2025-07-02: Digital Divide
- Log: 2025-07-02- Digital Divide
- Cast: Akane Shinjo, Meifeng Hau
- Where: Heaven's Base - Common Room
- OOC - IC Date: 0100-07-02
- Summary: Meifeng visits one of the few people in the Earth Sphere with an analogous experience of how reality works.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Tarabaman Climax Coliseum is, by this point, a 15-year-old game.
This means, of course, that Akane Shinjo has been playing it for 15 years and the muscle memory for playing it is more or less fully ingrained. She's at least started branching out from Dark Hinoen and Nalgus, who have been her go-tos forever. Anything to get some kind of meaningful novelty going on in this place.
Extraction was... difficult today. Difficult enough, in fact, that Akane has finally cracked on something, even if it isn't the 'something' that her jailers were looking for her to crack on. Her hair is a nice, pretty lilac-grey now. She really does not want people to see tired, miserable Akane at this point.
Her reflexes are slipping a little bit. She's also managed to alienate most potential play partners in the base, at this point, by being just a little too good for casual play, even with her body not quite responding the way she wants it to.
She elects to just lie on the floor in the common room for now.
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
Games....lounging...well, perhaps such frivolities make sense to someone in her position.
Someone enters the room, heelless boots clicking strangely against the floor. Out of peripheral vision, maybe she appears unusual, with what looks like bare legs under a high-leg leotard, and bruise-colored gloves and kneehigh boots. That's nobody's uniform...
Maybe she deserves more attention, however, when she plucks an object off of some part of her person and clicks it down against the tile. It beeps twice and uncoils, revealing a silicon-white irregular stone. It's nothing special, really, just some rock.
Unless, of course, you've seen a kaiju seed before.
She takes a step back and puts a hand on her hip. Her black hair is cut in a sharp bowl around her ears, and her eyes are covered by a visor with a brass-colored screen.
"Hm. Idling. Strange use of processes," she comments.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane's gaze tracks over. She wonders for a second if this is someone involved with the idol projects in some way; the high-leg leotard certainly doesn't disabuse her of the notion, if nothing else. She starts to half-turn her head to get a better look --
-- that is something that shouldn't be here, and Akane sits bolt upright as she processes what it is. Whatever she was feeling a little while ago, she is now very much awake and alert. She looks up at the woman with the bowl cut, brow furrowing slightly.
... she doesn't want to tip her hand too too far. "Where'd you get that?" she asks, canting her head just slightly, then glancing down at the kaiju seed again. "It's probably not from my desk, and I doubt Alexis is out of... whatever he's stuck in," she reflects. She knows these can just be found here and there in the Earth Sphere, for some reason, now --
-- but that doesn't explain why this one is here. She elects to ignore the comment about her 'strange use of processes' -- she knows exactly why she's 'idling,' and doesn't feel the need to justify herself.
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
"I'm a collector," Meifeng says, that visor staying locked on Akane as she activates. "There's a lot of anomalies we've been finding in this world."
The black-haired woman shifts to a squat, arms wrapped around her knees to watch Akane from closer. "This one turned up in REA Vietnam. A young child had found it. Fortunately, surveillance analysis allowed us to identify it before its processes could begin."
She reaches down to click the device, and it hisses shut. "So the original distributor was Kerib. Interesting," she murmurs, and slots the device back into a gap in her suit's lining. She turns her gaze back up to Akane. "Meifeng Hau. You could call me an independent investigator. It looks like you're still alive in there."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"I never asked for an explanation and he never really gave me one, either," Akane says, with a small frown on her face. She makes a mental note of it turning up in Vietnam -- why there? ... Something to investigate when she has the resources to investigate it, one supposes.
When Meifeng calls herself an independent investigator, Akane resists the urge to roll her eyes -- but only barely just. "Independent investigators don't end up in bases like these. If you're going to lie to me, at least make it believable," she shoots back, still watching Meifeng with some wariness.
... and some weariness, for that matter.
"And... yeah. It's not as bad as I was expecting," Akane says. "I haven't even been waterboarded!"
... she starts laughing, despite everything.
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
"Wrong kind of independent," Meifeng says, and rolls her thumb and forefinger like she were framing a display. One immediately projects into the air out of her glove. She twiddles her fingers a little more and it shifts to show the visual form of a Gaia Sabers Independent Action License.
(The actual license is a complex cipher that the image disguises,of course.)
"I do what I want," she says, simply. "Like secure and identify paranatural power sources, supracausal field phenomenon, and rocks that turn into dinosaurs when your parents get a divorce."
She rolls her shoulder, not even noticing herself do it. "No, I mean they haven't pulled your personality out of your skull," she says flatly. "It seems to be surprisingly early in the checklist."
Akane laughs. Meifeng shifts her weight. That visor gives her a really severe look, huh... "Honestly," she sighs, and dismisses the screen with a flick of her fingers. "Using your body's own needs against you...just having the thing in the first place is cruel."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Oh, of course. That kind of independent. Akane sits up a little straighter on reflex; she knows that literally anything could happen at this point and Meifeng would face only incidental accountability. The only thing really stopping anything from happening is how much clout any of Lilium's doctors and technicians happen to have.
"... Oh, so you've read my file cover to cover, huh," Akane says, at the mention of 'rocks that turn into dinosaurs when your parents get a divorce.' She finds herself laughing in spite of it all. The addition gets a, "Yeah. Can't make kaiju without real feelings. I'm pretty sure they aren't even drugging me or anything," with a small sigh. (This isn't entirely true, but it's not far off the mark, either.)
"What do you mean, 'the thing'? Like... having a body?" Akane looks Meifeng over, adding, "What -- do you not?"
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
Is Meifeng playing 'good cop' here? She's at least playing 'different cop'.
"You're a person of interest," Meifeng replies, with a shrug. "Information is key."
Without real feelings... "I wonder how it can tell that," she murmurs. DEVA has some degree of intoxicants - and emotions, of course - but the whole procedure is radically different from the chemical-drenched mollusk that operates the real-world human body. Would the procedure even transfer...she feels like she can just about see how, but--
She shakes her head, hair shaking around her ears, and then steadies her gaze on Akane. "I'm from DEVA. Think of it as a colony from very far away. We've long since existed entirely within a digitized environment." She tugs the leotard, which has less pull than she's expecting, then slaps it back, and grimaces. "This is a Material Body created from my DNA for the purposes of performing missions that require interfacing with your people. Regrettably, that's most of them."
She ticks her head to the side, her gaze proper drilling at Akane now. "So perhaps you can see why I find your file perplexing."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"You're gonna get used to that one. I don't really get it except that, like, it's got something to do with the way the universe is set up?" Akane waves it off, not lingering there. She knows a little more than that, but not that much. She doesn't really want to give this woman free information; she is, after all, at least affiliated with the Gaia Sabers.
"Oh, out where Neo-Britannia got to?" Akane asks, when Meifeng mentions 'very far away.' "Or farther?" She doesn't exactly expect an answer, instead keeping things going. "... Huh. So you need a body printed to leave, instead of being able to just leave..."
Akane turns that over, as Meifeng continues to look at her. "Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like you guys are doing things really inefficiently!" ... She can't really resist the desire to needle.
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
Meifeng grunts at 'it's just how the universe works' because YEAH DUH. But no; that's about where she's stuck, too. It works because it does. But no system works 'because it does'. A property exists...somewhere. And once a property is identified, it can be studied, and then simulated. And once a property can be simulated...then the material universe loses yet another flimsy excuse to be of any interest.
Meifeng shrugs about Neo-Britannia; the answer's yes, sort of, but indeed, she has no special need to confirm an unimportant hypothesis. The next part though...
Needle is right. She scoffs. "Yes, it seems there's yet further to go in improving the DEVA system." She can't suppress a grin. "And that's interesting. Earth has so many options to explore for new architectures. These 'compoid' lifeforms have a lot to teach."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane has had to teach herself, inch-by-inch, not to obsess over knowing every step of how something works. 3G interacts with too many things that are just inexplicable -- and even in her position, which has among the higher levels of interest in knowing every step of how things work in the Computer World, there's a limit to how many cycles you can spend trying to figure something out.
Akane feels her shoulder blades shift back as she hears the comment on Compoids. "... Well, you'll have to take that up with whoever's handling access to my fiancee, I guess," she says, and it's clear that she's rapidly deflating as she says that. "Really seems like you guys are always trying to figure out some new thing to do with Compoids... I'd say this is better than the brainwashing but I don't know if that's gonna be true long-term."
She finally turns her attention to the screen again, away from Meifeng. "... Do you play?" she asks, with a gesture.
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
Meifeng would call the approach sloppy, which is why she's probably going to get eaten by a digistar someday.
Access to her fiancee...right, yes. Meifeng pulls up another screen hovering over her suit, which she turns to attend to for a moment. "Not my project," she says. "Might be able to get her moved to our local instance, if I pull some strings." ...see how far she gets with a complete false premise, Meifeng decides. "Regardless. I'm not interested in all this......" She flicks her wrist like it were an unimpressive science fair project. "Control, nonsense. Someone else's project. The implications of just leaving are much more interesting to me..."
Ah, but rather than something weird happening she just tips her head the other way. "Play?" she asks, then looks at the screen. "Good Lord. Of course the screen's two dimensional..." she says, with a kind of quiet horror.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"No way," Akane says, and for a moment there's a little steel in her again. "Don't touch her." ... She worries about whether she's doing the right thing. Is this really better than whatever the Gaia Sabers have planned? Whatever is generating this pit of loneliness and isolation in Akane's stomach?
"I mean -- Alexis taught me how to do it, kind of," Akane starts, at the mention of 'just leaving,' "but I don't really... get how I'd explain it to someone else? You're kinda on your own." She isn't even sure she could explain it to herself, at this point -- it made sense as she was doing it, but the more time she's spent appreciating life as a normal human again, the less she knows.
"... Guessing that's a no!" she says, and that does get her to smile. "You probably won't have much fun against me if you're not at least decent, but I don't mind giving up for now. I should... probably get back to my room anyway."
<Pose Tracker> Meifeng Hau has posed.
Meifeng tips her head just a little at Akane managing to conjure some strength. "As you wish," she says, with a shrug. Akane is the one Meifeng's interested in. She doesn't get anything from antagonizing her.
Meifeng doesn't 'get' people enough to understand how many knots someone could tie her in with that kind of leverage, but for now, it's adequate to get her to drop the matter. Didn't even get to the point the fact the whole thing was BS would come up...
"Huh. It can be taught, though. Or learned. Alright. That's data itself." What principals could that run on....ugh. She's a systems architect not a WIZARD!
She's about to scrub her hair in irritation, but Akane chooses to flex, and Meifeng huffs. "Suppose I'll have to look it up, later. I haven't spent much time on what your amusements are out here." She checks her glove again, which apparently has a watch somewhere nonobvious. "Ah. Yes, I guess that is the time. Very well."
For her own part, she finds a seat and opens her terminal again. "Control, do I have anything back on that catapult assembly for Ninagal?" she asks the air. The answer apparently comes through her head gear because the next sounds she makes is an annoyed groan.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"You really could stand to have fun with it. If you spend the whole time you're here resenting how flat the screens are, you're gonna miss all the fun parts," Akane says, and it's the voice of experience that she says it with.
Akane stands up, finally. "... Yeah, it is," she says, with a slightly exhausted sigh. She heads out, and doesn't feel quite up-to-par enough to listen in on Meifeng afterward. She does catch the groan, at least, but she doesn't think to ask about what Ninagal is or the catapult assembly.