2025-06-28: Four-Letter Words
- Log: 2025-06-28: Four-Letter Words
- Cast: Akane Shinjo
- Where: Heaven's Base(?)
- Date: U.C. 00100 06 28
- Summary: When agony becomes routine.
The days become... not routine, exactly, but close. Wake up. Take her antidepressants and her hormones. Check if she's expected to be needed for the Boosted Songstress's maintenance. (She usually isn't.) Talk to Cherub-2 about... mostly nothing. Play Climax Coliseum. (She's not making friends by doing this. She's not 'serious-level,' at least not in this game, but she's too good to enjoy the game casually.)
She's been feeling at once better and worse since she managed to get them to give her her antidepressants back. What had been all-hours misery has become a brief 'up' -- or really, a brief 'neutral' -- that lasts until lunch and then a full-on doomspiral. (She doesn't suspect anything yet... though she's noticed that her reaction times have gotten worse thanks to Climax Coliseum, she attributes it to stress alone.)
And of course, every now and then, extraction.
How, exactly, the Gaia Sabers got access to such a device is a mystery. STORAGE would recognize it as a less jury-rigged version of the equipment found in Celebro's laboratory in Tsutsujidai, back when he had his hooks in Shinya Kaburagi and then in Hass; that it is less jury-rigged does not make it any less painful, though.
Indeed, given what it's extracting, that would be cross-purposes.
Beside it is another device derived from that information -- a (similarly less hideous) Gatcher. Sophisticated as it is, it has an input system that allows for different forms of output -- Capsules, Medals, Cards... the list goes on.
Akane... hasn't struggled. Her gut tells her Rikka is feeling scared and isolated and alone, and that is enough to convince her that what she's been told is true. It would make a warped sort of sense, too; selling the story that Rikka pursued her fondness for Sheryl Nome onto the stage would be little trouble. 3G would know better, of course, but they'd struggle to find purchase with such talk outside the OCU.
There's very little Akane wouldn't endure to prevent such an outcome, and as long as she believes it to be true, she'll endure.
That's not to say this doesn't complicate matters too, of course. The more recently Akane has gotten glimpses of documents referring to Unit-2, the harder it is for extraction to have much success. Even as the shocks force her memories up to the surface -- force her to think of moments like her time as Alexis Kerib's power source, or watching him stab Knight -- the more she can cling to love and friendship, the less of... whatever hideous liquid the extracted kaiju essence is... the Gaia Sabers get, despite the downturn in her mood.
Analysts begin to wonder if there isn't some secondary cause they're not considering, but 'love' is a four-letter word.