Board Thread:Role Plays/@comment-26130256-20150806184438/@comment-26130256-20150810195048

(Fair enough.  Sorry if this is long, but we're basically doing two more intro posts here.)

"All right, get yourself comfortable.  Now, they say history get's written by the victors, but I grew up in Vacuo, so I can tell you the facts as I lived them..."

Location: Training Room #2B, Beacon Academy, 6:00 a.m.

While Beacon couldn't be called 'normal' by any standards, it did have its own certain sense of normalcy. How certain people acted, what time things happened, even who would react in which way to something-- it all had a certain clockwork to it.

Anyone looking in the nearly-empty training room would have seen many things that were not normal, even for Beacon. Azulius Cardamom,  serious night owl, was up early, sitting in a lotus stance, in the middle of the pitch-black room with a blindfold (he had disabled the lights with some lockpick-fu), surrounded by training robots, all of which were about to turn on and fight. Something clearly was up.

"There is no vision, in truth," he spoke softly, almost meditating on the words. "All that has ever been seen is mirrored.  Reflections of beams of light upon the world as it was a moment ago.  And if what we see is not what is.."

The first robot opened fire on his position, only for Azzie to backflip out of the way, using Roaring Moxie's glaive-guisarme like a pole vault. He then lunged forwards, cleanly cutting the drone in half with a flare of Aura.

"Then seeing is no great boon." The other robots, in a semi-random order, all clicked on and began their attacks, some charging towards the magician, other preparing to flank. He kept his focus on his ears, trying to track the general direction of the enemies. But since his eyes had nothing to do right now, his brain was using the extra processing power to remind him of why he was doing this in the first place. The fight with the Jack-o-Lantern Phantom. His job against the Legion with Iris. Almost getting the tar beat out him by the invisible Stahlfritz Panzier. The Lemuria airship job. All times where Azulius was forced to admit the tragic reality that he was practically useless when it came to blind-fighting.

Nobody ever got killed because of their strengths, Azulius thought to himself, dodging a trio of combat drones and striking down two more with his polearm. ''It's always the weaknesses that get hose us. This is mine, one of many. The only Faunus on our team with night vision is Shani, and I can't expect one person to watch for four. Need to pull my own weight. Any half-sober Faunus with a steak knife stands a good chance of killing me in a dark room. Wait, no! NO!  It's been years, and I'm training! We're not going down this road right now! ''Azulius immediately dropped into a more defensive stance, trying to block the steak-knife-related memories of that night. The confused optimism of the date. The sorrow at her dual confessions. The blunt, non-computing shock of the knife sticking out of his chest as he fell in slow motion...

The traumatic flashback of Azzie's last attempt at romance left him a sitting duck for a flying combat robot to collide with him, easily knocking him off his feet and snapping him out of his episode, but at the price of knocking him out completely.

''Thanks for that, guy. I needed that. Say, how about we take a little break? A break sounds awsom...*Thud*''