't turn cool, the last few minutes have been too emotional for that. But it goes softer. More careful. ]

I don't believe I gave you that impression. [ He hasn't, he's fairly certain. She wouldn't err on the side of assuming something to be less dangerous than it seemed. She's met another stand user, then. Probably not Jotaro, unless she's keeping the significance of the card Hierophant chose to herself. ] It depends. Hierophant and I have been together since birth. This hasn't been the case for all people who have stands. It takes a long time to learn everything that they're capable of, and if the stand has an immediately obvious ability, it's difficult to think past that.

[ Avdol always said it was unusual, how many of Dio's minions seemed to have newly developed stands. ]

I'm not going to ask questions, but if you encounter a stand named for the tarot cards or the Egyptian gods, you should tell me before engaging them. Some of them are the kind of people that you call monsters.

[Ah. He caught her, then. That was probably a little more careless than she should've been, tipping her hand a little too far, revealing that she knows a little too much. But he hasn't closed off from her altogether, only grown more serious. And he offers up an explanation that comes with more valuable information, which is why it only seems right to respond a little further in kind.

Stands, she notes, are secrets. People don't show them openly or tout them brazenly. Noriaki Kakyoin died hoping to deliver a message about the tarot — which, by his own admission, must have been about a Stand. So. She'll have to pay much more careful attention to what she says, and how she frames it.]

I told you I'd seen someone with a wound nearly identical to yours, who told me how it was done. You're alike in more ways than just that.

[She considers, gradually.]

I haven't met anyone here with a Stand named that way. But...it would be fine to engage with "The Star", wouldn't it? That one's not a monster.

He gives people chances to stop being monsters. He's safe. You can trust him. And you can trust stands named for the Magician, Chariot and Hermit. Any other name, and you should let me know. Or your friend, I suppose. Someone who can see and stop them.

[ ...also Fool but. You know. Dog. Iggy's not going to be communicating his stand's name anytime soon.

Someone with a stand and an injury matching his, though. That's unfamiliar. A previous victim of Dio's, perhaps? Or perhaps someone entirely unrelated. Just because stopping Dio became the only thing that mattered to them doesn't mean he was the only thing that was happening in the world. ]

Hey. Hold out your hand.

...My hand.

[It's her turn, now, to turn a little serious from being caught off-guard. Is this what she gets in exchange for inadvertently implicating one of his secrets, an exploration of one of her own?

Well. It's not as though she hasn't already laid out the worst of it for him already. Her hands are more personal a secret, but they're still nowhere near so dramatic as the events of Hope's Peak, so.

Gingerly, she does as he instructs, instinctively turning her gloved hand palm-up while she wants to see what he wants her to do.]

Like this?

[ If he notices the resistance to the idea of extending her hand, he doesn't say.

Hierophant's hand rests on top of hers. It starts to droops slightly in the centre, like a candle melting, until a weight falls from it and into her hand. it hardens after a few seconds into something round and glassy-smooth and invisible. ]

This is how I'm testing people for stands. It brings up false positives from people with the ability to see other supernatural phenomena, but it shouldn't produce a false negative unless someone realises what they're being tested for. If someone can see stands, it'll look to them like one of the gems we have embedded inside us. If you're not sure about someone, show it to them to see how they react.

...You're right. I can't see this. I...know something is there, but I can't see it.

[She pauses for a minute, brow furrowing as she tries to wrap her head around it, before eventually settling on a decision — and a course of action.]

Hierophant-kun, would it be all right if you helped us with a test? Hide some of these around the room, and then step away yourself. I want to see if I can find them...on my own. Does that make sense?

[ The hat nods, then lowers itself into Kirigiri's hand along with the invisible glass.

He pointedly doesn't look as Hierophant webs across the room, flowing underneath couch cushions and into cupboards and between bags of coffee. It wouldn't give much away if he did, but she could go miles with even the smallest clue. Eventually, the hat lifts itself again. Tilts forward again. ]

There are five. Six, if you count the one he gave to you. [ He pauses, then- ] It might be best if I left the room if you want to be certain that you have no outside information interfering with your search.

No, stay. Outside information isn't necessarily a bad thing; in an uncontrolled environment, it's likely that there would be other distracting stimuli. It would be better if you stood somewhere that I can't see you, but you're not the one I'm worried about. You don't "sound" different; it's Hierophant-kun that's likely to bias the results.

[She pauses, momentarily.]

And if you stepped outside the room, you'd just use him to observe what I do anyway, wouldn't you? So that'd be more disruptive to me than the alternative.

I'm capable of just not observing you, you know. I don't watch you all the time. I have hobbies.

[ That's what he objects to, not the implication that he's a creep. But he huffs and nods. ]

I'll just look out of the window, then. So I'm focused on something else and out of the way and so you can't see my face if I do react to you looking around.

I'm running an experiment, and you're nosy. It's a given that you would try to find a way to watch somehow.

[She lets him go, however, trusting him to keep from biasing her test while she turns her attention to the rest of the room. Five hidden things, or six if you count the one she'd been given before. More likely than not he's lying, by giving her a concrete number to try to ferret out. She'll just have to be thorough, and focus on going through the room with a fine-toothed comb, rather than just trying to find the number he'd told her before concluding her work was done.

Carefully, she sets her own stone down near Kakyoin's feet — someplace where she can keep track of where it is, without risking overlap with another hidden one — and starts moving slowly through the room, looking for any sense of the same unsettling feeling she gets when Hierophant manifests and moves around.

Near a stack of books on one of the end tables, she slows. Something doesn't feel quite right...but is it psychosomatic, or the real thing? She moves a few steps away and back again — no, there's something, she decides. It feels that way.]

Near the stacked books on the table.

IC Inbox | noctiumrp

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