2022-03-01: Delivery Service
- Log: 2022-03-01 Delivery Service
- Cast: Kaworu Nagisa, Rei Ayanami
- Where: Tokyo-3, OCU Japan
- OOC - IC Date: March 1, 0096 (2022)
- Summary: After Kaworu delivers some groceries on Akane's behalf, he fills Rei in on the nature of Tsutsujidai.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Sometime in the afternoon, Rei's phone will ring. If she picks it up, she'll see the incoming call is from Kaworu... or from a local number, in any case, if she doesn't have it programmed into her phone. It's persistent either way; if she leaves it to go to voice mail, it'll continue to ring well past it would normally do so.
When she finally does pick up, either way, it's Kaworu's voice on the other end. There's a soft sound of rain on the other end. "Hey," he says, voice as casually friendly as always. "First, you left behind some groceries in Tsutsujidai. Why?"
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
It's about to ring a fifth time when a connection is made.
Rei Ayanami's phone has sat on a little charging dock which was provided to her by Dr. Akagi nineteen months ago. (Dr. Akagi provided a second, smaller charging device with a small cat decoration when prompted by the need for international travel. She didn't plan that one.) The phone lives on this dock when it is not in Rei's bag or, very occasionally, pocket. It sits in a place with occasional sunlight. There is a distinctive fade pattern on the plain casing with a quiet NERV logo on the back.
But it is picked up now.
There is enough of a silence for Kaworu to perhaps wonder if it's a failed call. Then:
"Ayanami."
Then:
Another delay.
Followed by: "Tsutsujidai." From the shading of the tone it is a question. She does not recognize the name.
But - a little sound as if she's about to ask something.
Then - "The place with no moon." With that same 'interrogative' shading at the end.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
The call connects. A momentary silence.
'Ayanami.'
"Yes," he confirms.
'Tsutsujidai.'
"Yes."
'The place with no moon.'
Kaworu chuckles a little. He does hear that slight upward lilt at the end, just present enough to make it a question even if it doesn't sound like it. "Yes, that's the one." He pauses a beat himself. "Are you in the habit of picking up groceries, then leaving them behind?" he wonders, genuinely curious. Even if she hadn't realized the name of the place when she came here, one would normally think that the mention of leaving groceries behind would narrow it down.
But then, as he'd told Akane, she's not very well socialized. None of them are, as he'd also mused at the time.
"The girl you ran into at the time gathered up the groceries you left behind," he continues. "Do you want them? Or shall I leave them with her?"
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"No," Rei answers the question.
There is a longer pause.
"The girl."
Another pause.
"I."
There is a faint hint of agitation on the other side of the phone. Something about this is exasperating Rei. This is, historically, a good sign in the long term, and a questionable sign in the shorter term.
"The girl assisted me in identifying ingredients for the cooking operation," Rei says. "She solicited classified information as well. She provided me with money to purchase the ingredients."
Another, shorter pause.
"... I was asleep when I encountered the girl. It... was not a real encounter."
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
In the short and the long term, it's quite fascinating to Kaworu. He's fully patient with her long pauses and her short statements, and waits for her to work through what it is she wants to say.
When she gets to the point--that it was a dream--he gives a little laugh again. "Oh, is that so? Hmm..."
So then she 'woke up.' And yet...
"You knew I'd been here before," he replies, unfazed by this apparent revelation. "You followed where I had been. That's what she told me, anyway. Is that so?"
It's not really relevant to the groceries. He just wants to hear it from Rei.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Another pause.
Rei's voice sounds stressed, but that's inevitable. "... I had felt that I had followed a..."
Searching for words.
"Road, that you had walked. It smelled like you."
More stressed breathing.
"I did not tell the girl classified information," Rei says. Not even, it seems, in a dream.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
"Oh?"
It's one syllable. But Kaworu sounds pleased--even fond. He doesn't press the matter, though, concluding with a simple, "I see."
When she continues, he smiles on his end of the phone. Well, he was smiling anyway, but it grows a bit. "I know you didn't," he reassures her. Given the circumstances, this is probably not at all reassuring. "Where are you now? At home?"
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
The breathing calms and goes below the threshold of audibility on the phone. Actually quickly. Rei may have been gunning towards a panic attack, even if it was only making her sound like someone was standing on her foot.
"Yes," Rei says. There is a faint sense of motion in the sound.
The phone is set down. The water tap is turned on.
There is a splash.
"I am not asleep," Rei says a moment later, basically back to the usual Rei Ayanami Inflection.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
"Correct," Kaworu replies, a smile still in his voice. It's good that Rei is calming down; he doesn't want to upset her. But, well... this is a matter that she'll need to confront sooner or later.
"I'll be by within an hour," he continues. "Until then..."
The call disconnects.
True to his word, within an hour from then, there comes a knock at the door. Kaworu already knows the doorbell doesn't work. When Rei answers the door, he's there with a smile, a damp shirt and hair, and--a bag of groceries.
"You weren't dreaming. Not entirely," he tells her point-blank. He holds out the bag. It will have everything she gathered the other day. "This is the proof."
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"Understood," Rei says. The phone goes dead.
Time passes. An hour is enough time that Rei has dried off. When Kaworu knocks at the door, Rei opens it fairly quickly. She is wearing her school uniform, almost certainly because it was the closest garment readily available.
Rei's hovel is as it always is. The only real difference is the monotonous sound of an electric heater in the corner, which has made it almost uncomfortably warm in the concrete cube. The air smells of dried laundry.
Rei blinks several times.
She reaches forwards and -- with a faint tremor in her hand -- takes the bag of groceries. She inventories the contents - entirely canned vegetables. Mushrooms, black olives, diced Roma tomatoes, sliced bell pepper, baby onions.
"I don't understand," Rei says as she turns to put the bag on a counter in the kitchen. (The sink is full of dishes and several cheap, burned baking sheets.)
The door is open.
"It is a dream. Dreams are images the brain creates as memories are formed."
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Kaworu hands off the bag to Rei, then tucks his hand in his pocket as she searches through it. Though it's cold outside, he seems content to simply wait in the doorway as she works through the contents of both the bag and her heart.
She doesn't shut the door, and she continues the conversation. Kaworu chooses to accept this as an invitation, and steps inside. "That is what a dream is, yes. But Tsutsujidai is more than that," he replies. If Rei doesn't shut the door, he takes the liberty to do so himself.
"Tsutsujidai is a dream-like space. One can appear inside it while asleep. Shinji and the Second had that experience as well. But it's also a place that actually exists. Those who call it their hometown have been able to leave and enter what you might call 'our' world."
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei accepts Kaworu into the room. It is a lot warmer, so there's that.
She looks over at him - staying in the kitchen, perhaps to respect his space, and so he closes the door. Several pieces of mail are dislodged and fall to the ground.
"A dream-like space," Rei says, slowly.
Rei takes the canned vegetables out of the bag. She places then on the countertop.
There is no place to sit in the apartment other than Rei's bed, which is disheveled. So it goes.
"Ikari and the Second have also entered 'that space' while asleep... and it is a real space. A place that has occupants who may enter and leave that space. But it is not our space."
The news that this is both 'not unprecedented behavior' and 'not a sign of something obscurely problematic with her, personally' seems to have fully placed Rei at her ease.
"I did not intend to enter the space. Why did Ikari and the Second, and now myself, appear there?" Rei asks, even as she picks out one of the beakers of water in the empty part of the sink and begins filling it from the tap.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Too bad for whoever's trying to correspond with Rei Ayanami by physical mail. Kaworu steps on and over them without a glance. He's content to stand, too--doesn't even bother to look around for a place to sit in the small apartment, though he does step to one side to allow Rei space to deal with the groceries as she will. This puts him roughly in the doorway to the bathroom.
"Yes," he confirms simply. It looks as though this is the confirmation she needed. It's good to see her more at ease.
"I can't give you a definitive answer," he replies, truthfully. "The space itself isn't meant to invite in 'outsiders,' but parts of it are ruptured, creating leaks. I've been there several times now--" as recently as 'right before this,' apparently, "--so it's possible you felt a trace of me somehow and followed it into that world."
He pauses. "Does it bother you?" he wonders.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
The bathroom has no secrets.
Rei walks out of the kitchen space, past Kaworu, towards her night-stand. She carries the beaker of water with her. She sets it down and opens the wrappers on several pills, putting them into her hand.
"Ruptured," Rei says. "The place was intact, and is now damaged. We are entering Tsutsujidai through its wounds." With that same hint of 'that's right, right? right?' interrogativity at the end. Her eyes turn towards Kaworu as she puts the pills in her mouth and washes them down.
Which also means she has a chance to think.
"I was afraid that I was diseased or that I had been successfully targetted by an enemy intelligence effort," Rei says, lowering her eyes. Perhaps not quite what Kaworu asked!
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Save for the secrets of womanhood...
No, that's just silly.
As Rei heads into the bedroom proper--though arguably almost the entire apartment is a bedroom--Kaworu strolls in after her, standing on the other side of the room with his hands still in his pockets as she takes her medication.
"Hmm... Yes, that's an appropriate way of thinking of it, I believe," he replies. "That space was 'made' by someone. Shinji, the Second, and I have been investigating it; that 'someone' has been referred to as 'the God of Tsutsujidai.'" He laughs a little. "It's a bit of an exaggeration to call that someone a literal god, though."
Humans are not gods, after all. Though there is a touch of the divine in the act of creation--and Akane does create very well.
It's close enough to what he asked, though. "I see. No, that wasn't the case. You needn't worry about that," he reassures her. "You don't need to worry about the girl you met, either." He pauses.
"But... there *are* dangerous things there," Kaworu continues carefully. "Kaiju occasionally rampage in that space. We've had a couple of sorties there as a result--that's how Shinji and the Second first appeared there, in fact. If you go there again, you should proceed with caution."
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"A space, created by an unknown being," Rei echoes Kaworu, looking at the floor. The electric heater makes its monotonous hum. "A space with wounds, allowing entrance and exit. The wounds would indicate that the unknown being is 'not a god.' Or, that they are not wounds."
Rei finishes the rest of her water.
"The girl was kind. The girl was also perceptive." Hence, presumably, the covert questions.
At Kaworu's statement, Rei, first, has her lips purse slightly.
"A 'kaiju' is an organism massing more than one hundred and twenty percent of the average mass of an adult male Balaenoptera musculus," Rei says, which absolutely came up in the classroom once. "Even a small kaiju could easily kill Ikari or the Second."
"Then, Eva can also enter Tsutsujidai," Rei infers.
"Is the Commander aware of Tsutsujidai?" Rei then asks -- and this one seems to be authentic curiosity.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
"Perhaps," Kaworu replies. "There's been a lot of speculation about it."
Which is true. A lot of the things Kaworu says are true.
He nods at Rei's description of Akane, smiling slightly. "And inquisitive," he adds, which makes sense, since clearly he also met her. Otherwise, how else would he have gotten a hold of the groceries in the first place?
"Correct," he adds to her facts and conclusions. As for Commander Ikari: "Yes. I've made reports to him about it. The details are sparse since investigation is ongoing," Kaworu says, more or less truthfully.
He considers her for a moment; then he adds, "However, we've made some contacts there. There's a group called the Gridman Alliance, who are affiliated with an entity named Gridman, who fights against the kaiju. Rikka Takarada, Sho Utsumi, and Yuta Hibiki... If you meet any of them, you may speak--*relatively* freely with them." He smiles. "I trust your judgment on that matter."
It's a bit of a joke. Rei Ayanami is not exactly someone who speaks freely on any topic.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei swallows this, just as she swallowed six different chemicals just now.
"Rikka Takarada. Sho Utsumi. Yuta Hibiki," Rei says, perhaps to memorize the names. She nods once, soberly.
"I will cooperate with them as necessary."
A second or two passes, and Rei continues: "There is another piece of information that I gained in Tsutsujidai."
"The girl informed me that 'pepperoni,'" now she's saying it right "is a sausage compounded of pork, beef and spices, and that it is best in thin slices. The inexpensive form is better for pizza. She did not clarify as to why. It comes in a cylindrical form like some white cheeses. 5 centimeter diameter, 40 centimeters length."
"I did not think this was reliable information, as it occurred in a dream," Rei says. "The 'black olives' might be information I learned but did not consciously recall. But 'pepperoni' had not been known to either of us."
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Kaworu nods as Rei repeats the names and confirms that she'll cooperate. It should make future excursions into Tsutsujidai easier.
"Oh?" he prompts. His expression turns thoughtful as she describes pepperoni. He's not 100% certain about it. But if that's what Akane said...
"True," he says, of it not having been known to either of them. "That girl's name is Akane Shinjo. She, too, is a resident of Tsutsujidai. Her information is probably reliable."
He looks over at the kitchen, where the ingredients have been left behind. "Is that one of the things you purchased, then? Or, I suppose, that she purchased for you." Since technically Rei left without actually buying anything.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"Akane Shinjo," Rei says.
She looks at the corner of the room.
"Yes," Rei says. "She provided operational advice. I did not purchase pepperoni, only the vegetable toppings. If it is necessary to prepare the pizza with pepperoni, I do not wish to burn it." She has to live here; to smell it; to, if necessary, deal with the stench of burned lunch meat.
Burned onions or something? Different story.
"In the dream, I had only thought that I should examine the material. I knew, in the dream, that it was not a nearby place. But Shinjo provided me with money, and I did not yet know that I was dreaming. I hope that she was not inconvenienced."
A second or two passes.
She looks at Kaworu. "Does she communicate with you?"
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
Sensible. Rei is a novice cook, and she only wants meat as something to prepare for others, for specifically Shinji. It would be best not to use them until she's certain she can make pizza well. It means not wasting an animal's life unnecessarily, too. Outwardly, Kaworu simply nods.
"Hmmm..." he murmurs as she describes the dream. He suspects that Akane was in fact somewhat inconvenienced, but he opts not to tell Rei that. It wouldn't accomplish anything, and things got where they needed to be in the end.
"Yes. I have her number, in fact," he replies. He pauses to think; then he adds, "I would consider us friends. I think she feels the same."
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
"Understood," Rei says.
The heater keeps buzzing.
She does not seem to have a great deal else to say, although there is no immediate invitation to depart. She returns to the kitchen, if Kaworu hangs around for several minutes; and he can see a secret, which is Rei turning on the (pitifully small) oven and getting out a plastic bin of pallid dough from inside of the fridge.
<Pose Tracker> Kaworu Nagisa has posed.
That's fine--that Rei has little more to say, that she now has a task on which to focus. Kaworu watches her for a moment as she eventually turns on the oven and fetches the dough.
"May I keep you company for a while longer?" he asks.
There is a subtle quality of *need* to the request--a deep desire to stay and just be near her, even if all he does is silently watch her make a pizza. (It would be better if it were Shinji. But would that be better *for* Shinji? Kaworu, fearing the answer, is reluctant to press with him, even as he can't bear to stay entirely away either.)
All the same, if Rei tells him to leave, or even simply indicates she wants him to leave, he'll leave. He doesn't desire to stay where he's unwanted, either.
<Pose Tracker> Rei Ayanami has posed.
Rei blinks once - as if mildly surprised.
How often does she have visitors? Not often.
Rei nods in affirmation, even as she washes her hands. "If you recognize an error, please identify it," she says, as the tap is turned off.
And with this, she begins the 9th data entry in a cryptic sheet of her amateurish hen-scratch handwriting. Dough and cheese only.
This one will fail, but it will fail due to being removed from the oven too early. An attempt to return will lead to a rigid, cryptic shape, not quite burned but certainly incorrect.
But there is progress... for this is the third time it has not burned.