Clair de Lune was described as the sun within the world worshipping the moon.
Of course, she did not quite look the part. Her hair was a swirl between glittering silver and midnight blue, her eyes were embedded with emerald jewels that glistened every singlet time food was mentioned. Living her years in a world where the worthy are equipped with weapons and capes marching along the street, it could barely be a question that everyone living in the Witching Hour knew of her existence.
This was a story that happened a long time ago.
One day, a man found himself stranded in an unknown world. Dressed in only a plain white button-up shirt and dusty dress pants, he could only admire the music that rang in his ears as he stared at an unfamiliar city in front of him. As if a fairytale had welcomed him in his dreams, he decided to walk closer to the city to be enveloped in the warmth of lamps in front of what seemed like a theatre.
"What a fantastic looking theatre," he complimented, tracing his fingers upon the corners of the stage, a tint smell of wood wafting to his nose. The backlights were dim yet brought out a mysterious 'opera-like' sensation, tingling his excitement. "I wonder when they're going to start."
As he turned away from the stage, he caught sight of a young girl holding a lollipop.
With a wide grin, she approached him.
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"It's..." Clair began, the duo's eyes glued to the mechanism they had just worked together to construct. "Not moving at all."
"Surely there must be something wrong with the connection between the core and another wire," Taiyou suggested, approaching the mechanism once again. Dragging its upper body by the bottoms of its arms and resting it on his lap, he decided to have another look at it. "Personally I don't think there are any outstanding problems with what you've made aside from its ugliness. Its arms are connected to the body quite well and the same goes for the other limbs...perhaps something is blocking the core from lighting up."
Another reason was that he had never worked with making mechanisms merely from wood pieces thrown around the rooms before.
"Well, we did use old equipment stuffed around these rooms, after all," she said with her eyes still looking around at her surroundings. She recognised the mossy corners and the sound of water dripping from the tap. "It would make sense for the core itself to just not be working since it's so outdated. How about you get a new core from that huge building while I wait here?"
Taiyou paused, slowly turning his head in the woman's direction.
"That's impossible."
"Why so?"
"Any equipment that comes from the Central Ignition seems to be possessed. By that, I mean that the mechanism will function like the ones outside if we use anything from the main building," he answered. "The equipment in this apartment complex didn't come from the Central Ignition, therefore being old and rusty looking."
"Then where did they come from?"
He did not respond.
Clair simply observed his hollow expression as the latter stared at the mechanism. With a smile and a huff, she stood up from the tatami mats and walked towards the right of the apartment complex. Taiyou silently glanced at the woman as she glanced around.
"There wouldn't be any spare cores there."
She waved an arm. "I know. I just thought I'd fix that dripping tap while we're at it. There was a spanner somewhere here..."
As she dived into the pile of boxes filled with hard materials, Taiyou raised an eyebrow, then switched his attention to the tap at the corner of the room. He was quite sure that the tap had not been dripping as there would not be any water connected to it. So why would it be––
"Tch, hey, we're leaving," he grunted, dashing towards the room where the woman entered.
Pulling her head from the boxes, Clair immediately pivoted her body towards the direction of the main room where the tap was, noticing that the rate at which the water dripped had increased drastically. Not only that, but they swore they heard a knocking sound come from the tap, causing her to reach for her two revolvers.
With an exploding sound, the tap flung to the ceiling, revealing mechanisms the size and form of bees.
"Bees!? You even construct bees, huh!?" Clair scrunched up her facial features, twirling the frames of her weapons with her index fingers. "No matter how good I am with aiming, being able to shoot these little guys will be a pain in the ass! Hm, should I just die here and reset at the Central Ignition?"
"Are you still half-awake? They'll still hunt you down even if you respawn back there," Taiyou frowned. "Although these guys are a lot weaker than the DES, they're able to shoot really painfully."
"Ah, then I don't wanna feel that."
Clair then glanced back at the box of materials stacked to her left, then returning the bees a smirk. "Alright, you said this place is the closest to the Sunflower Pavilion, right?"
"The Sunflower Pavilion? That's right...you can kite them if you dash fast enough to the flower gardens."
"Then I'll just run?" She answered, stepping outside of the room's window with her boots, simply hopping outside of the two-storey apartment complex. Taiyou widened his eyes, looking down at the window to see the intruder swiftly avoid the trees as the bees began to chase after her, leaving a trail of buzzing sounds for him to hear.
Once again, he found himself alone.
For someone like Clair, she did not seem like the type to sacrifice herself to respawn back at the Central Ignition. Respawning did not mean a person would be unable to feel the pain inflicted upon death. However, when she smirked before making her choice, he was sure that she glanced at the boxes for a few seconds before jumping off.
He brought himself to his knees and began to rummage through the materials. At first, it was full of different sized hex nuts and screws. However, there was a glowing battery sticking out from the bottom.
A core.
Just how long had there been a glowing core inside a run-down apartment complex? He was sure that there were no glowing entities within the building other than the lights adjusted to the ceiling. Perhaps Clair was the one who had left it after finding it? Taiyou shook his head. From what he recalled, he was at the Central Ignition, to begin with –– there was little to no chance of her finding a core within the building.
What he also noticed was that glowing cores were unusual. The cores that he worked with had never glowed until they had been placed within the mechanism's vessel and switched on, an entire personality must be booted in order for the core to actually glow.
This meant that the core had already been linked to a mechanism.
Glancing at where the puppet-like mechanism that the latter had constructed was, he felt chills running down his back once he realised that the puppet was no longer there.
In fact, the puppet was standing right in front of him, a smile widening on its round, wooden head.
"Is that my core, perhaps?" it said.