2023-02-09: What Can A Train Teach You?
- Log: What Can A Train Teach You?
- Cast: Knight, Shozo
- Where: Riksent's Finest Beaches
- Date: 2023-02-09
- Summary: A strange child appears to Knight. Knight evaluates him, and offers him guidance. Shozo learns about trains!
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
Riksent's beaches are a fabulous draw. Travelling out of France, Knight's found himself in this independent nation -- he has a real passport, thanks to his human friends, so crossing the border isn't a problem for him. (The passport is a little... fabricated, but, well, Knight's existence isn't exactly something which forms deal well with.)
Dressed in a much more put-together suit, with one single sword in a sheathe behind him -- held on his person, not in his person -- Knight walks, quite deliberately, down a wooden pier. There are no boats lashed to it, in the middle of the day. Their voyages have already begun, and will not end 'til sundown. The pier creaks as if it is old. It isn't.
He looks out over the water, blue to blue-green to deep and dark. He crouches down, and picks up a shard of sandstone, perhaps chipped from one of those ancient storefronts on the shore. He tosses it in his hand, once. Twice. The weight is textured and bird-boned, for all it's called a stone.
Knight tosses it out over the water, and it rises in a satisfyingly long arc before it plomps in between those quiet waves.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
KRAK.
Just as the stone makes contact with the water, a finger pokes through the space above the beach, not 30 feet away from the pier where Knight stands, revealing a swirling red behind the sunny blue. From there, cracks begin to spiderweb outwards, until a human-sized chunk of the firmament simply shatters, falling into a crimson abyss and letting Shozo hop out. He lets out a childish "Wah!" as his shoes sink into the soft sand, clearly unprepared for such a drastic change in terrain, and he falls back a moment after the cracks in reality seal up and disappear, sending him onto his back.
"Mmmm... The ground feels weird here..." he mutters, nevertheless staying there, laying in the sand. "Bright, too..."
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
Reality splinters.
Knight turns, at once, and draws his sword, looking down at the intrusion.
("Holy crap," a woman sunning herself under a beach umbrella exclaims to her girlfriend, on the wrong side of the pier to see what's happening with Shozo. "Who just carries a sword around?!" And the other woman slides her sunglasses down as she looks over, and explains: "It's obviously just a replica from the museum, sweetie.")
But -- 'wah!' says the intrusion into reality, and Knight frowns, regarding Shozo from behind the tip of his katana. He regards him in silence for a moment more, lips pressed tightly together. He evaluates the situation.
At length, he sheathes his sword.
Knees bending, calves tightening, Knight leaps from the pier down onto the sand. There's a light, distributed noise as his weight settles there; his centre of gravity lowers, before he straightens up, a conversational six feet away.
"Who are you," Knight says, stoic, hands empty of weapons. "And why have you come?"
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo sits up, having made a sand angel, and looks up at Knight, staring at him with those unquestionably alien eyes.
"Cooooool..." He mumbles, floating onto his feet as if weightless. "I've never seen a kaiju like you... Oh!" He suddenly leans in, unintentionally presenting his neck to the swordsman as if totally unconcerned. "Are you Knight?"
He begins to walk around Knight, examining him with a big, childish grin on his face. "Borr didn't say you had gotten tall! That's awesome!"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
Knight's eye -- the visible one, not the one hidden beneath his bangs -- is a deeply human blue. That eye watches Shozo as he floats, and thinks at once of aliens.
He nods, curt and sharp, when Shozo asks whether he's Knight. A short, wordless grunt, pulsing in his throat to press from his tongue to his teeth.
He keeps his eyes on Shozo, as he circles him.
Borr... his eye narrows, just so, as he identifies his identification.
"I'm no longer a kaiju," he informs him, matter-of-fact.
"I see you've come to meet me." One of his questions was answered, though it might not look that way; his curiosity and whence he came is, implicitly, a reason. "Tell me who you are."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo stops his little walkaround and snaps his arms to his sides, smiling widely at Knight.
"I'm Shozo!" he chirps, as if that's the only thing that needed to be said. He does tilt his head at the hyper agent's other statement, however.
"Not a kaiju... No, you're not a kaiju anymore, huh? You're like Gridman now..." He pulls out the Battlenizer from his pocket and holds it in both hands.
"Look mister, he's not a kaiju anymore. If that's the case, maybe you can be the real thing someday yourself, huh?" The device emanates a powerful glow in response, Shozo nodding as if hearing a cogent response. "I know it's a little different, but that's what you want, right?"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Shozo," Knight confirms, verbalises, acknowledges.
Once upon a time, Ako Furuma helped him think about the names people use to refer to others. 'Nicknames', she called them. Signals to confirm to someone what their relationship was like. On that day, he decided he would use their full names.
This, too, is a signal: that he considers their whole selves when he looks to them.
He applies this same courtesy to Shozo, though his name has only one part.
He notes, too, Shozo's regard for his Battlenizer, spoken to as a person. He looks at it, carefully, from a distance. His head tilts, just so. "You have a connection," he asks, though his voice doesn't rise at the end like questions usually do. "You're working together." Another question, phrased as a statement.
"I chose to be this way." That one is a statement, though the shift in speech is carried only in the way he straightens up to say it. "The 'real deal'... is something I changed to become."
He asks, and his voice does lift at the end, this time: "Is that what you want, Shozo?"
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo looked up at Knight, those alien eyes staring at Knight as though he were looking through him.
"I don't know what I want," he said, voice softer now. "I know what he wants." He looks down at the Battlenizer, his grip of the device changing to that of a parent cradling their child.
"He won't tell me how many times he was ripped apart, beaten, shattered, broken. He was made in the image of a great hero, with all of his powers, all of his memories, and a body of steel." There was a distance in his tone now, one that did not fit the speaker as he began to pace, still carrying the device with a strange reverence.
"He was built by a great devil. All for the sake of training his own monster, for showing his brothers the myriad hells that would await their youngest, the one that dared to fight him. None of them remember him, but he remembers the pain on all of their faces. He remembers them, like he remembers them. Growing up alongside them, watching their stories of heroism, leaping forth to begin a legend of his own... but his memories are not his. He knows they're not his. He was never a hero. But he would like to be."
Shozo looks up at Knight, smiling again. "Maybe you can help him too. After all, you were both made in the image of another, no?"
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
One desire is set; one still undefined.
Knight nods, and listens, as Shozo talks about -- his Battlenizer? Certainly it seems that way, to him. Violence forgotten and remembered, deliberately designed...
"Yes," he concludes, stern. "I was created by a devil to copy the strengths of my opponents. I analysed the greatest strength I faced. In time, I became Gridknight. I was able to do this when I no longer defined myself in opposition to Gridman. When I could choose for myself."
He's not much of a smiler, but he doesn't seem like that sort of person. "We may begin as tools of devils, but it is not the only end we may choose." It's stern, but he is trying to give him actionable advice.
Like this: "Learn what it is you want, as well, Shozo. Then, you will make be able to choices which define yourself."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo nods, smiling, then pauses.
"Oh- wait, wait wait wait, are you talking about me?" He blinks, tilting his head. "No, I'm talking about Mister in here." He lifts the Battlenizer up to Knight's face. "He's in here except when I let him out. I don't think he's a tool, but he has to do what I say..." He presses the device to his chest, smiling at it.
"I'm not a monster, I don't think. I'm probably worse? Alexis seemed pretty excited to see me, and Kaworu made it seem like that's probably a bad thing..." He clears his throat, and begins to speak in a perfect recreation of the villain's voice yet again.
"Oh, this is quite a lot to take in. You're a brand new entity, then. You've picked an interesting place to make yourself known." Shozo looks up at Knight. "I wonder what choices I have?" he says softly as his voice returns to his own.
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"No." Knight clarifies, for Shozo, though he lets him speak before he does. "We. He and I. That's why I gave you advice, as well."
(He has to do what Shozo says. Knight notes this, as well, but offers no immediate comment.)
Shozo thinks he's worse, though, and Knight will give weight to his personal determination of his self. "Alexis Kerib cannot be trusted," he advises him, and his lips thin to a line as they press tightly together. "He is the devil who created me. He lost his victims... so he'll search for someone else."
Like Shozo, implicitly.
"You can choose to walk," he says, instead. "The way you appeared will present you as an enemy to the world. Your eyes do the same."
He takes a step away from the sea, gesturing to Shozo, with a hand.
"I can show you how to catch the train."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo tilted his head at Knight.
"What's a train?" he asks, innocence returning to his voice. Nonetheless, he takes Knight's hand, and grips it tightly. He has small hands -- warm hands.
"Mmm... Enemy..." he mumbles, and a small section of sky next to his face cracks. A moment later, however, it is repaired, and he looks back up at Knight, beaming.
<Pose Tracker> Knight has posed.
"Transport for humans," Knight explains. He can cope with a tight grip. His is not too tight, though his fingers curl around Shozo's hand, when he expresses the desire to be guided this way. "Trains are connected to human hearts. Through them, they cross great distances... unpassable distances... to reach each other."
The sky cracks. Knight knows this.
"How you engage with the world is your choice," he says, sidelong.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo nods, now excited.
"I want to see the train," he says firmly, and tugs gently at Knight to take him to the train station.
Does he fully understand Knight's words about engaging with the world? Who knows? In this moment, he is once again a child, and an immutable fact of reality is that children love trains.