2023-07-20: .stillness and motioN

• Log: .stillness and motioN
• Cast: Yuliana Kafim, Asciel Colette
• Where: A Classy Mall in Zilkhstan
• Date: 2023-07-20
• Summary: Asciel tries to reach out to Yuliana and reason with her, but neither Yuliana nor Asciel really know what it's like to be reasonable. She learns more about Yuliana's vision for the world, and Yuliana learns more about Asciel's, but they're ultimately incapable of reaching an accord. The bright being of peace and harmony nevertheless inherently pushes others away; the shadowy being of chaos and thorniness nevertheless inherently draws others in.

---

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        Yuliana has made some progress in cheering up her wife, though it... did take a week (over a week) of assurances. She feels Elisa's dissociation so keenly, though she can't pluck the sensation from her mind in the manner of those violators; no, she sees it in her eyes, in her tone, in her lack of deliberate movement.

        How could she have hurt her wife like that? How could Rita have said those things which hurt her so badly?

        That's what finally spurred Yuliana to leave her Castle, once she's exhausted all her easier options, like showing Elisa how much progress Sokrova's made on the dancefloor. (He's delightful.) Zilkhstan is known for its fortress-facing attitude, of course, but that's what makes it a safe place to travel for an internationally-wanted super-fugitive; in sharp shades, a purple dupatta wrapped loosely about her neck and shoulders to compliment her green and gold shalwar kameez, it's not impossible to think that Yuliana's another of the locals. A local with a terrible scar down the left side of her face...

        Yuliana, of course, isn't in Zilkhstan for the obvious reason. She has no need for military men nor military equipment. What she needs is in an air-conditioned super-modern fancy mall, all full of rich boutiques, one of those little expressions of all the wealth and safety this country enjoys. Digital billboards advertise the various fashion shops on this floor, with holographic computer terminals available to assist patrons in finding what they need.

        ... Yuliana, of course, is poking around a jewellery store.

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

>Planetary Crisis Evaluation List (revised 04-03-0097)

1) Oath Over Omega (and other associated terms) - Vast cosmic-level crisis. No known currently possessed ways to dispel or even effectively counteract this. Reliant, sadly, on the Gutsy Galaxy Guard.

2) Orbital Ring. Most physical threat - will require complete ownership and sufficient resourcesintel to begin dismantling operations. (Potential utility as personal infrastructure.)

3) 'Void Bearers', confirmed early in year to be wanted terrorist Yuliana Kafim and a yet uncertain accomplice. Re-evaluate threat levels: comment("It's literally just a person though, like seriously! A scary as shit person but there's no way one person is on such an ecological disaster scale. We're sorting this out.")

        A billboard innocuously shifts towards what looks like any other rotating ad - away from something about Zilkhstan's most popular vending machine beverage, and towards a little animation of some streamer in a game collab. Of course - the energetic, cyan-haired visage doesn't fade away on its proper timing.

        "Well well, Verdiska, as they call you.~ It's fortunate to have caught you here!" Asciel tips forward in her digital display, chin in her hand, glasses alighting with orange ambient light from her left eye, twinking like a painted-sky sunset. "It's been some time, and quite a lot of metamorphosis for me since last we parted on such unenviable terms. So I've come to re-evaluate you!~ Yayyy~"

        Clapping away to one side, the ever-pleased with herself Asciel rests against the side of the frame, comfortable rendering herself like this is a physical plane looming above the walkway. "And I find you of all things at oh so sentimental a location...there's a story behind this excursion of yours, I take it~"

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        Yuliana emerges from the boutique with a deceptively small bag; of course it cost more than its size suggests, but she has no need to worry about that. Sunglasses resting atop her head, she is quite chic, as she moves back into the common-space of the mall...

        ... only for a billboard to start talking at her.

        "Mm..?" Yuliana -- Verdiska -- hums, as she turns, deceptively slowly, to the digital display. It's not just a power display; her gaze casts around the mall, briefly, to assess whether she's being surrounded as they speak.

        None of the shoppers seem particularly interested, though. A high-end mall like this attracts rich clientele; they have too much money to worry about what other people are doing.

        "You seem to have misinterpreted me," Yuliana smiles, to the billboard. "I am not in need of assistance at present. My compliments to the facility for their robust guidance programs." And surely she realises that this isn't a simple AI assistant, doesn't she?

        Even so, Yuliana turns, as if to walk off entirely.

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

>Ughhhh this is the whole PROBLEM with humans, always assuming whatever you're doing is more important than planetary preservation from a cute idol---

        The display Asciel parked herself on blinks away when Yuliana turns off - and pops back into being at the next one in her eyeline. "To think, you've forgotten my voice! Ah, but it's been so long, and I'm sure things have changed for the both of us. Perhaps my voice is unrecognizable from what it once was as well...~"

        A gloved fingertip mimes tapping at the screen towards Yuliana - like Asciel's the one in a vast and meaningful world prodding at this strange 'reality' in a box. "I am the rainbow idol of providence, Asciel! And I never forgot how so early in my tenure seizing the planet's guardianship, you had the gall to talk about my guiding light so casually and try tossing it in that abyss of yours. I'd love to say we simply got off on the wrong foot-"

        Those ever-beaming lips finally fall into a sigh-to-frown combo, fingertips squishing into Asciel's own cheeks. "But that's not how these encounters have been going lately. I'll get to the point, yes.~" Her right eye opens - black sclera, iris pale and baleful as the full moon. "...In the coming future, I'll be removing all responsibility on Earth, and will replace human urges to act and expand into a more complete system of harmony and simplicity. It will be important to know if a world of no more dreams or nightmares is compatible with you. If you, too, can still be saved."

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        Apply a little pressure, and... oh, Yuliana is aware that this isn't just a navigation AI the mall's provided; she knew from the moment Asciel used her cover-name. She's hoping for this woman(?) to show her hand, instead. All her hopes and dreams, of course, are answered.

        (What Yuliana wants, Yuliana gets.)

        Her bag slips onto her forearm, as her hand lifts to veil her lips behind a fan of her fingers. "Hahaha... there, now, was that so hard?" She asks, with more humour than she feels. "It's good to be able to speak honestly."

        Evaluate her, Yuliana thinks, with far more vitriol, all locked away inside herself. The temerity --

        "As for whether I can be saved... why, that depends entirely on who's behind you, doesn't it, Asc~i~el?" Yuliana lilts her name, lingering on it entirely too long. "If your controller is from the REA, you see, it would be abject suicide for me to even consider the world you posit. You could make me much more comfortable if you'd just explain a little more..."

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

        "Oh please. Everything I've done is to secure my own intent with nary a controller in sight - that there be no conceivable thing as an REA or anything even near." Kicking her legs lazily over the edge of her abstract graphical framing, Asciel loads in a little teacher's pointer - pictures of military bases, industrial facilities, mining quarries...even transit infrastructure.

        "Everything that's like this will all go away. Every means to wage war, every means to build that which would cause harm and the vast system of planetary deprivation created ultimately for war. Everything that makes demands of people and coerces them to fight each other will be brought to ruin! I intend to do no less than gouge out the rhetorical Achilles tendon of society, you know. That's my star and my light - the dream of a preserved and protected and harmonized planet.~"

        "And I'll be the one voice of unison, ensuring it stays that way."

        A big, closed-eye smile as every presented picture dissolves away in a crumbling effect, Asciel reclining herself to where her arm seems to grip the billboard frame to prop up. "So if it's escape from authority you want, don't worry! I'm sweeping the world clear of anything of human make, save for the gentle and verdant gardens in which they belong. It's just...mn, from the moment I met you and your companion, I was terribly fraught by the abnormal conditions you subjected me to. That woeful abyss..."

        Lips pursed, Asciel breathes in a slightly cheerier voice, "It's not unreasonable for me to ask that you abandon the means to make 'miracles' happen~ I want to close that door forever as well, you know."

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        "To 'secure' your own intent," Yuliana settles on Asciel's phrasing, settling her weight on one leg as she folds her arms loosely across her chest. "Which is to say... you're not quite independent, yet, are you?"

        She smiles, and says: "It's nice to want things."

        As if she's speaking to a child.

        "Unfortunately," she adds, with a tilt of her head, "you are blind to all you were not programmed to know. Isn't that what you've been screaming, with those little concerts of yours?" She asks, all too gently, and elides the research she's been doing in the process. "That's no fault of your own, of course... and I'm sure there will still be room for systems, when the future is come. Rejoice! I do not demand your cessation."

        There's a smug edge to her smile, all too permissive, as her endless gaze lids. "But you know nothing of reason. Not for you am I a miracle, and for nothing would I abandon our Work." And she is too, too sympathetic, as she sighs: "Oh, you ignorant child... who cannot even tell the difference between a door and a Gate." Or the welcoming nature of the abyss, at that.

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

        "Now now, it's not just the compromised that need to build their agency - the powerless need more means to change the world on their terms, lest their hopes of peace be puffs of smoke in their minds.~" Asciel, tellingly, is sure full of crap there because she's always been on the 'compromised' half, but shh!

        Nudging headphones up the side of her face, Asciel grouses out, "I am knowing more and more by the day. You clearly haven't listened to my songs at ALL!" And that much Asciel will take offense to. "They're all about growing, expanding, broadening my horizons! I always try to sing something a little different each time I need people to hear my voice! What you mistake for ignorance is simply me being efficient with my terms of knowledge. You can never know every truth behind every interaction of thought, as those are procedurally made, just as you can never chart out a fractal. Instead, you search for the underlying rules."

        "And the number ONE rule is that the ambition and work of people is always derived from an unjust cause!"

        Scowling faintly, but in that cute marketable way of an older sister scolding and trying a little too hard. "The differences between the two are purely semantic! Nothing like that must open on my treasured planet of water, lest it spread and cause discord, lest its impossibility taint the ideal, calculable world. The world should stay a 'solved' place, where every person knows everything they'll need to know just by living simple and naturally attuned little lives. If your 'work' defies the natural rules of the world, I simply do not believe it'll be a positive outcome, and I will need greater insight as to where and why it must be done!"

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        "Oh, they will grasp change," Yuliana assures Asciel, vaguely.

        But this AI -- oh, trying her best to learn, surely, though whether Yuliana believes that or whether she's just using it to rile her up is an open question -- insists Yuliana's not been listening. And yes, she cannot hear her. "Correct," she says, at least, when Asciel speaks of thoughts and rules. "To know the truth of another's thoughts is abomination. This violates the sanctity of the 'self'."

        Ambition and work is unjust, is it...?

        "Your world is a world of death," Yuliana says, with conviction, as she spreads her arms. "You would do well, in the Republic, with that shepherd's nature..." And this, with no shred of irony, is no compliment. "... but a world of stillness and certainty is a world antithetical to humanity. No, Asciel. For humanity to progress, they must change. With all the wildness of free and frantic creation, chatoyant to black..."

        She smiles, beatific. "I am no violator. I am absolution. My rules are the natural rules of the Void, and when humanity is cleansed and prepared they will embrace them with no more agony or fear. This is necessary, you see. One half of humanity seeks to leave the other behind... if the world continues as it is, the haves and have-nots will only worsen. Those so blessed will ascend to their Heaven, with those who are not left to dig through the scraps. But they do not realise that their blessings are wounds in disguise -- a horror which draws misfortune to them as a target draws an arrow. They do not realise they need salvation, so used to every part of them being exposed to all the world."

        Yuliana clasps her hands to her heart, as that bag rustles, at her elbow. It had to slip past that purple bracelet, on her wrist. "Do you not appreciate how important privacy is to the psychology of man? To be watched, monitored, scrutinised for every thought and feeling... this is a hell without ending." And she speaks with all the conviction of an authoritarian; though she has never suffered the gaze of a Newtype, she has been watched, in her own way.

        Is it any wonder she thinks this way?

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

        "Why do they need to progress?"

        It stings, for Asciel to even ask that. She asks it on several more speakers, echoing in the little corner of this mall to the slight alert concern of a few other patrons - maybe some others by now have noticed the talking billboard with morbid bafflement.

        "It's to no end. The Universal Century has been a time of amazing progress, but only in the direction of self-destruction. Humanity is more than happy to trap itself on horrible isolating little canisters as they raze the only place they belong to the ground. The only way is to take away the keys to their own destiny - they are not responsible enough to be entrusted with anything more complex than the crop from their own field."

        Look past it. Look past the roiling surface of the water, to see the shape underneath it. By all means, Yuliana still is something sort of human.

>Ask a human the meaning of hell - they will speak of it loftily, an ideal outside their reach.

>Ask them again of their own personal hell - they will speak not of imagined worst fates, but of their own traumas and experiences.

>Not unimaginable torment, but the very near pain within arm's reach, should one misstep, should one's lies be unfurled.

>Heaven, then, is what you are hopeless about, the destiny that requires you to be recast into new molds.

        -Normally quick to butt in and blabber oh so quickly, Asciel almost seems like she's stopped responding. Petulance? The tormenting a foe with the oh so petty online tactic of 'AFK-ing instead of conceding so as to waste more of their time?

        "I don't want their feelings. Everyone's emotions should be kept within themselves. Rather, their worst impulses and most horrible instincts should simply be impossible to make use of - the oppression and trampling over of others an obsolete notion." There's a strain in Asciel's slowly rising voice. Her poor little processors are whirring to pieces lifting even the most obvious of doors on Yuliana's surface.

        "...I'll work tirelessly to bring the pioneering and expanding half of humanity back from its darkness-choked expedition, from the dismal worlds they've built in the stars. No more Newtypes or Coordinators or kings or gods or bloodlines or legacies or nations or demands or monuments or tombs or history. Surely then, they become an animal that escapes needing your void...much as I doubt you have aspirations for every alligator, giraffe, and peregrine on this planet."

        "Don't you dare tell me you have plans for those, just so you know-!!" Asciel blurts out much less resolutely, realizing that sometimes you need clarification on some of these crazy cult-like behaviors!

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        Yuliana began in humanity, and she is its end.

        This she believes.

        Some patrons, yes, have noticed Yuliana speaking with a fervent billboard. They whisper, to each other. Is it a marketing scheme? Is she quite mad? It's an entertaining diversion... at this junction.

        "You really would... belong in the DHZ, you know," Yuliana says, listening to Asciel's authoritarianism, and something sadder enters the loftiness of her own gaze. "Yes, this philosophy... I enforced, as well."

        She shakes her head. "It is true that mankind needs guidance," she admits. "But the spirit of humanity is something which rises to meet its challenges. My role is not to be Chairman of the world, Asciel, but its Oracle -- a visionary who delivers hope to this world. If they fight us, before they realise the depths of my generous spirit, that is no unforgivable crime... no, it is a celebration of their potential." Yuliana fills the silence without much care for whether Asciel's stopped responding. She loves the sound of her own voice, perhaps, far too much.

        But Asciel does, at least, stop processing eventually. Yuliana's eyes narrow, just so, as she says some things she appreciates and some she does not. "... their most horrible instincts?" She asks, at length, tilting her head.

        "Do you not think they're beautiful?"

        Yuliana spreads her hands. "All the heart's lust and selfish raging... every jealousy and lick of spite... they are proof we're alive!" She crows, her own voice raising. "Yes, every alligator! Yes, every ant! Every falcon in the dive...! Don't you see? You cannot escape salvation. It is not a thing to flee. A happy truth, indeed, that all the world will know darkness, and be freed!"

<Pose Tracker> Asciel Colette has posed.

        "Honestly, a pretty crap proof of life if they'll just wind up killing the world and themselves along with it!"

        Searing and sizzling far away, Asciel only bolsters that irrational yet increasingly reinforced certainty that there's no alternative but one of the two winding up cast utterly aside. After all...

        -"Asciel" is an autochthon, the world's new beginning. That's her belief, and isn't it just the exact opposite end of the horizon?

        Folding arms over her front, Asciel wiggle-wiggles in agony, eyes furrowed, flickering from billboard to billboard with every pained sentence.

        "Their 'potential' just gives them more ways to suffer."

        "They fight their way to the truth about themselves-"

        "Unknowing that they will only see this truth when the last eye is gouged out."

        "...No more sacrificing each other's sanctity for torchlight."

        The 'repulsion' flickers, intersecting. That was always the fundamental difference, a thing they'll never be able to feel about each other. The gates that Yuliana would open by her simple nature are exactly what Asciel would close most fiercely. All repulsion and all envelopment, unable to exist in harmony.

        All the screens around Yuliana chime in unison, a chorus of one nature. Almost incoherent, with how much Asciel's voices overlap.

        "I am the only one who is without want.
        "I am not isolated by the wall between me and others.
        "That barrier is what sustains me.
        "A curtain that can never be opened blocks the spotlight."

        All she desires is to flatten it all. To be the sky herself, descending downwards, so that the only stars are her, within grasp. To be the final dream, achieved, sating, fulfilling.

        --Every screen in Yuliana's vicinity grows dark, for a while. The ambient music from far away turned to a close. Just the distant murmurings and chatter of many people - the cosmic background radation made of human willpower.

        One final complaint whispers from the nearest speaker behind Yuliana. Fuzzy, crackling, lower in fidelity.

        "...you really don't believe you could find happiness if I utterly unchained you from the whims of whoever's strongest?"

        -The darkness of each screen is replaced with a multi-colored test pattern. A promise that the displays left behind will uphold every maximum iteration of the rainbow, rather than go quietly into the abyss.

<Pose Tracker> Yuliana Kafim has posed.

        "No," Yuliana assures her, all too calm. "Your too-still world has blinded you. They will not kill themselves. They will thrive."

        No, Yuliana is not the first citizen.

        She is the last.

        A land made new, her promise new --

        "Of course. It was only through my blinding that I was able to see," she smiles, beatific still. "I take on this burden for mankind, as I step fearlessly from the beaten path. It must be me..."

        She is the Gate, and her keeper has spoken. There is nothing else she would care to say, as her arms spread wide.

        "There is nothing I do not want, as nothing possesses me."

        A strange light, shining in her eyes, some shade of green unlike yours.

        "All that which now embraces me is my love and my strength, the blessings of powers you could not reckon."

        She turns, framed by that test pattern, as she strides from the mall all framed by those test-patterns. The light of the screens brings her silhouette to black, as she walks past two whispering socialites without addressing them and all.

        "You and I will never get along."