2022-07-13: Bullet
- Log: 2022-07-13 Bullet
- Cast: Akane Shinjo, Renais Cardiff
- Where: Tsutsujidai - Sevendarake
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-07-13
- Summary: Renais asks Akane about just what she knows.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Sevendarake again. Akane's haunting the place, a bit, now, and she's not especially happy with the service she's receiving.
"I'm sorry, our supplier didn't update their network page," the clerk says, apologetic. "They're actually out of 60's Lecrall..."
Despite how unhappy she is, Akane keeps up her mask. "Oh! That's okay -- I just thought the design was neat," she says, tone retail-perfect. "Thank you anyway!" She clasps her hands together, and gives a slightly strained giggle. "I'm sure I can find it somewhere. Keep an eye out, though!"
She walks off. The instant she's outside of both the shop itself and earshot, she lets out an aggravated noise. Just let her finish this one damn thing. Please. Her list of must-haves and must-finishes is so short and she desperately wants it cleared out so she can --
... well, that's neither here nor there. Groan-growl-scream into her hoodie out of the way, Akane goes to a vending machine and buys herself a box of tomato juice.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
The other night, Renais started connecting dots. If Akane had created Anti, a self-described 'auto-intelligence kaiju', that meant that SHE was the 'invisible hand' behind the kaiju attacks. At that point, Akane still had the benefit of the doubt. She was being manipulated--her "benefactor" was using her.
So, these kaiju were being made for some purpose. Alexis needed them, for some reason. Some research into recent kaiju attacks, along with Shuffle Alliance data, told her exactly what she was fearing--there were several instances of Tsutsujidai kaiju being used in the outside world, all with ties back to one organization.
BioNet.
Either Akane was unaware of Alexis' work with the group that destroyed her life... or she was in on it. If she was capable of killing as casually as her kaiju had in Tsutsujidai, Renais couldn't rule out the latter.
If Akane didn't know, she had to tell her. And if she did, she had to confront her. Subtlety and cover were tossed by the wayside as the cyborg's emotions boiled over.
--
Now, she steps out from behind the corner next to the vending machine, hands in her pockets. Her voice is a touch cold. "Shinjo." She pulls her phone out of her pocket and turns it to the girl--on the screen is a photo taken from a domed, starlit city, with what is very obviously Ghoulghilas on the attack.
"This photo was taken in Copernicus City, on the Moon. Our Moon."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane startles; it's one thing to hear Renais -- but another to hear that coolness, that anger, directed at her. "Huh?" she starts, reaching down to get the tomato juice she just bought.
She notices, too -- 'Shinjo,' not 'Akane.'
"Huh. Yeah. This is the second time an out-of-towner's brought that one up," Akane answers, tone flattening out. "The first time it happened I was like, hahahaha, wow, that's reeeeeeeeally weird," She lazily fumbles with the straw. Tap, tap against the box.
Thwock, and through the foil barrier of the box. The straw comes up to her lips, and she takes a drink. "I know about the one in Tokyo-3, too," she says -- though this is perhaps more important in what it doesn't offer; despite getting ahead of other attacks made outside Tsutsujidai, she hasn't heard about the one in Fujinomiya, at the Photon Power Labs.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Renais looks at Akane and frowns. The cyborg swipes past a photo of the kaiju in Tokyo-3, to a modified Gonglee, attacking the Photon Power Labs at Mt. Fuji. "And this?" she asks simply, one eyebrow raised.
Her voice starts calm and even. "You aren't a very good liar, Shinjo. Alexis made me forget, but the dots were easy to reconnect. I know you created these kaiju. The originals, at least." Her voice grows more intense. "These attacks have exactly two factors in common, Shinjo. You," she puts up one finger, "And BioNet." A second.
Her eyes are burning.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane is a very bad liar.
Which is something that makes the surprise on her face pretty hard to miss.
It's a bland sort of 'huh?' rather than horror, but Akane... doesn't have any idea what's going on. Indeed, she has to hold the juice box in her mouth by the straw and get out a notebook to try connecting this.
"I mean -- it's kind of my kaiju," Akane starts, not bothering with a denial on that front, "but the palette is wrong. And doing that stuff with the tentacles doesn't make any sense either. Like, they're supposed to grip, they're based on the hunter-killer units from Tarabaman X4. Electrifying them ruins the motif and makes them less good at the thing they're trying to do in the first place. Creative? Not my style. Soulless copycat stuff."
On the one hand, she's not... overtly upset, in a way that she should be. On the other...
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
"So you knew about this," Renais concludes.
There's a silent moment.
Then a web of cracks spider their way across her phone's screen from the spot at the edge where her thumb touches the reinforced glass.
"You know. who they are. What they did."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane would very much like to flinch. She doesn't. Instead, she meets Renais's answers with... continued confusion. "I mean, I knew my kaiju were getting out there, but this part's news," comes Akane's continued nonchalant answers, one after another. "I guess it doesn't really matter what I know or don't, though, 'cuz those are my kaiju and they're up to stuff! So that's on me, actually."
There's a subtle droop in her eyebrows -- you'd have to be really staring at her, really assessing her, to notice. "Unless you mean you and Alouette in which case yeah I also know about that because Alexis read me her whole file and then yours and I guess it doesn't really matter to me." ... A far cry from the Akane who felt that the things she learned about Renais during her time as a Herald of Dawn were unfair for her to have learned.
"Do you have a point you're trying to make or something or are you just gonna skip directly to shooting me because it's summer exams and I kinda want to know if I should bother studying." The words are unusually rapidfire, and a little... subdued, even compared to her mood a moment ago.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
The phone drops to the pavement, hitting square on a corner. It doesn't crack further, instead clattering to the ground noisily. "How do you think Alexis got those files?!" she all-but-yells. "He's working with BioNet. YOU'RE working with BioNet!"
She looks away. "... I came to find out what you knew. To warn you, or..."
She fumes silently. She feels that twinge in her arm--the instinct to grab her gun, and...
No. She can't. She might have, before, but...
"Why?" she asks, flatly.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Well it's not like the Federation is going to help me and Sayla's buddies aren't going to play nice with me, here, either, 'cuz they're literally in the tank for Gridman," comes the practiced answer here. Now that it's become something she does have an answer for, she engages again, a bit. "Good job on figuring it out though! I basically handed Alouette the whole thing and she didn't put it together right off. Then again, you're probably a lot more motivated than she is when it comes to BioNet, 'cuz you never got a taste of a normal life after."
Akane drains her tomato juice. May as well finish that, too. "Anyway, heroes work with heroes and no one's gonna help me shut this place back up if it means killing Gridman or an Ultraman or something, right? That's bad guy stuff. You work with who's gonna play along with you!"
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Anger is spilling off of Renais now. She leans down and picks up her broken phone; her face is flat and calm again, despite the emotion.
It surges. Suddenly, in a blur of motion, her hand dives into her coat and whips back out with an auto-pistol held inches from the teenager's skull.
...
"Three months ago, I'd have pulled the trigger." She slips the weapon back into her coat, looking coldly at Akane.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Up to this point, Akane Shinjo has given zero indication that she's anything but a normal girl -- indeed, there's been some affirmatives that she's a normal girl.
Renais brings up her pistol. Akane's body moves without her even thinking about it; her hand comes up to the gun. She doesn't wrestle it; what she does, instead, is very blandly step forward and point it sideways, away from her head.
Her expression looks... flat. Empty. For how swift her body goes through the motions of keeping herself alive, she looks more like she wishes Renais would have been faster.
Her hand is gripping Renais's, she realizes. ... she doesn't look or feel like someone gripping a chop-job cyborg on the metal at all.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Renais is caught dumbfounded. It takes her nearly a full second to process what's going on and wrench her hand out of Akane's, staring at the girl's hand. "You-- what...? Are you..."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Don't do that again," Akane says, expressionless. She lowers her hand. She'll look later if it's burned; it doesn't really matter if it is or isn't, but it'd be annoying. This is a body that accumulates no wounds and no scars.
"Not unless you're really ready to go all-out with that nice cyborg body. Then again, killing me would put a stop to the problem, right?"
... then again -- Alexis has already been sniffing around new girls. He even made a kaiju for one -- and that's known, at this point, to Akane. ... it leaves her with no great answers for what to do.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
"... no. It wouldn't. He's using you, and he'd find someone else to use next," replies Renais, putting aside her disbelief at what just happened. "You aren't special to him. Merely his latest victim. I know how his kind thinks."
With that, she casually feeds a few coins into the vending machine, and punches the button for an orange soda. "I saw through him as soon as I woke up. You don't understand what you're working for, Shinjo." She retrieves her drink, and turns to leave.
"Get out while you can," she says simply before walking away.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
It's absolutely nothing Akane Shinjo hadn't surmised. Her intelligence isn't the sheer, exploitable mecha-designing supergenius that's become in vogue in the era -- but she's a smart kid and she puts things together.
Hearing it from someone else still stings.
"... You really don't know what's happening. You'll get it once you find out," Akane mumbles, to the retreating Renais -- before she, too, retreats.