2023-02-09: Easier Than Expected

• Cast: Seolla Schweizer, Akane Shinjo
• Where: OCU France, Paris
• Date: U.C. 0097 02 09
• Summary: A crisis of a first meeting - a disaster of a reunification - and a bond over mutual disasterhood, in the end.

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<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        For ten years, a specter has loomed over Seolla, one that haunts and haunts and haunts, and which she's just had to overlook to keep moving forward. The memories of troublesome, inconvenient yesterdays were always wiped off, but their taste kept staying in her mouth afterwards - coping with an unstable imminent previous time was just something she had to learn.

        But always - something shadowy lurking at the back of her head. The people she's 'supposed' to be with. Her ]family[, something she isn't allowed to think of as such. After all, she had a new family, so those were just people from 'before', right?

        ...Unlearning that idea, though-

        The notebook Seolla's been writing in habitually has been a lifeline to everything she's so used to washing away of her own accord, before she had to endure the pain of it being forcibly scrubbed out. It got almost automatic to wipe herself clear of inconvenient thoughts - one fewer hour in those awful tanks. It's why she survived.

        Underlined on a page with a special bookmark, in big bold letters, on a night where the thought just wouldn't go away - "My birth family is somewhere in Europe. Parts of French and German feel natural to me. I don't think 'Schweizer' is my real last name, it might be an epithet."

        "Seolla might not be my real first name either."

        "I was very small when I was taken from there, but old enough to speak, to fight a little bit, to have younger siblings."

        So! Seolla's narrowed down how to find her family for sure, to: "Some Girl went missing Somewhere Around This Sphere Of Europe - Somewhere Between 0085 And 0087". This, of course, being a timespan of immense discord and record-clearing all across the Federation due to being at the height of the Titans' reign of terror, so there's a better than normal chance missing persons records were officially taken off the books. Cool!

        Knowing full well that Seolla is effectively plunging herself a little perilously close to the people she just escaped the captivity from, pursuing information those very people likely directly had a hand in expunging, her aides in the Shuffle Alliance were, naturally, rather wary about her insistence that she wander somewhat aimlessly around central Europe poking around for this - and that's why she's here in France, to rendezvous with a few people who she's to stay in contact with for safety and regularly report coordinates to! Rikka Takarada being her primary contact at this leg of the journey.

        So that's the long and short of why Seolla's here, in Paris, milling around the big train station anxiously and heading towards an agreed upon set of coordinates - near to where Rikka's staying with company, mostly to pick up an emergency tracker! Bundled in a big fluffy coat, scarf, and hat, she's tempted to peek around their hotel to see if they happen to be coincidentally out and about...but she still feels painfully awkward about the last time she happened to meet Rikka, and part of her wants to just wordlessly pick up the little gadget and communicate as rotely and routinely as possible.

        If she looks like she's walking backwards and forwards indecisively right now, that'd be why!

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

As it happens, Akane's waiting for the same train -- she needs to make it back to Orbit Base for another medical check-in after a lovely week of vacation, which means she needs in turn to take several trains. She's anxious about missing the trains for such a long trip, which means --

She's here three hours early to wait for a train. Bundled up in her winter uniform (right now it's the only winter-adjacent coat-adjacent thing she owns!) as she scrambles to find the schedule in an unfamiliar train station on her own. She looks nervously from side to side, feeling so crowded at this particular hub. (Paris is, after all, not a small hub in the least -- indeed, it's one of the most major transit hubs in the AEU.)

Akane scoots around, and spots... a familiar face. Someone who she'd hurt with her movements in Tsutsujidai -- someone from whom she has no idea what to expect. As long as she isn't truly miserable, Akane remembers faces quite well.

... the first thing she does is wander off for five minutes.

The second thing she does -- when Seolla is even more pointedly walking back and forward indecisively -- is approach.

"... hi," she says, her voice unmistakable. She makes a bit of an impression no matter where she goes.

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        Pacing, pacing, pacing. Two beings who don't quite know where to go in life orbit evasively around each other, in a sense - one momentarily invisible to the other. Of course Seolla's not exactly 'welcomed', especially with what Akane's likely seen - and especially...if Rikka told her about 'there was this troubled girl with white hair who said she was here to murder Akane', which - - -

        Well, if Akane hadn't been told yet...

        Seolla's first action is to take that little 'hi' as just a stranger on the street - that alone makes her stiffen up slightly, say 'hi' back, and turn away for a second. Before abruptly: [That is the face and voice of your target, Akane Shinjo. She's the one to blame for Ouka's condition - your duty is to eli-]

        Seolla's second action is to yelp a little awkwardly, since that inner thought isn't her own voice, but someone else's - someone she'd like to be able to simply turn on a switch and forget. Her third action is to remember - "Oh gosh wait wait aren't you Akan-"

        Red in the cheeks, steaming enough from her fretting about to merit a dramatic, possibly kinda intimidating withdrawal of her scarf (Seolla probably moves a little imposingly quickly just in general...), Seolla takes a deep breath, a long and firm assessment of Akane-

        And tips forward in a low, apologetic bow. "Aaaaaa! I'm super duper sorry about running around all over Tsutsujidai thinking about assassinating you! I'm not here to do that!" A beat. "...I don't want to do that at all! Gyuuuuuu, everyone I met there was super, SUPER mad at me for saying that. Oh man, I...I didn't even think about how that was totally what I was trying to do at first, I was in such awful shape that most of the time I was just, kinda fighting for my own-"

        She bolts back upright, chewing on her lower lip, eyes trying to look anywhere except Akane, fidgeting rapidly on her feet, worrying her fingers together, tangling her scarf up into a bit of a knot between her palms. If it wasn't obvious she had complicated feelings... "...I i i i i i didn't come to France just to see you! ...I mean I didn't come here for you at all in the first place! ...Wait why are you here at all anyway?! Gosh..."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane definitely has not been told just yet that Seolla has been instructed to eliminate her; if she knew, she probably wouldn't have approached the girl with ice-white hair at all!

... which is why when she's bowed to, it's her turn to get anxious. "Wh -- what?" she starts, withdrawing into herself a bit, pulling her hands up to her chest and crossing her arms at the wrists as she tries to figure out what's even happening. Thinking about assassinating -- "What?! Why are people sending assassins after -- well, no, I get why people would have been sending assassins after me, but, like -- I, uh -- what? What?"

Her first reflex is, indeed, to start catastrophizing -- her eyes widen and she curls in on herself a bit. "Are they sending more people? Who was trying to send you? What was --"

The fact that Seolla points out she didn't come here to see her, though, starts to sink in and get her to at least vague comfort. 3G follows up on this kind of thing. She knows that from Alouette's file. Even if she doesn't see them, she almost certainly has a security detail, and they almost certainly would've intervened if they felt there was a threat here.

... right. "I was here on... a date," Akane answers, after a few deeply anxious moments. She still doesn't seem very settled. "Anyway, uh... a lot of people were doing a ton of things they regret in there, I think. If you're really not going to kill me, I don't..."

A long, deep breath. "... let's try this again. I know about the guys who did stuff to you and Ouka. It... sucks, to be on someone else's script for you, right?"

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        As any flighty bird would, the moment Akane starts panicking a bit, Seolla starts stepping back, stepping left, stepping right, forward - escape plans combined with general instincts formulating into this concoction of utterly misplaced fight or flight. Her arms are flapping to either side of her before-

        "...O...oh! Right! I only ever met you the once! ...Oh crap, that's right, I also have you on VERTEX, I shoulda, said something - nnn, yeah, of course I didn't. I thought I'd sneak in there, do the dee-" Another clapping of her own cheeks. Stop talking about how you were planning to kill someone in front of them. "THE POINT THAT I was going to talk to you over the phone is the point that, phones stopped working! Also I may have uhm. Uhhhh. ...right. I forgot you, uhm, existed, pretty shortly, after I met you, so that's why I haven't said hi in the mean-"

        It sounds SO BAD saying it that way, Seolla suddenly realizes. This is the conversation of both parties' nightmares at this rate. "Oh my GOD please don't listen to anything I've been saying, at all, I gotta stop - Okay. Alright. Okay!!! Yes. Square one. Hi! Yes, it's me! I'm Seolla! I'm Ouka's sister. And she's uh. ...well she was still in rough shape after the situation, where. ...I don't even know what exactly happened??? I'm so hazy on the details of. Everything. Nobody tells me details, I-" A winding of Seolla's scarf around her own arm, like she's anchoring herself to this plane of reality.

        "...I think she's better now. She sounded better! I think. I only heard one...sentence of hers, before I. ...I ran away! Basically. I was there for a STUPID as hell revenge thing. Fuck! Why'd they send me there for that!! It wasn't gonna make Ouka any better they were just being vindictive pieces of garbage and treating me like something they can use to send a message! Oh my god I'm so mad at them all over again, I had to keep it down because GHHHHHH I wasn't gonna get anything done but I'm SO angry at them, and I can still hear them yelling at me for being angry at them, but to HELL with them-"

        At this point, Seolla is basically ranting and raving at, like, the sky? Her emotions are POURING out of her. Like everything she's saying, Akane can probably pick up as gushing out of her every muscle fiber as also the things she is feeling. The color of her words matches the color of her spirit, at least. "G-gah. But yeah. ...Everyone in Tsutsujidai...wanted to help me. Rikka, Alouette, and Borr are your friends, right? I think Ennil too? They uh. They were giving me a pretty stern talking to and I sorta. I freaked out on them a fair bit, ahahaha, at first, before I got just too tired to be exhausted at them. I'm still worn out." ---that's probably an alarm bell in its own right, if Seolla like this is at her low energy point.

        "...I probably told that horribly but. You get the idea. I was actually here to sorta. Give Rikka a few papers and such, since I guess I'm kinda sorta working with her from now on. I think?! ...I didn't even ask you how you've been! Oh my gosh all that stuff in Tsutsujidai was basically happening way too much to you, huh? I didn't understand the half of what Renais and Doctor Mass told me, but. ...you look like you're doing alright. I think. ...Ugh, not like I can tell that, so...sorry if I'm assuming things about you if you feel rough! But you're here on a date! You said that. Oh! ...ehehe, you're not having a tour of the world trying to charm people off their feet, are you? ...Paris is...well...kinda was a whirlwind romantic city, but even I can tell it's seen better days..."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

... god, Akane reflects. Just. Wow. The more Seolla talks... on the one hand it's overwhelming and the information is all out of order and she kind of wants to strangle her about it? But on the other hand, she's...

She forgot Akane existed after they met? Wait -- oh, right. The... yeah... Akane looks down at her shoes, guilty. When they pull back to square one, though, she starts to reorient more fully. "Okay -- this is -- I, uh." She tries to get a word in edgewise, but the rambling continues, and she decides to just...

... let Seolla ramble herself out. When she asks if those people are her friends, though, she does briefly interject, "Yeah. ... Borr, uh... that's one of the guys around Gridman, right?" She only partway knows them -- but she still counts them as her friends. After all, they risked so much for her -- that's definitely friendship. When Seolla winds around to saying she was here to rendezvous with Rikka, though -- and coordinating with Renais and Sayla about it -- she's suddenly a lot more up for the conversation. Taking a deep breath, she starts, "Nope! No charming off anyone's feet... just me and Rikka. If anything, she's kinda the one sweeping me off my feet... ahaha..." She giggles, turning her head to the side and bringing her hand to her mouth. It's a remarkably demure gesture for the little gremlin. "She's amazing. You're going to be working with her and Dr. Mass, huh..."

Nodding and closing her eyes for a bit, she tries to put together what she even says to this. What she settles for is, "... then I hope we can be friends, too. I think the stuff they did to you at that place was kinda horrible... I've been looking for the right moment to bring it up to 3G, but everything keeps happening and my knowledge is kinda limited."

She glances back and forth for a moment, taking a breath. "Can we like -- go to one of the restaurants in the station or. Something? Anything but standing here. Anything. Booth. Now? Please???"

... between motormouth Seolla and the large number of People, Akane really wants somewhere more secluded to be having this talk.

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        Finally, space and time make sense to Seolla at Akane's clarifications. "Oh!!! Ahhhh. That's why Rikka was so especially-"

        She doesn't get into it there, because Akane pleads for somewhere a little more conversational, and Seolla gives a firm nod to Akane, almost. 'trained' to. Unraveling the scarf from her arm and fixing it back to her shoulders - scanning the surrounding area with a distinctly militaristic assessment. A cardinal directionward pointing - "There's the nearest one. You're right, it's poor practice to go over intel in publ-"

        One last smooshing of her own cheeks, before Seolla begins her march at a rather irresponsibly fast pace towards the cafe, then realizes two seconds later that Akane is moving at maybe 1/6th her speed, and takes it a lot easier.

        A request for the furthest booth to the back, and a quick provision of two large cups of water, and it's mission accomplished! Seolla fans herself in the climate controlled little restaurant, one that was high-end about twenty years ago and has since been a little scuffed up and repurposed into something more affordable. The seats were extremely cushy once upon a time, but elaborate leather patterns have since cracked and frayed just a touch.

        Bundling up her coat and scarf off to the corner of the booth, wearing a navy blue sweater with the logo for the Nairobi Trailblazers cricket team emblazoned on its front, Seolla folds her hands under her chin, elbows on the table, sipping her water at such a rate that it's half-empty before she's even begun saying anything.

        "...nnh, what was I saying. ...oh right. Yeah, when I said, 'that' right in Rikka's face, I got the impression she'd awaken some unfathomably strong power to crush me if I kept it up. The craziest part is that she did it by reaching out to help me. ...yeah, I can see how she'd sweep you off your feet. I see why she was so determined to put a halt to whatever I was on about. ...It's because I feel the same way as her now, for Ouka and Arado's sake. Yeah, it all makes a lot more sense. Maybe she felt even stronger, since I'm the one who ran away, even though she was making a point of being unarmed."

        Gratefully, Seolla's quieter with some water in her - something for her to 'do' other than stew in her own thoughts out in the open. The expenditure of energy saying so much to Akane finally catches up - the weight of her head on her hands expands to where it's propping her up, upper body scooched right up to the edge of the table. "...j-jeez though, already offering to be friends even when I still don't know how to feel about-" One cheek puffs up, and she stops herself before she brings up the more awkward subject again. "...a...about...so much in my life, you know."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane has also ordered tomato juice... except this place doesn't have tomato juice?! Scandal!? Akane has to settle for orange juice. This is fine, but not really her preference... really, it's kind of miserable how much restaurant drink menus contract when you eliminate carbonation from the situation.

Absently running her hand along the seat, Akane reflects, "Wow, I'm kinda surprised they haven't sprung for new seats... but I guess that's normal when you've only got so much budget." She starts with her water, since her orange juice is... not here yet! She also needs rather a lot of it, and potentially even for similar reasons to why Seolla might.

When Seolla mentions that it felt like Rikka would crush her if she kept up the idea of eliminating Akane, Akane... can't quite stop herself from blushing a bit, but she takes it seriously, too. "I think... one thing that I get now about her that I didn't really appreciate when I should have is..." She looks for a way to word it. "... honestly, I don't know if it's fear or if she just hates losing. But she really doesn't want to lose anyone else... even people she doesn't like. I can't think of anyone who's more committed to getting everyone home safe, even if all she's got is just herself. She's," Akane's gaze tracks off to the side, one finger on her (gently mauled) straw, as she stares off into space. After several seconds, she sighs, "incredible."

She thinks about what Seolla's saying -- it's not hard for her to catch what she's really thinking, either; Akane considers responding to the unstated premise... but doesn't. "Well... you've got time to figure it out." Tapping her chin, she asks, "... is having 3G involved in your stuff something you'd want? When you've got friends who're still trapped in that stuff, it's kinda messy, and those guys --" ... well, her, soon, too, she realizes -- "'quiet and subtle' isn't exactly the vibe."

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        Seolla orders for herself a round of appetizers - she's a liiiiiittle out of her element doing this, but she does boldly decide, after a round of looking things up on her phone, that it's time to eat snails. Here at least they do appetizer-style escargot, so it's nothing super hoity toity! But They Sure Are Snails. or. Well they were? When they arrive they're pretty well seasoned and garnished with a carrot-based puree. There's a meat of some sort that looks kinda - - - look they come in the shells and everything so.

        It's clearly not a bothersome idea to Seolla! Clutching one in the weird shell-holding tongs, the other tiny, slender fork digs in, and she's dutifully, diligently dining. "Oooh, pretty good! Have any of them you want, Akane! I needed something like this for sure, I can feel how it's a little richer than most of what I've had to eat lately. ...submarine food is submarine food even if it's better than most submarines I've been on."

        Once she's eaten up a little bit, Seolla's sky blue gaze locks onto Akane's violet eyes, lips pursed softly. "...I mean. You're pretty amazing too. From what it sounds like to me - and again I really...don't get any of this, but. You made a bunch of kaiju, and then you managed to fight free of the thing that empowered you to make them. I got that right, didn't I? You had help, but you still got out of it even deep in its clutches. After all, you're here now."

        "...Honestly, that's very powerful. Like...it's not something I was able to do." A slightly wistful, odd sorta smile over Seolla's lips. "Yeah. You're the kind of strong I wish I was. You were able to push out together with the people closest to you, who were all in the same boat, all with some unreasonably strong devil clutching your heart. I barely managed to get just myself out, even when it's just a couple of old farts who dropped my leash."

        The smile drops a bit. "...ah, and yeah...I...I probably need...everyone's help just to do the same for the people important to me, too. I'm not even here for that...I'm here because I wanted to see if I can somehow...find my actual family. I don't have any leads. I can't even be sure my name's a lead. ...nn, don't worry though too much. Renais is already...she was really intense about doing something here. Out of everyone, she's the one I'm holding onto the most...like a knight whose entire body is a flaming sword. Hah. I'm really lucky."

        A long, loud slurp from her straw, sucking out water that isn't there anymore. "...you just barely managed to grab onto my life, and it led to all this. ...I remember when I said 'thank you' early on. When you were doing your best to take care of Ouka. ...I meant it, you know. I mean it even more now. ...I think you're a lucky charm for me. Maybe if I don't let go of you, even more amazing things will happen. Even more people important to me will smile even when there's trouble on the horizon. Even more people will reach out to each other in harder times. ...yeah. I think that's what I'll settle on for thinking about you."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

It's not a bothersome idea for Akane either, actually... and she does need to expand her world, and that includes expanding her palate a bit. Experimentally, she takes the escargot, looking at it once. "... Yeah, I've eaten weirder," she decides, before popping it into her mouth. "Kinda chewy?" And sure enough, she chews.

"French food's kinda neat... I wonder if she eats this stuff, too," she murmurs to herself, thinking about it as Seolla meets her gaze. "... I didn't really -- get out. People pulled me out," Akane says, a little weakly. "But... I guess the reason Alexis did that was probably..." She glances up, musing. "... because he thought if he didn't, I was gonna slip out. Maybe I should give myself a little more credit after all." The more the two of them talk -- the more Akane notices that, while they're not terribly similar people, there's a lot to empathize with in their situations.

"Renais is really good. If anyone can help you find your family, it's her," Akane agrees. A knight... that gets her to giggle. "Seems like there are a lot of knights around lately. Between all the Knights and Braves, we're kinda tilted toward a weird party composition..." ... wait, is that joke even going to land for Seolla? "... never mind."

She doesn't start sucking and dying about it, though; she simply moves on. "... well -- you're welcome." It still messes with her -- this idea that her kaiju gave so many people the opportunity to move forward, to take better care of people around themselves and be taken care of in return. But it's not a bad feeling, at the same time.

... It actually gets her a little misty-eyed. "... I'll do whatever I can to help," she says, quietly -- but in exchange, she avails herself of some more appetizers.

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        "Too many knights and braves in the same party, eh..." Seolla taps her chin with a spoon. "...Well, lucky for you all then, I'm only really at home being an archer, even if it means I'm stuck at the back of the party. ...man..." The snails are, at last conquered, and replaced with an even more fearsome foe - a big old plate of spaghetti. (Isn't this kind of not the right place to order pasta!?)

        "...Do I even still keep...trying to fight? Like...ugh. So much of me just wants to hide in a box and hope I can just stumble into a decent plan. The rest of me is so, so angry that I don't know if I can hold back from doing anything, even if I feel like I'm running on fumes all the time these days. Fighting's kinda all I can really do though..."

        ~s l u r p ~ goes the noodles like a well-oiled vacuum cleaner. No mess or fuss or zeal - pasta simply enters at an extremely steady, reliable rate. "...How about you? ...hmm. Maybe in your case, where the thing you were using to change the world was...really complicated, it's a bit more about what you'd like to do. The kind of way to push at things that makes you think, 'that'd be really nice' moreso than existing talents. ...for me, that's always been...going really fast, flying around the sky, feeling the wind up high, so. It's...kinda easy for me!"

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Oh, she did get it. ... Load off Akane's mind, honestly; she starts giggling. "I'm still kinda trying to figure out what to do with myself." The last thing Seolla says is what snags on her brain on that part, though. "... you know, that makes a ton of sense. Maybe I do need to keep an eye on what I want to be, instead of just what I'm already good at. I was thinking about operator training for 3G, because I was basically doing that with Alexis for my kaiju... but maybe that's just falling back on something familiar."

Akane sticks to the appetizers, having not ordered any pasta for herself. "Flying high, huh -- that's a really neat dream. I'm... I didn't used to be afraid of heights, but honestly now I kinda am," she admits, feeling extremely uncool about it. "I don't think I could have died the way I was set up before, and I took some big tumbles! But now when I think about that..." Shivering, she admits, "... kinda scary to think about how easy it is to fall off stuff."

Looping back away from her own burgeoning phobias, she says, "... I think it's okay to get angry, as long as you don't let it get... weird. Trust me, I'm not great at this, but... it feels like it's easier to deal with and use right when you're not alone. And it doesn't sound like you are, so..."

... it gets away from her. "... good??"

<Pose Tracker> Seolla Schweizer has posed.

        "Going from fearless to fearful about something, eh...?" A careful, practiced dab at Seolla's mouth with a napkin before yet one more slurp - the pasta soon little but errant noodles here and there. "I've been hurtling through the sky for so long that I sometimes don't even realize it isn't natural. Well. Obviously I won't press it, but if there's anyone in the world you're safe with in the backseat of a plane, it's me. If you ever wanna tackle that worry, I'm happy to take you up sometime. You'll have a parachute and everything!"

        "Operator training, operator training...I mean, I can only say so much there, cause I don't really know how GGG operates. Honestly, until going to Tsutsujidai, I thought they were, uhhhh." Seolla mooshes at her own lips a little, fingers flicking at her braid. "...kinda assumed they were like, movies? ...Man. Ugh. I'm still instinctively assuming kaiju aren't real, but I know I've fought some before, when I really think of it."

        Muttering to herself under her breath, Seolla's eyes go evasive, leering at a street level wall photo of Anno Domini-era Paris decorating the side of the booth. "...i'm sure i did. ...they didn't...is there some reason they wanted me to forget there's a such thing as giant monsters...? ...why...? ...ugh..." Her hand moves up, cupping her forehead, thumb rolling at her temples, before she pushes back to reality a little better now.

        "...nnh. It does help that...a lotta people get angry about what I'm pushing at. ...can't really guarantee it won't get weird. ...There's someone out there a lot like me who...I feel like Chienne's anger really got to her. She did break free, with her two most important people by her side, but she's...scary now, for sure. ...I'll keep that in mind, actually. To not let it burn me up, just in case I meet her and feel like I want to be like her. Nn. She's likely to be steamed at me, now that's scary..."

        It's a blessing here though - after such a...difficult start to their meeting, that in this confined sort of space, it's easier than expected for Akane and Seolla to slowly learn to get along well...!