2023-03-27: Return! Monster or Not?
- Log: 2023-03-27- Return! Monster or Not?
- Cast: Akane Shinjo, Shozo
- Where: Tsutsujidai - Outside Junk Shop Aya
- OOC - IC Date: 0097-03-27
- Summary: After some decidedly non-routine tests of GaoFighGar, Akane considers whether to check in on her old home or Aya during a brief break. In the end, she does neither.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
From Orbit Base... right back to Tsutsujidai. While she's still having a little trouble relating to the city for lots of reasons, there are now some functional reasons she needs to stop by now and again. Her recent use of GaoFighGar has raised a lot of questions, some of which can only be tested in Tsutsujidai; it'd be cruel to make her spend all day on the Wadatsumi, though.
Accordingly, she's out on the town. Now's as good a time as any to consider whether she wants to retrieve a few more things from that cavernous, empty house; she can't quite work up the courage to go in, though. She glances between her own home and Aya, looking pensive. A hand absently comes up into her dark hair, then slides out; it comes out with a tiny bit of breakage.
"Ugh," she mumbles to herself. "Need to take better care of that now, too..."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
A boy sits on the sunlit bench outside of Aya, legs kicking absently as he draws in one of several notebooks next to him. It's curious -- he's clearly not a repli-compoid, since he isn't familiar to Akane. In fact, how many children had Akane even made in Tsutsujidai?
Furthermore, what was a kid doing in front of Aya of all places?
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
It's that feeling again...
Akane feels something in her gut recoil as she sees the unknown figure. It's a familiar sensation -- she'd noticed it here and there at prom, before she'd ditched with Rikka to go make out at the floodgate. But... it's just a kid. An unfamiliar kid, at that -- one who doesn't vibe quite like the city, even as the city's become so much bigger than it was.
... there's no way through this gut feeling but to confront it, though. She approaches him, moving away from her home and toward Aya. "Hey," she starts. "I don't think I've seen you around before."
Despite her effort to remain calm, one of her hands shakes involuntarily.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
The child looks up and --
The eyes.
Glowing red crosses -- just like his -- within yellow orbs. He stares for a moment, and word leaves his lips, almost involuntarily.
"Sparkling..."
He seems to have a realization himself a moment later, catching sight of her trembling fingers, and hops behind the bench, putting on the pair of sunglasses that was hanging from his collar.
"Oh, I'm... I'm sorry if I'm..." Now that he's standing, he's so... small.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Those bright crosses -- they're familiar. Gold and red -- the same as... rather many people, actually. It's a common thread in Akane's life, lately, those two colors time and time again.
"I -- no, this one's on me," Akane says, her gaze turning away from Shozo. She's always had trouble meeting intense eyes -- though this is a different sort of intensity than Akane's used to trying to meet. "Why're you hanging out here?" Her posture shrinks just a bit, as if trying to make herself smaller. "... Wait." She sorts through her memories, and...
"Are you Shozo? The kid Borr's taking care of?" That seems to get her to calm down a bit, though the fear is still quite plain in her body language. "Akane Shinjo," she volunteers, after a moment.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Those strange eyes widen with excitement -- though Shozo quickly reels his hype back in for the sake of not further upsetting Akane.
"Yeah, I'm Shozo -- you're Akane?" He puts his sketchbook down on the bench to hang on the back of it.
"Everyone's told me something about you..." He tries to smile. "They said you're super cool... It's nice to meet you."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Yeah," Akane confirms; she starts to level off, bit by bit, as Shozo affords her her space. It's not that the reflexive fear is lessening at all, and indeed Akane's physical reaction remains the same... but the fear isn't getting fed, and she has something else to handle.
"I've heard a little about you, too," she starts. "You're apparently really insightful. I hear it kinda messes with Vit... I get it. Whenever I notice something about Guy and actually say it, it goes about the same. He thinks he's so slick... nah. We can tell."
She glances at the sketchbook. "Didn't hear you drew, though. That's cool. I do too." ... this is someone the Gridman Alliance cares about; she doesn't want to hurt him. It takes effort to swallow her reactions, but... she can handle it.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo sinks down behind the bench to let Akane sit free out of his gaze.
"...Um, it's OK if you're not comfortable with me," he says, drumming his fingers on his thigh.
"Nobody told me the details of what you went through, but... I met Al-er... the guy who ruined your life for a while. I see how I'm, um... similar to him. You don't owe me time 'r attention, especially if it makes you feel bad." Trying to avoid feeling rejection, he starts sketching quietly, keeping his mind focused.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
How does she even explain this? "I --" she starts, when Shozo clearly does his best to cede space to her. She's learning to appreciate that -- if only because the alternative is falling back into the same cruelties she used to. "It's... not your fault," she says. "There's something about you that's..."
She takes a quarter step back, trying to cede the space back to Shozo -- then stepping forward, instead. "C'mon. Take a seat," she says, patting next to herself. "If Alexis is interested in you... that guy is horrible. Don't trust him." The anxiety remains, even as she does her best to tamp it down.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo crawls out from behind the bench, but sits down on the pavement, making sure to give Akane more space.
"I'm... the same sort of thing as him..." he says quietly. "I don't trust him, even a little, but... I wish there was a chance he could be better. I tried to see if I could do that, and I failed, and..." He tries to stop the tears welling up in his eyes. "I learned that I never had a chance..." Now he's the one shaking, biting his lip and trying not to make Akane more uncomfortable.
"S-so I understand why you're uncomfortable."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Why is she so uncomfortable? Shozo isn't... that upsetting, and he's making such an effort. Akane looks down at her own lap. She feels like a heel for thinking like this.
"You don't seem as much like him as you make it sound like," she offers, though it's a pretty tentative offer. "You're kinda scary in a way he isn't, but you also seem like you actually mean the stuff you say? It's... different."
... right. The conversations aren't going to get easier, Akane. Use your words, she tells herself. "... Something about you just feels like you're gonna grab me and put me in your pocket, though? It's not the feeling I got from Alexis all the time -- just the one from right before he turned me into..."
... she trails off, trying to puzzle out why it feels that way, now that it's said.
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo nods, sniffing and wiping his face.
"A kaiju?" The way he said it didn't feel judgmental, but there was a bleak silence in the air that came from his knowledge- he really WAS perceptive.
"Kaiju... fear me. Because I can make them obey me. Or at least... my father can. He passed that power, that role, onto me." He pulls out the Battlenizer and puts it carefully between himself and Akane. It's... oddly soothing, the sight of it providing a pathway through that aura of fear.
"If I use this, I can establish a bond, but without it, I can just..." He clasps his hands together.
"It would be bad. For both of us."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
The unnatural sense of dread gives way to something else. "A -- bond? Obey?" Akane says, now cautious for a whole different reason. It abates for a moment when she sees the Battlenizer -- but part of her second guesses that first reaction in exactly the same way she'd forced herself to second-guess the fear.
Her body locks up; she opens her mouth to speak, but a dry, dehydrated cracking noise comes out before anything else.
"... It would be bad," she forces herself to say, and agree, and tell herself that Shozo really does agree too. "Don't --." She could spare more words; she does not.
Her arms draw up and around herself. Again, she forces herself to try.
"... I'm glad -- you have people like Gridman and his friends," she says, haltingly. ... what else can she say? "You can make a lot of mistakes with power like that."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo's breath catches as he notices Akane's initial reaction.
"N-no, I don't want to-" His hands ball up into fists, and he pulls them to his chest, as though he's trying to beat the words out of himself. He fails, and a few moments later, he sits back down, tears filling his eyes.
"It's... so easy..." he whimpers. "They made it so easy for me... and I have to stop myself because I know it's wrong. But everyone still sees what they made me, even if I try to be something different." He wipes his face again, nodding as Akane brings up Gridman and the others.
"They helped you too, right?" he mumbles. "You made... all this. Even though it's real now, I can still see your handwriting. The only places I see his are the dark parts... and that house." He looks up at Akane's house, then back at her.
"Gridman and the others helped bring you out of there."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Taking a long breath in, then exhaling slowly as she tries to calm herself down, Akane lets Shozo speak. ... he really doesn't seem to want to take her, in that way. Good.
"Sorry," Akane answers him, first, after a long silence as she tries to figure out what to say. "I'm still not really..." What can she even say? 'I don't know if I'm a kaiju or a person'? 'I don't trust my own feelings'?
So she says nothing. "They did," she adds. That part's easier. "And yeah, I did. It... I wanted it to be somewhere I could run away from how bad the world was."
Her eyes shut. "Now I'm just worried the world's gonna swallow it up, still. ... I know a lot of people want to fight for it, though."
For me, she thinks. "I hope I can be the kind of friend Gridman is, someday."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
"You're a person."
Could the kid read minds? He slowly reaches out to pick up the Battlenizer.
"I know what kaiju look like. I can see them. Would you like to know how I see you?" he asks innocently, reaching for the sketchbook. Pulling the pencil from his ear, he begins to sketch at incredible speed, offering the page to Akane when he was done.
It was beautiful. Clad in an elegant outfit reminiscent of nobility and heroism, the depiction of Akane was radiant, crowned with sparkling crosses of light. At her feet were shards of chitin that were recognizably the discarded pieces of Zegga, fallen away.
"People do want to swallow it up," Shozo says quietly. "Places where peace can flourish are offensive to those that thrive on war." The way he spat those words bitterly made it clear that the strange boy had some kind of experience on that front.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane takes the picture, slowly. She looks down at it, and tries to look to Shozo.
She can't quite manage it. Her gaze hits his shoulder, stops, and then turns back away -- but the effort she's made to try is obvious.
"This...?" she starts, staring at it, incredulous. She sees so much in it -- a god, a hero, a human.
A friend.
... She visibly relaxes, though, once she really takes it all in. "Can I keep this...?" she asks, tentatively.
The other comment, though... "Yeah. But... maybe if a city like this one could make people like Gridman, Utsumi, and Rikka... maybe -- it'll be okay."
She pauses, reaching into her own bag and pulling out a piece of paper and a mechanical pencil; she hastily writes down her VERTEX information. "Maybe it'll be easier for us to talk online? I definitely think, uh... whatever I am now is making this a lot harder."
Say it, she tells herself. Practically wrings out of herself. But it does come. "Thanks."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo nods enthusiastically to Akane's request.
"Of course," he says, smiling warmly with tear-stained cheeks, uncaring that Akane still isn't comfortable looking at him. "I made it for you, after all. Never hurts to take a moment to look at yourself honestly, right?" His smile continues to brighten as Akane keeps speaking about her friends.
"That's the spirit. I love this place. I want to protect it. You did a really good job, nee-san. Oop!" Shozo covers his mouth, blushing.
"Sorry, Miss Akane. I didn't mean to say it like that."
When she hands Shozo the paper with her VERTEX details on it, he takes it gratefully.
"Um, I haven't set up the phone Borr gave me yet, but I'm going to now, after... some stuff that happened. It'll probably be better for you too." He backed away some, and... how long had he been in shadow?
Towering over him was the transparent silhouette of a tremendous giant. There was a warmth to it, similar to Gridman, but much, much older, and much... sadder. The giant reached down, and Shozo lifted up the Battlenizer.
"Mister, you woke up!"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane takes a little more care with this than most of her goods; she takes the time to fold it to commuter pass size, then slides it into her commuter pass case. (She's loath to fold it, but she's good at getting creases back out of paper, when she bothers to try.)
'Nee-san' makes Akane turn to face Shozo not out of warmth but tension -- and then he backs off, and... it actually does more to comfort her than if there hadn't been the accidental over-intimacy at all.
That shadow extends over them, though, and --
"Oh, is this...?" Akane recognizes the Ace Robot from the Phoenix Hunt, though it takes her a second to place the silhouette. "Huh... I was really scared of this -- though I might have actually been picking you up, 'cuz right now it doesn't seem any scarier than anything else." A pause. "Maybe less scary! ... kinda sad, honestly... Feels like it's been through a lot."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo blinks at Akane's recognition of the Ace Robot's presence.
"Oh, you can feel him...?" He puts a hand on the transparent fingertip of the titanic robot. "Mister must trust you too, then. He's still recovering," he says softly.
"He was never the scary one. I was." Shozo's shoulders slump, and the child looks terribly exhausted. "He's saved me several times now, but I just cause him pain..." There is a sense of deep love and compassion from the robot as it sinks to the ground, shaking its head. Shozo sniffles and wipes his nose. "I love you too."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Huh. Maybe. ... I've always had kinda a gut sense for kaiju, too..." Akane appreciates that a little more now that the loudest kaiju-feeling in every room she's in isn't, generally, hers.
Hearing that it was, indeed, Shozo who had her so offput during the start of the Phoenix Hunt seems to relieve some tension in her. "I don't think pain's always a bad thing. It hurt to get out of here," she admits. "If he's doing it out of love for you, like... appreciate it, but don't let it eat you up, I guess?"
Laughing nervously before bringing a hand up to her head and rubbing just above her eyebrow, she concedes, "Maybe I dunno what I'm saying. I thought 'Mister' was a Vessel of Light at first?" A pause, before she reflects, "Maybe it kinda is." Not human, orients on human pain, moves to alleviate it...
... maybe that was right after all. "Ahaha, feeling like this and seeing it seriously made me think I was losing it... it's pretty nice here though."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo smiles as Akane correctly lands on key elements of the Ace Robot's nature.
"Hehe, sorta. Mister is based off of an Ultra that my father hates more than anything. As much as I hate to admit it, he did a really, really good job. Mister has all that Ultra's memories and powers too."
The reason why Shozo's father would create such a being hangs heavy in silence over them.
"He lives in my Battlenizer so that we can keep our bond and I can empower him when need be. That's probably why you assumed he was me when we were fighting."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Wow, that's... the memories, too?" That's a familiar feeling. Creating something with hopes, feelings, memories... "Why would he do that? Just..." Hm. Well, no, Akane reflects -- creating something high-fidelity, but which you hate...
... she breathes out, slowly, again. "That makes sense," she adds, at the practical explanation. "As long as you let him stay an, uh, ally of justice or whatever, I think that's going to be a good relationship for both of you."
A 'good relationship' with what amounts to a kaiju, huh.
"I gotta get going soon... there's a lot I gotta do while I'm here and not a ton of time. But it was..." Was it nice? Feeling this dread -- and yet, this kindness, too? What was it?
... yeah. "nice," she affirms. "To meet you. Maybe we can talk again soon! Especially when you get your phone set up."
<Pose Tracker> Shozo has posed.
Shozo nods with a big grin, the excitement of a child back on his face.
"Don't worry about that. Nobody's a bigger hero than Mister," he chirps, and a sensation of warmth can be felt from the titanic robot, towards both of them. "I trust him to keep me good too." As Akane announces her departure, Shozo nods understandingly.
"It was really nice talking to you, Miss Akane. I think I understand why everyone had so many nice things to say about you." He puts the slip with Akane's contact in his jacket pocket.
"I'll send you a message when I can!"
With that, he gave a friendly little bow of farewell and ran into Aya, the giant behind him nodding at Akane before disappearing.