2023-01-23: Promise me safety from my people, and I will tell you all their crimes
- Log: Promise me safety from my people, and I will tell you all their crimes
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Sophia Mayhew Castellan
- Where: California Justice Facility, Britannia
- Date: 2023-01-24
- Summary: Sophia begins the interrogation of Yuliana in earnest, and once she promises not to return Yuliana to the REA, her cold approach yields horrific details of the human experimentation the REA conducts. As frightening as Sophia is, Yuliana fears her country far more, and not without reason. She is more reticent to discuss the details of her marriage -- but Sophia, at least, grants her mercy rather than interrogating her about Elisa.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana was only marginally cooperative, for the first few days of her imprisonment, even as her condition worsened. Finally, Captain Greyvalley managed to get more than Yuliana's Federation ID and a request for her lawyer from her, and she's looking... better, now she's getting her (many) vital medications again. She's even managing to keep food down, now she's not suffering those withdrawals.
Given a day to recover her condition, she's up and about as well as she can be, again. Medically cleared, near as they can tell. She's still not talking about why she's on so many medications, even though the assumption is clear, so it's hard to be sure about her baseline.
Perhaps it's good enough, for the likes of her.
Yuliana is pacing about her circular cell, when the order for another visitor comes in. Heaving a great sigh, she proceeds to the audience chair -- a tidy little euphemism for the bindings inherent to it. (Her arms and legs are a shade thicker than standard; she's sure to press them firmly to the rests so she doesn't get pinched.) The shackles lock about her lower limbs, and her fingers drum, on an armrest, as she's defanged.
(She has one too many teeth, a fang on the right side of her upper jaws. It does not appear to be a prosthetic.)
"All clear," the warden announces, after getting both visual confirmation and a positive lock reading from his console. Given this is a Class S threat, he'd really rather keep their visitor safe. "Go ahead, Captain." The door is open to Sophia, at least, as she enters.
And Yuliana is silent, throughout the process. God forbid she make it easy on her.
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
On some level, Sophia wonders if she'd have been OK with that being how Yuliana Kafim ends. Even she has her limits.
On the other hand, the woman tried to kill the world twice, so screw 'er.
A threat like this must be treated with zero trust in any other mechanism working. That's the kind of security Sophia requested, and she abides by that. She's dressed actually rather minimally, the lightest version of the Britannian naval uniform that mostly looks like a navy blue pantsuit, though Sophia has opted to keep the affectation of gloves. Despite it, her gaze is no less piercingly intent as the door opens to let them set eyes on each other. She hums an acknowledgment to the warden and then steps within. Nine feet. Outside the radius of the witch's most known magic. But Sophia has worked with her, and knows that letting her regain her center and her cunning may be dangerous indeed. Nonetheless.
She enters with a small case, an approved size for the documents she's brought with her, and sets it on the table at her side of the room, opening it and quietly withdrawing documents. "I don't think either of us are overly interested in the usual game of introductions, Captain," she says, and pulls out a folder of documents from the brief case, which she begins flipping through. Despite what she just said, she's surely already read all these completely. The statement is theater itself. But her eyes do cut up.
"Though you're doing better than I was told. Greyvalley talked some sense into you, I hear."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Ah. She's removed her weapons.
As if Yuliana could get her hands on them right now, anyway...
(Given she can move her hands, the thought had crossed her mind.)
Yuliana's eyes are green, and they are not a colour out of space.
Yuliana's smile is too, too sharp for the position she's in.
"No, Captain," she agrees, easily enough. "I don't suppose we are." How nice of her, Yuliana reflects, to place her on equal sitting like this. Perhaps the REA simply hasn't bothered to revoke her clearance yet.
Her smile grows a shade more fixed, for a moment, as she considers the alternative.
But she can't let herself get distracted.
"Hmm... she did, didn't she?" Yuliana turns it to a question, head tilting, as she smiles to Sophia. (Without her bangs, that scar down the left side of her face is perfectly visible.) "She's such a kind soul. Do be sure to look after her..."
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
Not even Britannia's most excitingly cavalier skunkworks has figured out how to sneak a laser gun into military dress gloves. ...Amalgam might have it by now though.
She still senses the danger in Yuliana, even from here. For her own part she projects...very little. A quiet, intense focus. If she's frightened or anxious she projects none of it. Though her eyes do cut up to trace down the line of that scar. "She is," is Sophia's reply. The sort of woman who should be far away from creatures like this. "And one with some steel, it seems."
She finally finishes flipping through documents. Her gaze cuts up to Yuliana, piercing her through.
"That's a very interesting regimen you have, in fact. The REA hasn't been the most forthcoming about your needs. But I happen to be rather familiar with the standards of the newtype research program. It bears a certain startling similarity to the Long-Term C regimen Augusta developed."
Her hands fold but her head doesn't. "A chemical cocktail quite necessary to the continued functioning of a certain generation of Cyber-Newtype. I'm beginning to think your Institute has even more skeletons in its closet than I believed."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
No laser gun in dress gloves, but when they confiscated her things G-Hound would have found a garrotte wire in Yuliana's watch. Her wedding rings, at least, were perfectly normal on examination, and perhaps that's why she's been allowed to keep them on her finger.
(They are quite expensive, though -- rich gold, emerald, diamond, onyx. An engagement band, and a wedding band, and the two weave together now.)
Yuliana can't sense anything, from Sophia, though certainly she can see what the other Captain allows on her face. Her own expression is just as controlled. In the fortress of herself, they didn't teach her how to regulate her emotions -- only to lie about them.
More's the pity, as anger can't help but flood her eyes, as Sophia names those programs. "I am not some common labrat!" Her voice rises, as she snaps out a reply. Her teeth click together, in empty air. "Don't generalise your assumptions onto me!"
She's denying it, but the truth is right there in her stay at this facility: that chemical cocktail is necessary to her continued function. She even admitted, to Mitsuba, that stopping some of those drugs cold-turkey might kill her.
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
Small dignities. The small signs that G-Hound has not...yet?...fully stripped Yuliana of the privilege called 'human rights.' Itself, a small reminder that G-Hound is not...yet?...as runaway an organization as the Titans.
Sophia keeps her Geass off. There's rumors Minovsky's woman could sense Newtypes. She doesn't quite know if Yuliana could sense her geass. She chooses not to try the matter, unknowing that it does indeed render her powers unseen to the cognitive hole that is Yuliana Kafim.
Sophia's finger gently taps the desk, a signal to nobody but her own self. There's a direct hit, she thinks. She eases off the intensity of the staredown as Yuliana becomes agitated. "Come now, you know I'd never. My conclusions are based on inescapable connections. Truths that not even your hatred can drown out."
Her finger runs along a line in a document. She doesn't let Yuliana see.
"Nothing natural can make your body require these substances. This is fact. You were dying without them. That is fact, too."
Again, eyes flick up. Centered. Like she could stare through stone. "Minovsky's Woman was engineered. A certainty. And yet you hate it so."
"What did they do to you, at the Institute?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Now, yes, Yuliana cannot sense the lack about Sophia.
Now.
Her own hands grasp the armrests, and her fingers tighten, as Sophia keeps carving in. She glares, at her, wound tighter and tighter. Her lips part in a grimace, flashing grit teeth, as she calls her engineered.
'You are something humanity has created, and God help us.'
Yuliana looks away; her eyes squeeze tightly shut.
"That's highly classified," she hisses, finally. "I haven't survived this long by speaking of any theoretical habits of our research facilities."
But if she's still a Captain... if she's still a Captain, the REA still expects her. They're still maintaining the illusion. Even now, they must be reaching, grasping, trying to retrieve her.
Even with the pressure Elisa's put on her country, she can't possibly save her from the greater machine of the REA. They are a collectivist people; there is alway someone else, ready and capable.
She takes a breath. Another. She swallows, and tenses, against herself.
"You mustn't... send me back there," she insists, finally, voice thin. Her head bows, chin to her chest, but there's no bangs to veil her face. "Sophia, you must not agree to any plot to return me to my people, though I am sure the Republic expects me." And she frames it like a demand, but it tastes, disgustingly, like a plea.
"If... if you'll agree to that much..." She's grown pale, in the speaking. "... I'll answer your questions then."
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
Sophia watches Yuliana thrash. Not physically, not quite, but Sophia has sat in judgment over people before, and she can all but see her soul winding tighter. The deflection. Yes. And then...
The fracture.
"Perhaps I never did tell you my own truths," Sophia says, and...stands, rising to her full height, and staring across at Yuliana. There is no physical light that exudes from her, but she unshutters the apocalyptic flame that sits at the center of her heart, eyes blazing and flashing with emotion.
"The rats who do these things to human beings are undeserving of being called human. If I had my way, you would have no need for concern! Every one of them would be long dead! Bent and broken, alone and screaming as they deserve!" she roars it, dares the record to condemn her.
She huffs out, and tries to seek her eyes with a soul of fire and iron.
"Fear nothing," she seethes, bending forward, that fury suddenly locked back to sparkling embers. "If you prefer my clutches to theirs, then we are of a mind. I'll entertain no breath of a bargain from swine that thinks itself a man."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana glares up, at Sophia, and -- there, the lack. The place where something should be, and isn't, where her gaze meets the oblivion about her. Her lips twist in new disgust, as she tries to grapple with it, like and unlike the hated existences she knows.
That anger, that emptiness...
Even Yuliana has to shrink back, in her bindings.
"I need no psychic violation... to see your heart is set," she settles on, slowly. Yuliana takes another breath, and nods, a small motion. Just the once.
But she still tears her gaze from the intensity of Sophia's, before she manages to say it.
"Though it shames me to admit," she starts, and it is a fragile-spun thing, like glass, and like glass it is made vague through a cloudy veil, "they did... mean to make a Cyber-Newtype, of me. In 0085... though it was not called the Institute, then. Before they changed their name every few years, it was the Renascence Orchid Project. Headed by Dr. Divya Devi... a neurologist laundered from the Titans." Yuliana swallows. "That's why they moved their operations so often, I suppose. She meant to evade detection and tribunal. They were the Advanced Research Facility for a while... the Modern Scientific Association, a few years after that. We've always known it simply as 'Medical'."
'We.'
"But that project, back then -- it was a failure." Yuliana's lips press into a thin line, a moment of quiet. "The rest of my cohort was unable to withstand the methods they used... I came to realise they were rather dated, later. I don't know if that means they'd been working on the theory for a while before they managed to sign up their subjects, but..." She shakes her head, and dismisses their names, from her mind. (She remembers their names.) "When they... finished making me, something went... wrong," though she sounds a little unsettled, about the word, as if she can't quite be sure. "The connections between people..."
Frustratingly, this is where she loses her voice, for a moment. Her hands squeeze to fists, and release.
She continues. "I saw it, and then I saw nothing. Nothing, where it ought to be. Nothing surrounded those creatures. Only the reaching, yearning emptiness. I knew them by the lack of their existence... the violations they visit upon the psyche cannot reach me. Neither can they inflict such things on the world, when I am near. I am the great equaliser... an anti-Newtype weapon. This... is what they have done. What they mean to keep doing..."
Pain enters her voice, as she says: "I have stared into my own eyes, grown anew. But though they meant to replace me, make me disposable, they yet cannot. I have value, still, that I am unique. While I cannot be replicated. One of the REA's great secrets... even so, I was too useful to lock up forever. I am... uniquely suited to addressing creatures whose intuition make them difficult to surprise." Murder, she wrote.
"... but an embarrassment like this... they'll not release me again. And they will... redouble their efforts to replicate me, I'm sure. It is..." That strange green gaze of hers is haunted, looking down, to the chain which attaches her to her bed. "... unpleasant," she settles on, in a hoarse and euphemistic whisper.
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
Sophia is grateful for the moment it takes Yuliana to get herself together because she needs a few seconds to gear down from exposing the crystal heart of hatred that is her soul's furnace.
Sophia flicks a pen - the most dangerous thing she was allowed to bring - out of her case and swiftly scribbles notes. Devi. There is an audible growl in Sophia's throat at the word 'Titans.' Her Geass flickers reflexively. It's like standing next to a black hole. She stands in the world of souls and bonds, and Yuliana's spiritual void whirls ahead of her, devouring all connectedness. It's only a moment; she knows without even attempting to search she'll get nothing. Yuliana's nature will prevent her from finding this woman through connection to her.
But traditional means are still open.
'Something went wrong.' The connections between people formed and then vanished. Sophia...feels no pity. Her mask is one of intense thought. She has been given the name of a witch to kill. She is ravenous, now, her mind crawling through more metaphorical connections. An accident? No, no, not like this. Not to a woman like that. Unless it was serendipity itself...but Sophia simply cannot allow such a woman to be anything but evil made flesh. The timing is too perfect. If this were something you could do by 'accident', there'd be dozens of Minovsky's Children.
She puts her pen down. Her eyes slide up. If they are softer now, it is by hairs. Yuliana's crimes are not forgivable. But, Sophia has learned the name of her enemies. All in a day's work. She does note the way Yuliana speaks of the Newtype power, so loaded, specific. Is that part of how she sees the world, now? Or is that something driven into her later? Before, even? She rakes her eyes across Yuliana. "So thus is your life. That highest cause, utility."
"You're right. They would not." Imperfect tense. A supposition. For a future Sophia will not allow. "Yes. It would be." Her jaw sets.
If she could, she would obliterate that building this instant. If there is needless suffering from it...she chose G-Hound because far fewer people ask questions about such things. But it is not within her reach. Not yet.
Her eyes and fingertip reach to the documents on the table. Elisa's photo, facing Sophia. But she doesn't shift topics that way. Even she understands such basics as that.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana doesn't want her pity.
That would make it all about her, after all.
Sophia's gaze tears across her, and though it is but a degree lowered, still it burns. Her gut roils against the premise -- the very premise of talking. She was trained to withstand far worse than this. She was trained to...
But even through her shame, even Yuliana must realise her country will not save her. "My utility has kept me alive all this time," she insists, a shade bitter. "No... not only this, but my capacity to act. Were I merely a thing to be used up, I'd be long gone!" What this implies about Yuliana, if she's not being used, is...
Well, the machine of human misery is often such that victims become perpetrators, on a long enough timeline.
Her fingers tighten, to a fist, though there's nowhere for her arms to move about it. She cannot see her beloved, from this angle; cannot see Sophia's heart, to know she keeps her from her.
"Extract what punishment from me as you like," she mutters, all bitterness, and knows enough not to tell them to hurry. They don't have to know that she'll be freed as soon as Elisa wakes. As soon as Elisa wakes... she'll save her, won't she? "Only, do not return me there. I... am afraid. I am nothing but an instrument, in their hands. And I have seen the way they refer to me, in my... documents." Her voice is strained; her eyes are still so haunted.
"Less than a person. Less than a dog. Valuable I may be, but I am not valued. Though I wished only to better the world, and help my country..." Her voice cracks, here, and tears spring to her eyes; they don't seem feigned, with none of the little tells which speak to insincerity.
It really does upset her.
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
Sophia doesn't reply, as Yuliana speaks. She learns. She can see the shape of the world Yuliana inhabits, even if she holds herself, just, away from it. She hates it. She despises it.
It does not absolve Yuliana of her crimes. It does not make them less of enemies. But there can be understanding in that bond. Sophia knows such shapes.
Sophia looks up to Yuliana, gauging her, as she speaks further. "I will not," Sophia swears to her again. Her voice shot through with iron.
She watches her, thoughtfully, for several long seconds. And she dares to ask it.
"She saved you from that, didn't she? She gave you that. Elisa Kafim."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
And Yuliana does take... a little reassurance, from Sophia's repeated insistence that she will not return to her people.
Not much. But a little.
Through those vulnerable cracks, Sophia slips the knife of that name, neatly, into her ribs. Yuliana sinks into her chair, into herself, and her fingers press against her wedding bands. Her eyes drop to them, too. Those glittering jewels...
"She saved me," Yuliana murmurs, and the pain in her voice now is a thing measured by the distance between herself and her beloved wife. "When no one else cared for me... she was there. Please, do not ask me to testify to her. She is all I love in this world. I will give you much... but not this. Not this," she says, again, softer, and it is a plea.
<Pose Tracker> Sophia Mayhew Castellan has posed.
They both know it.
Sophia isn't the top of G-Hound. She has some connection to Treize, and Treize is occasionally a soft touch in the ways that would let Sophia run the investigation unfettered. But there are men above him, too.
And so, Sophia swears she will make protect this woman, and they both know it might fail, and that whatever blood Sophia might shed in reply will be of no significance to the villain who makes her a liar.
She does not dwell on this. To dwell on it would force her to destroy herself, like Dorian Gray gazing upon his soul in the painting.
So she lets it go, and instead takes a long, thoughtful breath. "...what you've done casts a shadow on her, as well," Sophia says.
But she can't, quite, muster that soul-penetrating glare anymore, try though she might. It's she who cracks, this time, her eyes drifting aside. "...but I do know something of having someone you'd kill the sky for," she breathes.
She reaches for her papers. "Very well. I'll give you that mercy, too, Yuliana Kafim."
She reaches to slip her papers away. "I can't speak for any who come after me, though."
She stands, and reaches for the button to call for exit. "For what it's worth," she says, and her tone is, perhaps, just a hair conciliatory, looking over her shoulder, "It was truly only a slip, what I said at your arrest."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana winces, head bowing, as Sophia speaks of shadows cast over Elisa. "I should have listened to her," she whispers, ragged. "She's always known what's best for me... but I'm such a stupid, impulsive..."
The shadow she perceives across their house may well not be the one Sophia speaks of.
Even so, she disobeyed her wife, though she swore to her. No greater wound cuts across her.
(It's horrible, but it's... reassuring, isn't it? That Yuliana can defy her... means she really is different, to everyone Elisa grasps.)
Her lips tremble, as she presses them together, and she swallows. "Thank you," she breathes, as she hears those papers rustle. She nods, a shade jerky, and she'd hate how pitiful it looked if she could see.
And when Yuliana looks to Sophia, as she leaves, she says: "I believe you."
She will stand from the chair as soon as Sophia is free of the room, and the door is secured again.
She never sits there without the warden's orders.