2022-03-13: Thinking Post-Exam Lunchtime

• Log: 2022-03-13: Thinking Post-Exam Lunchtime
• Cast: Akane Shinjo, Kaname Chidori (by way of Sousuke Sagara)
• Where: Tsutsujidai - Restaurants
• OOC - IC Date: 0096-03-13
• Summary: Kaname Chidori stumbles into a world so like and yet so unlike her own.

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<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

There's a part of Akane that kind of... wants to eat something. It's not that she's hungry -- she hasn't been hungry in ages -- but there's a tiny bit of a food-tickle at the back of her consciousness. This is... abnormal, to say the least, for her. In practice, it comes out as 'I want to watch someone else eat.'

So here she is, at a steak restaurant. The crowd is mostly third-years -- well, graduates, now, actually! It's still weird to think about. Coming to Tsutsujidai and entering high school felt normal enough, but... seeing people graduate? Seeing them move forward? The vibes are...

... well. It's a feeling that has Akane sipping blandly at her tomato juice from one of the few tables with any open seats. It's not that she's sad, exactly; her feelings are *loud* -- but they're also unparseable, even to herself.

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Things have been 'abnormal' for Kaname Chidori for a good few months now. First the weirdest guy on Earth transfers into her class and gets into about five incidents that somehow didn't involve friggin' Might Gaine showing up to cut him in half; then it turns out he's actually for real a soldier, which she finds out because she got kidnapped and experimented on, and...

And now the world feels strange. And has for a couple months. She didn't mean to come to Tsutsujidai; Sousuke was gone ("a short assignment," he said, with a tenser face than usual) for probably most of spring break. Exams had been...strange. Especially the science and math exams. She felt like the answers just fell off of her pencil. She didn't like to think about that too much. Home didn't...feel right. So she walked.

And long story short, the blue-haired girl in the casual jeans and the little spring jacket is here, now. Her wide brown eyes have been taking in the sights for a little while. She doesn't know what's pulling her to this area, but aimless wandering draws her feet.

The tables slowly fill up, as they will; before an unfamiliar, fit girl with a red ribbon in her long, blue hair steps in, looking around. She looks around...and then, putting on a small, polite smile, steps over toward the table Akane is at, which by some strange coincidence, is now the only one with an open seat.

"Hey, uhm, sorry, can I...?" she asks.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

There's a bit of an... energy, to Tsutsujidai. And that energy concentrates, if you follow it, in Akane. It's like... there are textures, striations, amid the quietude -- strands of Being, of... *something* -- and most of them lead back to Akane like some kind of metaphysical yarnball.

"Huh? Oh, sure," Akane says, looking up as she's approached by Kaname. She can tell that Kaname is from outside instantly; she tends not to be directly approached by other people in her world, for the most part. She's rarely surprised -- especially when she's alone amid movement.

"What brings you in here?" she asks, curious -- then adds, "Do you want something? My treat." It's unfair for her to present herself as so kind, so giving -- in the end, all of this is fake. It's a construction -- the performance of kindness without cost. But she doesn't know how to do anything else, either. "Anything you want, actually! I'm feeling nice today. Exam scores went up! Top of the class. *History* was a bit messy, but everything else..."

... maybe a little spooky?

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname wouldn't know these things, on a conscious level, but...perhaps it's an inevitability of becoming what she always was, that such threads are easy to trace unbidden. Kaname smiles at Akane's acceptance, dipping her head in apology of the necessity. "Sorry about this," she says, apologetically. "Looks like everything else is full."

Seating herself, she looks about fit to pull out her phone and just ignore the universe, in the fashion of a teenager forced to seat with a stranger. But...instead...

....maybe a little spooky. But Kaname's known social butterflies. She thinks of her friend Mizuki, back home, the social butterfly who seems to get along with everyone. She decides to roll with it. "Oh, wow, that's generous! Thank you!"

On some level, maybe she's expecting Sousuke to fall out of the vents if anything goes too wrong.

"I guess I'm just wandering around," she says, pulling up the menu for a look. "School's out now so I'm done with Student Council for a little while. Not that there's ever a ton to do, President Hayashimizu is on top of just about everything, it seems like. Just decided to ride the train and see where I ended up, you know? I didn't know about this area. The big statues are neat."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane nods to Kaname; a waiter comes up to the table after a minute or so, and there's a chance to order. Akane just asks for another tomato juice, for her own part.

She gets herself situated again, after that. "How do you even keep up with that stuff?" she asks, a little mystified, at the idea of bothering with student council. "Our student council's a little overbearing and I thought *class rep* was too much." She laughs; it's actually pretty unguarded and pleasant, for once.

Okay -- that's *definitely* an out-of-towner, as if the rest of it didn't make it obvious. "Oh... you can see them?" Akane rubs at the back of her head, noting awkwardly, "Those... aren't statues. At least, they're *probably* not statues. Those are real kaiju. ... the town gets that a lot, lately, but everyone forgets so I try not to drive myself crazy over it. Most people are gonna look at you weird if you mention it, though. They can't even see them!"

She chews at her straw a bit, before saying, "Oh -- Akane Shinjo. I'm going into second year!" She must be... pretty accustomed to what's going on with the kaiju, to just breeze past it.

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname orders...something!! She finds the numbers easier to run than they used to be. There's a salad, because she is a teenaged girl who has to worry about her weight.

"The student council president does most of the lifting, honestly." She rolls her eyes. "Most of my job is keeping clubs from killing each other." She plants her elbow on the table and her face in her palm, because thinking about Sousuke Sagara for more than one millisecond is already trying her patience. "Or sometimes encouraging them to." God that fight for the new club room was SUCH A MESS.

And then, Akane says SOME WORDS??? Kaname looks at her with an increasing amount of shock. "Huh????" she gawps. "I thought guardian Kaiju was a thing on like....mysterious islands...and then priestesses sing a song to the fairy circle, or something."

Mothra. She is thinking of Mothra.

"And people can't see it? That's..."

...

......

.......She shakes her head, quieting the buzzing in the back of her thoughts. "Not how light or eyes work!"

She scrubs her nails through her hair, a clearly familiar frustrated gesture. "Geeze, Tokyo just keeps getting weirder..."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Well, like..." Akane pauses, trying to find an explanation. "You know how you'll see those videos where, like... you're supposed to count how many times people throw the ball, and a guy in a normal suit just walks through the middle of the whole thing? And you just... don't notice, no matter how weird it is, 'cuz you're thinking about something else, and then you're like 'wow, shook' when it points it out." ... Akane spent a lot of time online. Like, a lot. "I think it's more like that."

There's that buzzing -- and Akane notices it, too, for once, or more accurately catches its reflection. "Everything okay over there?" she asks, canting her head slightly to one side. "I get that it sounds pretty crazy, but... I started noticing it a while ago. Some of my friends did, too, but when they mentioned it I decided I'd keep quiet." With a hapless cant of her head the other direction, she reflects, "I kinda hung them out to dry there, huh? Oh well. It's not a big deal."

'Tokyo just keeps getting weirder.' "... Yeah, though, it's super weird lately. People keep coming through here talking about how there's a war with the PLANTs, and the third Neo Zeon conflict, and all this stuff," comes a fascinated-sounding follow-up. "But we didn't even have a *first* Neo Zeon conflict! Everything's been quiet after the One Year War. Have you seen anyone like that?"

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname has seen that video. And it DID take her a while to notice, but....like...

She scratches the side of her head. "I feel like hundred meter tall perception-filtered statue kaiju guardian whatevers is..." .....Shakes her head again. "And here I thought a guy who brings land mines to school was weird."

And then, Akane says some more words!! And Kaname surpasses her Being Polite To Strangers threshold!

"Are you just messing with me now?" Kaname huffs, leaning back and crossing her arms. "Obviously there's a war with PLANT, I only had to write two essays on Bloody Valentine alone! And there's no way anyone missed--"

She slumps back in her seat. "Ohhh my god," she groans, irritated. "You're one of those weird LARPers Kyoko told me about, aren't you? I thought your type was more into vampires and werewolves and stuff."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"... Huh?" Akane blinks. There's a flinch when Kaname says the words 'Bloody Valentine' -- it's slight, though. For the most part, she's managed to disengage enough that those things just roll off, but every now and then...

She gets a shockingly pointed question, and then takes a breath. Okay -- this is going to get weird. "No, for real. I'm keeping track of this stuff. It's probably part of why history is getting harder." Even if she knew this type of interaction was on the table, she can't quite stop herself from feeling the... rejection-feeling. It's *loud* -- it's hard to tell what, especially for someone new to the... feelings, axis. But it's a feeling, and it's negative, and it's big.

"If I pull out my history textbook, will you not act like I'm a middle-schooler?" she asks, voice *sharp* as she fumbles in her bag. She slams it on the table with... maybe not irritation, but firmness.

She slides it across to Kaname, saying, "The dog-eared pages are stuff that's weird."

Kaname's food finally arrives! As does Akane's... tomato juice.

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname is not in a polite mood so she provides NO CLEMENCY for bringing up That Whole Mess.

'History getting harder' resonates in Kaname's skull. It's not necessarily that her language scores were getting worse, it's just, suddenly the math was so easy....like...so, so easy...

Her eyes snap back into focus. "Hm. Fine, let's see it," she sighs, deciding to humor the girl. She almost thinks kid, but, apparently they're about the same age? There's this...feeling, rolling over her, uncomfortable...if Sousuke were here, she thinks he would've--no, this isn't the kind of thing he'd lose his cool over. Amazingly. Because everything is.

She kind of wishes he was here, as something she doesn't understand dances at the edges of her self.

And Kaname...is not rude enough to eat with someone else's book in front of her, so she flips through it quickly, eyebrow going up higher and higher.

Maybe someone less outspoken would let up with the quiet reminders that she is one: being mega rude and two: having her lunch paid for. Kaname does not. She gets to the second dog-ear and quite visibly looks around for cameras or people clearly paying attention when they shouldn't be. Nope. "...weird is right," she says. She looks at the copyright page, eyes scanning for traitorous mistakes. Nope.

"So, what, are you telling me I slipped into another timeline by falling asleep on the train?" she asks, looking, just, THE MOST incredulous. "This isn't the Langoliers."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

If anything, people are paying *less* attention than they should be, given the mutually incredulous back and forths.

"I was thinking more -- so you know that thing in the middle of Tarabaman 60, where the people from Tarabaman S show up because they had a shuttle malfunction?" Akane sips at her tomato juice. "That's the kinda guess I have. I've been tracking where people say it happened, too. You said you were in, what... the Tokyo train system? Normal or Nouvelle, or were you on the big loop?"

She's not actually that interested. The truth is, so many of the people who 'filter in' are... special, or at least, they feel like it. Even the ones who don't 'feel,' don't dump their emotions into Akane's -- they feel... like they try to move through the world in some way that matters. They aren't caught up in the tumult of the era -- they're people who change its shape. Something that's beyond Akane, she thinks.

What, then, is the shape Kaname's choosing...? ... Akane can't just ask. "Ahahaha, it's a lot to take in. Trust me, it wasn't any less weird the first dozen or so times on my end either... if anything, I'm surprised I'm getting kinda blase about it!" She seems to be rebounding a *bit*, at least.

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname does not know that thing.

But she knows something similar. She puts her hands above her eyebrows, pinching her forehead. "No, but it sounds like how Planet of the Apes turns out, so I think I get it," she says. That's time, not dimensions, but they're basically the same thing once you're dealing with external action and can get outside the immediate experience of the time axis, and she's going to VERY QUICKLY stop thinking about WHY SHE KNOWS THAT. "Nouvelle. Wasn't really watching the stops." May as well contribute to the scientific process.

...she slides Akane's book back and then pulls her meal over. May as well!

Lettuce go cromch. She hums at Akane's comments. Eventually: "I guess once you're dealing with it every day, it stops seeming weird. That...that, I know about."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Huh. Lots of Britannian movies. Is there a lot of Britannia-Japan cross-media over there?" Akane sounds *extra* disengaged at that, despite the fact that she's the one prompting for it. She's never actually been that good at making small talk.

Akane checks her phone. It conveniently gives her an excuse to not actually listen to any answer she gets to a question she already mostly knows the answer to. 'so I'm not gone.' She frowns, saying, "... Just a sec, that's. I need to respond to this."

> Sure thing. I have a deal to pitch you anyway.

Akane smiles. It's ... a little mischievous, or maybe past it. "Ha ha, *yes,*" she says aloud -- and then she realizes she's Emoting and has to Explain It. "Oh, uh -- something just went my way with a friend," she explains, barely. "I won't bore you too much with the details, but it's, uh... if I said there was dimensional science involved, I guess... actually at this point you'd probably believe me but I don't really wanna explain it."

She rubs at the back of her head. "Okay, though. Nouvelle. *Right*. Okay, that makes sense. I heard someone attacked the train stations over there last month, too..." A pause, before she asks: "Hey, could I get your name, actually? I don't think I got it."

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname gets called out on her taste in movies. "Eh," she says. "I used to live in Dakar, because of my Dad's work." Now it's HER turn to look EXTREMELY UPSET for no obvious reason, glaring at the walls, but she shakes it out. "Anyway, they had a lot of classic movies on the TV there, so I watched 'em a lot. Still do, I guess."

This has given Akane time to disengage so completely that she's checking her phone. Kaname does not get on her about this because she has at least enough self-awareness to realize she was way ruder than this earlier. Also it lets her eat.

She looks up at Akane's visible excitement. Her eyebrow arches, a bit incredulously. "Wow, you got your friends in on it, too? I guess its the logical thing to get to, with all that going on."

THEN, Akane points out that Kaname has been terribly rude. "Oh! Uh, yeah, I guess we got sidetracked--Chidori. Kaname Chidori."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"I mean, kinda," Akane explains. "I'm pretty sure this is actually someone from *your* world." Akane lets out a breath, then says, "... You're *really* better off if you don't get too close to this one though. Like, it's weird even by my standards."

At last, an introduction. "Chidori, okay," Akane says, with a nod. "Anyway, uh..." Hm. Her phone's getting kinda full of numbers. It feels weird. But... one more can't hurt. "... Wanna trade numbers? I'm pretty sure I don't get network service to, uh. Over there. But if you show up you can at least text me."

Well, if she's *already* got her phone out...

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname humphs something like a laugh. "I have enough weird, thank you very much."

And then: Huh. ... ...she really shouldn't, she realizes.

Like REALLY shouldn't.

Like if Sousuke were here he would slap the phone out of her hand and run out back to hide her in a dumpster while he went to 'deal with' the 'threat', and then she'd smash him over the head with a used propane cylinder.

Hm. Well that answers how worried she's going to be about this train of thought.

"Yeah, alright," Kaname says, and pulls her phone over.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Nodding once, with some firmness, Akane lets Kaname put her number in. "You know, it's kinda funny... no overlap with contacts so far," Akane reflects out loud. "But the phones *work*, which means the communications setup is the same." ... she doesn't think too hard about that one, because it's going to create a continuity error in her world in her brain and she can't handle that.

It's fine. It can just not be that textured.

Once they've traded numbers, Akane texts once -- the act of someone utterly certain they've been given the wrong number before that wants to avoid getting punked. "I kinda feel that way too, though," Akane says. "I wish whatever was... *linking worlds together,* just..." She sighs. "Some days I wake up and it's just like, 'Can you don't?' "

<Pose Tracker> Kaname Chidori has posed.

Kaname's phone goes ding! She looks and even flips it for Akane to see that it's her own message.

Kaname....does not have the option to not think about it too hard, and actually briefly grimaces as her chewing coincides with her mind immediately seizing on the implications of that little chestnut. Fortunately it doesn't get too far: It really is probably just...that the system is the same. There being zero dual-matches is...odd, maybe, especially the more people Akane talks to, but if the systems just operate on the same mechanisms then they should be intelligible to each other.

The system complications would come from integration, which Kaname grunts as she physically forces herself to stop thinking about that one by wiping her lips on a napkin. She huffs a laugh at Akane's quip. "Well, can't say my problem is like that, but, I know what you mean. I swear, I never know what that weirdo's gonna do next!"