2023-06-11: Borrowing Courage
- Log: 2023-06-11: Borrowing Courage
- Cast: Sayla Mass, Guy Shishioh
- Where: The Garuda
- OOC - IC Date: 11 June 0097
- Summary: With almost everyone back safe from the Garuda, Sayla leans on Guy to keep her own courage up.
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<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Despite helping finance the capture of one years ago, along with Luio and Co and Karaba's other financiers, Sayla Mass had never set foot on a Garuda-class before today. How much had did the Audumhla look like this- the first of it's class, she wondered as she took her leave of the meeting.
She found a quiet space in a side hallway, a room that seemed like a break room for the crew. After a quick sweep of the room, she decided it would do. She sent a text to her own number, knowing it would be picked up as it bounced out and back.
-Meet me in the starboard aft break room. -S
And then, she opened the fridge. Vist sure weren't spendthrifts. She settled on a a canned coffee, popping the seal to activate the heating element.
"Banagher and Mineva are going to have a real hard time keeping this running, even with the Three Ships Alliance." She mutters to herself- in part a test of if anyone's listening. "...I hope you two know what you're doing."
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
One of Guy Shishioh's Evoluder abilities is the power to listen to radio and perceive the transmission. Guy isn't...always listening to every radio wave, because that's SO MUCH noise, but...something unusual, that'll catch his attention.
Like someone texting themselves, that'll do it.
After a few final pleasantries, Guy emerges with a small cake, because he does have his weaknesses. It's just enough time.
"Not a chance," he says, with a good natured laugh in answer to her musing. "But I know a thing or two about achieving miracles when you start from nothing. I think they'll figure it out."
His gaze shifts more pointedly to Sayla, setting his hip against the counter to lean. "...Guess we'll start with the obvious question. You alright?"
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
She should have counted on Guy overhearing here, but she still looks surprised. "Well. I'm glad to see my texts aren't safe." It's a good natured teasing, but it's still a little forced. Up close, she looks tired- her makeup was hiding a lot, but... It's harder.
She takes a sip of that coffee, now warmed up. She could use something far stronger, but...
"...No." She answers honestly this time. "Until I got that message from Akane that she'd escaped... I was ready to give up." She sits down on one of the benches, and looks down at the can in her hands.
"I mean... you heard what I did. Who I was prepared to put my trust in." She sighs deeply. "I've probably burned my people's trust in me, but... Casval managed to keep my hope alive, for just long enough. And when I saw Akane again..." Tears form in her eyes, but she's holding it together right now.
"...She saved me. If she hadn't been there, I'd be waiting in the villa, hoping against hope as Murasame got away with Leina and Rikka. All of those kids pulled off a miracle."
Guy knows Sayla's relationship with the word. For her to say it...
"And then... I guess I found myself ready to swear my own 'oath of courage' for her sake. So even though I'm not okay... I know that I can't just give up. I'll make sure Leina's safe. And I'll ask who I need to for help."
She reaches into a pocket, and pulls out a secure data chip. "...I guess you've been a good influence on me, Guy." She pauses. "Don't let this fall into the wrong hands. It's source is already questionable enough, I don't want to know what NERV could do with it. So... I'm trusting you."
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
"Ships like this have a signal booster on board. Have to, the logistics don't work otherwise." Guy flashes the back of his left hand, briefly. "Signal going in and out to the same place? Figured you needed to see me."
"Yeah. They got us good," Guy says, with a heavy breath of his own. He wanders over, setting his plate on a preparation space. "If all it had been was Alexis keeping us away from Dakar...I might've been able to do something. But with the Nouvelle Tokyo crisis, I didn't even find out they were gone until they were back."r
He gives Sayla a crooked smile. "Yang decided I shouldn't be distracted," he says. "Man sure does his job, I'll give him that."
His smile is tight. "Your brother...I can't judge you on that. I wasn't in this universe during Axis. You used the resources you had to tip the odds that last one percent...it's all we ever do, around here, seems like." ...
Akane saved her. Guy can't hide a smile. "She does that," he says, mostly to himself. He finds his eyes tracking up Sayla, considering the weight of the word 'miracle'.
"I'm glad," he says. "I'm sorry. You went through all this while my back was turned. They had to save themselves." ...He can't hide the frustration, this time, hand scrubbing through that mane of auburn hair. "I promised to protect them and had no idea. Some King of Braves I am. But...they showed real courage." He forces his hand to still. "They're real Braves, each of them. They turned the worst possible situation into a victory. And now we can help to win the next one even more cleanly."
He steps over, hand out to retrieve that chip. "Is this what I think it is?" he asks, eyeing it in his fingers. "...I'll make sure. The Doctors'll keep it safe." Not even Entouji can beat them working together.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
"I mean, if anyone else showed up I'd at least know we had another Evoluder. Or Dr Hell snuck some kind of murder cyborg onto the ship." It nwas supposed to be a joke, but even to Sayla it lands roughly.
"....Martha Vist-Carbine isn't to be underestimated. I half suspect she's got enough allies- or at least enough dirt on people- to stymie efforts to get them labled as a science criminal organization." She sighs. "...Not that it makes me feel any better to know that Leina was taken and tortured by an organization that dates back to the turn of the century."
The guilt is heavy on Sayla's shoulders. "You made sure they had somewhere to come back to. Something worth coming back to. If you hadn't... they'd still be there." Sayla sighs, after a moment of trying toi hold strong.
"I keep wondering what I could have done different. If the timeline is right, they grabbed her maybe three weeks after I got back from Tsutsujidai. I keep telling myself that maybe I could have noticed if I hadn't been focused on my brother but... That's not going to help her. I need to focus on what I can do moving forward. That's what Taiga would say, right?" She looks up to Guy, as if for combination. He knew the old 3G Chief better than Sayla did. But it felt right.
"...My people have already scanned it. A full record of what Murasame did to them up until Dakar. You're going to want make sure it's on an airgapped system anyway, but... you'll need it when we get her back, right? It might help Dr Sai's work with Rikka, too."
The data handed over, she sighs. "...I'll save making Akane tell you who it came from. Yuliana Kafim gave that to me. Apparently she made her own attempt to get Leina out of Murasame's clutches... but in the end all she managed was a worm. It's legitimate, but you should be careful all the same."
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
Guy shrugs at Sayla's joking list of possible eavesdroppers. "Zonderian?" he offers, and then makes a face. What she got was close enough. It still bothers him, sometimes...
"GGG and Chasseur have the flexibility to do initial enforcements on our own. We can probably get the Brave Police on it, too. Yang tells me we've got *more* than enough to authorize raids unilaterally. But we'd need support from the courts and other enforcement branches to do things like freeze their accounts." A grimace. "If this is as bad as you're all saying it is, most likely, that support won't come. But we have enough ammo to force her to flinch, hopefully, if we pick our target and our timing."
"Besides...right now, we don't even have much intelligence on where we'd do the raids, so...that card might have to stay in our pockets for a bit. But internal designation, we can do that before I'm home today. I've seen enough here."
Torture. Guy's face firms. That's what it is, it's what has happened. This evil...while he's been trying to save people, how many have been destroyed? "Sorry," he says. "...times like this you think about the failures, huh?" he says, quietly. He picks his head up to look again, and his hand finds his plate. May as well get some calories in him. "I've barely talked to Leina since I got back." He shakes his head, clearing it. "...so we'll get her back. It sounds like she was becoming an amazing woman. I want her to get there."
The guilt is weighing them both down, an invisible mountain, but at least with two people it doesn't weigh as much. "You're right," he agrees. "Sometimes that's what the work is." He nods at the thought. "Building things so others can be saved while you're not there? Yes. That's GGG."
He meets her eyes and nods. "Regretting it won't help her or anyone. It'll only drag you down." Well, Guy is provably not a paragon in that regard himself. Still. "Right now, she needs you focused on the future you'll build together. From what I'm hearing, she doesn't believe in that anymore. You have to fix that."
He flips the chip back out of his pocket, considering it as Sayla describes its origins. "Her, huh. Alright. We'll be careful. Maybe even do it at one of the ground stations to be sure." Entouji's the only person he'd fully trust to handle data this potentially dangerous right on Orbit Base. "Yeah. Hinoki'll be happy we have this, it should help. Hope she can stomach it." Huff. He tucks it back away. "Who am I kidding?" he says with a joyless laugh. "She's seen worse than this. She'll use it well."
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
It really wasn't the time to attempt humour. "...She doesn't seem like the sort of woman to flinch, Guy. When you make your move... I want it to be one that puts her away for good." Deep down, she wants something worse than that, but... that won't help Leina. Not at all. "So if you have to wait to make it stick... please, do. She's going to slip up soon. She already has once. She underestimated all of them, after all. I think she's underestimated Leina, too." She sighs. "I hope she has."
"You have no idea, Guy. She's made her way so far from where she was. I'm going to make sure she can get back to where she was. She deserves that and so much more." Sayla looks down.
She takes another sip of coffee, mostly to keep her nerves calm. "You're right. It's like... they took her hope from her. I'll never forgive that." The joyless laugh doesn't get a response. "...I honestly don't know. I couldn't bear to read them myself. I understand there's a lot of personal data on Leina on there. I think it's best I don't know."
She looks down again, tired, resolved, fearful, hopeful. So many emotions. "...Way back when... when Judau had been gone for a year. I thought about asking Leina if I could adopt her. If she wanted that. But... Judau was still out there. ...So were Leina's parents. I looked into them, before I did anything but in the end... I never asked."
She takes a long deep breath. When she finally speaks again... "Guy... Can you promise me something?"
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
Maybe Guy senses that too. He shoves a forkful of cake in his mouth rather than comment on his own desires for Martha Vist-Carbine. When Renais killed Gimlet in front of him, he chided her. But he let Lamia murder Deus. Just what could that woman, who has visited unimaginable horrors on girls he cares deeply about, pull out of him?
He shakes his head. Absurd. He'll bring her to justice. "I'll make sure," he says, and strives to meet her eyes. "Yang will make sure it sticks. We might not have Taiga right now, but Yang's got skills of his own."
"Don't forgive it. Keep that anger sharp," Guy says, with his eyes just as focused and sincere as ever. "Enemies like this will need all the resolve you can get. When it's on the line and you can't yield an inch, use every resource to take an opponent down. Even everything you can drag out of yourself."
He listens, then, setting his now-lighter plate aside again. He feels like it's not quite his place to comment on the plan to adopt, so he just prompts her with a seeking gaze. Finally, she asks a question.
"Leading question," he says, with a faint tease of a grin. "Sure, Sayla. What is it?"
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Keep the anger sharp. Just like she did during the war.
But anger won't be what gets her family back. She'd need something else.
She nods as Guy promises they'll make it stick. She has to hold out for 3G on this one. As a clandestine organization, the Vist Foundation had the Shuffle badly outmatched. It would require a different fight to beat Martha Vist Carbine.
Now that Guy had said she would, finding the words was near impossible. What, exactly did she want him to promise her?
No. There was one thing.
"Promise me that it'll all be okay." The same promise she'd made someone else not that long ago.
"If you make that promise... I'll definitely be able to keep up my end."
The King of Braves is not a man to let a promise go unfulfilled. Maybe she could follow that example, for once.
<Pose Tracker> Guy Shishioh has posed.
<poem> Guy doesn't give it to her for free. Even having said it, he listens carefully to what Sayla asks for, and then lets his eyes drift down.
It'll all be okay, huh. Everyone gets out? Martha and Murasame put away, really stopped for good? No sacrifices?
His face softens into a smile. "I promise you, Sayla. Everything's gonna be fine. Might be rough going for a while...but it will all be okay."
He flashes her a grin, all those bright, heroic teeth of his. "Believe in that oath. Swear it in your heart and it will give you all the courage you'll ever need."