2024-09-18: Culture Aftershock
- Cast: Hayato Jin (NPC'd by Neo Getter Team), Liam 7-020, Neo Getter Team
- Where: Japan - NISAR HQ
- Date: U.C. 0099 09 18
- Summary: Liam meets up with his friends, the Getter Team, to talk about his experiences dealing with the fall of Junius Seven, and shares a truth with them he can trust them to keep.
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam requested a lot of medical leave after the fall of Junius Seven. Officially, he's still on-call in the event of an Angel attack, or a catastrophic event of similar scale, but for the most part, he's kept to himself. Yesterday, he sent a few texts to Gai, asking if he and his teammates were interested in meeting and catching up. Trying to make sense of what happened, maybe.
And so it is that Liam arrives at NISAR's little segment of the NERV apparatus, passing through the increased security with nary a complaint. He arrives in the pilots' break room, or whatever passes for it, looking much like he did before he left for Jupiter a while back. Completely clean-shaven, wearing his NERV uniform, visibly stressed, yet not to the point of breaking--this is Liam, now that the possibility of a calm, quiet life has been ripped from him.
Maybe it was all just a lie.
"Gai?" Liam asks, softly. "Sho? Go?"
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
The NISAR control room is the same as it's always been - a stepped bowl floor with the control console in the centre, around which the familiar faces of the Neo Getter Team are seated. The main screen is dark, and the computer consoles in front of it are similarly empty of operations staff... but there is a fourth person here, standing near the quiet screen.
Tall for a Japanese man, wearing a dark grey business shirt with a pink tie, with a black mullet and a dark green greatcoat, and bitterly cold eyes - it can only be Captain Hayato Jin.
As Liam calls out, the team rise from the central table. Gai is first over, shortly followed by Go and Sho. "Hey, man." All three of them look pretty tired, too. "You look like shit," Go says, his expression lacking his usual cocky grin. Sho, too, is quieter than usual, lips thin. "We hadn't heard from you in a while. It was a relief to hear you made it."
Gai nods. "Yeah. I figure it must have been hell up there. You want a drink, or something?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Captain Jin cuts a distinctive figure. Liam wasn't expecting to see him here, though perhaps he should've known better--this is his domain, after all. He turns to the Captain, snapping off a salute, before addressing his friends.
"I feel like shit," Liam says, to Go. He approaches the conference table and takes a seat, folding his hands on the table in front of him. "A drink would be nice." Liam glances at Gai with a faint, grateful smile. "It was..." He trails off, unable to put his thoughts into words immediately. He still can't watch the footage of it--any of it. "It wasn't ZAFT," he decides upon. He'd be surprised if Sho wasn't worried sick about Alouette, given the sudden surge in anti-Coordinator rhetoric. How many Coordinators were among the victims? How many have been murdered since then?
Liam's hands start to fidget in a gesture of open worry. "There were... ZAFT people there, but not--not a whole fleet. Just a couple. And they weren't alone. Most of them were from this... 'Cosmo Babylonia' outfit. No idea where they even came from. I haven't heard anything from anyone in Tsutsujidai since they took over Side 4."
"But the people who really wanted to kill us all," Liam says, his voice cold as the grave, "were the 'Jovian Lizards'. Not aliens. People who got exiled because they wouldn't play ball with the Federation, and got... nuked into near-extinction."
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Jin nods to Liam's salute, but remains quiet.
"You want soda, or something heavier?" Gai asks, heading over to the vending machine.
"I bet," Go replies to Liam's admission of feeling like shit. "But we're still alive. That ain't nothin'."
"Ex-ZAFT holdouts?" Sho asks, for clarification. "That... definitely explains the way people in NUNE are talking." The way she holds her fists tight shows off the bruises across her knuckles. Maybe she's thrown hands over the rhetoric flying around the planet.
"Stupid bullshit," Go mutters, angrily. "Gore and the Saurians want us dead regardless."
Then Liam drops the Jovian Lizards bombshell, and the room goes deathly silent... Until Hayato speaks up, stepping forward.
"NUNE's 'official' stance is that the 'Jovian Lizards' are an enigmatic alien force with the singular goal of annihilating humanity." He folds his arms, serious. "You're saying they're human?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam weighs the merits of vending-machine beer, and decides against it. The last thing he needs, he reminds himself--for what feels like the hundredth time--is to drink when he's stressed, and associate drinking with relief of stress. It's a more rational thought than the idea that drinking will somehow turn him into a drunken, angry stereotype.
"Just water, please," Liam says. "Yeah," he adds, to Go. "It... they were literally trying to kill everyone on the planet. Probably some of the closer Colonies, too. The Orbital Ring... It was either detonate the bomb ourselves, or let it drop and kill everyone." His gaze softens as he turns to Sho, noting the blue and black on her hands. "Yeah. I didn't--fight them myself. Just saw their beacons on approach. One of them was in this thing I didn't recognize, but it wasn't ZAFT-built."
Suddenly, Liam doesn't care so much about Hayato Jin being in the same room. He /has/ to bear witness to what he saw. He's tried to tune out the news as much as he could, but every state and corporate outlet would have him believe that this was, at best, a result of (Coordinator) negligence, and at worst, a deliberate act of genocide.
It was an act of genocide. But as usual, the truth of /who and why/ was the first thing to die once the dust settled.
"That is NUNE's official public stance," Liam says, "because it's still covering up atrocities from the Lunar Independence War. Back then, the Lunar separatists had two factions, and the governments of Earth played them off each other so they didn't have to kill them themselves. What was left of the authoritarian faction got driven off. They settled on the moons of Jupiter. And they found... some kind of ancient manufactory there. They made all those drones, they made Distortion Fields... including the one they installed on Junius Seven. That was the bomb. They wanted to kill every person--every elder, every child, everything /alive on Earth/--because of what Earth's leaders did to them."
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Gai grabs a soda, passing Liam a bottle of water with a nod.
"... That's a hell of a decision to have to make," Sho says. "I guess the early detonation spread out the damage, but letting a full PLANT hit with a Distortion Field around it would have been an extinction event."
"... It's like New Yark all over again," Gai mutters, "but so much worse."
There's another silence - a shared moment of mourning among the heirs to the brutal legacy of Getter.
As Liam starts explaining NUNE's official stance on the Jovian Lizards, Hayato reaches into a pocket and draws out a clicker of some kind. As he touches the button, the lights in the conference room flicker and go out, emergency lighting coming on.
"That should cover us," he says, before motioning to Liam to carry on, listening intently.
"The Lunar Independence War was before the founding of the UC Calendar," he thinks aloud. "These people are carrying a grudge more than a hundred years old to justify genocide."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam returns Gai's nod as he takes the bottle, and twists off the cap. The water is cool and refreshing, and he takes a long drink to ground himself. If he focuses on that sensation, he can keep the memories at bay. Liam shares that moment of silence with the others, and the specter of the thing he's yet to mention rests cold fingers on his shoulder.
But first, Captain Jin has a prudent measure. Liam cuts off in mid-sentence, waiting until the signal is given before resuming.
"Yeah," Liam says, and he shudders at the thought of it. "It's--I fought two of them. One. They were treating this like they were the heroes, and..." God, there's no way around this, is there? "Literally like it was fucking Gekiganger--" He looks up at the three pilots across from them, anger boiling in his eyes. "--Yeah, that Gekiganger--and they were in Gekiganger III, except that was a man's job and they were both pure and noble girls."
Liam lets that sit a moment. He quietly hopes Sho won't feel the need to punch something, not because it's not merited, but because her knuckles have been putting in overtime.
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
There is yet another silence in the room as the team process this revelation, only to be broken with:
"Wait - what's Gekiganger?" That's Go, of course. Gai and Sho shoot him a withering look, and he responds with "What? I was a street rat, I didn't have the luxury of TV."
"A show predating the Universal Century," Hayato explains, turning to tap some controls on the computer to pull up some archive data on the big screen - of the three Gekiganger forms. "Featuring some... peculiarly familiar designs."
Getter Team exchange some bewildered looks. "That's... uncanny," Gai admits. "Did Professor Saotome - ?"
"As far as I know," Hayato answers, "The Professor had never seen a single episode."
"... Creepy," Gai concludes.
"Wait - " Sho turns back to Liam. "They were acting like they were the heroes of the story? And, like..." She blinks. "... Like they shouldn't be fighting, too?"
"... what the hell gets people thinking that way?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam's gaze flicks up at the screen, and he nods. "Yeah, it's... cult media." A pause. "That's a show or movie or book that remains quietly popular for decades after it's released. Some of my girlfriend's coworkers are real into it."
"Doesn't make it any less creepy, though."
"They had a pair of magical girl robots," Liam says, with a straight face. "It was--" His stoic expression starts to crack a moment later as yet another point of /ridiculousness/ sinks in. "Wasn't even the first time I'd met them. The first time was on the beach, where they said they were ZAFT on a vacation. It had to have been the malfunctioning chulip, they were there to look into it. They were talking Gekiganger with Lu's coworkers and I didn't even think anything was wrong."
A pang of irrational guilt seizes Liam's heart. If he'd known then, what would he have done--?
No. He can't flagellate himself over what-ifs when he has plenty of real failures to account for.
"At the drop," Liam says, meeting Sho's eyes, "their leader said that the highest ideal she could aspire to was to be a woman worth dying for. That's it. A symbol that men see as the peak of virtue. Something worth defending with their lives. At least one of them actually did just that when that robot kaiju tried to land a lethal hit." Another pause. "Himeyuri Oono," he says. "That's her name." Etched onto his heart in acid, along with 'Haman Karn' and 'Rakan Dakharan'.
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
"Of course you wouldn't," Hayato points out. "You weren't looking for human enemies. One of the downsides of NUNE covering this bullshit up is that it means the enemies they're so keen to wipe out can just... hide in plain sight on Earth, if they want."
He cracks a sardonic, bitter grin. "Propaganda blinds the people to the truth on both sides."
The temperature in the low-lit room seems to drop as Liam continues to explain the motivations of the Jovian leadership - a drop localised around Sho, who Go and Gai have instinctively backed away from.
"... I see," she says, in a voice like ice. "A woman worth dying for, huh?"
"If that's her loftiest ideal, while at the same time dropping a colony on innocent people... then she can feel free to die."
She turns towards Hayato. "Captain. It's highly likely that the Jovians will attempt planetfall to capitalise on the damage caused by the Junius Seven drop. Requesting permission for Neo Getter Robo to deploy against them."
Hayato holds eye contact with his protege for a long moment, then nods. "As long as the Dinosaur Empire doesn't do anything that would take priority: Permission granted. I trust you won't put your team in jeopardy, Tachibana."
"Of course not, Captain." She smiles, humourlessly. "If I get in over my head, they'll pull me out. That's why you built a new Getter Team, right?"
Hayato nods. "I am going to have to look into a few matters on my own. Gai, if anyone asks - "
" - you're dealing with chronic complications from your old injury," Gai answers as though this whole ruse has been rehearsed. "Understood, sir."
Go, meanwhile, sits down next to Liam. He doesn't have much to say, so he just sits there in silence.
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
That's... right, isn't it? The Federation built up the "Jovian Lizards" as an implacable alien menace. Lucine had speculated that the drones were malfunctioning, somehow--that even if someone else built them, they were doing things their creators had never intended. Some of the tension unwinds from Liam's heart as he reassesses the thought, like Dr. Hinoki taught him.
"We're at an extreme disadvantage on multiple fronts," Liam says. "They can jump through space without Fold Drives. They have advanced gravity technology. Everything we've seen about their society is... from those two, and I don't know where they stand in the bigger picture." Somehow, Liam doubts that a woman would be in charge of anything meaningful in a society where women are idealized to that extent.
Sho seems to agree. Liam sits back, and lets her do her thing.
"It's like Dublin again," Liam murmurs, glancing over at Go without quite meeting his eyes. "It's... never the people at fault who suffer and die."
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
"Yeah." Go nods. "Indiscriminate destruction, just because they don't get to be in charge of Earth any more." He's pretty obviously thinking of the Dinosaur Empire here, but the parallel is there.
"Doing bad guy shit and playing at being heroes, though... That's just gross. I'm not gonna pretend I'm some kinda saint, but..." He growls. "Kinda want them to run across some of Gore's forces, to be honest - but apparently they don't like going into space."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam lets out a breath, and sets his hands on his thighs. "It would be nice," he says, "if all the horrible people would fight each other, and leave everyone else in peace. Doesn't work that way, though."
"Mom once told me war is worse than Hell, because there's no innocents in Hell." Liam pauses a beat. "You didn't hear this from me, but if you run into the Nadesico out there, remember they've been fighting the Jovians for longer than anyone else. Okay?"
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Go barks out a laugh at 'no innocents in Hell' - a cynical laugh, but a laugh. "Yeah, that sounds about right."
Gai looks over as Liam mentions the Nadesico. "Are people talking smack about that ship, too?"
"Yeah there's a bunch of conspiracy stuff going around online," Sho says with an exasperated expression. "Probably to do with the fact that they're linked to Orb."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam's whole face twists, like he'd just bitten into something sour. "Easier than thinking about how fucked this is," he says, as Sho brings up those conspiracies. "Nergal is crooked--" And there's venom in Liam's voice, like he wants to say something so much worse-- "--but that crew's doing the best they can."
Of course, it's no secret why. Lucine's part of that crew, and Liam's gotten to know her friends over the years.
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Sho nods as Liam elaborates. "We'll keep 'em in mind, don't worry. Lucine's good people."
"Hey..." Gai frowns. "Didn't the Jovians take over Mars? ... How is Lucine holding up?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
"Thanks, Sho," Liam says, his smile bone-weary, but grateful. He takes a breath, calming himself before giving Gai the answer he deserves. "The Jovians didn't 'take over'. They sent their drones to kill everyone they could find. Aside from a few Zentradi outposts--and maybe other little enclaves--the only place able to keep them at bay was Alba City."
As for Lucine herself... "Her heart was wide open because she was hoping for a miracle. We all were. Then there was this... hate even I could feel, and then the backlash of so many people dying, all at once." Liam squeezes his thighs, a little, the pressure grounding him in the present. "She was out for three days. She's back on duty, but she's still--" Helpless anger gleams in Liam's eyes. "The Jovians killed everyone in her colony. Her dad's still missing. The only reason she and her mom are alive is because she got past all those drones in the Dianthus. And everyone she knew online, all those other kids, they're dead, too. All because of what some rich bastards on Earth did to some other bastards on the Moon. And she didn't even /know/ because Nergal lied to her the entire time. How do you think she's holding up?"
A pause. Liam breathes in, sudden dismay in his eyes. "Sorry for yelling."
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Gai looks taken aback for a moment after Liam's outburst, then shakes his head. "It's okay. That was a dumbass question, I'm sorry too. What I meant was - let her know we're thinkin' of her too, okay?"
Go lets out a loud puff of breath. "This is the worst part of a war like this. The waiting for their next move. I just want to belt every single one of them in their stupid faces but they won't even show. How the hell do you even deal with it, Sho?"
"Iaijutsu," the redhead replies. "The discipline is all about waiting to strike until the perfect moment."
"... It's kinda scary how you're able to think like that," Go concludes.
"A kind of scary we need, against enemies like these," Hayato points out. "The ability to keep a cool head while the world's going to shit is an invaluable skill."
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
Liam takes a few deep breaths. "I will," he says. "Next time I talk to her. I'm sure she'll appreciate it."
In his own way, Go expresses what Liam has wanted to do for more than two weeks, now. But Sho has a damn good point, too. "They'll show up again," Liam says. Please don't let this be another Mars, where it's all faceless drones. "And when they do, they won't have surprise on their side. Then we fight them, together."
<Pose Tracker> Neo Getter Team has posed.
Hayato nods as Liam expresses his will to fight. "In the meantime... I'll do some digging of my own." He looks around the room. "This conversation never happened, understood?"
"Yes, sir," Getter Team chorus, sternly.
"Now." Hayato looks towards Liam. "Is there anything else important you need to mention?"
<Pose Tracker> Liam 7-020 has posed.
"Yes, sir," says Liam, only a little out of synch. One glance at his friends, and it's back to Hayato. "No," he says, with a shake of his head. And then, back to Go, Sho, and Gai. "Want to get ramen or something when you're off-duty? Been a while." Anything to remind himself he can still try and be normal, and that the world isn't going to hell.