Nero – Train
After the miraculous coincidence of long-lost relatives' sudden reunion, Nero rapidly lost interest. Personal drama of others bored him to no end, unless those involved asked him to step in and rectify things. Family members tended to be so...well, familiar with one another that when something problematic came up solutions proved hard to reach, and in several previous occasions Nero had been glad to lend some help in the best ways he knew how. Even Prince, it seemed, could muster only a passing interest in the conflict of the Shins, and a less-than-stellar attempt to get the focus back on him.
Trinity's rather unpredicted interest in the Horned One elicited delight from the genie, for his exploits were among his favorite conversational topics, be they successful heroics or tragic misadventures. The case of the Horned One denied this dichotomy by encompassing both, and Nero gladly related the details while Sasha continued, ignoring a flap of her hand.
“The Horned One is also called the Black Goat,” he informed her, holding up the plush for her to see. While its top half certainly represented its name well, the configuration of its horns appeared more like a stag's, and its yellow eyes numbered three. Each of its six legs were tipped with what looked like smaller goats, their eyes as numerous but their horns mere stubs.
“Since you asked, the Horned One isn't only a plush. This little guy is...uh, modeled after a big honkin' monster of sinister repute! I learned about it while slumming around a forest town a li'l while back. It and its icky brood of goatlings were terrorizing the village, breakin' stuff and occasionally stealing whole people away into the trees. I needed to know where this thing was hiding, but I didn't want to let it just take me, you know? So I talked around but -get this!- nobody wanted to help a guy out. What a bummer!”Fully absorbed in his narrative, Nero had relegated any discussion between the Shins and Prince to the background. He continued with excitement on his face,
“But I did meet this poor old lady. She had a wish for me: to save her daughter, who'd gotten so skinny 'cause of the famine that she'd gone into a coma, her body eatin' itself to try to stay alive. Well wouldn't you know, I had just the spell. But after I tried it all at once, her body rejected it. I undid it and then tried applyin' it slowly, over the course of a few days, and this time it worked! The girl woke up, maybe a little plumper than she mighta liked, but alive all the same! She was so happy, her and her mother, that when I asked for help the girl agreed. Uh...with her help, and a couple more days, we tracked the beast back to its hidey hole, I cast a Curse Law, and blammo! The Horned One was done for!”Nero leaned back, giving off every impression of pleasure to have been able to recount the tale. And yet, while the tale bore no falsehoods, it masked an incomplete truth. Nero neglected to mention that the girl's 'help' had originally consisted of her acting as bait and Nero tracking the beast, but after the plan went massively wrong, the Horned One had taken
him instead, leaving the girl, fortunately more familiar with the woods, to track him down. Several days later, she bravely accosted the beast outside its layer, trying to distract the monster long enough for Nero to escape. The plan worked, unfortunately, too well, and the Horned One badly wounded the girl before the genie could gather enough magic power. The sight of the girl's blood sufficiently loosened Nero's inhibitions to allow him to let loose a full-power Curse Law: the Law of Embodiment, turning the horrible beast to nothing more than a
little cloth doll. For a short while, he was sure, he had madly laughed at the inhospitable trees cruel enough to be such a creature's home.
After calming himself down, he had attempted to help her return, but in his state bringing the girl back to the village had been hard on her. Nero departed the town in a rare moment of shame and guilt soon after, leaving behind the girl as unconscious to the world as she had been when he'd arrived, taking with him the plushy token of his victory. He had thought about going back, but ultimately assumed that she'd hate him for what happened, possibly as badly as he hated himself.
All this Nero omitted from his story, but by the visible flicker of his expression, it was observable that the seemingly ever-jubilant mage was both ill at ease and unduly bothered by the tale he had just told.
