2022-05-29: Guides
- Log: 2022-05-29- Guides
- Cast: Nanai Miguel, Alexis Kerib
- Where: Tsutsujidai Outskirts - Near Venora
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-05-29
- Summary: Alexis Kerib checks in on someone observing the world of the heart just a little too closely.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
If someone expects you to be loud, it's that much easier to be quiet. History has taught her this. History and experience.
The last time Nanai Miguel -- the woman who calls herself Mesta Mesua, half driven by secrecy and half by shame -- visited Tsutsujidai, she was as loud as a person could be without the benefit of being sixty feet tall. The young woman she panicked then is the center of this living memory-in-progress. She knows that now. As well as anyone can know something about a frontier field of science.
If this is still science. Ideals about universal applicability don't always have functional benefits. Nanai Miguel is, in the end, a functional sort of woman.
Wandering the warm world doesn't come naturally. Maybe it doesn't come naturally to any human born in the cold, or maybe it's the cold still in her that makes this an ill fit. Yet, that she can wander at all is power enough. There's a link between here and there now: a moment forged in the noonday sun, a moment shared by a knowing look and panicked eyes.
Yes. That can bring her back.
And so Nanai Miguel stands on a side street in this eternal summer of someone else's stolen youth. She knows the temperature to dress for now. Warmer than Sweetwater. It feels odd to be unable to hide beneath layers of jackets and scarves, and yet she can't bring herself to wear those stupid sunglasses even if it's been years since then. Her hair is down. That's something.
Tap. Nanai lowers her phone and her head to inspect the picture. The motionless giant is committed to digital memory easily enough. It'll be the tests later to see if its semi-real nature can be confirmed. If only...
Nanai scrunches up her nose as she thinks.
Well, why not? This place seems stable enough to try to take a piece. Like Shelby's coffee cup.
Minutes later, Nanai arrives at the foot of one of the reset kaiju. This paw rests smartly in a construction site, but a chain-link fence does little against a woman willing to climb. It's only on the other side of the fence, among the dirt and cement prefabs, that she wonders if any actual building has ever been done here.
She cranes her head up, raising a hand to shield her eyes from what sun peeks out from around the silhouetted gargantuan. A brief primal feeling of alertness sprints through her as she adjusts to being near such a large organism.
Humans built mobile weapons to be like this, she thinks.
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
The weather is not quite so oppressively hot as last time, but Nanai's choice of dress is still correct; she's definitely not cold, here in this warmer slice of time and space. It's still firmly a Japanese summer, though, even if it's pleasant enough by those standards. Nanai Miguel -- Mesta Mesua -- is not the littlest bit out of place.
And yet, she is out of place entirely, in this kaiju-world.
The kaiju stands inert. Singularly unremarkable for what it is, and yet, remarkable as a thing at all, the beast stands some 70 meters high --
-- and does nothing. This is Tsutsujidai's far edge -- a foggy place where one of Nouvelle Tokyo's better-disguised artificial islands ought to connect to another. A river traces around that edge lazily.
Nanai is, in the next moment, no longer alone. A second inert form joins the first -- still larger than Nanai, but this time only by some two feet. Flames flick behind and around its masked head; it has no other discernible anatomy, though one would suppose from the cape that it has to have shoulders.
"Hooh... So does this mean you've begun moving with more urgency, or less?" comes a deep voice -- unhurried. Affable, even. "Does this mean you've started comparing notes with the other woman that man leaves behind, world after world?"
He translates through space, barely moving; teal panels dance across his face as he continues, "So many of you, worrying so much about a space not even in your world." He would ask if Nanai didn't have something better to do --
-- but then, far be it from Alexis to ask another why they choose to fill the voids in their lives in any particular way.
He is an enigma -- an utterly unreadable presence. No intent rolls off of him -- save, perhaps, the intent not to have intent.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
Nanai urges herself forward. She approaches the foot of the thing, her hand reaching for the shoulder bag she carries. There, hidden from sight, her fingers close around the cool weight of a folding knife. He gave it to her, along with a gun, back when she was being harassed by the Federation secret police.
Functional. Just functional.
Will it be enough to pry off some material from the beast? Will it waken the creature, somehow? At its size, it seems like a little metal peck would be nothing worth considering. But maybe...
Space.
Nanai's posture falters as she breaks mid-stride to sidestep away from looming presence that just entered her peripheral vision. She recovers with the speed of someone who is familiar with pressure; adroit enough to catch her weight and spin to face the interloper.
Her expression is openly baffled. The strangeness of Alexis' appearance is clearly enough to shock Nanai into silence for a full mini-monologue. Her hand has not left her folding knife, inside her bag.
Empty moments pass. Not just in silence as Nanai fails to respond, but between minds. She only punctuation is a sharp intake of breath when her mind makes that leap. The memory-people have nothing to read because they're only figments, but this man can't be like them. They're like river stones. He still has spikes.
There's only one other person Nanai has never been able to read. One other person who appears from nothingness, in the cold world.
"You brought her here," she says.
He's talking about Char and Sayla, her mind crossfires at her. She forces the thought down and, with it, the pain.
"You're her guide. Why is she still here? Does she need help?"
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
The mask renders Alexis singularly unreadable -- for the moment, at least. Its teal panels blink on and off as he speaks; its panels and cables do not deform the tiniest bit.
What's more, though, his presence seems to draw the rest of the world into a faintly sharper contrast. It'd be easy to feel nothing, in this space -- to assume that the static world remains so, so static. But just as placing a deep grey on a background of blackest black reveals the undercurrent of white, so too does Alexis's presence give lie, a tiny bit, to the stillness of Tsutsujidai.
In this space -- a space of memory, of hope, of empty light that warms the universe --
Something is blooming. It is faint, here -- still a sapling, rather than the cherry blossom tree you'd expect of a ward in a metropolis.
Something beyond Akane's world of self has begun to bloom nevertheless.
Still -- he speaks, once he has given Nanai the chance to do the same. "Ah! So you're already quite conversant, then, with the way in which these matters proceed," Alexis says, brightly. "Though even 'guide' gives me too much credit! She is the artist here, you know; I simply provide her the tools to carve her world into a shape that pleases her!"
Alexis moves subtly closer to the maintenance kaiju, as he speaks. "Help? She would certainly tell you she has no such need. After all -- she has already made her choice! Most would choose this freedom, if they could, would they not?"
His tone seems almost wry as he appends: "They're hollow on the inside, you know... and immature, besides. If you'd seen them in motion, you could even see the clay flake off!" Ah -- back to the kaiju, then.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
Nanai is transfixed. It's easy enough to read her expression, for someone talented in such things. Years of defensiveness have made her icy by nature, but by character she clearly has no shame in her curiosity. What began as shock has quickly become interest in what kind of odd being has presented himself to her.
Her mind touches upon the possibilities while she listens. Her child was born of the psycho-frame. Was this person born of something as well? She had given this thought over the years, but never did she find evidence to further the idea.
Junius Seven, maybe? Is that why -- would that create a guide who wanted to hide, instead of reach out?
World after world. Are the memories worlds? Or maybe... maybe, maybe, maybe...
Nanai slowly pries her gaze away from Alexis to glance to the kaiju's foot. Clay. Artist. Carve. Her attention moves back to the looming figure.
"She made these," she says.
The reports from the Alliance flicker through her mind.
"Does she make all of them? Does she... know that you're helping her like this?"
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
Alexis raises questions even as he provides answers. Perhaps he will answer those questions in turn, in time -- but for the moment, he chooses not to answer some of those. Perhaps he can read the text on the page; perhaps he can't.
He is perfectly content to exposit, though. After all -- it seems the SOS has begun picking up speed in earnest, now. Others knowing about the cruelties behind Tsutsujidai may well spur Akane out of her little... not-a-slump.
"All of them? I suppose you would need to define 'all' -- but the kaiju of this space have been her creations. There have been exceptions -- the heart naturally gives rise to monsters, and your Universal Century provides quite a platform for growing and shaping them." This is an easy answer for Alexis to give -- one which hurts him little. It seems things have proceeded to this point.
"I can tell you more!" he enthuses, moving a little closer to Nanai, again -- though it almost feels less like he moves and more like he becomes larger, while somehow remaining the same size. "But I'd like the assurance you won't ferry the explanation to Akane. She needs time to get to grips with the nature of this world's movement."
He does add, as one final note: "Oh, yes, though. She most assuredly knows."
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
He presses.
The breath slips out of Nanai as she tenses. Her fingers, which had begun to slacken on the folding knife, grip newly tight.
But she doesn't move. Little expressions, fleeting tells. Almost a professional.
Silent heartbeats pass. Nanai considers this devil's bargain. A bit too on the nose, but subtlety isn't quite the name of the game here. The conflict is writ plainly upon her brow.
"...I suppose I'd rather know and be unable to tell then not know at all," she says, eventually.
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
"Then, certainly. Of course she remembers making them; would you not be afraid, if someone came into your colony and began poking at every one of its secrets? I was really quite worried you'd moved the experiment to a close simply by being present!" Alexis starts, perfectly content to tell Nanai she was lied to.
"This world moves entirely at her whim," Alexis says -- and it's here that the contrast between Alexis's stillness and Tsutsujidai's becomes yet more apparent. The world *already* feels different from last time, and not all along the same shape and texture -- bit by bit, it changes.
Does Alexis, then, not know? Is he willfully ignorant, or simply blissfully unaware of what transpires in this world, where he is 'guide,' 'enabler' --
"You're quite the cruel woman," Alexis says instead, pivoting. "To know so much about the shape of this world, and wish to know more -- to try to change it." There's something subtle in Alexis's mien that shifts here -- those teal panels become a bit toothier, a bit rounder. For a being unlike him, this could be dismissed as a trick of the light.
"The stillness, after all, is the best part!"
This is, perhaps, the 'more' he offered. And the assurance --
-- comes at the point of a blade. It's hard to tell if he even draws it -- one moment, there is nothing; the next, a black-and-red blade, swinging through Tsutsujidai's hot air. Perhaps that shifting grip is enough to make Alexis nervous.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
"This isn't--"
Nanai begins to challenge this colony analogy, but Alexis' rolling joviality puts a stop to her words.
With her expression fixed, Nanai watches with dawning horror. It's difficult to put to words the feelings this man evokes. That stillness -- like a moving photograph. A living contradiction that tickles the animal parts of her just the same as being near this tremendous clay beast. For a woman like Nanai, who spent years trying to translate the ephemeral into peer-reviewed facts, this driving feeling might be anathema. But Nanai is more than that woman.
She's a rainbow.
A rainbow whose hand, still inside her shoulder bag, has unfolded her knife with a quiet click.
Moments. One heartbeat. Maybe two.
Nanai's eyes wide. Her hand coming up.
The glint of her knife clearing her bag.
Her body falling backward. An ungainly all-or-nothing dodge as she sees the blade.
Will it be enough?
She can't know. She's only human. Reflex will have its say now and nothing else.
With a thud, Nanai lands roughly upon the dirt of the construction yard. She instinctively props herself up with her free hand, trying to keep her knife lifted. It's a poor position to fight a man with twice her reach and impossible capabilities.
But the black-and-red blade never reached her. Instead, it remains stuck on the edge of a warm light dancing beyond the fingertips of an androgynous figure, cloaked and hooded to the point of anonymity, who floats serenely between Alexis and Nanai.
"She already chose," they say. "It's not for you or me to take that away."
Nanai's breath comes quick. Her gaze flits between the two guides.
"An experiment?!" she says, her voice raised enough to echo in this empty place full of clay and cement.
"It's her life! How can she choose if you're hiding things from her?! Your finger is on the scales!"
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
Alexis's expression normalizes -- if it ever really changed; it's hard to tell what about him moves or doesn't, at times -- as that blade comes to an upsetting halt. "Ah," is all Alexis offers at first. The blade withdraws; he looks to the guide.
His irritation may not scan at all to Nanai, with how little movement he is capable of making in a way that matters to a human; that androgynous figure, however, can no doubt see his malice plain as day.
"Do humans not make choices with imperfect information each day? I fail to see why this is any different," Alexis offers both parties, once again reverting to stillness. Any resistance at all, it seems, gets him to stop.
"Do what you will with your anger, and your..." He looks to the figure again. Kaiju? Compoid? Hyper Agent?
... somewhere in the middle of all, and yet, not quite any, he supposes. "... guide," Alexis finishes, moving to the word Nanai herself used, "is free to do the same. I'd suggest turning your gaze elsewhere, though; after all, your world has larger threats, doesn't it?"
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
The blade withdraws. The warm, rainbow light passes into nothingness like a rising heat haze. The impassive little figure floats back. They're human enough to look at, save for the unnatural ease by which their hooded cloak hides their face and body -- almost everything save for the slender and pale hands and feet. A child, maybe. But one that radiates surety.
Nanai looks up at the figure as they come to rest beside her. They look down, and the two share a silent moment. Then Nanai rises under her own power, shifting her legs to push herself to her knees and then feet, careful with the knife still in her hand. After a long look at Alexis, she folds it shut.
"It does," she says, her voice small in comparison to the passion moments ago. "It does have... bigger threats, than saving one girl."
Nanai's gaze falls. She briefly squats down to pick up her fallen bag.
"You seem to know about me. About... our world."
Not his?
"So you must know that once I tried to solve those threats. You must know how that went. And... knowing all that, you must know why I can't leave her alone."
Nanai's expression screws up into consternation. It's too internal to be focused on Alexis; her gaze has drifted off. Maybe some of him is in there, but some of the situation, some of her. Maybe even most of her.
"I understand. Maybe more than anyone. That's why I have to do this."
Her green eyes shift up to fix Alexis with her gaze.
"If you aren't from here, then you're either a tourist or a refugee. I'd hope a refugee would be trying to protect her out of sympathy. But you're not, are you?"
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
Alexis... is rarely faced with a human who knows as much as he himself. There is the urge, with a peer -- with someone who you can hide little from -- to hide even less, to exposit.
It is, perhaps, one of the few things that makes him feel like there's some semblance of life in him.
... Tourist or refugee, though. There's a question if there ever was one. "Must we apply such taxonomy to beings that exist beyond your world?" Alexis asks, instead of answering her question directly. "At any rate -- I suppose there is something that drew me to her." This is a non-answer, and Alexis knows it -- and yet... *is* it?
He loops back to Nanai's answer, rather than her question, then. "... Still, strange that you'd choose the 'colder world' and then fear working to warm *it* instead."
... Perhaps he simply doesn't understand, after all.
He starts to turn, slightly. To leave? Or simply to reposition himself around Nanai...? It's hard to be certain, with the way his movements betray so little.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
Nanai listens to the riposte. It fits the fragments of information that she has, half gathered and half imagined. Enough to make her feel like she's on the right track. Enough to remind her that there's still so much to understand. A part of her wants to beg him -- to ask about the other worlds, to ask about the people who go beyond and never return.
But this isn't the time, and it isn't about her. That line, at least, she can set for herself.
She drops the knife into her bag. Her attention lingers after it for a moment, and then she shuts the flap and shoulders the bag once more. This time, she can't bring herself to look at Alexis again.
Because her only thought is that she's not sure she has the right to change the world anymore. Not the world she chose. But, if so, why does she feel so motivated to...
"...maybe I'm like her," she says. "Maybe it feels safer to act in a smaller world, because the other one is so..."
Her hands tighten around the strap of her bag. She forces her gaze to the androgynous figure floating beside her.
"Both of us know I'll be back. Either myself, or through the others. That's my choice today."
<Pose Tracker> Alexis Kerib has posed.
"Hm. So be it, then," Alexis says. He doesn't attack again; he's too petty, perhaps, for that. Knowing he can be repulsed at all is sufficient to make him utterly uninterested in making a second attempt.
"Eventually, smaller actions inform larger ones -- so too with smaller and larger worlds. If you fear acting, perhaps it is best to avoid doing so at all."
Now he *does* turn, more fully, to leave. "Feel free to explore this place -- take a piece of the maintenance kaiju! It is clay and connections and nothing more, after all."
... perhaps that gives more than he'd thought. It's out there, though. "But even if I didn't receive my assurance you wouldn't speak of this to Akane -- you *did* give yours."
He moves to leave, then, leaving Nanai and that figure to their own devices.
<Pose Tracker> Nanai Miguel has posed.
Nanai watches Alexis go. The figure beside her does as well, though their detached observation is hardly a new mode.
Her thoughts collide unevenly. What secrecy does she owe such a malicious figure, especially when a life is on the line? How might she make the situation with Akane worse by betraying a figure that she seems to trust? She would know of the duplicity -- her guide would make sure of that. Would it help, or harm?
She chews her lip without answer. Eventually, her attention slips back to the clay foot. Clay and... connections.
Her knife comes out again. This time, it helps her flake off a chunk of clay from one of the lumpy feet. Nanai considers her oddly mundane prize before dropping it into her bag.
Connections. Memories connect. But he didn't say clay and memories. What if she has her categorization hierarchy set up the wrong way? Nanai looks thoughtfully to the towering kaiju.
The two girls Akane spoke to, when Nanai first arrived on the train. They had a flicker in them -- they felt like something between a person and a figment. Her friends. Then, the ones in the Alliance, who claim to be from here...
Nanai turns, looking out beyond the chain-link fence, back toward the buildings. She felt the pressure earlier, but now it has new meaning. It's different. It's more.
"She's making them real because she cares," she says, quietly, wondering in both senses.
She looks up to the floating figure, filled with that same surety.
"That's how we bring her back, isn't it?"
"I am only a guide. You are the one who prepares the way," they say.
But they say it with a smile.
A warmth floods Nanai's cheeks. She lowers her gaze, and neither can she hide her smile, soft and slight as it is.
He was right, of course.
It's the small actions that build.