2022-07-11: Appeal
- Log: Appeal
- Cast: Rena Lancaster, Anti
- Where: Tsutsujidai
- Date: 2022-07-11
- Summary: Anti realises that Tsutsujidai is bigger than himself and Akane, thanks to Rena visiting on account of neither one. He requests her help... in a fashion.
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
Rena Lancaster is in Tsutsujidai again. She wanted to get some sense of what the problems of the town are, so she came -- by train, as ever.
Now, she is in the downtown area. She isn't so far from the store where she bought a video game and ran into Akane; now, she is on the sidewalk in that little row of shops, and she has a hot dog in hand. She is in civilian clothes; she leans back against a wall, eating the hot dog, and looking around.
It's a nice town, Rena thinks. Even if something about it is nostalgic, in a way that she can't quite put her finger on.
She stands out, with blue hair and a dyed red streak; her T-shirt is for a Londenion hockey team, and she has blue jeans on.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
She stands out, and the waves of Tsutsujidai don't mind (pay no mind to) her; a dozen people pass, contained in their own universe. Accessories to the scenery, they go about their business.
They're very good accessories, mind. They even say 'excuse me' if they happen to cut her off for a moment. But no one seems particularly interested in stopping for a conversation, today. The world convinces itself it is whole.
The sun beats down, late summer in early July. It's enough to make a lettuce wilt.
Behind her, shoes beat down, just the same. The impacts are not particularly hard, but they are purposeful -- they meet the hot concrete without flinching or hopping along. They belong to a boy, hands buried in the pockets of his strange uniform, deep blue with flamelike patterning. His white gloves, dry again, obscure the outer fringe of his wrist.
She stands out.
She's being followed.
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
It's a little weird, Rena thinks. The way that she is here -- and not ignored, exactly -- but moved past, like a river adjusting its flow around a stone dropped into it. She gets a faint sensation of it, as a Newtype. The way people move around her still registers. She frowns, under the heat; her own mood is dampened by that.
Someone from Winter Wonderland doesn't do so well with heat.
She slows, though, as she hears shoes beating down -- she turns, looking at the boy with his hands in his pockets. A uniform; it's not like the other clothes. She gets a feeling off him, but as feelings that Newtypes get go, it's hard to pin down. They often are; feelings are messy.
Rena looks at him for a moment. Then, she smiles and lifts a hand, waving.
"Hey."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti is a banked ember, steam under pressure; his quiet intensity speaks to something so much larger and more devastating, leashed to four-foot-three of middle school boy.
Like he's fit inside himself, almost fifty times over.
It is... not, entirely, a human sensation. Not, entirely, a comfortable mental existence to touch. Neither is it entirely uncomfortable. It exists in the liminal space between human and inhuman, not entirely one or the other.
His eyes meet hers, red and yellow, all the colours of the sunset.
He stops. His eyes dart to her hand; his head does not move in the process. His attention orients to her face, again.
"... hey."
And for all those feelings, his voice is quiet and low, pitched down to the point it scrapes gravel. It's not so discordant; not such a coincidence. His tone isn't particularly friendly -- neither is it outright hostile.
"You're not from here." That isn't a question. "Why are you here?" That is.
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
Rena picks up on that intensity -- and she realizes why the feeling was messy. There is so much of him; somehow, he feels like something not quite human, and that takes her by surprise. Her eyes rest on Anti, for a moment, as she works through it. She doesn't know who he is, but he isn't like the other people here.
She meets his eyes, and her hand falls down to her side.
"Guilty," she says to his statement, not a question, with a smile. "I'm... not from here. Someone important to me named Arriety visits here a lot," she says. "So I wanted to come and look around, on my day off."
She takes a quick bite of her hot dog.
"It's a nice town," Rena says. "It's... different, somehow, from the places I know."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti's eyes narrow, just so. Rena may not realise just how vital a piece she's given him, in the estimation of the world.
Arriety -- a name he doesn't recognise.
"Another outsider?" He presses, but part of him knows already, what the answer must be. A person important to this woman; this woman, who is an outsider herself.
His lips thin, to a pressed line. "Tsutsijidai is connecting." It's an ominous sort of statement, theory, conclusion. "Becoming important to people outside your connections to her... it isn't fixed." There's a strange construction, to the statement, as if the word has more meaning than fits in its letters.
"Yes." Anti's head inclines, a few degrees down. "This is different to the place you come from."
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
"Yeah," Rena says. "We grew up on the same colony."
That further confirms that she is an outsider. She looks down at Anti, her eyebrows furrowing for a moment. What does connecting mean? The way they come to this city remains a mystery; something a little beyond time and space, and perhaps conventional science. Rena hesitates for a moment.
"Did it... used to be fixed? I know it's not easy to get here," she says. There are rules -- rules that extend beyond what she understands. They have to take a train to get here and fall asleep.
She hesitates for a second.
Then, she remembers her manners. "I'm Rena," she says. "Rena Lancaster."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
"Fixed in place. Fixed and unchanging. It was never just about fixing the damage, but that's what she believed."
The boy pauses.
"What I believed."
Association. Connect the both of them together. Humans understand implication. He has to believe that much.
He pauses, again. A little longer, this time.
"Anti." His name. His head does turn, now, just so -- glancing behind him. Eyes forward, again. "I'm the talking kaiju who attacks here." Rena fought on the opposite side of him, once, when he struck out against Renais for daring to try and call out Gridman -- and the Ra Mari has had dealings with kaiju attacks here, besides.
The fact that Anti looks for all the world to be a normal boy isn't something which he even deigns to address. He's bigger than his body.
He's strikingly honest about what he is, but... he still doesn't sound particularly aggressive, right now. Hands still in his pockets; still keeping to that conversational distance. It might not be a threat.
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
"What... 'she' believes?" Rena asks, hesitating for a moment. It begins to dawn on her that her read of this boy was right. He isn't like the others here. But it was wrong, too: there is much more to him than she thought. Her eyes widen for a moment, as he explains.
"A kaiju..."
But a human-sized kaiju, too. One who can talk; she remembers, even, a talking kaiju who fought Renais. She couldn't quite put it all together, then. Her eyes widen for a moment as she looks at him. He looks like he isn't aggressive; like a teenager, maybe down on his luck, but not...
Not the kaiju who attacks here.
"...Do you wish Tsutsujidai wouldn't change?" she asks, quietly. "Does that bother you? It's your home, too."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
"Akane Shinjo. This is all for her." Anti answers the easy question, first -- it is, of course, also the hardest question. His skin prickles, to volunteer her name just like that. "Was, all for her. But now you're here for someone important to you. Someone else." As if Tsutsujidai were Nouvelle Tokyo -- a thing which exists without allegiance to any one person.
His voice drops, like a stone or a guillotine or a conspiracy. "It can't be fixed." His shoulders shift, a little further forward, a little more wound up in his tension.
He's quiet, again. His lips part, and he says nothing, for a time.
"It bothers me."
When he speaks he speaks without telegraphing it at all, and just as soon falls back to silence.
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
"Shinjo? That's--" Rena's eyes widen. That's Arriety's friend. That's the girl they met in the game store. How could all of this be for her? She blinks, then looks down. "Did... how could one town be for one person? But--yeah, you're right..."
She trails off for a second, before she looks at Anti. He says that it can't be fixed; it bothers him, how the world has changed. How his home did.
"Hey," she says, after a moment, pushing her surprise and her questions aside.
"The place I grew up... it was out in space. But it changed a lot, too. It... used to be really far away from Earth. My first memories were out there. I remember when we activated the thrusters, to come back."
Memories of it spill out of her. The memories flood her mind, too; the rumble of the engines, as they moved. The schools and the atmosphere insides. "It ended up not just being the people who lived there, when we came back to the Earth Sphere. And... it eventually was changed forever. It hurts, sometimes, to think about how it can't be the same. How... how no one else could ever live there and see and experience the things I did."
She hesitates. "But there's parts that aren't so bad." Then Rena smiles. "I found new places to call home and love. And new people to call home and love, too. Even if Tsutsujidai changes... it doesn't mean you won't find a new place to care about. It's okay if it changes, Anti, even if it's painful."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
A colony... like the one he attacked. Anti frowns, as he listens. A place which has changed forever...
"This is a place designed to trap and destroy. The people live to be killed. The buildings were built to be demolished. I was made to crush Gridman. Everything here was created to be miserable. Even our victories."
His hands tighten to fists, in his pockets. "Even so, I have to hold on. I won't give up my anger that easily!" For the first time, his voice raises, above the murmuring din; for the first time, it's entirely believable that this boy's voice belonged to that kaiju, screaming in rage.
Anti shuts his eyes, briefly, and takes a long breath. His voice quiets back down, deliberately.
(The people around them don't take notice of the momentary disturbance at all.)
"I..." He starts, and trails off, for a moment, as his eyes open again. "I'm not the one who needs to hear that." Implying someone does. That there's value in the telling.
He pauses. He watches her, silent, for a time longer.
Finally: "There'll be another attack soon. Come here then. I'll tell you everything. But if you get between me and Gridman... I won't forgive you."
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
"Trap and destroy...?"
Rena heard that Tsutsujidai seems to be restored quickly. She never got a good look, personally, at the damage that the city suffered -- or the supposedly miraculous repairs. But she starts to understand that, then. Her brow furrows, for a moment, as she looks at him.
She flinches when he raises his voice. She didn't expect that.
And she realizes she was the only one who noticed it. That makes Rena tense, her back going rigid for a moment. "Someone... someone else?" she asks. Rena hesitates, for a second. She bites her lip.
He is telling her to be there. Rena can see that. "O-Okay," she says. "I'll... I'll do that. But... don't give up on yourself for someone else's sake, either, okay?"
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
"I was made to change and adapt so that I could take my enemies' strengths for myself. That is what Akane Shinjo wanted. Even though she wanted it..." Anti's voice lowers to something more sad than conspiratorial; his gaze tracks away, to look across the street. (Keeping an eye on his surroundings.)
"... she tells me what I should be. She won't change so easily. But I exist."
(And why does he exist? To crush Gridman..?)
He leaves these two concepts -- Akane's unwillingness to change, and Akane's desire for Anti's existence as an auto-intelligence kaiju -- sitting next to each other, and doesn't point out the connection.
That he is telling Rena just who that someone else is -- and just why he isn't the one who needs to learn about the positives of change -- is something else he leaves to implication.
He frowns, his stance shifting, moving back onto a heel.
"I still don't understand... why everyone is asking about me. Since I'm a kaiju... I'm a kaiju," he repeats, a shade smaller. "But... I won't give up on myself. Even if I'm a useless brat... I exist." Repeated, again, as if it could protect him. (From what? The thing he keeps checking for..?)
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
Akane Shinji was the person behind this, somehow. Rena stares -- wondering how that girl could also be the one to make a kaiju like Anti. She made a person, Rena thinks, and she stares for a moment. Then, she looks down.
"I... I don't know. I'd like to think we can be more than what someone made us for," she admits, quietly. "But--but you're right."
She looks up, then she nods her head. If he told her this, it must be because he wants something to happen. Maybe for them to stop Akane; maybe this is what Akane wants. But, somehow, she doubts that. She hesitates, then she swallows.
"...You might not be human, but you're still a person," Rena says. "A person is someone who exists. So... people will ask about you."
She hesitates, before she says, "Thanks. For telling me. There's... there's a lot I didn't know. I'll--I'll do what you said."
<Pose Tracker> Rena Lancaster has posed.
"Show her...?" Rena asks, but -- no, she'll have her answer to that soon, she thinks.
She frowns for a moment, nodding, as he turns -- and then her eyes widen. She heard of the name Alexis Kerib. He appeared on the Ra Mari, once. A strange, alien figure; one that had given Eight quite the scare, and one they had precious few answers for. She tenses up for a moment.
Rena nods to him, as he walks away.
She watches him for a moment longer. Then, she turns around, and starts walking herself. Back to the train station, head full of questions and uncertainties.