2022-10-10: Delimitation

• Log: 2022-10-10- Delimitation
• Cast: Akane Shinjo, Guy Shishioh
• Where: Tsutsujidai - Construction Site
• OOC - IC Date: 0096-10-10
• Summary: Guy Shishioh returns Akane Shinjo's shoe, lost from a great height. They outline the specifics of their situation.

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<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Tsutsujidai. A construction site.

No work happens here -- no work has, for months. With the situation as it is, Akane finds it harder and harder to feel like she has a future -- and accordingly, the idea of 'construction' has ground to a halt. In a practical sense, the location is abandoned, and for that reason: it's perfect for Akane.

The bloom is nowhere near off the rose with this particular scheme yet... even though the actual act of doing it is miserable every time. Each successive attempt leaves her feeling emptier, more convinced that the outside world is large and cruel and impossible to repair.

(And, as a creature of the outside world, 'Akane Shinjo' herself is --)

The act of planning, though, the act of moving toward a thousand tiny dreams: that part's fun! That part's GREAT actually. So it is that Akane hangs her feet lazily off a construction crane, one Mary Jane loafer hanging lazily off her foot --

-- and falling. "Eh. I'll get it later," she says, with a shrug. "Let's see... honestly, I feel like the purple-haired one would get it if I tried, but... maybe I owe him for doing the boring part of getting Renais out." (Never mind who Renais's new predator is, of course.)

Up here... it's quite foggy.

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

It falls into the distance, below the fog.

And then a flash of gold surges up from the mist, a solid leap from below, to the hook of the brane, and up to the crane's main mast itself. Even though the light is hazy, there's a certain backlit quality to the way Guy alights on the crane.

He is holding her shoe. He is not geared for a fight, though; he has the gold vest he wears for casual occasions, and his 3G jumpsuit below it.

His face isn't its old grin, but nor is it the scowl he wears for villains. A slightly awkward, but serious look. "You dropped this," he says, announcing himself vocally.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane's shoulder blades instantly seize up when Guy appears and informs her she's dropped her shoe. "I know," Akane says, a little flatly -- likewise meeting Guy with neither the cloying-sweet smile of manipulation nor the angry, shouting scowl of someone not getting her way. She's firmly at mildly annoyed. "I was going to pick it up when I came back down."

She doesn't move to take it, nor stand up; she just calmly powers down her tablet and shifts her posture slightly to fully regard him. "Long time no see, Evoluder!" It's here that she starts finding something like the antagonistic cheer she likes to meet 3G with. "I was expecting you to have GaoFighGar the next time you showed up. I mean, I wasn't, but I was expecting at least, like, the idea of GaoFighGar."

That bit of taunting out of the way, she gets down to business. "Let me guess. You're here because you think I'm up to something."

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

"And now I've saved you the trouble," Guy says, with a faint ghost of the friendly grin he used to favor her with.

Then it's gone. 'Evoluder,' huh. There's one way to set her position. Was the last person who called him just that Gimlet? "Seems the replacement project hit a bit of a stumble," he says. He's not approaching.

She cuts to business. It's a bit of a show of his abilities, this, balancing on the crane with ease. Is it a threat...? He just spoke with Mamoru, promised to trust in his courage.

Still, he feels an aggression in his stomach that moves him to assert himself just a bit.

"Mamoru's report seemed pretty open and shut, to me," he says. "There's not much need for thinking about it."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Oh right. You guys talk to each other. I'm not used to that one!" Akane answers, and in so doing gives rather more away than she thinks she is. "I still think you guys probably have the wrong idea, but hey -- that's not really my problem. ... still, I'm guessing you're here because you want to hear it the way I'm going to tell it."

Akane scoots around a little from her place on the control platform; she wants to have a bit more space to have this conversation. "Okay, so: here I am, then, up to something. Maybe you even caught me in the act. It's a long way down from here."

Pink, glossy lips turn up slightly. "Wanna throw me?"

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

His eyes narrow, ever so slightly. ...she's serious, about that. She actually didn't think Mamoru Amami wouldn't explain his findings to, at the very least, Guy Shishioh? ...interesting. Thoughts for later.

He even lets her retreat - center herself. And the question at the end gets a surprised look. "No. That's not what I'm here for. I didn't really know what I was going to do when I came here, to be honest."

He holds up his hand, the G-Stone circuit's emblem flickering on its back. "It's getting easier to sense you, by the way." Does that mean she's becoming more kaiju? Or that something in Tsutsujidai is syncing better with his Evoluder nature? He's not sure. "Though if we're in a sharing mood..."

He tosses her shoe toward her aimed to roll to a stop on the control platform. "I'd love to know what you've got in mind for all this."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Huh. I imagined you were the kind of guy who only acted when he had some idea what he was doing. Live and learn, I guess." She sets her tablet away more fully, now, and regards Guy in his fullness.

"Yeah, that doesn't surprise me," she says, at the mention that she's become easier to sense. "Vessels of Light know when there are threats around. The way they know changes, but you'd have to 'hear like an Ultra,' I suppose!" Is that what she's taken away from the lesson, now...? It was -- different, when she learned it.

'What she's got in mind.' That would be a question he'd want to know the answer to, she realizes. He doesn't 'get it' yet, and maybe he never will, so... "Hm. Let me flip it around on you." She stretches out against the railing, and asks, "What's 'Akane Shinjo' to you? What do you think I have in mind?" The question's almost playful, still.

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

"Trusting your impulses is an important skill to learn, Shinjo." Dropped a long way in familiarity from when he was treating her like a friendly kid, not so very long ago. "For my line of work, anyway."

So that's how she's classifying them. Vessels of Light and their enemies...

"Still figuring that out," he confesses of her character. "The girl I knew was standoffish, but she was very worried about her friends. She hurt people, but I think she didn't know how badly. But that's been getting worse and worse, hasn't it?"

He tips his chin up, eyes narrowing. What does he think?

"GGG's dealt with attacks like this a couple times. EI-18, you should've been around for that, the false sun off G-Island City? It started as a nanomachine cloud meant to disrupt our operations. Drove people into fits of ecstatic dancing. It only attacked after that."

"And you wouldn't have seen the Paras Particles. This really reminds me of those, actually. The 11 Masters of Sol released them on us in the Trinary Solar System. They caused a particular relaxation phenomenon, making it essentially impossible for people without neurological protections to do anything but sleep or laze around."

His attention focuses. "Then came the attack."

        J-Ark, alone. An army of Repli-Braves, screaming. "DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT!"

        No matter your will, Evoluder Guy, you have the body of a mortal. You have no way to escape my control.

He scratches behind his ear, not noticing the nervous tic. His jaw sets, and his stomach twists and twists and twists and TWISTS and something TEARS--

It feels like fire erupting out of his throat when he speaks. "You've got Alouette, Ouka...Renais, too, right? We've lost touch with Sayaka and Tetsuya, too. That group is more than enough. Sneak Alouette, Ouka, Renais aboard. Alouette gets the Protect Shades, intruder alerts, mass sensors. Her passwords are changed but she knows our architecture, she'd find a way."

"Then Ouka and Renais go hunting. Fish in a barrel. Mamoru, Ikumi, and I stand a chance, but nobody else, really. The gamble is if we stop them before they get to the Order Room, but..."

"With the Protect Shades down, Thunder Break does the job easily."

Does he think she'd do that? He...with the words out, maybe he doesn't? But the words keep tumbling out of him, a flood of terror masked as an accusation.

"And of course, having done all that, they'd never muster the courage to break whatever spell you've cast," he finishes.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane listens to Guy describe her as standoffish but worried. "Oh, trust me -- I know exactly how bad I'm hurting people. I came and visited Alouette in the hospital, you know!" she answers, ready to stance herself yet again as cruel. It's distinct from the stance she took as part of BioNet, a bit -- but that's still part of her, and it costs her nothing to go for it.

"I think I was still... somewhere else, then. My secret," Akane answers, on the topic of EI-18. She's not a Nouvelle Tokyo native, after all. ... but she does remember that, from the news, vaguely. The Paras Particles actually sound -- familiar, though, in this context.That one isn't far off, and there's a way in which her eyes widen a bit, the posture of her lips pinching in a little in some half-formed realization --

-- which passes as Guy scratches at his jaw and then lays out a possibility.

She listens. Something shifts in the pit of her stomach -- an unfamiliar feeling, and one that has to contend with an empty stomach. She tenses up, and then --

-- starts laughing. It's not villainous laughter. She legitimately sounds like she's just heard the funniest joke she's ever heard.

There's a nugget of truth in it, of course. Someone who'd done so many cruel things... could never muster the courage to go back to being a normal girl.

But the funniest jokes always have that nugget of truth.

"Oh, man! You actually sounded serious that whole time! Props for the poker face," Akane says, taking a breath, running the fingertips of her left hand over the curve of her cheek. "Hahahahahahahahahaha, oh, I still need a second. Wow. WOW." She's still kind of laughing -- her expression a big smile, her stomach doing that not-quite-a-belly-laugh soundless bounce that comes with laughter dying down.

It stops abruptly. "Your joke sucks though. If I wanted to break Orbit Base or kick over... wherever Gridman's hiding," she STILL doesn't know that one, "I'd just make a kaiju to do it. I have the basic idea. I'd do something like the kaiju from the end of Flash." Tarabaman, presumably.

Looking Guy dead in the eyes, she says, "I don't need to kill any of you except Gridman. Or you, I guess, but Gridman's the safer bet. You've got your own primary problems to deal with; I'm Gridman's. I just need you to get it so you get out of my way."

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

Maybe it's the memory of the Chemical Bolts that make him feel so horribly hot. Guy takes long, slow breaths, recognizing something in himself he doesn't usually let fly. Which is why he's gathered himself just barely enough that when Akane bursts out laughing - and it's not the maniacal cackles of the Primevals, not the cruelty of Palus Abel, it's just...a girl hearing something so absurd she has to laugh. He misses the passage of surprise across her face much as she probably misses the way he all but deflates, that strong, tense, defiant posture falling out of him.

She wasn't thinking of that at all.

It wasn't even the faintest glimmer of an idea in her head.

This time, instead of nervously remembering where the Chemical Bolts were lodged in his skull, it's an awkward scratch at the back of his head.

Had he really thought this girl could be as heartless as the coldly calculating, relentless self-styled 'god' Palparepa? As the Primevals, with their twisted vision of cosmic paradise? As Pasdar?

Not a haughty goddess. Not a devil with an evil smile.

Just a girl, wrapped up in herself. A girl whose heart is wounded so badly that all she can think to do, is...

The expression that dawns across his face is maybe not remotely what Akane's hoping for, because it's a calm, almost placid smile. This time, when he extends his memory back, he thinks of Mamoru, not so very long ago at all. Their promise to rely on each others' courage. He thinks of Renais, cracking herself up over coffee. He thinks of Alouette and Hana, fussing over cake.

And yes, he thinks of the Repli-Braves, and the courage that overrode their programming. It killed them, but their bravery saved everyone. He thinks of Mikoto and Mamoru, holding his hands as their joint Purification washed cold consciousness through him to destroy the Chemical Bolts' poison, promising him that with each others' courage, they'd overcome.

He shrugs, and takes a step up the crane, still balancing gamely. "Guess you're right," he says, comfortably. "Kaiju always were more your style."

He's drawn closer, but he also shifts his posture, reaching out for a hanging wire to make it look both more casual and like he actually needs the support. "Alright then. I'm listening, Akane Shinjo. I bet you feel like you've been screaming it from the mountains, but adults like me forget to listen, sometimes."

"What do you want me to get?"

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

It could just be Tsutsujidai's eternal summer, of course. It's so miserably hot -- it always is, except when that feeling bubbles over into rain. It makes one wonder why no one's ever seen Akane sweat, no matter how many heavy coats and hoodies and leather corsets she picks out to wear.

Guy concedes the point. "Right? Even if I specifically wanted something from inside, like -- I could take another crack at an autointelligence kaiju! I could ask Alexis! There's tons of ways I could do it. Didn't I -- oh, I guess you weren't in France. I don't need help when I have my kaiju." A very specific turn of phrase.

Guy reclaims a little of his height advantage; mirroring him, Akane stands up slowly, after placing a hand in her bag. She retrieves a box of tomato juice. Her right hand holds it there, elbow now against the railing. Her left pulls the straw off the box. Her eyes shut. Shake, tap, tap.

Stab.

As the straw pierces through the foil, Akane brings it up to her lips, letting Guy ask his question.

"It. Everything. The fact thadditizn' --" mouth fully around the straw now, talking around it -- "OVvious means you prob'ly can't," Akane answers, but... she might as well try. He probably won't leave until he hears it anyway.

Sighing out and letting the straw flop out of her mouth, she continues, "If you understood how much better the dream was and why, you wouldn't want to break it. You'd want in on it. You're thinking of it like I enslaved them, and it's not like that at all. I just gave them a chance at a nice dream, and they decided a dream was nicer than everything out there."

She brings the straw back to her mouth, taking another sip. "Jussayin', even with my world in the wrong thpot, 's better for Alouette and Renais to end up in the PLANTs thish way than 'cuz they got deported by Man Hunters, right?"

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

...he's gonna leave the point on the Man Hunters alone, that's a fight he can't win. The notion they'd target Alouette and Renais is wild and the thought they'd succeed is outright laughable, but...he can't deny they exist in his world.

Still.

Mamoru said they 'gave up.' So this is how that happened, is it? A dream, she says...

"Like Brain Primeval, huh," is what comes out of him, remembering when it tried to paralyze him. "No, I guess not. The world it showed was no kind of paradise."

He watches her fiddle with that juice box. Finally, he says, "I don't believe they'd just give up on their courage without something else. Not those two. You're right. I guess I don't get it."

Then he stands up straighter, and this time rather than standing on it like a hero challenging a villain, he sets one hand on his hips in an upright, open posture. A common one, for him.

"Still. Even if I can't let them sleep like this forever...Thank you, Shinjo. For trying to take care of our friends."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane -- who has only ever been small, until her partnership with Alexis began, who has only ever known the world as something that issues demands that you either assent to or meet in violence -- lets that point fade, too. An emblem of the different worlds they live in, perhaps.

If that's it, then...

"Maybe you don't know them as well as you think." Akane thinks about her next words for a few moments, taking another sip of tomato juice. Doing something besides talking to Guy -- even for a second -- makes it easier to focus. "Maybe it's worth thinking about what you've had that Renais hasn't! She's been through a whole bunch." Her gaze tracks out toward one of the maintenance kaiju, away from Guy. "... There are plenty of memories you can unload in a place like this." It's the closest thing to a hint that she can think to give.

Guy -- cedes the points to her, ultimately. It's the one thing Akane doesn't know how to deal with -- someone freely giving her the point. The confusion on her face lasts only a moment -- but it is there.

Evenutally, what she settles for -- after another sip from her tomato juice, until it runs out -- is, "... You're welcome, but I think you should go. The ultimate goal is still killing a Vessel of Light, remember!" It's still one of the threats Akane's come to rely on -- just... smaller, more oblique than has historically been her style.

That doesn't make it not a threat.

<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.

He's keen, now, listening, now. No longer held down by the vision of a stern-faced man who tried to bind him as a demon, he hears those words. What he's had that Renais hasn't? They've talked about that. A lot, actually. Memories you can unload...the maintenance kaiju...

Renais...

No. They'll get them back. HEAR her, and process it later.

"Wow, you are feeling generous," Guy says. "But I think you've always had that streak to you." She really demolished that juice, huh...

That...threat. "Ah right, it is, isn't it?" Guy says. He holds up his left arm, flexing the hand where his Gao Brace used to be, back in the old days. "And I seem to be out of a robot. Don't much want to find out what Ouka would do if she put that one together, either. Well, then, I think we'll be seeing each other around, Akane Shinjo."

He steps off the crane and just falls, kicking up dust with a neat landing, and walks away from it like it were nothing.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane finally retrieves the shoe Guy brought back, putting it back on her foot. She lets him retreat.

She can't think of anything else to say, so she doesn't, but... her train of thought on hunting down another victim for Bujack has been interrupted.

She heads back down the crane, taking the slow, lazy path down to the construction site, and then the street, heading home.