2023-06-14: Old / New ~VANTAGE~
- Log: Old / New ~VANTAGE~
- Cast: Permanence Pasternak (NPCed by Ruri Hoshino), Akane Shinjo
- Where: The Ra Mari II
- Date: 2023-06-14
- Summary: Akane helps an ill middle-aged woman get to the cafeteria, only to find that she's an absolutely ancient labrat, by labrat standards, having a bad labrat day. Permanence checks in with her, after her own experiences on the Garuda, and gives her the space to verbalise some of her own pain. They share VERTEXes, and a hope to connect in the future.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
The Ra Mari II is vast.
And sometimes, like, it's WAY TOO VAST?
Just, objectively speaking.
Permanence Pasternak called in on her shift today; sometimes her body hates her, and these days, no one gets around that by injecting her full of combat drugs and telling her to get it done anyway. It just kind of means she gets to exist with a heart which can't keep time to the beat and a brain which scrambles itself into nonsense, weak lungs and aching muscles and tortured joints. (And that's leaving aside the toxicity they've left to her liver, with so many medications; the doctors assure her it will heal, but that's a matter of years, not months. One more thing to keep track of.)
It's -- locally, going by the shade of the lights -- some equivalent to the middle of the afternoon, by the time she manages to convince herself to get some measure of dressed (loose clothing, all baby-blue cotton, clasped at the front; nothing which requires overhead movements or a lot of dexterity) and drag herself out to at least not lie in bed all day. It's fine, really; she has a cane, for days like this, so she can at least get out to the closest cafeteria. (Again, cannot emphasise this enough: the Ra Mari II is Big. It is so big. There is not just one place to eat.)
And if her bun looks like she put it up yesterday and if she's holding onto that cane with a bit of a death grip as she makes her way out there, well.
That's normal.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Officially, 3G probably shouldn't send someone to go talk to the 3SA for a little while. Unofficially, however, this isn't even the first time that 3G's gotten entangled with a semi-internal, semi-external rebellion in the Federation so it'll probably work itself out.
Besides, getting out of Tsutsujidai for a day really can't hurt Akane, here; the day after her... half-argument with Namiko, she started getting anxious about small missing items in their food delivery. Orie, in her infinite wisdom, told her to spend at least a day doing literally anything else but being in Tsutsujidai before she got weird about it again.
So now, she's here! On the Ra Mari II! Which is -- well, if ever there was a 'bigger world' to handle, this is it, huh.
Akane has already had the meetings with the Three Ships Alliance she was requested to handle; they're mostly boring, functional follow-up regarding the Vist Foundation. Now she's wandering -- and hungry, to boot, which means she ends up at the cafeteria. As a result, she in turn ends up about three feet from Permanence.
Normally she might give this a pass? But part of her 'homework assignment' is to talk to other people for reasons other than functional ones, which means, after a few seconds, the dark-haired girl offers an awkward, "... Hi. Do you need a hand?"
(She's in the 3G Blue uniform. It's very brightly colored and hard to miss.)
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
The afternoon lights, Permanence decides, are DEFINITELY too bright. And all those background Monitor noises? Way too many of them. Fuck all of that.
So the fun thing about grumpiness and chronic illness is it just ages you terribly, which is why the first thing she thinks of, seeing a teenager in an Official GGG Uniform rock up, is to glower and grumble: "I'm not that fuckin' old --"
At which point she hisses her breath out through her teeth, and leans a little more heavily on her walking aid. "No, no, I'm being a dick, you're fine. Just having a bad health day, here. They reckon I should at least... get out and have something to eat when this happens, something about my circulation, I don't fucking know," her eyes screw shut, for a moment. Her tone falls down, a notch, as she asks: "If you wanna just maybe... stick around a second, call someone if I fall on my ass again... that'd be great." And she takes a second to breathe, before she starts on towards the cafeteria, again.
"... you... an intern, or something?" She asks, glancing over to her. (It's not like she's setting a challenging pace.) "I like your hood. Real fierce."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane immediately flinches when she's snapped at -- but recovers fairly quickly when Permanence acknowledges the being a dick. She resists the urge to lead with 'I can tell,' instead saying, "Jeez, rough... yeah, I can stick with you." She then moves to do -- just that!
"Yeah, actually. I was in Mobile Corps operations, but after some stuff happened, I thought Intelligence would work out better and asked for a transfer," Akane answers, with a slightly tense laugh. "3G kinda ends up hiring most of its biggest problems once they stop being problems, but... eehh, actually, maybe the whole story's a little long. Uh -- Akane Shinjo." She has no idea if her reputation is going to precede her here, and isn't actually sure which way she'd want that to break.
Mentioning the hood breaks through the tension in short order. "Oh -- thanks! 3G uniform policy's pretty lax, and I'm used to wearing this kinda thing..."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Permanence shakes her head, with a rueful grin. "You can say it," she assures her, offhand. "But -- thanks."
She's just kind of 'listening politely' as Akane talks about herself as a massive problem, and clearly doesn't recognise her infamy at all. At least not until a name comes up, at which point a light bulb (ow) lights up over her head, too. "Oh, shit," she double-takes, looking over to her. "You were one of the kids on the Garuda, right?"
Wait, THAT'S where she knows her from?!
"Name's Permanence -- Permanence Pasternak," and she kind of has to give her the wrong hand to shake, because she still hasn't let go of her cane. "Normally I'm more put-together, promise. I don't have these days so much as I used to, now I'm out... but our uniform's a bit too rough on me with days like this."
The cafeteria, thankfully, isn't so far away, and with Akane's watchful assistance Permanence manages to enter the room and take a seat at one of the tables. "Thanks again," she says, a little wince as she settles down. "I'm just gonna -- sit here a bit before I think of getting anything, I reckon. Uh, hey, are you busy, or...?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Being known as a victim -- which is absolutely how Akane parses that being Permanence's first point of reference -- leaves a bit of a sour taste in Akane's mouth. It's one she can clear, but it doesn't feel good. "Yeah," she says, a little limply -- when she's offered a handshake, though, she reaches out and accepts it.
Her grip is a little too strong, a little too tight for someone as small as she is -- not crushing, but it's obvious she actively pushes herself to grip firmly. As a lefty, she doesn't mind shaking with the 'wrong' hand, either.
"Don't worry about it," Akane says, waving it off after the handshake. She's had her own share of physically miserable days since getting out of Tsutsujidai. Even the act of acclimating to 'having a body that needs food' again wasn't great, let alone meds changes. It's given her a little extra humility about this sort of thing.
"It's nice to meet you, Pasternak!" She knows foreigners don't use quite the same form-of-address structure, but... all things being equal, she does prefer the surname. (First-name yobisute with someone she doesn't know that well feels extra awkward now, for some reason.)
She keeps moving with Permanence, giving her a nod as they settle in. "Nah -- I did the check-ins I needed to already. Since then I've mostly been taking care of Rikka -- uh, I'm her girlfriend -- but I was getting weird about stuff and her mom told me to get out of the house for a day or two, so I'm kinda just killing time." A beat. "Why, what's up?"
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Permanence can hear the contrast between that limp voice and her firm handshake, if nothing else. It's a point of conflict, huh?
Her own grip is -- well. It could be a lot stronger than it is, in more than one sense of the word.
"Oh, would you prefer Shinjo?" She asks, with mild surprise, before she places the name, and -- "Right, right, the Japanese are like that, too. Sorry, I never was well-travelled, before I came here." It's... half a lie. She's travelled to plenty of places.
Just, you know, to kill people.
There wasn't much socialising involved.
"Ah, you get stuck in your head, huh?" She grins, with a look of comprehension, before she rubs at her wrist. "You know," she smiles, a little ruefully, "it's not really a big deal. You don't really want some old bastard like me nosing in on your shit, right? Someone like me still feels a lot of obligation to take care of kids who get chewed up by fuckin' science, but it's not about me, really. Congrats on getting yourselves out of there."
A beat, and she adds: "You should get something to eat while you're here, though. Just before everyone sends you running off taking care of five hundred fetch quests."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"... really, like -- anything but 'Akane-kun' is fine?" Akane answers. She manages a smile as she notes, "Akane-ojousama's off the table too but, like. That's way, way out there, haha..."
When Permanence explains herself, Akane gives her a nod. "Thanks," she says -- though she catches on something in Permanence's words. ... she'll ask after she gets food because she's legitimately incredibly hungry. "It was pretty rough, but... at least we're in the 'what comes next' part, you know?"
Before she goes to snag food, she asks, "Oh, uh -- do you want me to get yours too? I don't mind." Feeding people is always Akane's favorite activity. One way or the other, she does go and get food, though, and when she's back...
"'Someone like you,' though, huh..." She settles in with her food and -- if Permanence requested it -- hers, too. "I'm not gonna pry if you don't wanna, but I don't mind hearing it. ... Did someone like Dr. Murasame put you through the wringer, too?"
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Ahh, might just stick with Shinjo, if it's all the same to you, I don't really..." Judging by how accented her English is, Permanence probably doesn't speak Japanese at all. She trails off, though; she's embarrassed to say it.
... how little does someone have to travel to not know Japanese, in this day and age?
"Oh, uh -- sure, since you don't mind, thanks," Permanence nods, to Akane. "They know me here, so --" And, indeed, the man at the counter has already seen her come in, so he's got a tray sitting there for her. He gets Akane something to eat, too!
(He knows better than to bring Permanence's lunch over to her without her asking for it. She can still be pretty prideful, even given everything.)
Lunch for her is a sandwich, a cup of tea, and some leafy salad which was almost certainly frozen and defrosted but which at least makes an effort not to be ultra-processed. Everything is recognisably the ingredient it is, and there are no bars of anything on her tray.
"Ahh... something like that," she smiles, trying the fork on her salad, her expression a little shadowed. (She finds that she's able to handle it fine enough to not embarrass herself in front of the kid, at least. Well, that's progress. Those patches they gave her for days like this work, isn't that nice?) "It's a long story, though... I don't know that you'd be old enough to know the Second Huffman Conflict. To cut it short, there was a raid on the lab I was in, earlier this year -- they got us out, and I decided I'd rather follow a couple of 'em back here instead of going to another fucking facility. These days I'm a custodian, suits me better... still recovering, but I'm doing pretty good."
Beat,
"I mean, I'm dogshit today," Permanence adds, glancing down to her 'I absolutely cannot dress myself in anything more painful than this old-lady getup' self, "but that's the nature of the beast, right? You don't always go up, you're not always getting better. Sometimes your heart falls outta rhythm and you fall the fuck over, sometimes your brain falls outta rhythm and you fall the fuck over, sometimes your joints fuck up and -- you get me," she cuts herself off, clicking her tongue to her teeth. "You get me. But I was way worse, when I got here... so, you know, it's getting better. Just takes time. Like -- a truly fucking unreasonable amount of time," she adds, with a rueful grin, "but I guess you don't age so quick when you're not in that situation, eh?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Yeah, that's fine," Akane affirms, before actually snagging the food.
(Akane has a hot dog with bean sprouts. It's not quite the egg-lettuce-radish sprouts-cucumber combo she had once while she was moving to Nouvelle Tokyo and which got enshrined in her brain as peak food, but it's still -- for ship food -- pretty good.)
Leaning in toward Permanence, Akane listens to her story. "Huh? That's like..." don't say forever ago don't say forever ago "A few years before the One Year War, right? No, yeah, I know about that stuff... or at least, like, I've heard about it. My mom was getting back from doing salvage stuff there when she met my dad, I guess." The mention of a lab catches her off guard, though. Her knowledge isn't that high-resolution.
Straightening herself out just a touch, Akane... well, she can open up a bit in response, too. It feels more fair that way -- at least, for her. "Yeah, I can get that. That's actually more or less how I ended up with 3G. Before this stuff, this alien" (surely a Zentradi, right? ... right?) "sort of adopted me, but it was really, like... a BioNet thing but a complicated one? And I didn't wanna stay where I was, and I didn't want to go back to my crappy apartment either, so..." She tugs at the uniform vest. "It... sounds like it's actually kind of a common story, huh."
Conspiratorially, she whispers, "The first meds they put me on after that gave me super bad nausea about three weeks in..." She avoids sharing that one usually, but it actually feels appropriate for once to share it. "I'm -- glad to hear it's getting better! This ship seems like a pretty okay environment for that kinda thing."
Akane slurps at a boxed lemonade. Not her favorite thing in the world -- not salty, not particularly robust -- but better than nothing. "Jeez though, that's like... longer in that whole thing than I've been alive. I can't even imagine." Distantly, she mumbles, "Two years was bad enough." A little louder, then: "Yeah. It can get better."
... she hopes.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Ah... '74, yeah," Permanence says, with half a shrug. "Not that they sent me out into the field until '75. They weren't... it wasn't what you'd think about, back then. No one even said the word 'Cyber-Newtype', until the State got antsy about Britannia's new patriarch and all those scientists suddenly discovered the magic of open cooperation." Which a good three years later, but Permanence glosses over that part.
She listens, as Akane shares her own history. "BioNet? -- ah, yeah, right, the blatant criminals," she asks, and places them, in neighbouring breaths. "Yeah," she frowns, and takes a bite of salad.
"It's pretty common."
Permanence grimaces, sympathetically, when Akane tells her about her nausea. "You don't have to take any of that," she tells her, firmly. "None of it, if you don't want to. That's your decision, Shinjo." Well, realising that she had the decision herself was something of a horrific revelation, but that's the reason she has patches on her skin, under these light clothes.
She can't stand taking pills, and she'll die before she lets someone else shove a needle in her again.
"But -- the Ra Mari II's been good to me," she says, and smiles again. "The Captain -- Eight York, I mean -- she's been real helpful in, like, telling me there is a future after all this shit. I... you know, I really owe her a lot. Everyone who got me out, really, but, like -- getting out's just the start of it. There's all this shit you gotta do after, or you may as well still be stuck there, just by your own damn brain."
Another bite of salad. Chomp, chomp. The chill's a little much, on her teeth, but it's fine. She'll live with it.
"...hey. Two years is enough," she tells Akane, lifting a hand in a 'halt' gesture. "Hell, two weeks is enough. We all go through our own shit when we get dehumanised like that. Some things hit different people harder... sometimes you do shit you're not proud of," she adds, a shade distantly. "But getting reduced to a function is going to suck no matter how long it's gone for. And if it sounds like it doesn't get better, right now, like -- I get that," she adds, and not unkindly. "You literally just got out of that shit. You don't need to do all the work at once... you know, it took me like a month before I'd let them do anything to really help me, here."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Oh, it's way worse than that. Like that's the vibe everyone gets since the late 80s, but that's selling them kinda short... sometimes I think the obvious stuff is almost, like, a distraction. Everyone feels good when you bring in the guy with the 20 meter tall magnet and no one pays attention to the thirty disappearances over average in Sapporo or whatever." Akane did try to treat with the worst parts of BioNet as a peer, once. She knows a little bit of what the sausage getting made looks like.
She can tell that the pills part is catching Permanence. "A -- ahah, yeah, it's not like that," she stammers out, before a bite of slightly less special dog. "Dr. Sai has been really good about that. I said I didn't want to be on this many pills because it freaked me out, so we switched some of my stuff to biweekly injections and one thing to a patch. Now it's only three a day instead of," quick mental math, "10? Eesh. And one of those is just first-generation spacenoid stuff."
Not that she takes that for first-generation spacenoid reasons, but that's neither here nor there.
It... checks, that Permanence has some opinions about medication and self-directed care, so she clarifies, "I picked that after I got off the Garuda. I hate needles and Rikka's first aid trained, so I asked her to help too. I'm about where I want to be on this stuff..."
It's... kind of nice, to be able to be this candid about it in a situation where she doesn't expect judgment. It's not that she doesn't cringe her way through the interaction a bit -- especially at first -- but she does seem to be leveling off.
"... yeah. I, uh... there was a lot I did on that ship that I don't feel great about. A lot I did while I was still under BioNet's thumb that sucked, too, but... man, I gotta think about one thing at a time." Another sip of lemonade. She can tell Permanence has some experience with this too, and while her first urge is to comfort the older woman --
-- maybe she's the one who needs the help, here.
"... while I was on the ship, I... well, like -- it was me, the girl I'm dating, and two girls I've kinda been," a vague gesture, "skinship-adjacent to, even if it's not really like that, right? So to get them to buy that I was getting worse I started acting, uh..." She looks down at her hot dog. "... gross about it. And like -- it worked, obviously? Those kinds of guys love to see you get... ground down to some kind of basic instinct, it makes them think the stuff they're doing is working. We wouldn't have gotten the kinda room to escape we got without me doing that, either."
Her tone turns sulky. "But I feel like... ggh. Ever since I got a minute to think about how Dr. Murasame just rolled with that -- and started encouraging it... it's been -- kind of hard for me to be around guys older than like, 30 or something. I already kind of had that going on but it's, uh."
Sip.
"Worse."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Shit, really?" Permanence sighs, with a moment's frustration flittering across her face. "I'm... still catching up, on a lot of this. Not many newspapers where I'm from -- not the areas I was in." She doesn't speak Japanese, she doesn't know much about the villains of the hour...
She looks sceptical about the medications, at first, but -- Akane sounds like that is how she wants them, so she nods, around another bite of salad. Swallow that, and... "So long as you're where you wanna be, that's what's important."
She is, in fact, eating her salad to avoid scrutinising Akane too hard. She does have some sense of her discomfort, given the cringing; but Akane's the one who expressed interest, so she's not going to tell her to stop for her own good, either.
(Well, not at this level of engagement, anyway.)
But -- Akane doesn't feel great about things, and Permanence listens, as she talks about it. (She doesn't understand all the lingo, but she just presumes that it means she's one of those poly-relational people. Probably still figuring it out? Definitely not her business; she's old enough to be Akane's mother.) The point is that these people who she's close to in some way which is somehow romantic are people she had to act sleazy towards, to survive in there, and Dr. Murasame...
"They're fucking predators," she settles on, after a moment. She has to take a moment to count backwards from ten in her head so she can at least try to leash the anger in her voice. "Every one of those god-damn science freaks. Even if he wasn't enjoying it in that way, he sure as hell was enjoying forcing you into that position. Sounds like I don't have to tell you it was a power thing, but shit, Shinjo. That's fucked up."
Her fingers shake, a little, as she reaches over to get her cup of tea instead. She sips at it, and focuses on the warmth, for a moment. "People like that dissect your weaknesses like you're some fucking frog they pinned to a board," which might suggest that she's at least been through high school, to call to a reference like that. "I wouldn't be surprised if he figured out your discomfort and just decided to push on the whole damn button. Like, even when the whitecoats figured out I was faking being sick -- long time back, now -- they just thought it was fascinating. I always regretted that, but those people, you know, I heard them laughing... something like that, it was funny to them."
Another sip.
"I'm gonna guess it's hard for you to talk about that... but you gotta tell someone in your program." She's gentle, saying it, but still quite firm. "Even if it feels like you were the one hurting your..." Friends? Girlfriends? There's a long, lingering pause as she tries to figure out the right word to describe what Akane tried to communicate, "comrades," Permanence takes the route of the REA coward, "it's a whole different kind of hurt to be put in a position where you feel responsible."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
There's definitely some relief in Akane at actually saying it; she doesn't feel great, but there's some sense of liberation in being able to admit the things that have been weighing on her since then, too.
"Yeah... even knowing they're predators, like. Still sucks to get chewed on." She glances down at her hot dog; her appetite is a little... less than stellar for a few moments. "And he definitely was. It kinda seemed like he found it funny! Like his whole tone was, I dunno... You know when you go to the beach with your parents and their friends and stuff when you're real little, and you fall off the paddleboard and one of them just starts... chuckling, while you're scrambling to get back on it and you feel like you're drowning? Like, 'haha, kids,' and not, 'oh jeez, hope she's okay,' you know?"
Come to think, Akane's record with water is really bad, huh.
"That was the kinda vibe the whole time. It kinda felt like he was enjoying watching me and kinda sizing me up for a lab assistant job at the same time." She shudders, at that. It was absolutely priced into how she was presenting herself, but at the same time, actually thinking about doing it... that's kind of nightmarish.
What she's told next is a little demoralizing, but at the same time... she can't say it's wrong. She finally gets back to the hot dog as she thinks it over. "I'll ask Dr. Sai if she's comfortable handling it or wants to kick it out of the org next time I go in," she answers. "I dunno if she and Alouette are actually close... I guess I should just trust her to know if she's up for it."
A little of that anxiety-tension slips out of her posture, bit by bit. "Thanks for -- going through that one with me. It's been like -- most of the people I've been hanging out with are Leina, Rikka, and Alouette's friends and family, you know? I can't put that stuff on them."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Yeah," Permanence agrees, when Akane says that it sucks. "And honestly? I bet he did. Find it funny, I mean," she thinks to clarify, in the next beat.
"It's cool," she assures her, after listening a little longer. "Just remember that you've got your own shit, even if you did shit in there. And it's not gonna get better if you just focus on other people, yeah? I'm glad you were willing to talk to me about it. Sounds like a real fuck of a bug to just be sitting in your brain."
She takes a bite of her own sandwich, to take a moment's pause. "... you know, this might be hard to hear," she brings up, after a moment, "but I really doubt they were considering you for any real position with them. There was this woman with the lab they shipped me to -- fuckin', what was it, Ulyana? Only really saw her a couple times -- her whole shit was making Cyber-Newtypes fucking miserable. Turned our powers right off. So they tested us against her, just -- I dunno, felt like a regular thing they did there. Not sure what they were hoping to achieve... it's not like anyone figured out how to get the sparkle working around her."
Another bite. "I heard they treated her like she was a Captain, out here -- as if she was running her squad and everything. But she wouldn't have had any real power. Scientists use all sorts of tricks to control you, and making you think you've got more control than you do is a real fuckin' classic. Hell, sell you on the lab tech thing hard enough, and you might have even helped him hide, if you felt bad enough. That's probably what was going through that bastard's brain, anyway."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"I'm working on it," Akane admits, and she's back to that cringing smile. "It's like... I've never been great at talking to people, but usually when I force myself it goes okay, hahaha..."
Even with someone who seemed kinda scary at first.
"Hey, wait. You mean Yuliana, right? I've run into her a couple times... that explains some stuff." She doesn't dig too deep into that -- but at the same time, it reminds her that even if she's slid into Yuliana's story at some complicated points... Yuliana is a victim in all this, too.
Maybe she ought to reach out to Yuliana again... she needs to make sure Leina's okay first, and for that matter needs to focus on her own recovery, but just the same...
Clearing that thought out of her head a little for a moment, she says, "No, yeah -- I know about that kinda stuff. When I was with the alien, he gave me kaiju so I could, like... control that weird PLANT that popped up by Junius Seven." GROSS oversimplification. This is the digestible version that at least kind of makes sense. "And for a while I even felt like I was his boss! ... but, when it came down to it, it was the same stuff as ever, right? Shove me into something that could fight and make me fight the 'good guys.'"
Rubbing at her head, she says, "I guess it's just... like this." With a gusty little sigh, she says, "That's why I transferred to Intelligence, though. I wanna... do the kind of stuff that helps after this kinda thing. Tracking these people down, and... making sure their victims make it through okay."
She thinks for a few moments. Then: "... Do you want to trade comm numbers? I also have VERTEX, but I dunno if you'd have that. You seem cool." Hastily, she thinks to add, "I'll try not to blow up your phone at weird hours."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Permanence laughs, lightly. "Oh, I was the worst at talking to people for ages. Don't even ask the docs here the list of where and what with about precisely I specified they could get fucked. Or do, if you like! You might learn some new words." It's kind of a rough joke, but it takes some of the focus off Akane's efforts to communicate, and Permanence suspects she might appreciate that at this moment.
"Huh? Oh, yeah, Yuliana! That's it." The names are very close in Zaftran! "When we spoke in the Institute, she was... well, I put it to Banagher as 'fucking deluded', and I don't see how I could improve on that. I don't reckon I have much more than a decade on her, so her brain's probably not right, too -- that's just kinda how it is with early-gen Cyber-Newtypes, anyone who got fucked before the '90s got real fucked -- but man, I swear she was their fucking poster child for infighting. Pisses me off, and I know the game, even."
She stops reminiscing about her labs, though, as soon as Akane's ready to talk about hers again. (So to speak.) "Yeah," she agrees. "It sure is like this. Sucks." Permanence tilts her head, tapping a finger to her cup of tea. "... I get it," she says, a moment later. "I was always... trying to keep people's heads above water, in there. I guess I was trying to make up for being cowardly, that one time, but... you know, that was someone I could cope with being. It kept my head together. I think it speaks well of you that you're thinking about steps two through ten for people who go through shit, Shinjo -- it's not just getting them out, it's what happens after. That's the real hard work."
She smiles, and reaches for her phone. It has large icons, all the better for her to hit them when her hands are seizing up. "Oh, yeah! They showed me how to install this, it's -- this one, right?" And that is, indeed, the icon. "Let's see, I'm... 'xX_PasternakPhalanx_Xx."
Beat.
"Licia assured me it was super badass," Permanence says, entirely straightfaced, "so I just kind of went with it. I kind of remember stuff like that being how screenames worked, anyway... not that we used VERTEX, back then."
Oh no.
She DEFINITELY HASN'T DEALT WITH SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TWENTY PLUS YEARS.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
The joke lands. It's a little crass for Akane, who in some respects is a goodie-two-shoes, but the mental image still hits. You don't have to be the kind of person to do that to find that kind of thing funny.
They sound close enough to Akane's ear, too -- once you get past your second language, you start picking up on 'the idea of a language,' and from there things get easier.
"Yeah, they were kind of trying to get to that, too... they really wanted Leina and Rikka fighting each other." She decides to let that skate rather than digging into it very deeply, though, because... well, because she's kind of running up against the limits of her own stamina for this, for one, and she doesn't really want to push Permanence too far on a really mediocre-looking health day.
"Yeah... I guess it really is about just, like, being 'the you you can live with being.'" That much, at least, she feels like she's getting a handle on... some days. "Apparently I've got the talent for both intel analysis and deprogramming, though, uh, whoo. Wish this wasn't how I was learning it." Then again -- maybe she'd never learn it, if it wasn't for this. Is what she's gone through worth making sure another couple dozen kids don't get it the way she does?
... questions she can ask herself when she's Permanence's age.
VERTEX is easier, anyway. "Okay -- haha, jeez, some of the 3G guys from the ID5 era have VERTEX handles that vibe like that, too..." (When she's 40, will she be cringe? ... she's cringe now so it's probably inescapable --) "It seems like it works for you."
Tap, tap. Tap tap. "You should have something from a_shinjo," she says. "No pressure." She drains the rest of her lemonade, nodding once, respectfully. "They were using my old handle as my lab codename so I had to change that real quick."
Straightening herself out, she says, again -- and she knows she's probably oversaying it, but if she doesn't, how is she going to get used to saying it at all? -- "Thanks. I hope stuff gets a little easier to handle for you... the bad days sure do suck."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"They do that," Permanence affirms, on the in-fighting she saw between Leina and Rikka -- but she doesn't dig into it, either. It's enough to just affirm someone's not crazy, seeing these things, sometimes.
"One day, the world won't put kids your age through these trials by fire," she sighs, looking down at her dwindling cup of tea. "Well, the Captain believes things can be better, anyway... sometimes I have to just coast on her belief, but I mean, I'm out. Objectively, that means today's better than it was a few years ago, even if it doesn't always feel that way." It's advice for Akane, even if it's framed as her own experience. (And that is her experience, to wit.)
But Permanence gets the feeling that Akane's the kind of girl who approaches problems side-on, so she's not going to make her the subject of the sentence.
"Let's see... oh, yeah! There you are." And a sympathetic grimace, as Akane tells her why the account is new -- "Yeah, fuck that. No problem -- I'll give you a ring later." A text. She means a text. Again: she was stuck in a lab for a VERY long time.
She smiles, to her. "No prob," Permanence says, all too casual. (She learned English through expletives, first, and she stopped socialising with people who weren't broken when she was a teenager. It's -- an interesting lexical footprint.) "And thanks for your help, too, yeah? Don't worry too much about me -- I'm having more good days than bad. Maybe in a few years, my bad days will just be the ones which are kind of a pain in the ass right now. I can actually, you know... recover, now. Decide what I want to do... maybe help some other people out."
She waves, to her. "But I'm guessing you've got more to do, there, yeah? So I'll see you around, Shinjo. I'm glad I got to meet you. And your killer hoodie," she adds, with a grin.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane can tell, on some level, the real reassurance -- and she doesn't mind that it's coming side-on. It really does make it much, much easier to digest.
Nodding at the mention that she has stuff to do yet, she agrees, "The big stuff is finished, but they said that if I wanted I ought to do some intel-sharing stuff about everything that happened on the Garuda. If it makes it easier for these guys to help Leina, that's probably worth doing." She starts to stand, stretching out and rolling her shoulders a little bit; the mention of her hoodie gets a genuine smile. "I'm glad I got to meet you, too." A beat passes, before she adds, "I'm pretty glad it vibes. I was kinda worried everyone was just playing along, ahaha..."
Making sure her vest and uniform dress are still sitting right, she says, "I might see you around if I become a Ra Mari contact point for 3G!" That doesn't sound so bad...
She gives Permanence a few moments to respond if need be, but she does, ultimately, go to handle that intelligence drop before heading back out of the Ra Mari II at the end of the day.