2022-09-30: The convenience of your assistance is a thing I cannot presently deny
- Log: The convenience of your assistance is a thing I cannot presently deny
- Cast: Yuliana Dispersal, Alma Stirner
- Where: Medical Bay, The Gwennangorn
- Date: 2022-09-30
- Summary: No one gets left behind, even if they're someone like Yuliana -- and even someone like Yuliana can't keep her defences up when they've all been battered down. Meanwhile, Alma gets a lead on a personal mystery.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
It takes quite some time to pry Yuliana out of her machine -- without crushing her the rest of the way. "Don't bother saving it," she transmits, dismal, through the scratchy remains of the radio. "I'll build another." The Annihilation is, under all its improvements, just another Tiandong 3: a reliable but unimpressive piece of military hardware.
That Yuliana made this one what it is is a detail she lets slip to the undertow.
When they finally do dig her out, she's in terrible sorts, burned and cut and compressed just a hair too much. Even so, she finds it in her to protest, when they assure they'll take care of her: "You have no PERMISSION to treat me! I'm classified, damn i--"
The cough which interrupts her is too damp and too dark. She could die, they say, if she doesn't let them fix her up. Yuliana's gaze tracks to the gold ring on her left hand, and her gaze veils and disappears, eyes shut tight. She's the REA's secret, but...
"help me," she breathes, she betrays, all for the sake of living to see Elisa again.
She has a flinch reaction -- subtle but not unnoticeable -- to the medical facilities of the Gwennangorn; when they try to give her medications she insists she has her own, and it's another round of cajoling before the medic convinces her to show them her pill bottles. (Another medical secret she just tosses to the abyss.) When they ask her whether she's still in pain, whether this has been painful in the past, when they offer to manage her pain before they see to uncomfortable procedures -- why, as soon as Yuliana overcomes her confusion, she weeps.
REA Medical has a particular way of handling its patients which is rarely as considerate as this. It was easy for Yuliana to consider Elisa's care an exception, given how Elisa cares for her -- how bitter, then, to realise how casually dehumanising the Institute's own care is.
It's hours on before she's able to be left to rest in the medical bay, but she's stable, now. Regenerative gel dressings are affixed to her skin, in some places with something like clingwrap, and in others covered by a non-stick dressing which has been taped to the undamaged skin around her burns with paper tape. There's a cannula threaded through one hand, dripping something into her veins; her opposite wrist is in a brace to support it.
Her cheek has one of those patches -- her bangs have been clipped back to give them access to that half of her face, because there's another large dressing over her left forehead. She has a call bell to ask for help -- a bizarre novelty she hasn't touched. Rather, she dozes, fitfully, until (not for the first time) her eyes blink open again.
"Nnnh," Yuliana says, eloquently, as she lifts her head to look about the room. Not for long, though, before it flops back onto her pillow. It certainly feels like the Shamblo personally caved her skull in, but she's afraid to make them fetch a mirror.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Alma is not nearly so bad off as Yuliana -- her problem, as near as the doctors can tell, is a psychosomatic pain reaction to the staggering amount of quantum brainwave activity. This isn't... unheard-of, though it's more common among Cyber-Newtypes, which as far as anyone knows Alma is not. It's baffling, but by the same token, it's not...
... well, most importantly, it's the sort of thing you can handle by letting them sleep with monitoring equipment on to make sure they don't spontaneously hemorrhage or start headbutting the wall until they die of it.
Alma's awake a little before Yuliana is, but all she manages to do is stare up at the ceiling and wait to feel like herself again, at least until --
'Nnnh.'
That, from about 10 feet away -- just out of the misery range, is enough to get Alma to slowly roll over onto her side and look toward Yuliana. Her face is at least clean, something she's deeply thankful for; she thinks she can feel a bit they missed in her hair, but it's a marked improvement nevertheless.
"... yeah, about the same," Alma groans out. She still feels somewhat violently ill, but -- Yuliana's not toast, at least, which everything else at least felt predicated on by Alma's standards, so... it's subsiding.
"... You feel like you can keep food down? I have thirty gilla in my quarters... if I hit the call button someone'll probably spot me for apple fritters or something." She admits, after a moment, "... I should probably get something too, actually. I, uh..."
... she feels not just fuzzy but bad, once she processes what she's talking about. "Why would you be happy about a battle like that...?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Ugh," Yuliana grumbles, eloquently, in reply.
Her mouth... that's... right, yes, where her tongue lives. Complete sandpaper, because she's been breathing out of her mouth, on account of the nosebleed. She bit her lip at some point. She can't quite remember when.
Yuliana looks up at the ceiling, for long moments, before she resigns herself and turns her face in Alma's direction instead. She does try to roll onto her side, but a short hiss of pain and sharp wince stops that in its tracks very fast.
Her mind goes to the last question Alma asks; the mental overhead of processing is more than she'd like to admit.
"Zeon kills people... ruins their lives. That thing wasn't about to stop. Zeon... never stops. That's why the only good Zeon is a dead Zeon --" Yuliana's teeth clench, briefly, as she tenses only for her muscles to complain about it. "I'd be positively gleeful if someone took that damn kid out."
She stops; she breathes, for a time.
"But... you..." Her breath slows; she takes one deeper. "... you did a good job out there. I'm pleased with your performance, so don't worry about that." At least for now -- at least while Alma is the only damn person she can come close to trusting on this ship.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
It feels... less like a command, now -- less immediate, less stressful. Alma manages her reaction -- though she doesn't immediately rebuke Yuliana for it. "... A lot of people think that way," she says, a little weakly. She can't quite bring herself to directly confront it, even though the sunlight between herself and Loni...
... well, the Shamblo brought back some memories, and none of them good.
Yuliana says she's pleased with Alma's performance, and that relieves a lot of the pressure. "Good. Even if we've disagreed on some stuff, I like to think of you as a friend," Alma says. She still feels, just, absolutely vile? But it's improving, bit by bit by bit, as she wakes up. Rest helps a lot.
She feels a little tongue-tied herself, even if hers isn't quite so sandpaper. "... You... really are in a lot of pain, aren't you?" Alma doesn't spell out whether she means emotionally or physically. She has to really stew in Yuliana's words, though -- really sort out what she's hearing, in a way no one else quite challenges her to do.
"... I'm sorry," is all she eventually manages. It's been a long time since she felt personally guilty about the crimes of her motherland... but then, today has rolled back a lot of things, hasn't it?
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"All the time," Yuliana says, finally, quietly, eyelids lowering over her jealous gaze. "Reality... is so terrific painful. Ever do I tremble and break on the contradictions."
It's more honest than she ought to be to one of them, and Yuliana entertains, distantly, whether they've medicated her pain away this much to loosen her tongue. (It's more logical, in her world, than the other explanation.) Certainly she knows she's no friend of Alma's, not really.
... but here, broken and bleeding, she's what she's got.
"More... more now than most times... I admit," she forces out, and the humour dies on her puffed breath, though certainly the statement hoped to begin as a joke. Her grin becomes a grimace soon enough, as her face sinks into her pillow. "Damn... I wasn't thinking. Blood in the water... tcha, what did they expect me to do?!" It might be a rhetorical question, but it's spoken for Alma, anyway.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"... Let it go," Alma says, flopping back onto her back. "During the One Year War," and she does have to specify because this is Alma's... severalth conflict (yes that's a real word and it's important because Alma has done this dance like five times), "there were a lot of times there was 'blood in the water.' I let it go. There were times it came back to bite me, but... the times it didn't were more than that, and they saved me from the ones where it did."
She lets out some of the tension in her back, shutting her eyes for a few moments. Something about Yuliana's phrasing and the contradictions -- that sticks with her, but she's not actually sure how to approach 'so hey, why do you say two different finishes to your own sentence back to back,' so she ends up losing the track.
... she might also be on painkillers, though not nearly so much as Yuliana. She hasn't checked. She'll ask later.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
Let it go, huh...
Yuliana hisses a breath in through her teeth -- and sighs. "Maybe," she mutters, with an undertow of bitterness. "I just can't stand... being a tool like this. Kch, I bet... nhh," she grunts, cuts herself off, shakes her head. She can't go so far as to wonder whether she was sent out here specifically to enrage the Shamblo's pilot and make her do even worse.
(They're talking past each other, but no one can hear Yuliana from this far away, so that's to be expected.)
She falls quiet for a moment, before she looks to Alma, again. "You're... not much older than me," she realises, as if for the first time. "Back then, I was a useless brat just about good enough to drown... were you already fighting, then?"
Yuliana's head flops back on her pillow, as she looks up, at the lights. "Ahhh, this world sucks," she grumbles, and it's not even any particular trick.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"I think even if you're a tool, you can still, like... get to know people, get to care about them," Alma says, and there's enough wistfulness in her voice that it sounds like she's saying this as someone... well, who did that.
"Ahahaha, that obvious? Yeah, I was part of what eventually became the Flanagan Institute... gosh, thirteen, fourteen? It wasn't officially the Flanagan Institute until later, but, you know." Alma raises a hand, before saying, "I was a test pilot at fifteen, and my first live combat was sixteen." Not atypical in the One Year War, at least.
"I don't think this world sucks at all, though! Sure, people do bad things, and that sucks -- but that just means we have to try not to. It's easy to just go lower... and it does kinda seem like there's no bottom, but -- that just means we have to keep each other from falling into that." She's a little more muted than she usually is, too -- blame the environment.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Tch," Yuliana hisses air through her teeth, as Alma insists she can care about people. She's able to keep it in her head a little better, at least, as she listens to Alma speak. (Was there something she forgot, earlier..?)
"Institutes, Institutes... cheh!" Yuliana exclaims, another little puff of dismissive air.
There is, in fact, no bottom.
That's the very definition of a hungry void.
"You're too idealistic," Yuliana grumbles, finally, finds her words. "Getting to know people... how childish. What do you expect to happen, in a world like this? If you come to care for someone, they so often die bereft of dignity or mercy. In this line of work, you're like to be the one who kills them." Yuliana isn't really talking about Alma, there.
Her eyes trace the lights, above. She has a headache, but it's fine. "Not to say I never believed in nonsense like that... but you know, even when Hadijah survived, I went to the hospital and asked her not to die. I was quite concerned."
A beat of silence; two.
"It didn't mean anything, of course," Yuliana concludes, distant. "Floodwater got in her cuts, so the infection killed her a few days later. I've often thought it was more fortunate to have drowned, but at least she has a grave with a body, I suppose."
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
... all that pain. Alma can't sense it the way she could with Lilith, but... it's plain as day the way Yuliana talks about it. Having to navigate the world with just her words... that's a little harrowing, but she'd like to try, for Yuliana's sake.
"I don't think that means it didn't mean anything..." Alma says, tentatively, weakly. She wishes she had more certainty. "You remember her. You can try to make a world where there isn't another Hadijah -- where people don't have to die of floodwater and infected wounds. Maybe that world won't be perfect, but does that make it not worth it?"
Letting out a faint "Fffwuuugh," Alma breathes out, "I don't know! I just know you deserved better than that, and so did she, and I want to make a world where that gets to be true!" It's the first time they've gotten to talk about 'nothing,' and Alma... really does want it to matter, to help.
"Maybe I am too idealistic, but... I don't think I'd want to be a different way."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
It's kind of Alma to try.
But, the kind of person Yuliana is...
"Yeah," Yuliana agrees, vaguely. "I deserved better. Why, Sydney did, just the same. And," her fingers twitch, and can't quite curl into a fist, "that's why I wanted that Zeon devil dead." The hate there is such a stark counterpoint, to Alma's hopes.
"Even so... they won. Torrington's a mess... there were a lot of civilians there, too. A lot more useless brats who couldn't even die well... all for the sake of military objectives." Yuliana closes her eyes; her breath shakes, as she draws it in. She swallows. "Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, but... it's still unfortunate when the story ends this way. Because all these battles, they're ultimately without purpose..."
Her eyes open halfway, lashes caging her eyes.
"Suffering with no hope for change."
What a strange distinction; what a strange cast to her voice, all a sudden.
"And oh, I am... still... overly fond of hope."
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
... doesn't really matter? Alma opens her mouth to rebuke Yuliana again -- then stops herself. ... it's okay to be angry, she tells herself, and lets the moment pass unchallenged instead. 'Suffering with no hope for change,' huh... Alma begins to understand why Yuliana feels so frustrated -- why she takes her pain out on the world, when she's incapable of connecting with it (at least, in a way Alma understands).
"... I hope for a lot of things, too," Alma says, perhaps missing the point; the first thing she wants to follow up with, too, dies on her lips.
"... that you deserved better," she eventually says, "doesn't mean they deserve worse." It's -- exhausting to say; she doesn't quite pass back out, but she finds herself worn down by doing so just the same.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
Yuliana glares, both eyes darting to Alma, again. She feels -- too exposed, without her bangs. She is hit with a sudden stab of, oh, call it nausea, that something like Alma would think to make a moral judgement about her.
"You are trying my patience, Rusalka." Her warning is not characterised by any, her voice a taut line, bearing weight. Nevertheless she thinks it is true -- thinks she has been very patient, very forgiving.
She thinks in this pattern, all a sudden, all gathered around herself like a shield.
Yuliana's gaze turns forward, with her head, back to the ceiling. "You must return me to the REA at once," she insists, more removed, more demanding. "I acted within the scope of my orders, so the Major surely can't rebuke me for this transgression... but I shouldn't stay in foreign care overlong."
She sighs, fingers curling. They brush the call bell. How melancholic.
"No... I can't stay here," Yuliana says, again, a shade quieter, a shade more wounded. "It isn't right..."
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
The faint rebuke bothers Alma less than she expects. "Ahaha, sorry," is all she offers -- though she doesn't pursue her previous discussion with Yuliana further, certainly. Then again, that might just be that she's not feeling great in general.
Alma should return Yuliana to the REA at once; she's dimly aware that the REA prefers its projects not to be looked at by anyone else. (They and Zeon are alike, in that way; certainly Alma's own records are a black hole.)
Yuliana seems unhappy, though, and the REA is a place where -- well -- shit rolls downhill, to put it bluntly.
"They're not gonna listen to me right now anyway," Alma says, still flat on her back. "I'm guessing we'll be going to Tenchu from here, even if it's only to resupply... you're probably gonna have to hold on at least that long." She sounds almost embarrassed, as she does so.
Her gaze turns to the call bell. "The apple juice they store in medical is really good -- actually better than the stuff they have in the mess hall," Alma encourages. (It's because it's basically just sugar and Alma has a child's palate.)
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
She apologised, and it seems sincere enough, particularly given the wisdom she shows in not pushing it. Yuliana isn't entirely happy with offering Alma as much latitude as she is, but... it's an unusual situation.
... as much as she hates to admit it, she's vulnerable, in this place. She's aware of the relationship between Alma and the Gwennangorn's Captain. If Lilith decided to kill her for her callousness, Yuliana isn't sure she'd be able to pull something out of her back pocket, the way she is right now.
(Certainly, the vest she prefers to wear under her suits isn't on her person right now. They couldn't treat her through it.)
Her eyes track down, to follow Alma's gaze, as she looks down to her hand. That hand shifts, away from the alarm, and Yuliana is feeling self-conscious just the same.
"They won't listen to you, mm?" She asks, instead. "No... I suppose not. That's fine. It's fine," she repeats, and offers Alma that much forgiveness, looking to her other side, to the bedside table with its locked drawer of medications and the ring in a dish on the table. (They removed it, to make sure her skin wouldn't swell around the metal.)
"I'm not without gratitude," she declares, distant. "I'll send her a message. So she won't worry."
Her?
Yuliana's eyes close, briefly, and her thoughts are her own. She turns her head, and looks to Alma, again.
"How strange," she says, gaze lidding. "The food in Medical was always... mm, let's call it 'nutritionally complete'." Things designed less for taste than for purpose -- food for experiments. You know.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
Alma glances over. She thinks back to her last meeting with Yuliana, and -- 'her?' Oh, right -- the engagement ring. Right. "Ahaha, I imagine she's out of her mind worrying about you right now," she says, though truthfully she's a little bit out of it and not entirely sure how long the two of them have had to recover from their ordeal. She guesses it's been at least a few hours, though. "Oh! I've had that stuff too!" Alma realizes, with a slightly-too-delighted, big, slightly-open-mouthed smile. "It's been years! Does the REA use the drinks or the paste? We had both -- paste in transit situations only, though..."
That's a long ways to think back, and the beginning and end of those memories is a little fuzzy... but still.
"Fuahh, don't tell anyone this, but that stuff gave me a weird taste for instant food... like, I love cooked meals! I like to cook! But every now and then it's just... I want something that you don't find in real food and you do find even in that stuff. Is it like that for you?"
It's salt and preservatives, Alma. The thing you're craving is salt and preservatives.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
Yuliana sighs, but softly, softly. "I do hope not," she says, eyes closing again. "I would hate for there to be any... misunderstandings." Her dear Elya is frequently out of her body, but if she were out of her mind..?
No, that's much more frequently Yuliana's affliction.
Her fingers press together, absent a hand to hold, and she misses her. How bitter that Alma should see her, in her weakness, when Elisa ought to be the only one.
But... it's fine, she tells herself.
It's fine.
Elisa prepared Alma just for her, after all.
As a distraction, perhaps, from the misery of her current existence. Yuliana reflects, from far away, that at least there's not much pain when she's still. She's aware there should be pain, yes, but the magic of pharmacology is deep and full of mystery.
"Tablets in transit," she reports, a shade numb. (She really shouldn't. She's not supposed to talk about any of this. But she's so, so tired.) "Drinks, most of the time. It's more efficient to handle fluids and nutrients at once, I suppose."
She pauses, for a moment. She tells herself she's disgusted with Alma.
"In any case, don't worry. I won't tell anyone," she obviously will tell whoever she pleases. It costs her nothing to lie. "But I can't stand preserved things, myself. Mama always cooked things... joining the military was something of a culinary shock." Yuliana wasn't a child soldier, after all.
"... what you're finding is the salts," she adds, finally. "Just adding salt to a meal can't come close to what they do to keep those things on the shelf for so many years."
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"Yeah. For us it was -- apparently there's something in the drinks that's human-safe but it just destroys the water filters on a Musai once it comes back out of you," Alma explains, "so I can see why they'd match up with us on that one..." A moment passes in silence, before she appends: "But with an actual purification station like they have on a colony it's fine, so -- yeah. Efficiency."
Yuliana suggests a simple explanation, though, for Alma's palate: the salts. She thinks about that... her eyes brighten -- even though she's still lying in a medical bed, mildly nauseated.
"Of course," she says, sounding like she's having a Eureka! moment about something or another. "That's it! Well -- it's probably not the whole thing, because I didn't notice how salty all that stuff was, so there has to be something covering it up a bit, but I've lowballed salt every time!"
... what on Earth is she --
"... if you're stuck on the ship," Alma asks, "do you want me to make you a cake? I have the feeling I'll be up and around before you..."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Well, the Institute has no control over my diet now, unless they put in for a new test, so it's hardly my problem any more." Yuliana rolls her eyes, and adds: "Most of the time."
Sometimes the military just has you go on duty for 48 hours at a stretch, and you don't have time to... eat. That's normal.
What's not normal is -- oh, good Lord, Yuliana's helped her.
Yuliana can't quite hide her grimace, in her current state -- but in her current state, it might have just been a twinge of pain. That's entirely plausible.
She actually looks a shade nervous, when Alma segues into that. "Not a cake with a bowl of salt poured in, I hope," she connects the dots, and wonders if such a thing counts as poisoning her. Yuliana is reasonably sure Alma would suffer consequences for poisoning her. Would they apply if she didn't think she was poisoning her?
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"Hmmm? Oh, I was going to halve the batter and give you the version I know is good already," Alma answers, doing her best to reassure Yuliana that no, she's not going to just shove salt down the REA Captain's gullet and play havoc with her insides.
Groaning, Alma finally makes the effort to full-on sit up. She stretches her legs a little, tries to pivot at the waist to consider getting up --
-- nah. Not yet. Bad, actually. She flops back down very unceremoniously this time, putting her head on the pillow.
"... Maybe when we're both feeling a little better," Alma reflects, "I can meet your fiancee... ugh, but I'm honestly kinda tired right now. I still feel kinda gross, but... this was nice."
... honestly, this wasn't a bad conversation even by normal Alma conversation standards...
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Dispersal has posed.
"Oh... oh, very well," Yuliana doesn't have the fight in her to protest, and it's not as if she dislikes cake. What sort of monster doesn't like cake?
Not that Yuliana isn't a monster in plenty of other ways.
She frowns, seeing Alma try and get up, only to fail at something so simple. She entertains the notion of telling her not to give up so easily -- let her fall on her face in the hall, just like she deserves -- before a twinge in her hand brings her back to her present situation.
"You... should rest, now," it takes her a moment to spin up the theatrics in her voice to 'concerned', and maybe it's because of her own miserable state. "You ought to let yourself recover. There'll be time enough for everything else later."
Was it nice? Was it, really?
Yuliana, deliberately, would use the word 'convenient', and perhaps that at least won't twist her gut.
<Pose Tracker> Alma Stirner has posed.
"You're right," Alma replies, to Yuliana's seeming concern. "I really don't need to push it..." she agrees, stretching out her legs a little and settling in. There'll be time to fret about the full results of the battle later -- one, when she and Yuliana know the full results of the battle, and two, when they're feeling better.
For now, though... Yuliana's right. It's worth resting and taking 'later' as it comes.
... she is going to make Yuliana eat some cake, though. The upside of being on a Londo Bell vessel and not an REA one. She can even show off her new pots and pans set!