daybreakacademy | Danger Zone

WHO: Maya, some open, some closed
WHAT: A collection of things for the latter half of February
WHEN: Let's not focus on details like that
WHERE: All over
NOTES: Various things will probably be tagged with specific content warnings as they come up. The usual Maya stuff. Also her permission post as is standard.

(Open) A. Learning Lessons

After the dance Maya's more than a little... aware, of her shortcomings. And if she plans to help put this final countdown on hold, she'll need to step up all the skills she uses. She isn't a fighter because learning to fight has never been one of the things she was good at, she's the band nerd sister. If Katie had powers, she could beat up anyone she wanted. But here she was.

So Maya can be found making a pest of herself in the Legionnaire Quarters, working out and trying to keep in shape. She's also skulking around the Mythril Cage watching other people spar and practice, she might be impossible to hear coming but she's very visible if you look at her. And asking all sorts of questions about what can be made when she's around the Anvil of Hadur.

All her activities run toward the same idea: what sort of tools can be made to fight with, that are easy to learn, and can be minimally loud magically speaking. That last one propbably takes more explaining than Maya directly offers.

(Open) B. Practice makes Perfect

Maya's taken over one of the band practice spaces and set up several speakers and music playing devices she's found in storage. Record players, a boombox from the 70s, her computer, her phone, each one playing a different 'thing' for her to practice on. Mix tapes, Best of Queen discs, youtube covers, a few TED talks.

A bunch of things that shouldn't be playing at once. And fortunately for those that pass her door... only one thing is making noise at a time as Maya practices muting the various objects around her. Controlling the sound so that only one thing can be heard and all the other objects in the circle around her are quiet.

...Of course sometimes trying to balance so many things at once gets too much and she gets frustrated, turning off the sound of everything in the building for a few seconds. But- what can you do, you have to practice right?

(Open) C. Overcoming Obstacles

Maya had a half-dozen objects made, tiny things the size of baseballs to be hidden around the school for her to go and find. She enlisted her friends to help her on this. Each one had a magical camouflage to them, that once set would make them invisible. But as it's magic, it meant it created a specific noise that Maya could follow.

They were meant to do two things, first is she had to hear past the chaos of the campus to find them, helping to control how overwhelmed her senses were. The second was to work on hearing things further away, focusing her mind to better track a noise.

No point in learning to fight, while letting her natural gifts degrade to being useless in the process.

So Maya's moving around campus trying to grab things from trees, under bushes, and in the various buildings. Invisible things. Naturally this looks weird to anyone who doesn't know her.

W.Wildcard

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Maya is perfectly safe. There's nothing in the cage, right? Well, not in the physical world, anyway. However, the monitoring system automatically trains itself to the near-plane where it judges the most activity, and a nice and helpful "FEED SYNC: AETHERIAL" label shows on the display in the corner, next to the time stamp.]

[Well. That's interesting. While the cage itself looks empty, on the monitor trained on that same space, there's what looks like a librarian in a catsuit fighting radiant turkey creatures. Maybe she recognizes her as the school lit teacher, maybe not.]

[Well... maybe "fight" isn't quite the term for it. That implies a certain even capability between parties. At one point the stiletto-heeled woman punts one of the heavy creatures into the air with astonishing strength before unloading a cache of bullets from a very big gun into it in midair. Another takes a swipe with those holy polearm things; she backbends at the last second, firing a pistol... from her heel? (Yes. Her heels have guns.) into her attacker, blasting it back with a flurry of feathers. A third tries to swipe at her in melee, and she blocks it and forcibly rips the offending arm off of the creature with the kind of sound one wouldn't expect living flesh to make when torn apart.]

[Meanwhile, in the real world, more feathers and blood scatter onto the floor of the empty arena. Yeah. Maybe "slaughter" is the better word for what's going on here.]

Whoo! Thanks, boys. I needed that... I probably shouldn't use this thing to host these kinds of parties, but it's better than heading down to the village cathedral every day. After all, I'm a busy woman.

[Cereza says to the room, now devoid of any other living creature. Her voice is audible through the monitor speakers and, possibly, echoed through the open aether to Maya as well.]

*Maya's trying to listen to the air and not just the monitor. Feel the magic in the area she might not be able to see. Being on a plane that isn't this one definitely hides it from her senses. But- not everything. The stronger hits reverberate a bit more, and when something finds its way out of the other place to here there's a slight buzz to the air Maya can hear even through everything.*

*It's gross, certainly, but not really enough to move that stillness that snaked through all of Maya's being. She looks over the monitoring equipment to find the right controls for what she wants. A microphone and a call button. To speak into the room, and she hopes into whatever other plane is connected to the monitors.*

What exactly is that, I mean where you are- were? While fighting those things?

*Being able to hear things just outside of reality might be a pain, but it should have some use. She'll ask about how you pull the trigger on guns strapped to your boots later. That's not as pressing.*

[She IMMEDIATELY stops in her tracks when Maya speaks, glancing around at first, and then to the monitor's location.]

Oh. I didn't know I had a audience.

[She kisses two fingers and sweeps them in a circle in front of her, and... that opens a strange sigil that suddenly sweeps open like a clock in the middle of the arena in real space. Then she struts through and makes her slow way to the arena entrance where Maya is.]

You'll have to excuse the mess. It's part of the job--well, my night job, I guess you could say. Luckily, the stage is self-cleaning.

[She saunters to a control panel and boops on a function that sets a sweeping arm out into the arena. Lasers scour the blood from the floor. She turns to Maya, curious.]

What's your name?

*That didn't answer her question at all, the self-cleaning aspect of the cage honestly just made her question what combat classes were like and that clearly she wanted nothing to do with them.*

Um, Maya. Maya Matlin.

But, where were you? You were, and were not, in the cage. I could only hear the really loud stuff, and whenever bits of whatever-those-where came into this side of things.

*She would like things to be reasonable and make sense at this magic school with magic things and BDSM librarians fighting giant chickens.*

Technically "Where" isn't the right preposition when you're trying to describe people on another plane. However considering that there IS no part of speech that covers it, I suppose that's the closest we've got.

[...Well she IS still a teacher.]

I was in Purgatorio. A kind of spirit realm that almost exactly mirrors and maps to the real one in the physical sense. Think of it as kind of a buffer zone between our dimension and others. Many different kinds of creatures can invade that plane, but they can only move into the real world by way of portals and other specific points.

[She sits on the console now, crossing her legs and arms.]

...That being said, the fact that you were able to HEAR me while I was in there is quite remarkable. That usually only happens when the membrane is quite thin.

As for all the feathers and blood... [She smirks.] Well. I tend to hit pretty hard. Does that answer your questions?

My hearing is better than everyone else at the school.

*Not boastful in tone, it was just a truth. She'd not run into anyone else like her enough. Someone who heard past her silence, or recognized sounds the way her mind did.*

So sometimes you wander into another reality to kill monsters before they work out a way to get to this side of a portal. That- I think that covers everything I could ask.

*Beat.*

Wait, no, how do you fire guns strapped to your boots?

[That's close enough to the truth, anyway.]

Oh, that? That's just some of my magic at work.

[Because "I thread a lock of my prehensile hair down each tightly-woven leg of my suit, and directly into the firing mechanism of each one" might generate more questions than it actually answers.]

*She's not hearing specific spells there, more of a- all over magic. Maybe they're inert. But she's still not entirely sure what she's hearing.*

Right, well, this isn't at all what I was expecting to find looking around here.

*Maya should stop expecting things, it never works out.*

Danger Zone

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