2022-06-23: A fairy's magic never could ensorcell me
- Log: A fairy's magic never could ensorcell me
- Cast: Alma Stirner, Yuliana Dispersal
- Where: Federation Hangar (Helmajistan)
- Date: 2022-06-23
- Summary: Alma meets the Nega Force, and Yuliana stays behind to introduce herself. It's a deeply uncomfortable 'friendly conversation'.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Dealing with Zeon remnant cleanup is actually... not that much of a problem for Alma, even if it's for slightly sideways reasons. She legitimately likes patrolling high Zeon traffic, and doesn't even... really mind fighting them; the truth is that she's looking for a handful of someones, and she knows that a lot of them made their way here. (She even knows that some of them -- not the Fairies, but more distant connections -- have been in prison for a while... but that suggests that others may have made their way to this side of the globe, too.)
No hits today, though. Not even any Zeon remnants; non-zero chance they were tipped off to the possibility of an Actual Patrol by Londo Bell by local officials. For now, though, it doesn't matter; she's still successfully done her job, and she's plenty fine with a job well done!
Hopping out of Titania, Alma rappels down from the cockpit at a nice, comfortable speed. Taking off her helmet, she shakes her hair out a bit. "... Fwah, it's tangled..." she mumbles, with a frown.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
Fwah...!
Just as Alma's stretching out of her mobile suit, three more tromp in -- two wanzers and an arm slave; if she's good at identification she might be able to pin them down as a Tiandong 3, a Laiying 1, and an RK-96 Savage II. And indeed, that particular grouping could only have come from the REA, if she's of a mind to know her unit details.
(They're also a particularly vicious lineup, especially given they seem to be of custom makes; the arm slave is toting a sniper rifle, while the Tiandong is armed to the teeth and the remaining wanzer has gone all-in on explosive ordinance.)
There's something strange about them, though. The Savage's pilot is perfectly normal in every way -- but the Laiying's is sending out significant signals of discontent, and there's dead, absolute silence coming from the Tiandong.
Once they're properly seated in the docking bays, the cockpits open -- and there are, allegedly, three humans vaulting out to land on the walkways. Once their obscuring helmets are off, they're revealed to largely be a female squad, though one of them has a distinctly ambiguous appearance which is hard to call man or woman.
It's that person who pauses as they're walking along the catwalk to look straight to Alma, with wide eyes of recognition. If there was a word for that feeling, pouring out like rushing water, it might be... anxiety? Dread?
'Get clear'?
And then, all a sudden -- it fades -- and STOPS, and it might not be immediately obvious that the source is the darker-skinned woman who's clapped a hand on their shoulder. She follows their gaze to Alma, and perhaps there's some hint her eyes narrow, even up here.
"Hit the lounge and relax a bit," Captain Dispersal tells her squad, breezily, as she keeps walking. (The unnerved signals from the Laiying pilot resume, once she's out of arm's reach.) "These might just be training exercises, but you still gave it your all... nice work." There's a breath of a pause, as if she might have said something else, there.
(She'd normally criticise Cascade's performance, here; but she can't discount being in earshot of the woman she's just marked.)
"I'll be a few minutes -- I've still got some sluggish responding on my left side," which is a story of extended repairs, don't ask her how that happened.
"Sure, Captain," the Savage's pilot responds -- she's got bright red eyes, as she passes by, which may or may not be entirely normal. (The pink hair, on the other hand: completely normal.) She waves a hand in front of the Laiying pilot, tilting the upper half of her body into their field of view in the process. "... hey, Cascade, do you think they're still doing those curries around here?"
"Huh?" The pilot -- Cascade -- blinks. "Oh, I don't know." Their eyes narrow, now, as they look back over their shoulder to their Captain; the enmity there is not at all veiled. (Indeed, this, too, is pushed out into the world, in some subtle act of sabotage.) "But I'd feel rude eating without you, Captain. You sure you don't want to come along?"
"Oh, no, I'm fine," Yuliana launches back, and -- she looks like she's smiling, anyway. "But feel free not to eat until I get there, if it means that much to you. Ciao!"
The Savage's pilot mutters something to Cascade -- which has the general tenor and shape of 'it's not worth it', even if the exact meaning is muddled by her low voice -- and the two of them start walking off to the pilot's lounge, while the Captain hops down to a lower catwalk to examine the mechanisms of her wanzer's leg.
A display like that absolutely says... something.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
The Savage II is pretty standard -- but the Laiying is a novel catch, and Alma identifies it quickly enough. She got passable at identifying wanzer lines during the Gryps Conflict... it's valuable data, even if thinking about how she came to decide that was important data to learn kind of... ends up sad.
(Alma misses when Mia had that data for her.)
Alma meets that person's eyes, and the trepidation in them is immediately obvious to her; she orients to face them almost before she realizes she's being looked at. There's a sadness that enters her own immediately, and she doesn't really know why; it's not quite pity, per se, but it's close, and then --
-- Alma flinches. She's ready to rush over, and then that feeling stops like a death (and Alma isn't... unaccustomed to that, either). She knows it didn't, though? So why is --
She watches, a bit, and listens to the dynamic between those pilots. Something about this feels just... absolutely, dreadfully wrong. As Cascade and the Savage's pilot retreat, Alma gives them a sympathetic look. ... maybe some kind of experiment? If that's the case, she ought to get a little data on it...
... so she starts approaching the ranking officer, which will surely work out great. That silence... it's rare for her. She's so used to navigating conversations on her gut, so used to skipping steps she doesn't even realize how many steps she's skipping.
Here, she has to settle for:
"Hey... how did your patrol go?"
Small talk.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
The first test is what she'll do, presented with this data. Yuliana doesn't always have to verbalise the command to come to her; whether this wretch will try is the first piece of the puzzle.
But when she gets close enough -- there! The torn-out silhouette of information, and Yuliana's stomach turns, as her eyes fall on Alma. Her disgust at seeing the liminal outline of her own lack, informed by those failed attempts to see her, is a visceral thing.
She smiles. There's a hint of teeth, as her lip lifts just a little too much to be friendly in the process -- and then the expression's gone, replaced by what seems for all the world to be affability.
(Giving the game away. It's hardly her fault. There's nothing more loathsome than such obvious sensitivity, to Yuliana.)
"Oh, just fine!" Yuliana responds, cheerfully -- it sounds cheerful; she's smiling, and has the correct tone, and there's a horrific abyss of nothing behind them all. Not even 'hard to read' -- emotionally, it's as if there's a vast black hole where the Captain ought to stand. (Complete with event horizon, which Alma may come to recognise, if she gets close enough; there's a horrific feeling of empathic vertigo, approaching her.) "We're just out here drilling the local defence force on operational tactics -- it's important to help each other in the Federation, wouldn't you agree?"
Those words... sound nice and good enough, arranged in that order.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Yuliana is disorienting for poor Alma, who has navigated her world with her heart ever since it started beating. She feels almost drawn to her, and yet... adrift, like her world is contracting as she approaches the Captain. "Oh, sure!" she agrees, forcing herself to approach with her usual good cheer and smiles. Just because she's having a weird experience doesn't mean she shhhhhh...
...hhhhhhhh...
There's almost a glassiness to Alma's eyes under normal circumstances, a sense that she's seeing a world that's just invisible to everyone else (and maybe she is!) but this is something different. She looks almost ill, then anesthetized; she actually stumbles back a step, as if she just ran into a wall at 100-meter-dash speeds while looking off in the wrong direction.
She realizes she's been addressed, had a question posed to her, and agrees, "That's definitely important, yeah," before walking back through the last several seconds of conversation and figuring out what it is she agreed was important.
... she feels authentically horrible in a way she hasn't since the second time the Flanagan Institute had her try out the Grublo. Her first reflex is to leave, but it doesn't even really feel like her legs work right. "... you're kinda strange," she eventually manages, reasserting herself in the world consciously -- and maintaining a comfortable distance from Yuliana, this time.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
Ah! And she was so brave! How disappointing, to see her stumble. No, no, disappointing isn't entirely the word. 'Satisfying', let's try that one.
A more calculating woman might plot a method of manipulating those Newtypes dazed by flying straight into a glass window to nowhere. It's not even difficult to see how such an arrangement might work, keeping them off-balance and disoriented. But Yuliana has never been the one to complicate her hatred; she purely, simply, elementally wants to hurt Alma, regardless of the opportunities.
(Now, if someone who was more calculating entered the picture... surely not.)
"Ohohoho," Yuliana chuckles -- good-naturedly? -- fingers splayed over her mouth. It's not... a particularly sinister laugh. Is it? "You'll have to forgive me -- I've been told my greatest foible as a commanding officer is my informality." As if she's strange because she's too casual, rather than an existential threat.
And then -- as if there was no horror in her wake at all -- Yuliana steps up to Alma, hand gesturing out in a friendly motion. It has all the component pieces of approaching for a handshake, approaching at just the right angle that Alma's most intuitive escape route will leave her hitting the guardrail instead.
And there's the twilight --
And the darkness.
Silence is a funny little thing. It's so easy to say a street is silent, with all the little noises of midnight -- an owl fluttering, the wind rustling the leaves, the distant sound of a car pulling into the street. This is not that. This is not ANYTHING -- as Yuliana steps into arm's reach -- and all the emotional information of the world goes dead.
It's the silence of an isolation tank -- the sorts which drive primates mad, scratching at the metal until they perish.
(Or humans, at that.)
Her face is smiling; her hand extends to shake Alma's. All the signs of friendliness, in the eye of the worst storm imaginable. "Captain Yuliana Dispersal -- REA forces," she introduces herself, and the scarf tied about her pilot suit may well indicate her for an ace, in the way those signifiers often do. "And you are..?"
A beat -- and as if anticipating Alma's reaction, she reminds her, a fraction of a degree sterner: "Come now, your name." She's still smiling, of course. Indeed, she may smile just a little wider, at that reminder.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"Ahahaha -- no, it's fine," Alma says, finding her footing comfortably again, now that she's been reminded of where the conversation was. "I don't usually like when stuff is super formal! It's not really my style... my first commanding officer was pretty casual. Her XO was the serious one?" That's... a normal statement, but Alma's unmoored enough that it sounds like a question.
Alma reaches up to pleasantly wave off the handshake. After a few breaths, she feels like she's in a cage with a jackal; she understands, perhaps, what that person whose gaze met hers was trying to say. Taking a step back and offering, "Usually I'm kinda touchy-feely, b --"
--
Alma realizes she's giving a handshake. That part is normal and pleasant enough, and she's... a little lost on why she still feels so horrible. She gasps for air a bit, mentally, trying to find something to latch onto --
-- right. She was. "Alma Stirner!" she says, with enthusiasm but a little bit of the trained crispness of -- well, of someone who's been piloting off and on for her entire adult life. "Enchantress Leader, Londo Bell Irish-class Gwennangorn... though, uh, right now I'm on loan to the Helmajistani defense force for supplementary patrol... ahahahah." She forgets to mention that she's hoping to find someone among the Zeon Remnants. The idea of 'finding someone' is kind of alien right now.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Ah, so!" Yuliana exclaims, brightly, when Alma shares her thoughts on formality. "I'm amongst friends!" Are they friends?
Probably not. You see, Yuliana wasn't offering to shake Alma's hand. She might have all the body language of offering, but Alma's wishes never really factored into her movements.
Certainly she hears her attempt to decline, though. Delightful.
"Hmm..? Then surely I'm enchanted, Alma," Yuliana says a true statement for all the wrong reasons, with no real insight; she at least releases her firm handshake, after a moment. (And moves, immediately, to a first-name basis, with too much familiarity.) She doesn't step out of Alma's personal space. Instead, her hand settles on her hip, and surely the way it widens her profile -- narrows the angles of escape -- is a coincidence.
"It's always wonderful to meet more faces from Londo Bell... you do fine work, for all the resources given you," the words, the words, they all fit together in a perfectly warm fashion -- does she even realise what she's doing, just by standing here? The fingers of Yuliana's other hand come up to fan through the bangs over one side of her face, hinting at some old war-scar, obscured beneath them. "I'm sure you're giving the dear people of Helmajistan your best effort..."
The next step in the game, of course, is to see how long this meaningless conversation can carry before she cracks under the weight. Yuliana loves this game.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"Ahaha, it used to be Fairy Leader," Alma explains, casually volunteering what is actually some fairly buried personal information, "but they didn't want me bringing a Zeon black operations callsign along with me... so, Enchantress it is!" She nods to Yuliana, remaining blocked off a little bit in every sense of the word.
Yuliana turns the conversation toward her work for the people of Helmajistan. "I don't..." She takes a breath. Steadies herself, as she tries to put her mental narrative back together -- but it's a little bit like looking back into a tunnel when you're around a bend. It jogs her memory, but she can't actually see the steps she took, so she has to...
... okay. Right. "... Your squad," she says, the words -- no, the thought itself -- stone-heavy. "They don't seem like they like you that much? You seem..."
Anger's rare, for Alma. She almost never goes there, but it starts to bubble up in the back of her head in a way she doesn't quite understand -- but it only goes inward, only stays. There's something wrong with this interaction but the wrongness feels like it's in her head, like she's trying to put one foot in front of the other in her mind but both feet are asleep and she's about to roll an ankle.
... but why? She can't get that together, and this conversation feels perfectly nice, so. "... I actually don't know what I'm talking about," she concludes, uneasily.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"That's certainly safer," Yuliana agrees, too easily, to the information she pries from Alma's heart.
It isn't. Indeed, Alma has rapidly just escalated her situation to something far LESS safe than she was a moment prior, impossible as that might sound.
"Hooo...?" Yuliana asks, a hand curling by her cheek. "Perhaps I come off as someone a shade too permissive... but I see no reason not to let my men keep their hair down, just the same. If they're disgruntled by their this appointment, wouldn't you say it's my job to absorb their frustrations..?"
She's putting words in Alma's mouth, of course. But perhaps she's just trying to help someone who's clearly confused after her mission. ... perhaps.
It's strange, though. Her words all ran into each other for a second there, at some point, as if she wanted to say two things at once. A record-scratch in her conversation, which she moves past without a word of acknowledgement.
She smiles, kindly -- is it kind, with the way it sinks into her cheek with just a shade too much tension? "Oh, it doesn't bother me," she assures her, as if that's what Alma was worried about. "Focusing on the field like that can leave you feeling a touch scrambled, can't it..?" Is it really the fault of her scouting mission?
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
That verbal clutter actually gives Alma something to focus on -- something unusual, something less... slidey, something with a little texture to it that feels off. Where everything else feels dizzying and easy to go along with, there's something about that that's somehow less vertigo-inducing than the rest of it.
"I guess? But a team's supposed to work well together... it's not just about being someone your team can... throw their frustrations at," Alma answers. Being in the narrative of her own life reminds her that she was shuffled along to Tir na nOg because she wasn't a good fit at the Flanagan Institute -- so that logic doesn't fully add up.
Which helps her get out of Yuliana's spiral, if only long enough to pull away. "... no -- I'm a close quarters specialist and team leader," Alma answers. "An okay number of my other operations were solo, too... I'm pretty good at focusing on my patrol." Which means there's something else. She doesn't fully have her head in the game enough to suspect Yuliana, but --
-- she pushes away from her a bit, moving through most of the space she doesn't have blocked off and maybe some of what she does. "I don't think I'm fit for duty... maybe it's heatstroke. I'm going to go get something to drink and lie down." It's not... fully true -- Alma doesn't feel hot, but... on the other hand, being given to doubting her senses as she is right now, that doesn't quite enter in. "Thanks for the talk, Captain," she says, though... she's really not that thankful.
After all -- she doesn't feel like she made a connection.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Oh, we work quite well together," Yuliana assures Alma, smoothly. That it has everything to do with their authoritarian influences is a fact she is perfectly happy to leave to implication.
She sees the way Alma is pulling away, and does some silent estimations on how far she wants to push her. "My, my... we're so similar," she purrs, taking an obliging half-step back. How convenient, that Alma also fights in close quarters.
Obviously, Yuliana can't suffer this fae to live, but if she wants to destroy her properly she's going to need a more deniable battlefield than the middle of a Federation hangar. Having tagged her ankle, she'll have to content herself with releasing her back into the wilderness, for now.
Perhaps she'll lead her to an entire nest of spacenoid rats.
"Do take care of yourself, dear," Yuliana says, with sympathy -- certainly it sounds sympathetic; years of rehabilitation in the lab have taught her everything she needs about how to feign emotions for the pale narrative. "It can get so vulnerable compromising, out there in the sun."
Control, on the other hand, is always something Yuliana has had a contentious relationship with.
Watching Alma leave, Yuliana leans against the railing of the catwalk, elbows hanging off into the yawning abyss; in front of her, one leg crosses over the other, balanced so, so precariously.
And as Alma slips off to the pilot's lounge, there's the faint sound of laughter, all edged in malice.
"Hahahaha..."