deercountry | The Building Blocks and other assorted tales!

"That's true. You must have come across plenty of different people with many different languages! How did you manage to decipher them?"

Luz started rubbing her hands.

"Oh no, I am NOT too proud too accept help! It's actually pretty hard to do this when it's this cold!"

"I uh..." (Thanks, canon, for never specifying.) Keith shrugged. "It just kinda worked. I think it was part of ship we were on that automatically translated stuff." (Like Star Trek? Sure...)

Keith nodded. "Alright." The physical work was something that would keep him occupied for a bit, anyway. That sort of thing usually prevented him from getting too antsy. He looked at the wall. "You know... if you're able to clean off anything that's identifiable, it might not be a terrible thing to just leave the rest of the artwork up..."

"Oh cool, like Star Trek! I figure that has to be the case here too though, since we all seem to speak English and I'm pretty sure that some of us ought to not?"

Certainly how Usagi spoke English was a mystery, so Luz assumed there was just something that translated everyone.

"Thanks, and you know, you're right! She may have been a vagrant, but just like me, her art skills are totally on point!"

Let's just lose some of those middle finger drawings please...

Keith nodded.

"Yeah... probably something like that... there's weird stuff here, so it wouldn't really surprise me at this point."

He did smile a bit at her comment, but yeah... some of the more 'rebellious' images and words could go. So, he settled in to give her a hand with cleaning off that stuff.

"I never really bothered to question it myself. The last town I was in had its own rules and crazy happening that had been going on for years, so I just sorta went with the flow. Since the place I'd been to before it was the demon realm, the type of new creatures I'd meet were not as surprising as they might have been."

Now the macabre stuff and all the death? That was definitely new and frightening.

"Thank you for this, by the way. This was much harder to do than I anticipated, and she tagged more places than I'm prepared to go visit!"

"The demon realm?"

That kind of took precedence over anything about graffiti tagging...

"Yes, the place I was before here or Deerington. I kinda stumbled into it really, but that's where I learned how to do magic! It does have demons there too, but they're not as bad as humans make them out to be."

Some WERE, of course, but the same could be said for certain human beings too.

"Yeah... that actually doesn't surprise me," he said quietly. After all, not all Galra were as bad as the Alteans had made them out to be... but he kept that to himself for now. "It happens, unfortunately."

"Honestly, I think it kinda comes down to the power that people have, and what they do with it. You can have power and you can use it to help, which benefits everyone! The thing is, most people consolidate that, and make sure to only help themselves. Everyone else just has to be fine with what's given to them."

Luz was very clearly thinking about the Boiling Isles here, and how the emperor of said isles dictated what witches could and could not practice.

"Mm." Keith nodded a little. "I mean, most people I know have either done really bad things or really helpful things with their abilities. But, I definitely know some who've been kind of selfish about it. I guess they exist everywhere."

"They do," Luz said, nodding. "I've known a tyrant who took something as amazing as magic and made it something only he could use, restricting it to others. But that's what people who have strength always seem to do: they limit the good so they can squirrel it all for themselves."

Luz was certainly thinking about the Emperor back on the Isles when she said this.

Keith was definitely trying not to intrude on anyone's thoughts here, but being a paleblood this week was making that hard. He frowned a bit.

"So, uh... is that this Emperor guy you keep thinking about?"

Huh? How did he know that? She hadn't even talked about him out loud. She gazed at him with suspicion.

"ARE YOU A WI-ok, just kidding, you're not a witch. For one thing, I actually AM one. Guessing that you're probably a Pale Blood though, like me."

Keith was a bit startled at her initial reaction, but then managed a small chuckle.

"Yeah... at least, for now, I guess." He frowned a little. "This whole shedding thing actually changed the blood thing. When I first arrived, I was a cold blood. But..." He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I'll go back again? I'm not sure."

It was off putting! Luz hadn't expected someone to read her thoughts! Not that she was too bothered by him knowing that specifically.

"Hopefully. I have a friend who also changed blood types. According to the blood minister, that CAN happen, and sometimes its permanent, but hopefully that won't be the case for you? I mean, unless you're fine with it. Are you fine with it?"

"Heh... uh... not exactly," he said. "I mean, not that was used to being a cold blood before, but this change? I think it's harder to deal with... all the extra... stuff... going on in my head. I'm not a fan." He shook his head.

"I understand. I don't even have that specific power, at most I get impressions. I can travel out of my body and see ghosts though, so I can get how strange it would be to suddenly hear people's thoughts."

And that being said...

"The Emperor is the worst though. There were several times he came close to killing me, and he definitely almost petrified my mentor. No one like that should be the emperor of anything in my opinion."

"Travel... oh..." Keith paused for a moment in the scrubbing, and then shook his head. He saw Allura use quintessence based alchemy to transfer a trapped soul from inside a sentient robot spaceship into a dying clone body. And this was after Keith himself momentarily had his soul in the same metaphysical space and spoke to the trapped soul. These things should really not surprise him anymore. He nodded. "Right. It's uh... definitely weird."

He listened as she continued on the initial topic. "Yeah... I've only known one Emperor, and he was a pretty nasty guy, too. Conquered most of the known universe and enslaved entire races... and worse. That's why I was with Voltron. To stop him."

"Yeah...I'm still working on that one. Not even I understand how to do it at will."

Luckily it didn't just happen BECAUSE, so that was a good thing.

"Ugh, that's my worst nightmare, that he's trying to go bigger. I'm glad you guys fight your own version of that emperor guys yourselves. Voltron, you said? That's the big pilot mech, right?"

"Yeah... so I'm kind of hoping to go back to the other type soon."

He nodded in response to her question. "It separates into five somewhat smaller ones, but they're still really big. The big one is humanoid shaped, and the smaller ones are lions.

"There's a couple of them here in Trench, actually." Not the complete set of five, so they couldn't form Voltron, but... three out of five wasn't bad.

"You might still after this month," Luz offered. "They say this is supposed to be temporary anyway, for the people it happened to this month. I'm not certain about that, but then who is about anything around here anyway?"

She knew full well that this wasn't entirely reassuring, but she didn't want to fill him with false hope if it suddenly became new. It was strange enough that it happened to begin with.

"Oh, wow! Like an anime! Don't think about that too much, just know that in my world, there are cartoons and live action shows that depict plucky teenagers in mechs fighting against evil! I didn't know that there were that many that were actually here though! Which ones are you missing?"

"Ugh..." Keith wasn't sure what was worse... the changing process or being stuck with inescapable crowd noise in his head. "Yeah... sounds about right."

He did raise a slight eyebrow at her response. "Yeah... I've seen shows like that on TV sometimes. Though, I don't know if you could really consider our team 'plucky'... and not all of us are teenagers." Well, they probably could have been considered that while Shiro had been missing and Keith had been in the Black Lion the first time, since Allura was technically an adolescent despite her actual chronological age being different than theirs, but... Alteans aged differently anyway.

But, semantics aside...

"Ah, we're missing two... the Blue and Green Lions. We have Black, Red, and Yellow."

They were both pretty bad. Luz wasn't going to act like she really understood other than when she got her Pale Blood magic alongside her own glyph magic, but the adjustment to seeing ghosts ALL the time and having weird premonitions had been pretty startling and took time to get used to.

"'Plucky' is just another way of saying spirited or, you know, slightly going against the grain. You usually don't see someone who's a dog of the state piloting something like that. It has to be people that march to their own drum, usually having some kind of similarity to the mech that they pilot."

Ah. So there were five, and the truth was that Luz had technically only never MET one, only seen her in a memory. So technically, in one way or another, each of the lion pilots had somehow been either in Deerington or in Trench.

"So you're missing...Allura and that other person...Pidge, right?"

Keith snorted a small laugh.

"Well, yeah... I guess you could say that about us, then."

Keith looked a little surprised. He wasn't sure how much Luz had learned from the others, but to think she knew that Allura was in Blue... okay. That was a post-lion-swap situation. He nodded.

"Yeah." He was curious. "Who do you think is in which Lion?" Because, sure... three Lions here in Trench, but there were technically four Paladins...

"I've met a few of you guys! I can tell Shiro is this, like, stoic, leader-y guy, and Hunk is this warm, awesome dude I wish I could meet more often. Believe it or not, there's a female counterpart to him who's the best person I know. Anyway, then there's you, still figuring you out since we just met, and Lance, the hot shot kind of guy."

After seeing his memories, Luz could tell that Deerington had put a pretty big gash in Lance's sails. She knew from experience anything green you had about you was pretty much ruined in a few months. The less said about that, the better though.

"And then there's Allura, who I'm PRETTY sure is a pilot even though that throws the count awry. So let me think. Oh, I should ask. What are the colors of the Lions?"

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