2022-03-09: 3D Models! The New Sub Is A Hyper Agent?
- Log: 2022-03-09: 3D Models! The New Sub Is A Hyper Agent?
- Cast: Takeshi Todo, Akane Shinjo
- Where: Tsutsujidai High School
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-03-09
- Summary: Akane gets an unusual call into the faculty office to talk about her attendance record. She gets a project -- and maybe reveals a little more about the relationship between herself and her caretaker to a third party.
<Pose Tracker> Takeshi Todo has posed.
It is... unusual. Unexpected change is supposed to be something rare in Tsutsujidai after all, isn't it? But recent events have been all about changing Tsutsujidai. From Gridman's appearance, to the interference of otherworlders, to the manifestation of Ruin Apostles, so much has been changing...
And now... A new math teacher out of nowhere.
How unusual, indeed.
"Ah, Miss Shinjo!" Takeshi says with a warm smile, pulling a chair up next to him (because these are Japanese cubicles, so things are . . . tight). Fortunately there are conveniently basically no other teachers except for old, basically deaf, mister Sanada over in the corner. "Please, have a seat."
"I wanted to ask to make sure everything's alright," he says in a quieter tone. "I'd noticed that you've been having quite a few absences recently, and while your grades have held steady, I'm concerned that you might be... missing some of the content," he adds genially, gently adjusting his glasses. "It's clear from your grades and the notes I've been left that you're a very intelligent young woman, but-- as your homeroom teacher-- I have to ask:"
"Is... everything alright, Miss Shinjo? At home, in... general? I promise you can trust me to keep anything at all a secret."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
... A check-in again, Akane thinks. It's just like with Sayla. People keep asking all of a sudden, and...
Akane has a seat, as requested; she scoots in a little bit. This is the first time she's been actually checked in on for an absence, despite... the large number of absences she's racked up. It makes her a little uneasy -- it's not like someone with her grades is going to get held back or anything, but...
"Oh, it's fine, sir," Akane says, pulling her bag up onto her lap. "Some of it's been sickness -- and the rest of it is mostly just not feeling like it's a challenge. If my grades are holding steady even without going to class, I might as well not go, right?"
Rubbing at the back of her head, she admits, "... Okay, every now and then I stay home because of hobby stuff, too." She glances off to one side, explaining, "Lately I've been doing a diorama." She shifts her bag a bit, with the sound of a few plastic clacks. "The science department was nice enough to let me take home a few more empty bottles to use for structural stuff..."
Unzipping her bag, she asks, casually, "Wanna see?" This *could* be risky -- save that, well. How would anyone connect 'sculptures and dioramas' to 'kaiju' unless they already knew the whole situation?
<Pose Tracker> Takeshi Todo has posed.
"Aha," Takeshi nods along as if this totally explains her entire situation. "I see. That reminds me of an old friend of mine," he explains, jotting down a note on his clipboard. Said clipboard is also full of other jibberish, such that the note is half-lost in the maelstrom of words and numbers. It's almost as though he's been coding something by hand in his free time. "He was a brilliant student too. But that brilliance also... sometimes kept others at a distance."
And now he shines with another light entirely...
Todo's eyes take on a wistful expression. He gazes for a moment out the nearby window, towards a part of the sky that seems otherwise to be utterly unremarkable.
But just like that, he's back in the here and now. "Well, if you like, I can prepare some more advanced material for you. The last thing I want is for any of my students to feel as though they've been wasting their time--"
"A diorama?" He asks, canting his head to one side. "Hm. Sure, I don't see why not. Do you build these sorts of things often, Miss Shinjo?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Old person talk. Teacher old person talk. Akane offers a, "Sounds like you kinda miss him," and moves on.
Akane spots that wistfulness, though. She glances to the code, too. ... that's a little beyond her. Her engagement with computers and phones is a lot more -- direct.
On the topic of wasting her time, "Oh, uh -- sure, if you're offering." She has no idea if she'll actually follow through, but it's better than nothing. "I've been improving my French a bit, too! I originally learned it just to watch TV, but now I've got a conversation partner. ... for now, anyway."
In the end, though, she winds around to hobby talk, because... it's easy. "I mean, all I have here right now is a couple sketches and some tools, plus the supplies I picked up today... I needed to make sure the craft knife I was using was good enough to get through what the science department was giving me." A beat, before she adds, "Oh, um, don't worry. I asked them and they said it was okay to bring it in. It's smaller than most of the craft knives in the art department."
She unzips her bag. There's a brick of clay, some doodles of a mountainside... the aforementioned empty supply bottles from the science department, and... something that might be familiar, if only in a secondhand way.
An old, grip-worn yellow boxcutter.
The spot where the tip would exit has been covered with duct tape -- a concession to safety in having such an item enter the school without anyone getting weird about it. There's an... energy to it, though, a sympathy -- a familiar one. Only one person could've gone to such trouble -- but why?
"See? I'm at least using the time outside class, ah, constructively." It's hard for her to hide the faint undercurrent of nerves that often enters when she's talking with an authority figure.
<Pose Tracker> Takeshi Todo has posed.
"We parted on... non-ideal terms," Takeshi says, wistfulness creeping ever so slightly into his voice. "But I suppose that I do, yes."
Ah, but that's old person talk! There's other stuff that he has to deal with! Stuff that has nothing to do with being old and having a history of poor decision making and orange crush-related separation issues. "Ah, French. The language of love, so they say. A speaking partner is always the best way to learn that kind of thing. Oh, but-- Maybe we can do some vector stuff. If you're a crafts kind of person... Have you ever considered a 3D printer? They're amazing little machines--"
Akane brings out the diorama. The happy little hobby crafts project.
She brings out...
...That boxcutter.
Years ago, Takeshi's friend told him a story about how... Circumstances saw him use a boxcutter very much like this one to do something-- unpleasant. Of course, his description was much more vivid, and at the time, he owned that very same boxcutter... Only to have it disappear in the midst of a move one day.
...
It can't be the same boxcutter, can it? But... it feels familiar...?
...
"You're doing... a landscape?" Takeshi asks curiously, it takes him a moment to identify the right word. Almost like it was something he had to dredge up from the depths of far-off, borrowed memory. "Ah, are you using the empty bottles to act as the framework for parts of the model? That's an interesting way to get around the structural issues of using clay. Unless you used all the clay for mountains, I mean."
Maybe some statics and force balances problems, too...?
He... doesn't mention the boxcutter. His eyes seemed to fix for so long on it, even if it was in reality only for an instant. Perhaps it was just because... bringing a something like that to class is potentially A Problem?
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Oof," Akane says, with characteristic teenage understatement. "That sucks." She can't really bring herself to fully sympathize -- he's an adult, right? He ought to be able to patch up his own mess. There's that reflexive urge to play therapist to her teacher, but that's... even *she* gets that that's weird and inappropriate.
On having a partner, and on French as the language of love... that's a little sore right now. Akane gestures vaguely, starting to pack up what she's shown. "Aha... she's probably not gonna come around much anymore. Chasseur stuff." ... At several, SEVERAL layers of remove. "Nice while it lasted, though!"
She notices the fixation. "Ahaha, don't worry. I cleared it with Otsuki-san. That's why it's taped up at the tip." It seems she's drawn the expected conclusion about why he'd be so surprised at the presence. "And -- yeah! Usually I just make little stuff, but it's *really* important that this one doesn't start sagging under its own weight or anything. I needed some structural support... bigger hobby wire, too. Usually I just use whatever's cheap but this time I had to buy a big thing of 3-gauge stuff... honestly, I dunno if I'll go this big again!" Then again -- if this is enough to crush Gridman, this might be the last time she *needs* to consider something bigger.
She loops back. "A 3D printer, huh? I've never thought about that kinda thing... it seems kinda soulless! Art's about getting out your feelings. That's what my guardian tells me, at least." ... no, too far. Don't dump cold water on him. "On the other hand, I could see where you could use it to make scaffolds to work with, or copy a really small design a bunch of times... Wanna teach me?"
On the one hand, it sounds like she's definitely going to use any knowledge she gets out of it to make more kaiju. On the other, she's gonna do that anyway, and it sounds like she's talked herself into enthusiasm for something at school...
<Pose Tracker> Takeshi Todo has posed.
"Yes," Takeshi nods, his head bobbing up and down with quiet acceptance. "Big oof."
He's... an adult, right?
"Oh, Chasseur. They're the European special investigations unit, aren't they? It's a shame that you've fallen out of touch. But you never know. Relationships are the sort of things that... tend to sew seeds for future re-unions. Perhaps you'll see her again one of these days?" Perhaps all too soon, in fact. But then:
"Oh! Good. That's good." He seemed a little nervous there. Maybe it's just the prospect of his students bringing knives to school? What kind of (neon genesis junior) high school is this, exactly? Is one of the after school clubs secretly a...
Fight... Club...?
"Are you entering this into a competition or something, or is it just for fun and the challenge?" There's a beat as he asks: "You have any of your finished stuff on hand? It sounds like you're really into modelling just... in general. Usually whenever someone can talk about anything in so much detail, it means they're really passionate about it." Takeshi knows, because he's seen the kind of drunken nerd huddlestorms that result in reprogramming the entire Orbit Base operating system and determining whether you can in fact run DOOG on a Mic Sounders unit's cosmo robo mode's optical display.
"Soulless huh...?" Is that... the sound of a man whose dreams have been crushed...!? No, it's a little more contemplative than that. "I suppose it can be seen that way. But I think, as long as the creator is putting their all into something, giving whatever they're working on part of themselves... As long as they're doing that, then any work of art or craftsmanship has a 'soul.' Whether that's a program, or a 3D model, or a diorama. That 'soul' is something that can shine through."
He pauses, adjusting the frames around his golden eyes. It seems he's caught himself getting carried away...?
"Oh, but I've never been able to really make anything like that myself, so in a way I'm kind of jealous. That sort of talent and passion is rare. I'd be glad to show you how to operate that kind of software if you think it might help, though."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Hmm? Oh, no, I mostly just do it for myself." The model talk is easier than finding new ways to not lie about her ongoing complex feelings about Renais. It's about now that she realizes that she might have put herself in a position where she'd need to create just for the sake of... creation, rather than making a kaiju with a seed at the center, solely to maintain her cover story.
"Actually, uh... a lot of my finished stuff broke recently," Akane admits, glancing down. "Around the end of February I woke up one morning and a lot of my stuff had fallen off the shelf. I guess maybe the house settled while I was sleeping or something..." This is like three overcomplication layers too far; she's trying to tie it to Renais and Anti's attack. She is *way* too deep in the lie. "Lugging the whole diorama around when it's finished might be a pain, but I can bring something smaller in some time!"
Yep. Now she's committed to art for art's sake. Whoops.
"Huh -- so the medium doesn't matter, as long as the heart's in it... I guess my guardian might say something like that, too," Akane thinks aloud. "The stronger the feeling, the stronger the piece, or something like that. So... yeah! I think that could be a big help, Todo-san!" She at least sounds pretty genuine about it.
Glancing up, Akane finally meets Todo-san's eyes for the first time. Huh, that gold. ... She's seen it before, now and again -- she's more used to seeing blue around town, and she does notice it, but... there's been gold now and again, too. She doesn't think much of it. (She notices red and green, but gold... that's just the splash-of-color in her so-consistent world, right?)
"I'm gonna warn you again, though, I'm not super great with computers," Akane finally says. Cultivate lower expectations.
<Pose Tracker> Takeshi Todo has posed.
Isn't creation for the sake of creation the joy that lies at the heart of all true artists...? It might also be a nice distraction from CREATING TO DESTROY GRIDMAN and other such similarly dastardly pursuits. Creating for the sake of creation... might just be something entirely novel.
Is it so bad?
"February..." Takeshi leans back, as if casting his mind into the past. Of course, he knows what was going on, because one does not simply forget giant kaiju stomping around. "Oh, I remember there being a few strange tremors at the time. I think it might have knocked over a few of my things too. That's too bad, though. Losing weeks-- months?-- of work like that must have been rough."
It's like not saving your thesis and then going to bed and coming back and YOUR COMPUTER BLUESCREENED OVERNIGHT AND O H N O IT DIDN'T MAKE AN AUTOSAVE.
And then you sob into your pillow for a few hours.
"I'd like to see that," he adds, then. "I can imagine this would be the sort of thing you'd... have to set up, something this large. So, one of the smaller things would be nice to see, I think. I'm no good at creating things like that myself, but I like to think that I've got a pretty decent eye for artisanry. I'm an arteyesan, you might say."
Takeshi's glasses gleam over his golden eyes. SOMEWHERE IN THE VOID OF CYBERSPACE an exactly identical person with differently colored eyes shudders as if feeling a terrible disturbance in the cyberforce.
"Don't you worry. 3D modeling software is actually pretty intuitive to use. As long as you know how to use your mouse and keyboard, everything else is learning the program."
"Ah, your Guardian," Takeshi brings the conversation around ever so slightly, "They... ah, know about your attendance, right? I'll have to write a letter about your special homework, too. But, yes, that's basically it. When someone invests their heart into something, lets their feelings shine through their work... That's a talent that needs to be properly appreciated. Too often, people hold themselves back and keep from expressing their real feelings, but when it's art, so many of those inhibitions come off and you can learn what words might fail to communicate...!"
It does seem as though his passion for... arteyesanry rivals his passion for computers. Perhaps, even exceeds it...?
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"I don't mind building them back up, it's just... finding all the pieces and actually doing it," comes Akane's eventual admission. "Some of the stuff I make has really weak parts. I try to reinforce it, but it's always kinda a challenge." Then again -- Akane seems to like challenges, for all that she's seemingly not up to coming to school all that often lately.
It sounds like she's committed to at least giving the 3D modeling thing a shot. It's probably going to suck and she's going to have to sulk back in, apologize, and say she can't keep up with it, but... even so, it's better than not giving it a try.
Oh boy. She has to actually talk about her guardian with a teacher. That won't get weird. "Oh, yeah. He spends a lot of time taking care of stuff I can't handle when I'm not feeling up to class," she says, which is true if from a very sideways angle. "I'll let him know to expect something, okay?"
Akane starts shifting her bag in her lap a bit. Having to have Alexis start being adjacent to her school life in a more-than-cursory way has her anxious. "... I should get going," she says. "Thanks for not getting mad about the attendance thing." That's... actually genuine, at least -- this really did end up way less stressful than expected.