2022-03-18: Lives Sharpened to a Killing Edge
- Log: 2022-3-18 - Lives Sharpened to a Killing Edge
- Cast: Asuka Shikinami Langley, Renais Cardiff
- Where: Nouvelle Tokyo
- OOC - IC Date: 3/18/0096
- Summary: Two hedgehogs walk into a cafe.
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
Asuka has been to Nouvelle Tokyo far too often lately as part of the NERV Tsutsujidai investigation. She's not fond of it. It's too clean, too full of people living out their normal lives. It's like every corner of the city, every pairing of people offers a simple overarching message to her.
You do not belong here.
This kind of life isn't for you.
Because you're not even human.
Hands in the pockets of her cargo jacket, she watches examples of normal people pass her by, and understands truly how isolated she is. Just how it's supposed to be. "Another failed test. How annoying." She doesn't yet understand the rules of Tsutsujidai enough to get there any time she wants to. She keeps a notebook of all the failed attempts and the data such as time of day, weather conditions, train station she got on at, etc.
It's late, and she's still got a train ride back, but she's at least gonna grab some coffee first and stretch her legs. It's while she's ringing up a German Coffee sans Kirschwasser, that she spots Renais - and double takes.
Tossing some Gilla at the Barista, she grabs her coffee right out of his hands and just heads right out onto the patio, and storms right up to her table. A palm striking the table surface as she leans forward, teeth grinding as she spits out the words with a certain venomous vehemence, "And just what do you think you're even doing here right now?"
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Asuka's initial arrival catches Renais' attention for a moment, but she doesn't pay the girl any particular mind until she picks up the footsteps approaching. Her hackles raise, and she tenses just slightly, taking inventory of exactly where her quick-draw weapons are, how they're oriented... her eyes glance along the street, assessing the best escape routes if this goes badly.
Her eyes are back on her phone by the time Asuka actually speaks, and that's when she actually looks up at her, one eyebrow raised, looking quite calm.
"Enjoying a macchiato," she replies plainly, her Japanese bearing a distinct French accent. She holds up her cup briefly for emphasis. "Pardon me, but-- I'm gathering you know *me*, but I'm afraid I don't know *you*."
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
Renais' answer seems to make Asuka angrier in stages. From the mostly shock of before - to annoyance. To just outright anger, the palm on the table even shaking. "After all you've done, you think you can just sit here acting like you belong around normal people?"
She sweeps out her opposite, coffee holding arm as if it were all-encompassing of humanity. Asuka's own Japanese is flawless, save that it bears no distinction of a regional dialect. She looks half-Japanese at best though in complexion.
However, she actually manages to take a breath as Renais offers back politely, blue eyes closing to steady herself, before she opens them again, drawing her palm off the table and crossing that arm across her abdomen as she stands back up straight, looking down upon her seated at the table, "Asuka Shikinami Langley of NERV." A beat pause, "Pilot of Evangelion Unit-02. That clear up the confusion for you?"
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
"Ah. You pilot one of those monstrous things, then. I see." She thinks a moment. The way this girl acts... "The purple one?" she guesses, incorrectly. A shiver runs down her spine as she remembers it.
In one sense, the answer to Asuka's question is 'no'. But that answer had been the same since she became a cyborg--she's different, apart, not... entirely a *person*, in her own mind.
But that's not the sense Asuka means. And while the answer should probably be the same... well, even enemies of Earth are person-shaped, and do person-shaped things.
She lets out a sigh. "Did Gihren Zabi? Char Aznable? The people who directed the Titans? Surely, even Doctor Hell got out of his island lair now and then." A pause. "I don't mean to justify them, Madamoiselle Langley, but they were more monstrous than me, and I'm sure they also took the time to do the sort of things people do." Her tone is calm, but her eyes are quite serious.
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
The annoyed look she gets as she says 'the purple one' tells her the answer is definitively no. "What about me screams to you that I pilot that one?" Yet she doesn't say which one outright, too prideful, and perhaps that pride hurt slightly by the assumption that she pilots Eva-01.
As Renais sighs, and starts speaking on other villains of both Earth and Space, Asuka just glares at her, and then eventually... the metallic chair legs screech back.
And Asuka sits down, taking a sip from her to-go cup, before putting it down on the table.
And in her eyes, an inhuman doll with a purpose - and a monster sit at a table together drinking coffee. And the world doesn't know it.
"Because there's one fundamental difference between them and you." Her eyes level on Renais coldly, "They were all still human. Twisted? Monstrous? Sure. But still human. They wanted to change things in ways that are very human. You though?"
She looks away with a sort of dismissive contempt, watching the rest of the crowds passing them by, "You just think you are. When right now you're just another alien monster trying to destroy everything because some space energy has twisted your logic into knots trying to justify its aims. More monstrous than you?" She holds up a palm, "Don't kid yourself. You can only say that because you haven't succeeded at your mission."
Eventually she drops the palm, "And sure great costume that energy has put on claiming you. You can fool everyone walking by - maybe even fool yourself into thinking you're still a person from time to time. But don't get conceited."
Asuka looks right back at her, a look of disgust in her blue eyes, "You don't fool me. Not even for a second."
You don't belong here anymore than I do.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
"Anger. Rage," she replies. She doesn't elaborate on that point. She'd rather not think about it. "I suppose you must pilot the red one, then." It's a simple process of elimination--she's heard Eisen's voice, and she knows that Kaworu's been piloting Unit 00.
Her expression softens, slightly. There's a hint of sadness as Asuka goes on about her thinking she's human, being fooled into thinking so by the Dawn. She takes a sip of her drink, and shakes her head. "No. You're wrong."
"We're the same people we always were. The difference is that were shown the truth." She gestures vaguely, and adds, "I'm sure the old man has the numbers, if you need the science. But you know my reasons by now, and I don't want to argue. It won't accomplish anything, besides making a scene."
"And as for me... I'm in the shape of a person, both in mind and body. But I'm not one. I'm just what's left after BioNet killed a girl, and sharpened her corpse into a killing blade." There's a bitterness, there, but it's matter-of-fact. And, presumably, not entirely literal. (Though it's hard to say for sure with BioNet.)
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
Asuka snorts at the comment on the pilot of Eva-01's anger and rage. "You should see Daddy's Boy when he's out of his Eva. You'd be embarrassed for the mix-up three minutes in."
Leaning back, her arm drapes over the back of the seat, there's a sorta casualness to her pose, despite how angry she seems basically all the time. Like she's used to just living with it, lashing out at everyone around her comes as easily as breathing.
"Fine. Don't want you to go ballistic and start melting the masses after all. Personally? I think you're full of it though when you say you saw 'The Truth'."
Asuka's posture stills though as she says she's not one, and watches her intently. Then at the end, there's this slow blink of her eyes.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Asuka S#@&** Langley... who loved her mother vERy MUcH.
"What's your point? Trying to squeeze some sympathy from me? You're barking up the wrong tree."
Asuka takes another sip of her coffee, and puts it back down on the table roughly. "Neither of us have the right to sit around pretending to fit in in places like this."
She doesn't elaborate like Renais does, however... perhaps by saying that, she makes something abundantly clear all the same.
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Renais shakes her head. "No. I don't want or need sympathy. But you said I was fooling others, fooling myself, into thinking I'm human. But... I know full well that I'm not. And the Dawn had nothing to do with it. I spent my life as a weapon, aimed directly at the people who created me."
She puts down her cup, porcelain gently clinking against the dish beneath.
'Neither of us have the right,' she hears Asuka say, and that catches her attention.
She sits up a bit, looking with a solemn sort of curiosity at her. "... So you aren't a person, either? Mm." she turns the half-full cup around on the dish, thoughfully. "I'm sure this will ring hollow, but. I'm sorry. I don't know if you're like me, or if you've never considered yourself one... but I don't think something like that comes without pain and trauma."
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
Renais is correct, Asuka had some mistaken assumptions, yet she wouldn't be herself if she admitted she was wrong. The best she can do is just give Renais the point without acknowledging it. Though perhaps she looks away when Renais points that out.
Upon hearing what she has to say though, Renais seems to sit up straight with that kind of solemn curiosity and... Asuka stiffens. "Don't." She says, though it's too late and there's an edge of explosive anger as she sits back up from her casual pose and pounds a fist on the table hard enough that Renais cup clinks on it's saucer. "Don't you dare pity me! Unlike you. What I am isn't some sob story! It's my purpose!"
She stares forward at Renais balefully, "And my purpose is to kill you - and anything like you. Angels. Kaiju." Maybe even Bionet Criminals who take girls in and experiment upon them is fresh on on her mind, "Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'll beat them all."
It was a mistake to say anything she thinks. It was a mistake to think anyone could understand her. Even someone - something else inhuman. Maybe it's because she used to be human that she can't, Asuka thinks.
Standing up, she takes her coffee cup in hand, and says to her as she takes out her phone and starts working it. "I just wanted you to know who's going to put you down. Besides - given the way you're acting-" She looks at her again out of the corner of her eye, "-I bet somewhere deep down - some part of you'd agree that it'd be a mercy if someone like me were the one to do it."
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
Renais frowns. There's a twitch in her eyes and lips, anger bleeding through for a brief moment as Asuka yells that she's pitying her. That it's a sob story.
She picks up her cup and downs the rest of her drink, all at once, then stands quickly enough that her chair skids out behind her. "What I am and how I came to be is not some 'sob story'. It defines me. It is *my* purpose to destroy the ones who did this to me, and everyone like them! To make sure *nobody* can suffer the way I did!" Her green eyes seem to burn with emotion. "That's what it's always been. There is NOTHING. ELSE."
She slams the palm of her metal hand into the table. Her coat starts to flare out behind her, before easing back down. She calms, slightly. "I was offering you empathy! Not pity. I know that we're set apart from humanity. That we can't be like them. And I *know* how that hurts."
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
Asuka is momentarily startled, then tense as the anger comes out from Renais. As she yells back, then slams her fist on the table... labelling what she's offering empathy. Asuka regards her in silence for a few long moments. It's hard to say if she's about to have another outburst. Or what... Then...
"What are you stupid? You think that you're gonna finish off BioNet so noone can suffer like you? Or kill everyone so noone can suffer like you?" It's enough that it might start a fight right then and there, it feels right on the verge then... "Empathy?" She sounds incredulous and abstracted at the same time. "Was that really what you were trying to do?"
It's the best she can offer, Renais' true intent gives her pause. That Renais maybe understands that it hurts. Yet she can't admit more than that. She can't say outright it hurts. How much she hates it all. Renais may not know it, but that's the moment she wins in Asuka's eyes.
Because inside, she backs down, just a little, just enough. Under the understanding that maybe someone understands her better than she thought. Yet at the same time, she can't let herself accept it. It feels like POISON to her self-reliance.
"You should know better than to offer something like that to me. I didn't get where I am now by taking hands extended my way." She puts her phone back in her pocket, "I got where I am by lopping them off."
Asuka slings her bag back over her shoulder, still holding her half finished coffee. "Just so you know - because I don't actually want you doing something drastic, I'm not calling NERV on the sly. My phone isn't going to contact NERV HQ unless it registers my vital signs spiking. I'm not some amateur who would try to corner you around all these people. So you can finish up whatever you came to do."
<Pose Tracker> Renais Cardiff has posed.
"It was originally just BioNet and their ilk, before I saw the truth," Renais replies, more coolly. She nods to Asuka's second question, and holds up her gauntlet. "That's all right. I can always have it replaced." There's a small smirk on her lips at that. Trying to defuse the tension a little, perhaps?
Ren glances at the empty cup on the table, and shakes her head. "I intended to spend more time on this cup, that's all... and I wasn't planning on it. There's a time and a place, and this lovely cafe right now isn't it." she gestures vaguely.
Both hands slip into her pockets, and she exhales, blowing steam into the cold air. "I do look forward to meeting you in battle, though. I don't plan to hold back, next time." She gives Asuka an oddly humorless smile, then turns to leave.
<Pose Tracker> Asuka Shikinami Langley has posed.
It runs counter to her purpose. The duty of the elite is to protect the ignorant masses. As one of the elite, an inhuman thing created to kill monsters, she can't be part of them. She can't have a normal life, she is just there to protect those who have normal lives.
And that is why Renais has to die in her eyes. Because this 'truth' would deny everyone normal lives.
Still, her comment does get a smirk out of Asuka. "Tck. Cheeky." And perhaps the tension does get defused, if that was her intent.
"Good." On both the cafe being apparently safe, and meeting her in battle, "I have no intention of holding back - or losing to you."
Renais humorless smile isn't met by a smile by Asuka, before she turns to leave. Asuka never learned how to smile and laugh. And even now out of the clutches of the lab where she grew up - she doesn't feel she's the type to learn.
Asuka though does think it's a pity Renais is walking away though; despite what she said earlier about neither of them having the right to fit in on some level...
... some part of her thinks that as a courtesy to the person Renais used to be, her sitting at a cafe for a few more minutes wouldn't be the worst thing after all.