2022-01-24: Chose My Direction: Running Forward
- Log: 2022-01-24: Chose My Direction: Running Forward
- Cast: Mitsuba Greyvalley, Lune Zoldak
- Where: OCU Korea
- Date: January 24, 2022
- Summary: Lune cuts through doubt.
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
After a night out, Mitsuba has actually decided to have... a *couple* nights out! They're still in Korea, and getting out at all has gotten her out of the loop of literally sitting at her console drinking instant breakfast and watching for something that never comes.
It might be good, she's reasoned, to actually try moving her body a little more. She has a modest exercise regime under normal circumstances, but after last night's good night out and eating real food, she's noticed how good it felt and kinda wants to do more -- if only so she can comfortably have nice food more often.
So right now: she's on a jog. (To be sure, she's wearing her service pistol openly -- a thing you can get away with easily, when you have G-Hound clearance; people see the unit patch on her right shoulder, then the one on her left, and let that just happen -- to dissuade assassins.) Her ankle is mostly-to-fully better at this point, after her Caruleumposting Experience, so why not get back into the swing of things?
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
EARLIER, ON MITSUBALL D:
Mayvy Hawkins, head gremlin of the Dreisstrager Wizardry Division, had made some mild comments as to the Captain's physical exercise regimen.
So she decided to go out for a run. This was entirely innocent, cleared by the ship's Master-At-Arms, and mapped out to make sure that nothing 'untoward' happens.
The thing that happens would not, later, be categorized as "Untoward" by Nergal Human Resources, but ethically speaking, they could make no other comments.
ADVANCE OF "Z"
2300 Shipboard.
Lune Zoldak works the form dummy again, palming the jutting poles in another loop of motions. Elbow, forearm, palm, forearm, palm, opposite, rotate.
Her eyes focus ahead as a wall clock loudly chunks away on the wall, analog for the specific metronomic reason of pace-keeping.
Pausing mid-motion and curling her hand around a bar, Lune looks back at the hatch, where a darkened corridor rests unwalked. The motion sensors for the whole section reveal it abandoned.
It's just Lune.
"Wasn't she going to exercise after?" Lune asks the air, contemplative, as she moves to her bag to retrieve a towel and check her personal device.
Scrolling through missed messages with a flick of her finger, she frowns.
"She was coming, right?"
KOREA
Right now, spinward time.
Mitsuba hears her move before she hears her voice, the telling sounds of jogging shoes hitting the path.
"On your right, captain." She announces, and then pulls alongside.
"I thought you were going to the gym." Lune states, matter-of-fact. "The track's better for your knees."
She does not explain what she had been doing while she waited, but Mitsuba...
... she knows.
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
Mitsuba lets Lune match her pace; it's a bit of an awkward thing for her to be exercising with someone, rather than alone. Still -- the company seems welcome. She smiles. Her smiles aren't especially large, demonstrative things, especially while she's exerting herself, but they're very much there.
"I didn't realize how much I needed to get some fresh air until last night," Mitsuba admits to Lune, with a pleasant nod as her pace slows slightly. "So I thought I'd take the chance to. If we head up to space -- and we might have to, soon -- it'll become a lot harder to get moments like these."
She picks back up. "How are you finding things on the Dreisstrager, now that activity in the Earth Sphere is picking up a bit more? I'm hoping to find some leads on the Gundam-types you're looking for while we're out here... it's one of the reasons I'm not too concerned about heading up to space yet. They seem to be primarily operating on Earth. I thought we'd find something in Japan, but that was a dead end..."
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
There's no need for Mitsuba to slow her pace except to 'become conversational'. There is a speed the body can no longer carry a conversation on with, a deliberance of exertion that takes focus. Short of that, there is a speed the body can carry on with the activity and speaking.
Mitsuba setting the pace gives Lune the excuse to throttle back, anyway, and so the blond girl enjoys cleaning up her form while matching gait.
"It's certainly more alive. Whether or not that's good is just up to your taste. Do you know about circular breathing?" Lune returns, about breath. She softens, a moment after, from cavalier jogging tips and barbs to a thoughtful pull of her expression across her cheek.
A few paces later, she adds: "I'm not in a huge hurry to leave Earth again. I just got back, and I need to finish up business here, sure, but then it's definitely space."
The softened expression favors Mitsuba up and down, and then returns to the path with a gentle sigh-huff out of the Zoldak girl. "No use putting any other energy into it. We're going back up, because down here's all the little problems, and up there's all the big ones. You can hold all of the problems of Earth within a single atmosphere, one ball of rock. Give or take the Moon, obviously, but that's just the Earth's overflow lot. Tall, dark, and dimensional? He's not from -around- here."
Eyes forward, her eyes narrow. "And if the royal 'we' wants a royal knee to the face, he can get one. It'll fix that stupid grin on his face."
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
Carrying on a conversation while exerting herself is something Mitsuba has had to train herself to do, a little bit, given the demands of her job -- though she's not especially fantastic at it, all told. She's still, ultimately, new to this, and hasn't had the benefit of having her life singularly engineered to meet this exact moment in any obvious ways.
"I don't know anything about circular breathing -- all I've really done is basic gym class and cardio," Mitsuba admits. She thinks for a moment, considering adding 'also, I've tried to learn two idol dances from the Macross fleets and wore myself out before I was satisfied with it.'
She does not.
"You're right," Mitsuba agrees. "There's a lot to address. We've had two kaiju attacks in a week, I think... plus the horned man, the return of the Gutsy Galaxy Guard..." She closes her eyes -- then realizes she's running and stops herself from doing that. "It all seems to link back and forth, anyway. Finding out how all of it connects will be a project -- and one that will probably take us up and down multiple times."
Lune's punchy ender gets a few moments of consideration. "... It'll probably come to that. I just hope if it turns violent, problem the mobile unit can address. His first choice of greeting worries me."
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
"Circular breathing is when you breathe out with your mouth and in with your nose, effectively simultaneously. It's a technique used by the players of certain instruments to produce continuous tone. After getting the technique down, the way you practice it is with a piece of paper, held against a wall. It's a good way to train your lungs, if you're feeling out of breath. If you're having problems with internal atmospherics, find a way to turn it into something to work on."
Rounding a bend, Lune slows around the curve, falling away from Mitsuba's line of sight and staying there, audible by her jogging feet.
"If you're wondering about if I'm going to leave or not, you don't have to bother. Those terrorist bastards aren't just in it for my dad - they're in it to destroy what he made. It's not just the Gundams, it's Celestial Being. Twice, Mitsuba."
Lune's tone veers dark, low in her register. "They won't stop trying if I find a new warehouse to jam it all, or a mountain to bury it under, or an asteroid to hide it in. Their 'intervention' in my life won't end until either they can't keep trying, or I can't keep stopping them. So yeah, Mitsuba."
"The Dreisstrager's great. It's got everything I need to never, ever leave. I will, of course. Leave. I can't stop them if I don't leave."
She pulls alongside Mitsuba's opposite, keeping at her left now with a scowl etched into her face. "Why are we here, Captain Greyvalley? Is it to stop the kaiju? The GGG? They're not here. And you won't be able to shield the ship against the horned man if the main engine isn't on. I -was- right, wasn't I? It's not a Minovsky drive. One of those at any size wouldn't give you the lift without saturating the Earth with enough particles to re-define 'safe levels' globally."
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
"Oh -- I'd never heard of that," Mitsuba answers, truthfully. She'd never had the time to *really* explore her physicality -- it's always been one thing to the next, one thing to the next, one thing to the next, and usually along the lines of either being jostled by the Earth Sphere's conflicts or working toward a position to be one to do the jostling. Now that that's all stopped and she is, in fact, the one doing the jostling... maybe she has time.
Mitsuba remains at pace, as Lune slows -- and then they synchronize again, and Lune looks upset. It's the question that catches Mitsuba off guard. The rest, she knew -- she knows it acutely. It makes her feel acutely guilty. "It isn't, no," Mitsuba admits. "It's a gravitic drive. Proprietary -- even I'm not allowed to look at it, strictly speaking. We know that it works, and it's apparently deep enough in the guts that if it were to be damaged we'd have bigger problems than the drive," she answers, quite honestly.
That's sort of a dodge though. The real question lies deeper. Mitsuba glances around to either side. "... I'd like to pause a moment -- there's a bench about sixty feet ahead," she says, truthfully, starting to veer toward it. "On the right."
She continues answering as she moves, though. "... Strictly speaking -- it was a hunch. It hasn't seemed to pan out, and now that I've gotten some food in me, I'm not sure what I thought I saw. There's an overwhelming amount of data available to me. Sometimes I think I'm just seeing a ghost in it. I felt like we'd find something if we stayed here, based on how things were moving -- then we didn't."
She comes to a stop at the bench, but doesn't yet sit. "I'll be taking us to space once we've finished getting the hangars back to their standard disposition."
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
'Gravitic' returns a bit of the amused-and-running to Lune's face. The question about the bench - the rest of it - goes unanswered or unobserved.
Mitsuba veers away, and she loses track of Lune's footfalls for a beat, and then a second.
She pauses at the bench, and Lune is -very- close behind her.
"Do you feel things outside of yourself often, Captain?"
It's probably not circular breathing that places hot breath on Mitsuba's shoulder. She's...
... not sure.
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
The hair on the back of Mitsuba's neck stands up as Lune leans in close. She certainly feels *that*. There's a bit of an awkward pause as she tries to grapple with that; her posture stiffens a little.
"Not exactly," Mitsuba says, with a shake of her head. "It's more like... well -- when I told the crew about my desire to unify the Earth. For peace and freedom in our world. Sometimes things just flow out of me, and I'm not really thinking about it. It happens when I'm looking at a big enough run of data, too -- sometimes the conclusion just... seems obvious?"
She laughs a little, admitting, "I think it's just new captain jitters. I know more than I think I do, and it's easy to *do* it but not easy to *explain why.*" The longer she sits in that thought, though: "... Are you worried about me?"
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
"Do you generally doubt yourself, or is just about your intuition?"
Lune lifts her hands to hover besides Mitsuba's biceps, holding her opposite gently. "Intuition comes from somewhere within you, or someplace without you. But it comes from someplace. The jitters are what are clouding the eye of the mind."
Lune centers herself behind Mitsuba, hands rising to the shoulders, and then spanning shoulderblades to run thumbs along the spine. "Your posture is fine, but your breathing is a bit shallow. It's fine to close your eyes when you focus, and you can stop if you have to - mental clarity is good for your work and off-time, isn't it? Engage your back, and let your shoulders pull down. You shouldn't have to adjust your neck much - let your spine align and come to rest, and the whole center will follow."
As she gives posture tips, the corrective gestures of her hands follow her words, and then lift to rest paused across Mitsuba's shoulders. "I'm worried you're going to start with bad habits. If you have an intuition, and you see it before you clearly, you have only two choices: take it, or let it pass. If you take a course of action, see it through, or end it with deliberate purpose. That's it. Anything - everything else, is details. You are going to make choices that send people into danger. You are going to make choices that send people to be hurt. The one unforgiveable thing you can do is not mean it when you make an order. You can be wrong, later. You can be anything, even sorry. But this..."
Her voice hangs, as she searches for a phrase.
"... hesitating, it only means you're teaching yourself bad things about your intuition."
Finally, Lune rests her forehead against the back of Mitsuba's, her right thumb stroking idly. "Are you right? Are you wrong? Were you close? How can you tell? Run the test. Why are we -here-, Mitsuba?"
"You're barely winded."
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
This level of closeness -- intimacy, even -- is something Mitsuba's never really shared. She struggles with it. Even when she passed out on Mayvy's couch in second year (an incident she has resolved never to discuss again), she mostly waved off more than the most cursory contact. She's able to rationalize it, of course, as form correction from a superior athlete, which is something reasonable to accept and possible to benefit from. But it still unseats her.
She adjusts her posture slowly and surely. Lune walks her through it. It would've been a good lesson to apply when she was responding to Caruleum -- and she can have it, for the runback, too. She seems more comfortable instantly. "You're right," she agrees, after a few moments' thought. "If my resolve is muddled in the moment, that's worse than a bad call. It's better for us to be unified in a mediocre call than scattered in a good one." It's a lesson she's managed, in practice, sometimes -- but only now is she fully coming to appreciate it in the real world.
"I was wrong about Korea -- I expected movement along the economic corridors from a set of enemies primarily interested in causing chaos rather than disrupting supply lines," Mitsuba eventually concedes. "I wasn't thinking about the enemy's objective; I let myself fall into theory flow rather than looking at *what* we were fighting. I think I overtrained myself on the idea we'd be engaging ZAFT."
She allows herself to relax a little bit more; she doesn't quite lean back into Lune, but she does allow herself to accept that closeness a little more. "And that's something I can price into the assessment next time I'm looking at the data. Disruptions have an objective behind them, and not all of them have the same style. It's a lesson learned and it'll put us in better positions as we go."
She assesses the final implicit question of Lune's test. "On this one, I'm not sorry -- we didn't have enough data to draw lines, so I made a guess based on my gut. It was at least still better than doing nothing."
Wryly, she finishes, "and I got a really nice meal out of it."
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
Lune nods, a rocking motion that transfers into the back of Mitsuba's scalp - a rolling ball of scalp against forehead. "And you're not moving at size. You're doing theory like a single captain, of a single ship, as part of a whole operation. If we were chasing one group of ZAFT, the tender for one team of Gundams, we'd be one ship."
"The Dreisstrager chases 'ZAFT'. The whole thing. We aren't participating in an operation, we -are- an operation. What's our -mission-? That's why I'm here, Mitsuba. I have a one-ship mission. I'll Amuro Ray it - the only 'newtype' that project needs. What's the -Dreisstrager- doing? A ship-of-ships. What..."
Lune pulls back, finally circling to sprawl out on the bench, throw her arms behind her head, and sprawl, looking 'up' at Mitsuba Greyvalley from a full recline. "... Problem are we correcting first? Shore leave and training's fine, but pick a target. Throw a dart. Make a call. Pick a threat to peace to erase from the map. Pull a knife out of the table."
She smirks, twirling her hand at the wrist and ending with an upraised pointer finger. "What's public enemy number one? It'll give the chief something to feed to the sims."
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
"... That's a good way to look at it," Mitsuba says, shocked at its clarity. "Military Academy 30 was training captains. I have to think of myself almost like a flag officer instead." She allows Lune to continue speaking -- and when Lune breaks from her, she moves to sit down as well. "It's not quite the same, but our position is... relatively unique. The flexibility of an autonomous corps. *Two* supply chains."
For a moment, Mitsuba takes the time to appreciate her advantages. Not from a place of guilt, or an 'I-shouldn't-have-this,' but simply... realizing how much has been placed at her fingertips. The duty, but also, the trust. She lets herself feel *good* about it for a moment.
"... ZAFT and the Sleeves. They mostly move as a single unit. I think moving directly into PLANT territory is too big a risk right now, but we can test their defenses -- see how they react to a ship-of-ships showing up at their door."
Straightening out her hair a little and then checking to make sure her boots aren't at risk of slipping, she says, "Let's get going in a moment? Back to the ship, at the same pace. I have plans to make."
<Pose Tracker> Lune Zoldak has posed.
The moments between challenge and answer are important. Lune just watches and listens. It breaks positive, and she just watches and listens. Then, Mitsuba makes a proclamation.
Turning her head to grin at the captain, Lune nods. "If you think we're done here, sure."
"Are you done taking a break?"
<Pose Tracker> Mitsuba Greyvalley has posed.
<poem> The double-layer to the question isn't lost on Mitsuba. Conveniently, the answer to both layers is the same.
"Absolutely," she affirms, on the same double-layer. "We have a lot of ground to cover."