2022-03-04: 'Fairy' Circle
- Log: 'Fairy' Circle
- Cast: Ruri Hoshino, Alma Stirner
- Where: The Nadesico (Korea)
- Date: 2022-03-04
- Summary: Alma visits Ruri to discuss her contact with the Amabilis, and her relationship with the Nadesico.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"Ah, Ruri-Ruri! You have a visitor!" Minato, the Nadesico's first (and if you ask Ruri, best) helmswoman, informs her co-worker cheerfully. They've parked in Korea, right now -- a nice enough port, and Mr. Prospector has a few things to follow up in a place like this. (If you ask Ruri about that one, she'd just dismiss the whole concept. Ledgers are boring.)
Ruri has the good sense to be embarrassed, hearing that nickname, but give her credit: she only sinks into her chair a moderate amount. "All right," she says, because she can already feel Omoikane pinging encouragement to go and see what's going on, so she can guess what's going to pop up next.
What pops up next is
< SYSTEMS AUTOMATION ENABLED >
obviously.
The Nadesico's guest lounge is, as ever, a surprisingly opulent place; green walls, a chandelier, a fireplace. (It doesn't burn wood, but it's still pretty convincing.) And, of course, there are brown lounges, facing each other. Ruri sits in one of them, hands folded neatly in her lap, thinking that this is a room she ends up in alarmingly often these days.
It's almost like when she came back to Earth, she found out that the world is bigger than the Nadesico, and the world wanted to know what was going on with Ruri. How foolish...
Anyway, it so happens that visitors get escorted through the Nadesico, because the Nadesico is still a battleship, even if it's staffed by civilians. It just so happens that it's one of Uribatake's minions, this time, who took the opportunity to walk Alma up so he could get out of some particularly unpleasant gruntwork. "Here you go!" He announces, cheerfully, as he opens the door. He shortly vamooses.
Ruri looks up, in turn. "Hello," says a twelve-year-old, who is still twelve, just like Lilith saw on the comms feed after the Angel fight. She is very small. And very pale, at that; her skin is almost as light as her hair, and her hair is just a shade too blue to be completely white. The most colour on her face is her eyes -- far, far too gold.
Colour can, of course, come from expression as much as hue; but that's of little help, because her face is flat as a still lake.
"Welcome to the Nadesico," she says, entirely too proper. She can at least remember to be that polite. "I'm the systems operator, Ruri Hoshino. You asked for me?"
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
This is actually mostly... it's not that it's a courtesy call -- it's that Alma needs some very specific explanations that she's pretty sure only Ruri can give, and if she asks for them over the airwaves, they... might be considered accidental corporate espionage. (Alma did not have this thought on her own. It wasn't until someone else pointed out to her that ferrying the full undoctored and unredacted readouts from a UC Project unit to Nergal would probably lead to an arrest that she went 'hmmm.')
Alma is pretty easygoing when it comes to getting escorted around the Nadesico. She's comfortable with the idea that she can't just walk around a battleship unattended, and...
... honestly she's pretty okay with finding a young lady Ruri's age here. The engineering lead of Noisy Fairy was 15, after all -- and a very round, moe 15, at that; this is a little weird but it doesn't actually move the needle. "Ahaha, yeah... Alma Stirner." She realizes she is, in fact, old enough to be Ruri's mother, and the interaction becomes very slightly weird at that point, but... "You were there with the Gwennangorn, during that -- kaiju attack, right? In Tokyo-3?"
Monster classification: not Alma's specialty.
"I noticed some weird data from the Amabilis... and it lined up with something I felt a little during the battle, too, but I don't know if I could explain it! I've never really experienced something like it before." She has a folio with her, though she doesn't actually think to give it over just yet. "I'm not good at using remote weaponry or anything... I actually flunked out of that before there was a that to flunk out of! So it might just be normal for a psychoframe, but... I thought I'd talk to you about it!"
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"During the Angel attack," Ruri corrects her, cool, "yes." It's not that Ruri knows much more about Angels than Alma does, but she considers correct nomenclature important, because Ruri is responsible for handling the system reports. It's important to be exact. "The Nadesico participated in that battle."
'The Nadesico', not 'I'. Maybe it's Ruri acknowledging the group effort -- Alma looks, after all, reasonably ancient, so Ruri has to up her responsibility game or she's going to get horribly embarrassed. It would be nice if that were all it was.
Oh, well.
Ruri leans forward, a little, signalling her interest when Alma names the Amabilis; she realises, on one track of her mind, that Alma must have been the pilot back then. Weird data, and something she's never experienced...
She nods. She's quiet, for a moment, as she gathers her thoughts. "I made contact with the MSN-05R Amabilis during that battle," Ruri explains, at length, in that same even tone. "I can communicate optimisation data from the Nadesico directly to other units, so it's more efficient for me to use low-level language than try to send the data through convential channels. While I was there, I took note of the Amabilis's surface-level capabilities and offered some additional advice on how to optimise its output during that situation. Of course, I didn't pry."
Ruri pauses, and adds, with a little more naive interest: "So, that's how psychoframe is... is that why the Amabilis was ignored so long? It's lonely."
How can a machine be lonely..?
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"Angel... it's kind of a weird name to give something like that," Alma reflects. Then again, it's weird for a mobile weapon unit to be named after fairies, too, so maybe there's just... maybe the type of person who names things is inherently a little weird. "Huh. I'll try to remember." She takes the correction well, at least; she's used to being a tiny bit hapless.
Her lips purse, and she listens to Ruri. She notices, a little, that Ruri isn't... the same, as a lot of people. Her gut is picking up the difference in her... 'frequency,' a bit -- and that gets her to slow her usual approach. Alma takes a seat. She gets comfy.
"Communicate directly -- with the unit? Like you can talk to computers...?" Alma looks confused for a moment, and then meets it with a, "... That's so cool!!" and a big, dawning smile. "Then I bet what I picked up was you, through the psychoframe!"
Now that she gives voice to it -- Ruri does have a familiar sort of energy to her...
... right. The important part. "So -- I can't give you everything, but I do have some of the readings from then," she says, setting down the folio. "You can read it, if you want!"
The loneliness, though... that's an interesting thing. "Ahah... I didn't realize machines could get lonely, but I guess that makes sense. The Amabilis was a test unit for the project that built the Jesta... but they ended up dumping it on us when we asked for something that fit a pretty specific performance profile." Alma's, though she doesn't want to talk herself up too much. "I guess it got sad sitting in a closet for so long... do you think it'd be happier if we had more Jestas on the ship, since they're, like, family? Or does it just want to get out more?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Ruri prefers not to think about fairies too much. It's awfully silly.
She shifts in her seat, despite all her efforts to present herself as Cool and Capable, because Ruri has some sense of just how strange her gifts are. "Yes," she answers, anyway, and there's a light dusting of surprise on her face, when Alma decides it's, quote-unquote, 'so cool' exclamation mark exclamation mark. "Um... I guess so. You could feel that, through psychoframe..? Strange."
And Ruri, as it turns out, is an iceberg; her words and her face are poor indicators of just how deep and vast those cold crags lie. She puts it down as strange, and it speaks nothing to the relief she feels to meet someone who not only appreciates her methods, but has some sense of how they work.
She leans forward, to take the folio. "Thank you," she replies, politely, though she holds it unexamined in her hands as she listens to Alma's realisations.
So, that's what happened, she thinks. Well, it's not like she isn't sympathetic to a situation like that.
"I don't think anyone paid attention to it for a long time," Ruri says. She's not sure why, but she feels more comfortable, so it's easier to just be plain about the details. "It's sad to sit in a room alone without getting to do what you're good at, I suppose. But it wasn't defeated, or anything like that. It had a sense of..." Here she pauses, looking up, for a moment, to the hundred glittering lights of the chandelier. She wonders, not for the first time, why a battleship needs one. She wonders this at the same time as figuring out how to express what Amabilis said, back then. "'There's nothing we can't do'... well, I think I'd call it a statement like that. It felt a little strange, but I suppose the Amabilis was taking cues from its pilot."
She pauses. She explains, looking back over to Alma: "I suppose that means Amabilis likes you. So it would be nice if you would keep using it, now and then."
Once she's advocated for the attention-starved machine, Ruri looks down to scan through the readings. It doesn't take nearly as long as it should. Kids are just getting faster and faster at reading these days, huh..?
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Alma is all sparkles and excited hand-clasping about this. "Yeah! It makes sense, I think... I was talking with the Amabilis through the psychoframe, and you were talking to it how you do, so...!" She takes this as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "It's like having a translator! ... though I guess we can just talk the normal way... so that's not really..."
She rubs at the back of her head. "I felt like that, too...! Ah, it's so exciting! Amabilis and I feeling the same way..." She's a little giggly. "I feel like we were made for each other. I could pass the tests at a standstill, but I couldn't make the remote weapons go, with older units... but the Amabilis doesn't use that kind of thing."
She lets out a content breath, and turns her attention back more fully to Ruri rather than following the urge to gush. "A lonely machine, though... ahh, that just makes me want to track down all my friends more! I want to introduce them to Amabilis, too!"
The files, for what it's worth, are probably not anything Ruri didn't get from her interaction with Amabilis -- though it's nice to see the Amabilis's clear response to kindness all written down like that.
"So... I'm guessing Nergal took an interest in you because you can do this kind of stuff?" she asks, curious but without judgment. "Ahaha... the truth is, that's how things went for me, too, kinda. Have you ever read about the Flanagan Institute?" Zeon's early Newtype projects. ... Lots of kids being bought and sold for their unique comprehension of the world.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Ruri blinks, which doesn't quite communicate her bafflement, as she listens to Alma's excitement. Finally, she asks: "Through the psychoframe... you were talking to the Amabilis, too..?" She sounds a little surprised, which really means she's INCREDIBLY surprised, because apparently that's how children work.
She makes a note to herself to look up the specifics of psychoframe development at her earliest convenience. If they made a type of machine which can facilitate, like her, then...
It's a horrible, yawning flash of loneliness which doesn't come from any machine's memory; it's being lost in a shopping mall, or looking back to see a sheer cliff where a path should be, or waking up from a nostalgic dream.
Of course, it's foolish to think there's any connection. But it takes Ruri too long to think that to stifle the feelings. She'll look it up anyway.
Seeing the response is nice, though. She's still relieved to see she helped. "You're awfully energetic," Ruri remarks, dryly, when Alma bubbles about her friends. "So you're bound to find them eventually."
Beat: "Or they'll find you."
Is she calling Alma loud? Well, she is pretty loud. She's so loud that Ruri can't even manage to keep feeling too melancholy about things.
Does that make sense? Probably not. It's kind of weird. Don't think too hard about it, probably.
Speaking of weird feelings: Nergal. That's a complicated set of emotions, which really speaks to how much work 'kinda' is doing in that sentence. "I don't know much about it," Ruri says, after a moment. Was it one of the laboratories in Sayla's briefing..? Oh, well, she can look that up later, too. "But I was raised in a Nergal subsidiary laboratory. After they found me, that is. Well, I suppose I was an orphan, so it would have been an improvement." She's awfully dismissive of the whole situation. This, too, doesn't speak to how she feels. "Since I was trained to operate the Nadesico, Nergal paid for my education, and I came here."
Well, that's one way to say it.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"I don't know if that's how anyone else would describe it," Alma concedes, scratching her cheek. "For me, at least, it's kind of like... I've been piloting for a long time. I can feel the Amabilis, and the world around it?" The cheekscratch turns to a headscratch. "So it's sort of like -- it, me... I don't know if we're talking to each other, or if I'm just hearing myself back, but... I definitely felt you through it, kind of the same way I'm feeling you right now."
It's a small sample size, but at least it's something to go off. She takes the comment about her energy in stride. "That's what I'm hoping, yeah... and hey! It wouldn't make sense if Noisy Fairy-1 was quiet, right?" A big, toothy grin.
Shared experience. That's the easy part. "I spent a couple of years in a lab, too. It sounds like not as long as you, but I understand. After they found out I couldn't use the remotes, they dumped me on Noisy Fairy -- an all-girls' special operations unit." A second passes, before she admits, "I'm trying to find the other Fairies, still... I know they're out there, but... we all kinda lost track of each other after the war."
She's just as eager to talk about Ruri's past as her own, though she handles Ruri's pretty gently. "Were you raised alone, or in a group?" she asks, curiously. Then she thinks to add: "You kinda seem like the brains of the place here, though... so I guess it's working out, finally. I'm not naive enough to think 'everyone finds their place,' or anything like that, but... it feels like everyone on the ship thinks a lot of you! You don't know when things are gonna break you up, so... appreciate the way they make you breakfast, or the way they tease each other!"
Her lips curl up. "You've only really got 'now,' so do what you gotta to make 'now' a now you're happy with, okay?"
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"I see," Ruri says, which is a little deceptive, because she sees two things, but she only talks about one. "I know what's going on with the Nadesico, but that's because Omoikane knows, too. So sensing threats to our Distortion Field or knowing the status of our engines isn't difficult for me, even when I'm not integrated with the systems."
The other thing she puts together is that Alma is some of Newtype, too, except the kind who has a sense for people. Her hand lifts, to curl near her heart. Well, it's a little uncomfortable, but Alma doesn't seem like a bad person.
It's a little uncomfortable to hear Alma refer to herself as a fairy, too, and the strange part of that is that's a shared experience, too. ... kind of. Ruri realises it mustn't be relevant, when Alma explains them as a unit. "Oh." The acknowledgement is a little sullen. The feeling, in fact, is disappointment.
"I don't remember." The words are flat, and their roots are deep. "I think I must have had human friends, too, but I was alone until they introduced Omoikane to me. Then we were together." She pauses, for a moment, before she decides to explain: "Omoikane is the Nadesico's computer system. Before he was installed in the Nadesico, he operated in a data block. And I operated with him."
Ruri frowns, lightly, looking down at the files held in her other hand, on her lap. "Everyone here is very foolish... well, that means you'd fit in, I suppose. Even so, it would be a shame if Nergal-san disbanded the Nadesico this soon." She doesn't want to go back, all written in the melancholy. "I guess they'd just tell me to do something else, but I don't want to leave," everyone, "Omoikane."
She shrugs a shoulder, and this movement, too, is restrained. Alma, wittingly or no, has tapped a deep well; it's been on her mind, for a while. For this reason: "This is our ship... that's what the Admiral said. Since it's our ship, I'll keep maintaining things, even though everyone's so immature. Well, maybe there's nothing I could do if something happened... I'm just a young lady, after all." Ruri puffs out a sigh, lightly. She is quite serious, as her hand lowers, the fingers of each hand curling over the edge of the folio. "But all our memories are with the Nadesico. In that sense, Ms. Stirner, now really is all I have. I won't be happy just to let that go." Alma's smiling, but Ruri is entirely stern about the subject.
... then again, she is young enough that imagining another life so soon after her life changed so rapidly must be downright impossible. Under those conditions, no wonder she's so attached to things staying as they are.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Not all of that is things Alma has the words for -- but she's clearly happy to listen. When you're that age, sometimes just having someone sit there and scratch their head with you and nod along and sit with you is better than suffering in silence. "I don't really get it. My parents always told me I was horrible at reading the room... and here you are, reading a whole ship at once!"
Alma, that's not what any of that means. Alma. Alma.
"But... it sounds like you've got someone," or a lot of someones, "you're close to here." Ruri... is a pretty closed off young lady. Alma wants to help with that. "Try to enjoy it, okay? I think we appreciated it enough, ourselves, but... that just makes it more important to me that you do it too." A beat, before she concedes, "... I actually have no idea what I'm saying. Ahaha, I guess you've got my number."
She really is a fool.
Taking a breath and moving to stand, she says, "I don't have a very big opening here... Londo Bell keeps us pretty busy, and I gotta do some pilot training stuff with you guys's mobile weapons division while I'm here, too... but it's been nice to talk to you, Ruri. You and Omoikane," and everyone, "take care of each other!"
"And," she says, with an easy grin, "make sure to get the recipe of your favorite dish on the ship. I've been trying to make Irmela's cakes for years..."
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Ruri just kind of gives Alma a Look, when she declares that it's just like reading the room. Her dismissal is withering: "Fool. You don't think anything of sensing me, do you? I just know computers, not humans."
She is, indeed, terribly closed off, and apparently humourless to boot -- which isn't the whole story, but Ruri's wit doesn't really involve laughing and smiling, so it's an easy mistake to make. Easy for her to make, even, because she's surprised to hear advice about enjoying herself. Does she not seem like she is..? Strange.
Ruri glances aside, muttering a response, as Alma laughs her insight off. "I wonder if you believe that."
... who is she talking to???
(It's either the audience or Omoikane. Who knows.)
She looks to Alma, as she stands; she has to look up a little further, but it's not much of an ask, because Ruri looks up to everyone anyway. Even when Ruri stands up, too! She's very short, even set against a shorter woman. "I see," she says, and there's a sense of disappointment to that agreement, even if she became more guarded at some point in this conversation. "We will. I hope you can find your friends, Ms. Stirner... but I won't tell you it's worth rebuilding, since you already know."
Alma didn't say all those facts in sequence, but, well, there are only so many reasonable interpretations of what she's said.
"I should get back to my station, as well. I'll escort you to the hangar first... it can be hard to navigate a strange ship." Not that Ruri has been on many of them, but it's just polite.
...
At some point during the walk, Ruri reveals, out of nowhere: "Chicken fried rice." And a beat, "... that's my favourite."
Well, that's one way for her to leave Alma with the pilots.