One Step Closer [OPEN]

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Tessa stood at the edge of a cliff, high up on a mountain she had taken her cohort up to train them while she was still a centurion. Looking down she couldn't help but think how easy it would be to just fall off the cliff. Of course she wouldn't. As a roman woman who petitioned the gods for her life back, she had a certain amount of dedication to them. Gratitude, and a debt she had to pay back. Turning away from the cliff edge, the grand daughter of Apollo climbed higher. The breath in her lungs struggled. It was painful, but the kind that made you feel really alive. That you were struggling, and working to keep moving forward. Her life had broken apart, she had died, but that didn't mean she couldn't continue to walk forward. That was all she could do, keep taking those steps. One day at a time and all that mess. There was one promise she had made herself though. She would always love him, and she would never fall in love with anyone else. Perhaps less of a promise, and more of a silent wish. Tessa knew her grandmother might have other things to say about it, or her uncle that was also a son of Mars.

Dropping the ruck sack to the ground, Tessa leaned on it for support. The air was thin, and she took breaths to try and get the oxygen she needed. Drinking water to cool her, thankful it was already winter. That she wasn't dealing with the summer heat. Tessa tugged open the top of her bag and pulled a few things out, before gathering up wood for a fire. It didn't take very long before she had a make shift camp set up, more training from the legion. Never a very good cook, at least the Hollywood starlet knew how to heat food up. She had tried to learn, but the reasons for that were gone now. Instead she ate re heated food from a restaurant in New Rome. Not without throwing a few choice bits into the fire with a small prayer of course.

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i wish  I could go back i was h a p p y (even if I didn't know it) Edmund missed camping. Time and life had gone forward, so sue him for being a bit nostalgic. He allowed himself this luxury every once in a blue moon. Camping with the other questers had been (when he looked back on it) one of the best times of his Legion life. Besides, it was good to get away in to nature every once in a while. Sure, it was cold, but he wasn't going to die in it or anything. They had worse while on the quest. If not for the life or death component and his past irritation with the members, he would have said it was something akin to "fun". Living off the land and all; okay, who was he kidding? He had just been happy to get out of the suffocating prison which was the Legion. Somethings never changed. If he saw the forge, Circus Maximus, Terminus, the inside of their house, or the Field of Mars once more, he was going to set something on fire (not that he didn't get that opportunity to do so every day in the forge, but still!). Is this how it started for Felicity? The overwhelming feeling of being trapped in one place? He didn't bother telling anyone. No one would miss him for a day or even two (or ever... kidding, kidding, he knew people did); he did it all the time: a night in the forge or armory, late night strolls that took him all night long, he had even bunked down in the Circus Maximus after weapons maintenance. Sometimes he just didn't want to go into a house; he still had his habit of roof sitting on random structures, and he'd occasionally fall asleep on them if it wasn't too cold. It happened a lot more in the summer than winter, but seeing as it had been rather cold as of late, he had cut back a bit. Traitor on the Roof, The Musical. Not that he was a very musical person. His singing voice was mediocre as best. Horrendous if put in competition with an Apollo kid.  He walked up the mountain, Cinny rolling along at his side. He inhaled, noticing the thinning air. Good technique for strength training... did he come up here with Jolly once? He couldn't remember... all of her training had blurred in his mind. The earlier, strenuous training (like the first 48-hour drill he had experienced) had probably gotten blocked from his memory. He only noticed that his ears had popped when his swallowing cleared them. He walked for a bit before deciding to stop. He was far enough away from... and then he saw the tent. Apparently not far enough, he thought, half in amusement. The Legion would never leave him alone. Then he noticed the figure bent over the fire. "Tessa." He had never been one for all the formalities... he may have been a tad nicer now, but somethings didn't change. "Seems as if we had the same idea." Behind him, Cinny whirred in happiness before zipping over to Tessa, making a mechanical purring noise all the while. COMMENTARIUM: CinnyxTessa is my new ship VERBA: 520

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Tessa heard the very familiar whirr of a small paper shredder, which she greeted with a smile and a pat. Regardless if the metal creature was able to feel the touch or not, she did feel attachment for it. “Cinny, Edmund. What brings you two up here?” They both kept rather busy, and since she had stopped going to the forge it was as though they didn’t even exist in the same city anymore. Perhaps that was because she was avoiding people now, or maybe it was Edmund who was keeping his distance from others. To be perfectly honest she didn’t know, nor care. Perhaps at one point she would have, but it was too much to worry about what other people were doing when she was having trouble just keeping herself from leaping off the edge. Keeping herself from finding a way to completely and irreversibly destroying the being known as Tessa Yates.

Oddly enough she had missed Cinny more than she thought she might, and the cheerfulness of it brought her up in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. Perhaps humans wouldn’t be able to stay by her side, but this little machine had never let her down. ”It’s been a while, how’s the family?” she asked with a laugh and a smile. He had one. A family. Even if other people didn’t admit it or call it such. An organization of traitors, the house that people avoided. The people inside which no one could quite believe were still allowed to live in New Rome. The hostility was less now that it had been, but she still saw it. Still heard people talk about them in foul ways. Not that anyone ever spoke of Edmund in a kind tone, except the few who liked him.

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forget about me i **** you Honestly, if Ed hadn't made Cineribus himself, he would have thought someone programmed it to act like a cat. Like Metal Bird, Cinny had taken a personality all their own. Apparently that included adopting affectionate gestures from Jadis and Shadow. The machine continued to mechanically whirr, doing its best to replicate a purring noise while rolling back and forth near Tessa's leg. The machine had missed her. To her question, Ed gave a small shrug. "Looking at views, recreating training... Sentimental things," he ended with an edge of sarcasm. Between working in the Circus Maximus and the forge, Edmund and Cinny jumped around between camp and New Rome a lot. He had considered taking classes at one point, but then decided not to. Maybe if he found something he liked more than forging, but he hadn't found anything of that sort to date yet. He hadn't seen Tessa since helping her to the infirmary around a year ago. Yikes. Had it been that long? Edmund was still... well, Edmund. Albeit, he was a tiny bit more open to being social than he used to be. Would he still purposefully shut himself in and work? Yes. But he'd be a bit social around Josh and Rhia when given the chance and wouldn't look for the first chance to distance himself from others. Was he still distant, yes. Maybe just a fraction less than he originally was. Progress? Ugh. Humanity was truly infectious. Having machine friends were usually better than human friends. Machines were under his mental control. Machines didn't die or mysteriously go MIA. They could be wrecked with fire or acid, blown up, and dismantled. But he could fix them. He could duplicate them perfectly as long as he had the original, correct plans. They had a hard reset if anything went wrong. He could start over and over and over again until he got a result he liked. They were logical, unsentimental, robotic, useful. Humans... humans, not so much. Humans were more complicated. Humans were more fragile. Humans couldn't be recreated if too severely broken. Humans had no hard reset. Humans were irrational, illogical, and out of his control. Being a machine was all he aspired to be... and yet... Yet he created machines that developed sentiment (sentiment that he could take away, but he didn't want to do that... shoot, he was getting soft) and became more and more human during his time in the quest and at the Rogers' house. "They're," then he hesitated. For a moment he considered his usual lie of 'they're not my family', but this was Tessa. In front of her, that was too horrendous a lie for even him to keep up. "They're doing alright." Sure, Rhia had died and then come back, but they had worked through that. Typical Traitor house... "How've you been doing? I haven't seen you in a bit. Unless you come into the forge when I'm not there." Maybe she was avoiding him. Not that he'd blame her or anyone else who didn't want any association with him. COMMENTARIUM: omg ed i'm so proud of you tru chara dev right there :') VERBA: 511