2023-01-27: The truth beyond the page of this narrative is wrapped about my bones
- Log: The truth beyond the page of this narrative is wrapped about my bones
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Sonia Sophia-Grace
- Where: California Justice Facility, Britannia
- Date: 2023-01-27
- Summary: Sonia comes to interrogate Yuliana about the dragon kaiju associated with her. Yuliana tells her very little, and very, very much.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana crosses her arms, lying on her back, on this pitiful excuse for a bed. One foot extends out, to tap, lightly, on the rounded wall of her cell; her other leg, with a manacle affixed about its ankle, bends in deference to the weight. She looks up to the ceiling, where that sniper nests.
"Soooo," she calls up to them, loosely, and not for the first time, "how's your shift treating you? Anything fun planned, after this?"
The barrel of the gun pointed at her doesn't shift; she receives no response. Pouting, Yuliana taps her foot, against something stronger than glass. Her drab blue frock has slipped up to her knee. (She's normally far more modest, but it's difficult to care, much, when she's been afforded no privacy at all.) "Got any loved ones?" She tosses out, petulant. "If so, I --"
"The prisoner will refrain from provocation," the warden's voice cuts in, from where he's monitoring her, before she can go so far as to threaten the person pointing a gun at her head.
Yuliana huffs, with another little kick. "Oh, you're no fun," she grumbles, fingers drumming against her bare, scarred arms. (Some of the scars are from war. Some are more deliberate, more surgical, than that.)
"Proceed to your restraints," the warden goes on, and it might explain why she was able to get away with chatting at her sniper for a moment. "You have a visitor."
"Another interrogator, more like," Yuliana sighs, as her legs swing about and her chest pushes up. "I'm going, I'm going!" She snaps at the warden, to forestall any... interventions.
She's not eager for them to pump suppression gas in here again.
She seats herself in that wretched audience chair; the restraints click shut, about her lower arms and legs. Her fingers drum at the armrests, as she waits, with a dour expression.
Meanwhile, outside the cell, the warden confirms his lock. "All clear," he reports, to the NERV associate they've called in to investigate this woman's strange ties to those eldritch draconic kaiju. "Proceed inside." He's unlocked the door for Sonia, at least.
The chairs opposite Yuliana's are a little more comfortable -- there's even a table, there, to place documents or evidence. Yuliana, it seems, won't be starting this conversation; she drums her fingers, and she waits.
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
Sonia can't say she was... pleased about this. Yes, she's interested in kaiju, but there's more to this than that, she can feel it in her bones. Such as she is new to the war at a higher level than she was before, the Cuban-born woman waits quietly outside of the cell area. She hasn't bothered to change in the slightest; she knows she looks young, and the NERV uniforms, such as they have any, just look particularly silly on her - most then, do, to be fair. (Excepting school uniforms.)
She does at least have the appropriate paperwork and IDs to show that this tiny thing is who is supposed to be here, at least. She bears with her a single piece of lined paper, and a pen. Why just those? Well, she doesn't precisely plan on taking notes. ... more like doodling.
Once given the pass to clear the room, she slips in with a murmured 'thank you'. She takes the steps to the chairs, and past them to the table, and that is when Sonia's hackles rise. Her gaze flits over the woman secured in the other chair, and doing the math, she quietly takes the couple of feet and is totally blanked out. she rocks back, though, out of that six foot range, and shudders.
"... Well." She murmurs, to them all. "That answers my first question. Good day, I'm Sonia." She takes her seat.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana's teeth flash, as she looks -- not quite at Sonia, but just a little bit around her. The lack of her existence...
No wonder she snarls.
"A NERV agent?" Her sentence construction is deliberately distasteful, as her too-green gaze settles on that insignia. "What a shame... I've long appreciated your work."
Even if they have a distressing habit of employing children to do it... though Sonia isn't a child, at least.
(Yuliana is an Indonesian woman; she doesn't view short stature as childlike. She was markedly tall, in her childhood home, though she stands only at 5'5". ... her mother's from Zaftra, you see.)
"You'll forgive me if I don't bother to introduce myself," she goes on, dryly. "Given the circumstances of our meeting." She wouldn't introduce herself as Captain Kafim these days, anyway. Her relationship with the REA is such that she'd tell Sophia anything, so long as she promised not to return her.
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
Sonia is a bit phased by the snarl, but she covers it relatively easily with having to take her seat, fluffing out the back of her skirt as she crosses her ankles together. She centers the paper with a ounce of non-malice, and gently writes the date on the top line, her name on the second, and pauses on the third.
"Just because I occasionally can be a bit of a smarm, can I get your name?"
Whatever she gets told gets put on the third line. Fourth line is skipped, and the fifth line starts with a question mark. "... and a follow up, when was the last time you felt at peace?" It's not a barb, or a pointed question. If Yuliana is so Turned Off, well... time to see what can be turned on. (Not Like That.)
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
Yuliana's eyes narrow. Her eyes glance up, towards the sniper nest, and she takes a centreing breath.
"Yuliana Kafim," she reports, a shade mechanically. "Federation ID REA-WEI3SOIC-238D." Just as it always has, it immediately identifies her as shang wei, the third wei class equivalent to captaincy, a special operative, and personnel of an improved class.
Her eyes narrow, as Sonia asks her next question. "That's personal!" She bites out, before she can stop herself -- she's never had much self-control. She just learned how to lie, instead, and that theatre is sorely tested in a place like this.
But she grits her teeth, and her fingers tighten to what fists they can, against those armrests. "All right, all right," she cedes, a moment later, as her hands relax again. She looks down to her hand -- her right hand, to wit. (Zaftran custom.) There are wedding bands, still permitted to reside there, on her ring finger. Emerald, onyx, and diamond, in a rich gold setting. It looks far more expensive than a socialist ought to wear.
"I'm married," she spells out, though it might be obvious enough by the way documents on Yuliana called her 'Yuliana Dispersal' right up until late November. Even with her impatience, affection still creeps into her eyes and her tone, to speak of Elisa. "I know peace with my wife. I love her very much." She misses her terribly, she adds, and does not say, as she closes her eyes. Directing her gaze back to Sonia, with all the tone of privacy -- "Now, your next question?"
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
"Ah. Congratulations on your marriage. Whatever this conversation ends up being about, please do not take -that- as snark or dis-kindness." Stilted wording, there, but genuine honesty. "... sometimes it is the simple act of another's person face that can bring peace. That has always been obvious to me." Sonia looks down and taps her fingers on the middle hole of the paper piece, as if thinking to herself.
"They brought me on to ask about the dragon kaiju. I'm not entirely sure -why-, mind you, as my kaiju knowledge has been mostly centered on the Tsutsujidai events and Akane Shinjo, so all I have is what I have been given."
Looking up from the paper, she looks at Yuliana intently. "I, frankly, dislike reports. There's always more that needs to be said than what is in there, so I ask - if someone didn't read the reports, and wanted to know about them, what would YOU tell them?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Thank you," Yuliana says, and it's a haughty sort of statement, but it isn't entirely ungenuine.
Her eyes narrow, when Sonia moves to the obvious topic. Yuliana was expecting it, of course -- NERV's specialty, in a very broad sense, isn't much of a secret -- but it's still a private topic.
"... that knowledge will not avail you," she answers, arch, as her chin tilts up to look down her nose at Sonia. (She's still quite restrained. Even so.) "What you question is a thing this world does not know. You grasp for comprehension of what you are yet untempered to understand."
A strong cry from her story after the attack on Frontier -- that she was ensorcelled against her will.
"Ask no more of this."
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
"I enjoy hearing about others. It is my pleasure." The very, very, very peppy NERV captain murmurs. Friendship, after all, is magic.
NERV's specialty, in a broad sense, is not Sonia's. Yes, there are kaiju. There are ... whatever the Angels are, even if they are described as kaiju in many circles. They are curiosities, but to Sonia, it is not the what they are, but the who behind them that is. When Yuliana goes arch, and beyond that to full on looking-down-her-nose, Sonia sighs, tucking her left leg under her in a just barely modest fashion. Right arm behind her, hand tucked into the small of her back, she closes her eyes before she speaks again.
"I'm here for 'this', as you're well aware. What would let me understand? Going through your life, piece by piece? Or would it be my years of racism faced as a number in the Britannian forces, or perhaps, the fifteen years I spent undergoing through childhood tracking and testing in a field where I'm lucky to make it to my ripe young age of twenty two? What is the tempering we need, and what is what this world does not?"
"Is it the rubber face of dead children, when war rampages across, or is it something even darker, hidden in the shadows that you and I are both intimately familar with?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"The suffering of your wretched existence is nonetheless unfortunate," Yuliana allows, and her tone has shifted quite fully from her attempts to amuse herself with her captors, now. "Know that the future will not tolerate this injustice. Our equality is absolute. No more the violation of psyche, no more the conquest of the strong to the weak we call 'war'. This world can be better, Sonia. You need only wait."
Her eyes narrow; her lips thin.
"But if you cannot bear even to approach me..."
Her voice is cold, a closing door.
"... you will never understand the truth."
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
Gaze meets gaze. The void meets chaos. Sonia's own eyes narrow as Yuliana's does, and while her lips don't thin, she pushes them out, almost pouty.
"Why is it so quiet?" She finally asks, into the silence that was hovering between them. "What's so wrong with the noise that you've drowned it out?" Sonia presses, leaning forward onto the table, voice sharp.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"I? No!"
Blessed, impulsive Yuliana, whose mind was scarred right across her sense, snaps a reply before she thinks on it.
"She!"
Her eyes widen, as that holy invocation spills from her lips; she looks away, but the damage is done. "... this world... is a fake and ignoble thing," Yuliana insists, her fingers tightening, against the armrests. "It claws and grasps at my bones. It will not release me! And yet reality shall not be denied. This fiction will end."
She returns her gaze to Sonia, and her green eyes are hard, hardened.
"Even the most cohesive narrative stops, when the book closes."
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
A crack, a chink.
"She?" Sonia echoes, but obviously not with the tone behind it that Yuliana had.
"This fiction will end..." Sonia echoes again. "This world... do you mean this Earth, which is already dying as you and I talk? Or do you mean we, our ever-evolving human selves? The world was quiet once. Is that the same type of quiet that the kaiju are trying to create? We claw and grasp because we want to live. Our lives are noise."
"Not silence."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"Never mind that," Yuliana snaps, of Her.
She clicks her tongue, to her teeth. "Look at your restrained point of view!" Mrs. Kafim accuses Sonia, though her arms and legs are clasped firmly to the chair she's sitting on. "You hear an ending and think at once I set out to destroy our Earth?! No!"
Her back arches, against the chair; if she could wrest herself from it, surely she would. But it is rated for the strength of an enhanced woman. She cannot break free.
From these restraints, or this world.
"The noise you know is a story you have told yourselves, apart from the reality of this world. I see the truth." Yuliana's eyes narrow, and she is looking just a little to the left, of Sonia. "Even now, in those jagged edges you have carved about yourself... all violation stripped away, the truth remains."
Her gaze grows more vague, for a moment, more indistinct.
"I am here," she whispers, ragged. "Consume her not. I need her...!"
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
Sonia's eyes narrow.
"Yes, well, that is typically the common result to 'ending'. Finale. It's over. For most, that is death." Sonia retorts. "So no apologies for where I jumped to immediately, and on a global scale, what could be more ending than that of the Earth?" A pause, before she adds on, in a more subdued tone: "Not that it hasn't been dying for centuries, anyways."
Her gaze watches Yuliana struggle for the moment, before leaning in on the table, frown dimpling across her face.
"What jagged edges? The story? Told ourselves? I'm a historian, ma'am, I know the old saying about the winners writing the story." She points out. "So what is the truth that you are holding onto so fiercely? What are we missing? Why are we missing?" She presses.
"We are but flames in a fire. If we do not find out now, however will we be able to perpetuate it?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"It is because it is dying that the truth must come," Yuliana insists, fervent.
But Sonia's next questions -- at first it is as if Yuliana does not hear them, listening to something else. With a jerk and a start she returns a wide-eyed gaze to Sonia, and once she closes her eyes and takes a breath, her hard expression has returned again.
"The truth that I am witness to this narrative," she says. "I am not the author of these fictions. I am their reader." And it's a strange way to position herself -- not as the arbiter of autonomy, but as a passive observer. "So I move through this feigned world, and offer what salve I can... but I alone can see the theatre for what it is." A light pause. "No... I, and one other."
She looks down, to her wedding ring. 'One other' may well mean her wife.
"Though she does not See, as I do. I must be her eyes. Yet I left her to attempt her own communion... I should have protested. The strength to hold audience with nonexistence... it's a different power entirely...!"
Yuliana is upset. She is upset, lips twisting, tears springing to her eyes. She does not speak of flames, when her mind is trapped in the question of Elisa's wellbeing.
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
"Audience with nonexistence..." Sonia whispers, a soft little exhalation of words.
A flicker of quiet understanding lights up in her dark eyes, as Sonia looks down at the mostly blank space. Yes, that would make sense, with the feeling she got from being near Yuliana. Blinded and deafened, when normally the world IS so noisy. That is how she is. The other newtypes... she remembers Amuro's peek into the cockpit she shared with Lina, of the comfort she shared with those like minds.
"Not the author, but the narrator. But still, you are the one holding the book, so we reach out and ask for the information. What is the timeline? The prologue? Is there subsections?" (That was not a joking question, as much as it sounds funny being spoken out loud.) She prods gently, then hovers, for a moment.
"Your wife. You've no news of her?" Compassion to a enemy, even one such as Yuliana, is still something that should be held to, at least in her opinion.
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
There is one Cyber-Newtype who is constantly held in Yuliana's isolation tank, who cannot see, who cannot hear, who cannot reach anyone at all.
Herself.
"Naturally," she nods, to Sonia's questions. "Many stories, crossing each other on the stage... but here, now, is the conflux of time. That I have come... that I have come to See... so now may this world choose its salvation. For now, I am here... and through me, true existence."
She sighs, looking down to her ring, again. "You will forgive me. I am given to prophecy, not prophesy... her refined oratory far surpasses my unfiltered existence." Yuliana's fingers press together, the best she can do, to feel those wedding bands. "And I've no news," she adds, downcast. "No news at all..."
Which answers both her question, and the implicit one beside it: who one of those women she's speaking of is.
(The emphasis in her prosody certainly implies there's more than one.)
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
"You know, for being the reader, the narrator, you sure are prone to speak in riddles, rather than direct from the book." Sonia remarks with only the slightest edge of sarcasm.
"You keep saying her, but I am not sure which one you mean. There is obviously Elisa, your wife. You, the Yuliana I am currently sitting in a room with. The Yuliana that the one in the room is speaking with on a level I cannot follow, and then someone else entirely - or perhaps the latter two are one and the same?" She wonders out loud. "You said 'do not devour' in regards to something..."
"You need her. You need Elisa. Yet, importantly, you need yourself." Statement.
"If we are to choose our salvation... tell me. What choices are in front of us?"
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
"... my mind, too, is torn between," Yuliana explains, frowning, looking away. "They call it madness. They know nothing of nothing!"
Sonia tries to unravel Yuliana's pronouns, and Yuliana watches her, and looks through her, and finally her expression gentles.
"It is more accurate to say I am needed. And yes... I need my dear Dr. Kafim. More than anything..." It hurts, to be away from her. It hurts.
She closes her eyes; she takes a breath. She looks to Sonia, again. "Come to me," she says, again. "Come to me, and bear witness to her work. Oh, she is such an artist... such wonders does she craft from Her gifts!" Wonders, perhaps, like the kaiju?
Yuliana doesn't say.
"Oh, my mortality is a stain on the piece," she says, instead, enraptured. Her eyes fall a little to the left of Sonia, again. "Yet I am lock and key to the gate of Her, and through me must she open the way!"
Yuliana sags, just so, in her bindings. A deep sigh. "So this world may be embraced by the truth," she insists, vague. "By Her hands and Her hands and Her hands... She who makes the Void Her home."
<Pose Tracker> Sonia Sophia-Grace has posed.
Sonia shrugs. "Madness is often used as a term to explain things one doesn't want to know or what they refuse to learn. They call it madness because they don't understand it. You understand it." She says, plainly.
Yuliana is enraptured by the concept of Her, the one above them both, that rules as much as she en-homes the void. There is another whisper, a flicker of understanding in Sonia's eyes. This would be a easier conversation if Yuliana hadn't been locked off by Her (... and, in a sense, Yuliana herself, Sonia suspects-), but there is the offer. If the Warden, if the snipers don't give her any any signal of whether it is acceptable or not, she makes her own decision, standing abruptly from her chair.
"Tell me, Yuliana." She murmurs, softly. "Show me, if that way you must."
<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.
There's that glimmer of understanding, in Sonia's eyes, and Yuliana's narrow. She smiles, just so. Her hands flex, as they can, in their bindings; she tilts her wrist aside, to curl her fingers in.
"Come here," she bids her, though she's in no position to command.
But the warden's voice cuts in, through the cell, before Sonia can follow through on her directive. "Step away from the prisoner, Captain Sophia-Grace," he directs her, firmly. "Please exit the cell immediately."
"He doesn't want you to know the truth," Yuliana sighs, beleagured. "You'd best follow his advice... else I may regret it."
The door opens to her; it will not open again, once she steps through. The warden takes her by the arm, and leads her away.
"Are you all right?" Is the last thing Yuliana can catch from him, before they disappear, into a hall. "It looked as if she was... influencing you..."
Sonia will receive a full mental debriefing alongside her report, and prompt release to NERV's care.
(Subsequent investigations will not reveal any hint of mental influence or mind control; Yuliana's fervency was not supernaturally compelling.)