A Time For Peace, And...[Yaksha/Ryoichi]

What a mad year it had been. Yaksha couldn't help but feel an odd sense of scope when he looked down at the ground in front of him; scarred and pocked, slanting off into a shape that almost resembled a bowl. He could see water pooling in the bottom, and a sizable cloud of what may have been flies, or mosquitos; it was large enough that Yaksha could imagine them all combining together into a humanoid form, that he could suddenly find himself faced with an entity from mankind's deepest nightmares.

It was a thought he'd had more and more, of late. Parasites, vectors, infections...it made him really wonder if he'd made a terrible mistake when he had intervened in the stress of Chicago. Since then, it had been nothing but doubt. Doubt about his origins, his purpose in the world. All he could do was sit in his penthouse, drinking and distracting himself from the truth; that he was a hollow man, a creature with every disadvantage in the world. For all his charm, for all his intellect and wit, Yaksha was just another masked monstrosity. He stared down into the pool of water, letting his gaze slip off into some distant place, his mind roaming off onto odd horizons. It was an act he stopped himself from doing, time and time again, with broken fingers and mangled limbs and shed blood. But not this time.

He could feel the world around him changing, warping, contorting. He could hear the steady thrum of wings beating, the far-off baying of animals he could identify as easily as he could if he had seen their picture in a dictionary. His mind raced and bubbled and boiled over and more than anything all he could feel was the futility of it all. He was a cursed creature, a miserable existence that could only ruin that which he touched. Wasn't this depression itself proof of that? He'd blown the Nevada Desert nearly to slag, just to defend himself. And he thought he could do something as ridiculous as protect the people of this world without fighting? By talking and forcing people to sit around a big tea table, and hoping they'd all just be willing to put aside their prejudices and accept that the world had changed enough for them to finally look at the world around them?

The lazy, meandering pace of the day left him at a loss. He could feel himself suddenly filled with a violent, visceral hatred, a disgust that made him wish he'd made the depression twice as large. He could already feel it expanding inside of himself, like pressure about to burst...a feeling he'd had very similar to all the times he'd used his powers to date. He pointed a trembling finger at the glassy, slick surface, hand trembling faintly as he shook his head, as if lost in thought. Perhaps, if he did away with this incessant droning, he could finally remind himself what it was that was supposed to make this all worth it.