2024-07-30: .welcome now our silent support grouP
- Cutscene: .welcome now our silent support grouP
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Wendy Yuan, Forte Foxglove, Salvacion, Borislav XII, Jadgit Singh
- Where: The Silent Castle, Kaffeklubben Island
- Date: 2024-07-30
- Summary: The Silent Castle has welcomed some new faces into its halls -- including some escaped Cyber-Newtypes seeking the safety of its walls. When Forte tries to restart the support group she relied on now she's here, she draws Yuliana and the other survivors together to share their stories.
Yuliana strolls down the hall, a black scarf tied about her neck to match her black robes. She pauses when she hears a youthful voice, behind her -- "Oracle! Grand Oracle?" -- and turns to see one of the younger Cyber-Newtypes they're sheltering, now, Forte Foxglove. She couldn't be older than nineteen, a Britannian girl with blonde hair in twin-tails and purple eyes, and Yuliana's own green eyes narrow as she regards her.
"I told you, you don't have to stand on titles here," she reminds her, with a stab of irritation only made more stark by the nothing around the girl.
"I -- I'm sorry," Forte says, clasping her hands and dipping her head. "Mrs. Kafim, I just -- we all wanted to know if -- you wanted to come with us. Since there's a lot of us what came here... the survivors, we were gonna get together and talk about it. We invited Ms. Yuan too..."
Yuliana's eye twitches, as this young woman in her own black robes looks to her. (Down to her; Forte is a beanstalk of a girl, a full 5'11", much taller than her great leader.) Her first reaction is to berate her for including her in a Cyber-Newtype group -- even if she does have some similarities -- but she takes a breath, and reminds herself she's just irritated over being treated so formally. Besides, she thinks, they've invited Wendy too, so they're not just Cyber-Newtypes.
"It would be easier if you were there!" Forte adds, all in a hurry, her pale hands grasping each other. "When... when I'm with you, the music goes away."
"The music?" Yuliana asks, tilting her head.
"There's music on the inside," Forte explains. "There's always songs stuck in my head."
Yuliana glances away, and then steps forward, patting a hand to her shoulder. "I'd like to come," she decides, more amicably. "Where have you gotten together?"
...---...
"Um... thank you for coming," Forte says, to the circle of unfortunates who have gathered in the library. They sit around a table, and she hugs a throw pillow to her stomach, as she starts. "When we'd have these meetings back home -- um -- we'd go around and introduce ourselves. Except our Speaker helped us out, the first time... guess we don't need one here," she adds, with a glance across to Yuliana. (The leader of it all.) "I -- I can start," she adds, with a thin smile. "My name's... um, I don't know what my name really is," and Forte's expression grows uncomfortable, there. "It probably wasn't Forte, but -- that's what they called me. Forte Foxglove... it's basically my name now. My parents were killed in Second Impact, I'd just been born... they took me in. The scientists, I mean. But when the High Priestess -- um, I mean, Dr. Kafim -- when she attacked Pendragon, um, they wanted to deploy me, but something went wrong. There was a malfunction in my machine, the sensors were wrong... when I landed, the local cell found me. I guess they were planning on it, they knew there was a lab around there, they'd made the machine to mess with my sensors... at first I thought I was going to be hurt, but they really wanted to help me. So... so, I didn't have to go back... I'm very grateful to the High Priestess and everyone else," she adds, meekly. "They were supporting me for a long time... but I feel safer here." Yuliana, give her a shred of credit, feels a little bad for snapping at the girl after hearing her speak so warmly about her wife.
"Hoi," the Zaftran man beside her says, clapping a hand on her shoulder. He's much older, perhaps in his forties, with wild blue hair that tumbles to his ears. "Don't look so glum. I don't remember my name, either. They didn't take me as a child -- but they wiped my memories. Put a whole new man in there... ha ha!" His hand lifts, to slap against his knee, instead. "They sent me to kill one of you, but somehow the Calling knew. Not so strange, now I've met that Parminder, no? So they tranquilised me and put me through deprogramming, get all that violence out of my head. I remember some of who I was, but not so much. Little bits, so it goes. They said I was Borislav XII, but call me Boris!"
"Hello, Boris," smiles a Filipino woman, wearing a bob of brown hair with brown eyes to match. "My name is Salvacion... that is my real name, but I don't want to use my last one any more. I know it isn't proper to spurn your parents like that, reject them, toss them away." She looks down at her hands, "... but my parents sold me to the lab, just because they were struggling with what the State provided them, and the scientists were willing to bribe them handsomely. I can't forgive them for that. Tossed, rejected, spurned, me first. They did it to me first!" She slams her fist down on the table, and it trembles under her might. Luckily, the furniture in the Silent Castle was made to withstand Yuliana. "I was just fourteen! Just fourteen, and there was the war, the War in One Year, so they wanted to make it happen themselves, so they made their own, do it yourself, destroy it yourself!" Strangely, it's Yuliana who reaches over to take her hand, patting it in both of hers to calm her down as she tears up. "Sorry," she sniffs, scrubbing at her eyes with her free hand. "Sorry. Sorry. They didn't rescue me so long ago. Not so long ago, compared to how long it's been. Long and long. Nineteen years, or twenty. Lots of long." She falls quiet, squeezing Yuliana's hand, two products of an earlier era struggling for stability.
"Man," a Sikh man with a metal arm scratches at his black turban; the hair beneath must be a striking rusty red, judging by the shade of his beard. "I'm kind of embarrassed to be here, hearing all that. My name's Jadgit Singh. Funny you should mention Parminder, by the way -- did you know he's my cousin?" Jadgit laughs, much more good-naturedly, as he demonstrates the real reason he was selected to be sheltered here. "But unlike his side of the family, most of mine are Khalsa. Anyhow, they did toss me in a lab after I showed some weird results in my yearly check-up, but... they never really managed to make me that great of a Cyber-Newtype or whatever it is. I could never even work the funnels. When I got messed up in a fight they decided to shove me full of metal," he taps his arm, "and they treated me better after that, I guess since they could put me in suits which would screw up a fully-human body. Though they didn't miss me too much when I left, either. Say, they ever do that to you? Give you an overtuned suit because you were the closest thing they had to a Coordinator in the squad?" He asks Wendy, beside him.
"Oh, all the time!" Wendy laughs, waving a hand. She's a woman with pale skin, pink hair, and red eyes with striking ringed pupils. "I'm about a three-quarter conversion, so they'd put me in overclocked Arm Slaves and have me go to town. Once the Captain tried to borrow mine, and she had to soak in a hot bath every night for a week," she adds, with a grin to Yuliana, who scowls in response. "I'm Wendy Yuan," she adds, gesturing to herself. "I went by Wen to make the State happy, but, well -- see, I was maimed pretty badly in the One Year War. I went by Chun Fang, back then. When I joined the military, I managed to find the Zeonic bitch who destroyed my village... but it turned out her name was Wendy Kal Vie, and she was just getting revenge for something one of our elders did. It stuck with me, so I took her name... but you know, a good Han Chinese girl can't go around with a Zeonic name, right? I just don't have to be afraid of them any more. I'm not Awakened or anything," she adds, "they just upgraded all the bits inside me to military specs when I joined up, and ended up replacing more of me to make me a better soldier. I think most of my bones are artificial, by now, all my arms and legs... a lot of my face and throat is artificial, too, and I've only got one real lung left, and there's this thing in my heart to keep it working right. My skin's real!" She adds, proudly. "They had to regrow most of it, which is why it's all so pale, but it is real. I can still feel stuff. But I didn't have a sense of taste for a while, since my tongue isn't... Dr. Kafim got me a referral to a doctor who fixed that right up, though. Now I finally know how bad Parminder's muffins are. How could you let me eat those all those years!" She reaches over to shove Yuliana's shoulder, companionably.
"Well, I certainly wasn't going to eat them," Yuliana scoffs. She rubs at her arm, though Wendy certainly didn't shove her that hard. "Anyway, you all know me, so..."
"Uh-uh," Wendy crosses her arms in front of her in an X-shape. "If we all have to drag out our sorry stories, you gotta do it too. No getting embarrassed! We all die together!"
"God, don't go saying things like that, outsiders would have a field day," Yuliana grumbles, folding her arms and closing her eyes. "But okay -- okay. I'm Yuliana... started out as Dian, but after I got funnelled into my project, they changed my last name to Dispersal. They injected me with alien cells when they..." She grimaces, "Awakened me, so... that's why I See as I do. I'm attuned to the Void, not that... Omnisphere, I think that post called it." The post she's referring to wasn't talking about Newtypes -- but Yuliana recognises the similarities between those two beings, with her sense of absence. "My... creator, Dr. Devi, was quick to shift the blame onto Newtypes. Even tested me against one -- Rita Bernal -- for a few years, to make sure I had someone to blame. Not that Ritechka ever blamed me... stupid," she curses, her fingers drumming against her arms as her head jerks aside. "Anyway, I was free range for several years -- did some wetwork like Boris here, and I was a pilot, too. So long as I reported back to the lab on the weekends for -- upkeep -- they let me pretend to have power. Even promoted me to Captain... but it was an empty title," she adds, her lips curling up over her teeth. "It's only when I started dating Elya -- Elisa -- that she was able to try and help me get out of there... since I was a state secret, and they made damn sure I wouldn't tell anyone what was really going on. Last they got their hands on me, they wanted to make me into a brain-dead Orchid Cell farm so they could clone more of me, since my negation powers are one-of-a-kind... suffice to say, I don't really trust NUNE when they say they want to execute me for my so-called crimes."
Forte frowns, clasping her hands together. "Even you've been through the same thing... that's why we can trust you, Oracle. All of us..."
Yuliana sighs, shaking her head and looking to Forte with a wan smile. "It was hard to me to accept," she admits. "But a lab is a lab. It's all abomination. And we're left to pick up the pieces of ourselves, only to find half of them went missing in the struggle. It's not fair," she insists, with a stab of pain. "You -- you're still young -- you should be stepping into college, not fixing yourself!"
"Yeah," Forte sighs, looking down. "Maybe... maybe one day... one day I'll go."
"Then..." Yuliana takes a breath, and sighs. "Why don't we start with what we'd like to do? In the future. You'd like to go to college, Forte... is that right?" The girl nods, and Yuliana turns to Jadgit. "What about you?"
"I used to be a teacher," Jadgit says. "But there's no way anyone would hire me, now. Standards for teachers are -- like, no one would trust a labrat with their kids," he laughs, as if it doesn't sting.
"We would," Yuliana insists, because to say otherwise would be to imply that she oughtn't be trusted with her children. "There are several children here, now. I'd much appreciate someone local to help the boys with their distance learning -- I'm sure the others will feel the same. I'm sure it's not a conventional class, but..."
"No, no, that's fine!" Jadgit insists, waving a hand. "I used to teach special needs, I know all about shifting my roll."
"Then... what about you?" Yuliana asks Boris, now, turning to him. "I know you said they took your memories... but you must surely have some things you favour more than others."
"I dunno," Boris shrugs, scratching at an ear. "I've been learning to paint. That's pretty good, no? Might do more of that, since my resume is very much... ah... too murdery to put out there."
"Tell me about it," Wendy adds, rolling her eyes. "It's hard out here for state-sanctioned murderers. Especially when they throw you under the bus!" She pauses, and adds, after a pointed look from Yuliana: "I'm getting to know someone... so hopefully, what I'll be doing soon is getting married!"
"It's been going well with Guanyu, then?" Yuliana completely barges past her efforts to be subtle.
"Y--yeah," Wendy laughs, covering her lips with a hand.
"Then we can all come cheer you on," Yuliana decides, just going ahead and inviting not only herself but everyone. "... but what about you, Salvacion? You've been pretty quiet about what you'd like to do."
"I want to chase the darkness away," Salvacion says, staring down at the table. "It's always eating me, at the edges. I run, but it catches up to me."
And Yuliana frowns, because she recognises that kind of loose, flighty speech. She reaches over to squeeze Salvacion's arm, and offers: "I'll show you around the gym. If you want to outrun your demons, it'll help if you actually have a treadmill to run on." It's easy for her to sound sure, but she's lying. She doesn't know how to help her, and she finds, with some surprise, that it disturbs her.
She recognises that cadence, and she wants to help.
But Elisa has assured her it's fine for her to play at empathy, here, so why not make some effort?