2022-07-09: Where Are The 'Connections' We Dropped?
- Log: Where Are The 'Connections' We Dropped?
- Cast: Ruri Hoshino, Akane Shinjo
- Where: Post Office, Tsutsujidai
- Date: 2022-07-09
- Summary: Ruri goes back to Hachiko for a farewell, and happens to decide to ride a train while she's in Nouvelle Tokyo. It leads her to Tsutsujidai... and to Akane.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"Captain, before we leave..."
That's the statement Ruri began which ended with her landing here in Nouvelle Tokyo, again. This time, she -- and Minato, who's come with her, because even though she's thirteen now she is still only thirteen -- stands in front of the replica Hachiko statue with a more contemplative air. They're dressed in their Nergal uniforms, this time, rather than outing clothes.
"Good boy," Ruri settles on, quietly.
Her head turns, at the sound of the whistling from the station. "Ah --" She exclaims, lightly, her eyes widening just so.
"Ruriruri, did it startle you?" Minato asks, kindly.
"No, it's not that..." Ruri shakes her head, and looks up to Minato, with eyes too gold and too bright, "is it all right if we ride the train?"
"Hmm? Oh, I'm sure they won't mind if we're a few more minutes~ o/`" Minato lilts, sly, and gestures the both of them off to the station. They end up leaning against each other (well, mostly it's Ruri leaning on Minato) as the train ride takes a little too long... the rocking back and forth is quite conducive to just closing her eyes and...
w e l l d o ne, r u r i!
y o u' r e w o nde r fu l, r ur i!
yo u ' r e a d or ab le, ru ri!
With a start, Ruri wakes, and straightens, cheeks coloured a sharp blush. "Minato-san!" She issues, more sharply than she usually does. "The stop."
"Oh!" Minato gasps, as she straightens, herself, and hops up in a hurry -- she's used to wearing heels, it's fine. "Right, right!" They hurry off the train, only to look up, and find... "Tsutsujidai...?" Minato wonders, shading her eyes against the harsh summer sun.
"It's too warm," Ruri remarks, with dry criticism.
"Summer's really hitting this place!" Minato agrees, shrugging off her Nergal jacket to fold it over her arm. The vest she has on underneath has been modified with confidence. "But it seems the next train will be a little while," she goes on to press, gently, "so why don't we walk around?" Minato happens to know a thing or two about how little Ruri gets to do normal teenage things like that.
"Sure," Ruri agrees, easily enough. Ambling through town...
... the Nadesico feels far away, Ruri thinks. It's a little unnerving, but... she supposes that's what happens, when she takes a train away from where the ship is berthed.
Not for the first time as they walk, Minato exclaims -- "Oh! What a fantastic hole in the wall!", only for Ruri to give her a sceptical expression as she sees the clothing shop which has caught her eye.
"You're interested in a lot of things here," Ruri remarks, tone just as dry. The way Minato is trying to engage her in the city has, tragically, gone right over her head.
But Minato is a clever woman -- she taps a finger to her cheek, and smiles. "Why don't you go ahead for a little while, Ruri? We can meet back up at the station on the hour." Now, is it irresponsible to leave a child alone in a city, even if she's a genius? Obviously yes. Is it much more respectful of the independence Ruri is implicitly hoping for, even though she's here with a handler, as always? ... also yes.
(Besides, Minato has been watching this district, and it's positively sleepy.)
Ruri blinks, and nods, a shadow of surprise over her face. "... okay." She wasn't expecting Minato to let her go just like that...
She keeps walking, as Minato enters the shop. Down the street, she finds that same sleepiness Minato saw, ambling with quiet contemplation rather than the purpose she employs moving through the Nadesico. This place is... interesting, she decides. Quieter than she expected a city to be, based on what she looked up. Not much traffic...
Her eyes fall on signage proclaiming the 'POST OFFICE', and Ruri -- who has never once had an occasion to write a real, physical letter -- is curious. She hurries a little more to get over to the shade of the building, in that sweltering sun, only to reach for the handle and find it locked.
"Uh..?" Ruri asks, looking up over the storefront, only to finally spy the sign hanging over a nail: CLOSED FOR BUSINESS. OPENING ON:
There's a clockface, on the sign. It should have had an hour and a minute indicator, pointing to the numbers, to suggest when patrons could come back.
Except... there are no hands, on the clock.
The post office is indefinitely closed.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
It's sheer chance -- real chance -- that takes Akane past the post office; it's certainly not something she has any occasion to use, here. All of the people she cares to contact are either impossibly far away and have to come to her, or inches away, in the cosmic sense.
It's simply that it happens to be between the school and Sevendarake, and Akane's had a little bit of interest in finding the last of her favorite kaiju from Tarabaman 60 to fill the gaps in her collection.
She's finally tracked down and polished off the Tarabaman X4 game recently, too. A bunch of small, insignificant 'lasts,' to go with a few big ones. Why do they feel so pressing, now...?
... well, it's not really worth thinking about.
Another outsider...? Akane notices a small, silver-haired girl near the post office, looking confused at its closure. Her brow furrows a bit. It's not that the post office is always closed... but it's only open when it would strain the situation for it not to be, and an outsider definitely doesn't qualify there.
Nevertheless: Akane plays it cool. "Hm? Are you looking for something?" she asks, approaching at a casual, comfortable clip. "Mail service is a little messy, especially on the weekends... I know some wards have all-week service. We do things a liiiiiiiittle different."
Probably a newcomer, Akane realizes. She doesn't need to overwhelm her. "Anywhere I can help you find?" she asks, instead.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
A last and a first make for an interesting chance meeting.
Ruri turns, as she hears Akane calling out to her, a hand clasping near her chest. The Nergal uniform she's dressed in is perfectly obvious, facing her like this. "Oh... I don't really know how it works," Ruri shakes her head, stepping away from the door. "I didn't have any reason to look up how postal services work, so..."
She glances back to the post office door, and settles on: "... I was just curious." She doesn't look very curious -- she possesses some mild wondering, at best -- but even so, there's no sense she's lying about the feeling she describes. Do they not... have post offices, where she comes from..?
Ruri takes a step towards the pale-haired stranger, instead -- to conversational distance, at least. She doesn't get too close. It's something carried in her positioning, her expression, and her tone: Ruri speaks and emotes with a mild kind of neutrality, entirely stoic.
"I'm not looking for anything in particular. I think we arrived here by accident, more or less... since we fell asleep on the train, and it had already stopped. Well, it was surprising that we both drifted off, so I suppose we jumped out here." Ruri glances aside, before looking back to the older girl. She -- definitely doesn't have the speech cadence of a girl her age, given she looks like she belongs in middle school.
"Um..." Ruri starts, and the hesitation is the first hint that she isn't, really, in the know about any of this. "Do you live here?" Of course, the 'knowing about any of this' Ruri is thinking of is much more mundane than any fundamental secrets of Tsutsujidai -- she's lost because a girl has decided to start talking to her outside of a work context, and 'making friends' was never part of Ruri's expansive curriculum.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Ruri's cadence... all told, Akane finds it a little bit pleasant? She can play at more conventional conversational cadence. (With some people, she doesn't have to play.) Her own delivery occasionally comes out overprecise and stilted, though, so hearing that from someone else...
... it's a bit of a pressure reliever. "Oh -- so you're just exploring the neighborhood," Akane affirms. "That's fine. I don't mind showing you around, if you want." And that much, at least, is true; these sorts of casual encounters don't really bother her. There's a low chance of failure, and broad opportunities for the sort of low-key kindnesses Akane likes to give.
"I do live here. I moved here... hmm. Not this last February, but the one before that?" ... It's almost 18 months now, Akane realizes. "I like it here," she says, with flat affect that leaves a lot of 'liking' and 'here' on its plate.
She forms up a small ways ahead of Ruri, relative to the operator's own gazeline, seemingly ready to take the lead. A question follows: "Do you want something to drink? It's my treat."
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Ruri can go from remarkably childish construction to highly-precise technical conversation without missing a beat. (And the lexical approximation, well -- she does that for free.) It's just one more sign that she's not a typical thirteen-year-old, for all she's four feet tall.
"Sure, if it's no trouble," she agrees, easily enough, to Akane's offer of a tour. Ruri listens, quietly, as Akane explains how she came to live here -- and she doesn't much begrudge her the flat affect, because Ruri occupies that very same space.
"I see. I've never lived in a place like this... it's very hot. So I would like a drink, I think." Being fair, weather -- just, in general -- is always kind of striking, to someone used to air conditioning. After a moment, she decides to explain that out loud, just the same. "The Nadesico's climate is controlled for maximum staff efficiency, so I'm not really used to this."
It takes her a moment, because Ruri... isn't really sure what she's supposed to say in this situation. She's quietly a little grateful that Akane is leading the way.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane feigns peppier, a lot of the time, but Ruri's own flatness gives her permission to relax the performance a tiiiiiny bit. Moving to Ruri's speed is, if anything, an accommodation for Akane.
"The Nadesico, the Nadesico..." Somewhere climate controlled, with staff... Akane starts turning the name over in her head for a bit and then -- "Oh! It must be a ship," she realizes, after a little bit. "If you wanted to name something like that, you'd want it to be a successor to the 'Yamato,' right?" That's been a ship name time and again since the pre-Universal Century era, so it stands to reason that this, too, is a ship.
"It wasn't this hot where I used to live, either..." she admits, sounding a little tired as she does. "Half the time I feel like I'm going to wilt. I don't get outside a lot because of it... Alexis says it's fine, though." 'My guardian' has gotten profoundly tiresome; everyone already knows so much, anyway. "It's apparently pretty normal for a place like this to be hot all the time."
Akane leads Ruri along to a vending machine, pulling out a 5 gilla bill from her bag after... a lot of rummaging. Once she gets it out, she slides it in there, though. "Go ahead! Get whatever you want... uh..."
Oh god she's been leading this girl around for a couple minutes and doesn't even have her name.
"... Oh, my name's Akane Shinjo. What's yours?" She takes a step to the side, at this point, actually allowing Ruri to hit the buttons.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"The ND-001 Nadesico is the first of the Nadesico-class mobile battleships," Ruri explains, stoic. "The next-in-class is the ND-002 Cosmos, actually. But I agree," she adds, without inflection. "It's strange we haven't seen Yamato, yet." Ruri isn't privvy to the shady development of Nergal, as it happens. "Well, by sheer circumstance, the Dianthus is our long-range mobile suit. And our primary wing is the Aestivalis units, of course. So you might say the theme is floral, more than moral."
Ruri pauses, and adds, a little more quietly: "A floral moral bawrel for a quarrel in matorral..." She's amused by it, anyway, even if the expression on her face doesn't shift from its stony boredom.
She might have asked Akane whether she enjoyed this sort of thing, except -- her tired explanation actually has Ruri stopping, for half a beat, before she hurries to catch up. "Ah -- I see," she says, and the hitch in her voice is only more apparent given the ease with which she rattled off those obscure rhymes.
"Miss Shinjo..?" Ruri confirms, as she steps up to the machine. (Ruri tends to upgrade people from 'Miss' to 'Ms' around seventeen, and she's not entirely sure how old Akane is, just looking at her.) She nods, and looks to Akane, first, rather than the vending machine: "I'm Ruri Hoshino. Um... I'm the Nadesico's systems operator," she offers, in a slightly awkward introduction. Ruri looks a shade embarrassed about the introduction, just the same, because she's realised she never introduced herself.
Looking to the vending machine, she selects a can of orange juice. It's her favourite processed drink. "Thank you," she says, to Akane, as she leans down to fetch it, and straightens up again.
"Um..." Ruri starts, and she's still looking at Akane, those too-gold eyes searching from beneath the still pond of her expression. "Excuse me, but..."
She's trying to match Akane to her description.
Ruri glances away, before she looks back to Akane, again. "... are you... the girl who Mr. Kerib is taking care of?" She asks, a shade nervous -- or hesitant.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Ruri starts amusing herself with rhymes after a seemingly accidental one... and Akane's kind of excited to play along. "Is that as far as you can take the rhyming?" she asks, rhetorically, before musing, "Don't rest on your laurels." She doesn't have a full barrage -- but to be fair, Ruri did take most of them in the first scoop. (She thought about 'choral,' too.)
"Miss Shinjo is okay. Shinjo is fine, too." Akane doesn't quite skip all the way to first name basis on first blush. She isn't Alexis, after all, and enjoys a slightly more comfortable distance from people. "Ruri Hoshino, huh..."
The orange juice comes out with a clunk -- as do another 3 gilla. Akane takes them and puts them right back into the machine; she wants a large tomato juice. (It's too hot for a small drink of her usual size -- and the idea of a yogurt drink in this kind of weather, while outdoors, is... a lot.)
What she's asked, though, catches her off guard. Alexis isn't that uncommon a name... but then again, it must be, here in Japan. "Huh. Small world," Akane reflects. "Yes. Alexis takes very good care of me." The playfulness she was starting to find slips back out of her voice as if it was never there -- indeed, she seems a little colder, now.
Her head cants to one side just a tiny bit, as she looks over Ruri, her own sunset red eyes appraising. "How do you know him?" Tap. Tap. Clunk. Akane gets her delicious, vending-machine-refrigerated tomato juice, at least. It's not her brand, but that's fine; she can deal.
Already she's calculating. Is this the other girl...?
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
"Yeah, I'd better not," Ruri agrees. "I might sit on some coral."
She was actually having quite a lot of fun, before -- well.
He kind of sucks the air out of the room. Or maybe it's the heat. Who can really say?
Ruri is happy to see Akane taking a drink, too; everything she knows about 'being given a canned drink' comes from the Nadesico's pilots, which means she's comfortable with it as an act of community. She takes a step away from the vending machine so that Akane can access it without crowding her personal space, of course.
Her tone is... different, Ruri reflects. She hears it, and thinks of closing herself off, so the scr---- scientists, couldn't detect fluctuations in her electroencephalography discharges and ask questions. She hears Akane flattening out, and misattributes where the injury lies entirely.
"I..." Ruri starts, fingers curling around the cold metal of the can. If anything, she seems a little -- ashamed? Well, her face just has a little upwards pull on her brow, lips tugged downwards by millimetres. Even so. It's difficult, she reflects, to come face to face with a girl she was... so jealous of.
She feels a little wretched, really.
"Mr. Kerib... happened to notice I was in concerning circumstances," Ruri starts again, words lingering with a shade of discomfort. "Well, the Nadesico is a civilian battleship, but it's still true that volunteer enlistment only really begins at sixteen. I started working when I was eleven... I'm thirteen now." The numbers there don't entirely add up, since the Nadesico went on its first mission last year. Ruri doesn't call attention to the way time lapsed for her, and not the world. "He started offering me advice... listening to me. Well, the things he said..."
Ruri looks away. "Even so, I wanted to impress him," she explains, and sounds a little sad about it. "I wanted his attention. So I tried not to think about it terribly much. But then, Ms. Sheder attacked a nuclear facility... with a weapon she got from Mr. Kerib. So I told everyone that he was talking to me... I was worried that Ms. Sheder was being... isolated from people who could've helped." It's a more passive arrangement of something she can't quite bring herself to state outright.
Not to Akane.
"Well, I guess everyone thinks badly of him now," Ruri admits, and -- it doesn't even really take psychic powers to realise she feels bad about that, given the frown on her face, the way she pulls her can of drink in towards her chest to keep something between her and the world. "And I can't just say they're wrong... the Captain's always looked out for me. But Mr. Kerib hasn't spoken to me for a long time... I don't know how to feel about that, either." Bad. She feels bad about it. She's not sure if she feels bad about because Alexis hurt her, or because she told on Alexis, but -- she feels bad.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Hearing Ruri stumble -- noticing the subtle curl of her fingers. Akane's done Ruri an injury, she realizes; this sucks. She's known this girl for a few minutes and in that time she's already made her feel self-conscious and upset.
Damn bottle. It'd be nice if it came with a straw -- something to chew at, something to worry at. Anything to push this feeling out of her and onto.
She closes her eyes for a moment, taking a drink instead. She's inclined to let Ruri talk as long as she can; it lets her get some space between herself and the feeling she's somehow wrecked the conversation. Following along with Ruri is easy; a lot of this, after all...
... is pretty familiar.
"Yeah... that's kind of how things went for me, too. I was talking online about..." A trail off, here, and then a noncommittal, "some stuff that was happening, and we started talking. He offered to help take care of me and let me move somewhere safe." Akane tries to end that sentence with an exclamation point.
She cannot.
Ruri brings up Riika, and that clinches it for Akane; Ruri is the 'other girl' that Riika mentioned. "I think Ms. Sheder is kinda a weak person," comes Akane's next comment, without a hint of irony. "She told me about the kaiju and stuff, too." Some of how Ruri explains it helps Akane figure out the process; no doubt Riika made Mecha Trembulor the way she made the Venora that watch, stone-still, over the town.
When Ruri mentions the fact that Alexis hasn't spoken to her in a while, though... "Alexis has been pretty busy doing stuff for me," Akane answers, still flat, still cool. Another long, bland drink of bottled tomato juice ensues. "I don't think he's ghosting you or anything like that. Honestly, though... don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like a lot of people from your world are kinda ungrateful brats."
Akane avoids underlining who in this conversation fits into that category best.
"Ms. Sheder is a ZAFT pilot. The instant she was doing something about how things were that didn't involve a mobile suit, she lost her nerve. Kinda pathetic." It flops out of her mouth before she has time to stop it from doing so. "A little while ago, there was someone here who he helped purify that Triple Zero stuff out of... they were all nasty about that, too. I don't get why people are so flinchy about this stuff..."
By the time she finishes saying all that -- about the things Alexis is doing in the real world -- she sounds exhausted. Maybe Akane Shinjo doesn't flinch -- but flinching might be easier than the slow grind she applies to herself, running through all that.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Ruri frowns, lightly, as she listens to Akane put Riika down.
As she distances herself from someone like her.
It's... more difficult, for Ruri to reach certain conclusions. She's coming from a different route entirely; she's prone to taking responsibility for the blame herself, besides. Even so...
'You want to live up to everyone's expectations? Learn to do everything by yourself... and stop trying to connect to anyone. Anything else you could do is just a waste of time.'
... it's hard for Ruri to blame herself without hesitation, because she heard something so much like this, from Asuka, months ago. Ruri struggled a lot with it, back then... but many people convinced her it wasn't just her fault.
Which isn't to say being called an ungrateful brat, by implication, doesn't sting.
Ruri sips her orange juice rather than comment, and continues to listen, watching Akane quietly. Why they're so flinchy... what Akane is willing to do, by implication.
"So you're a child soldier too," Ruri surmises, in that same stoic tone. "I understand."
She can't quite look at Akane, as she's speaking. "Maybe I am ungrateful," she addresses her own faults directly, at least. "I just didn't want Ms. Sheder to be punished for her good intentions without everyone being aware of all the factors. I guess I'm idealistic." It wouldn't be fair, Ruri thinks, and thinks of Alexis Kerib as an extenuating circumstance in the process.
Ruri clasps her drink tightly. It doesn't crinkle or crumple, though. She's always been a frail child.
"Miss Shinjo," Ruri gets to the point, "are you being watched?" She is -- always, always is, in her mind, in her heart, in the memories of monitoring, even now the assessments are long-done -- so it takes her a moment to explain what she's wrestling with, under her skin. "Since you're controlling your tone and your reactions... like you're in a laboratory." There's a certain implication to why Ruri would describe it that way. She doesn't pull this one out.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
When Ruri fires that shot, blind:
'So you're a child soldier too. I understand.'
Akane stops dead. Once again, she lets Ruri talk as much as she wants, highlighting every single unassessed slice of her situation, every minor frustration and moderate fear. This again. Mesta Mesua had brought it up, too, in her way, slowly working around to convincing Akane that she was one of those exploited Newtype children you'd see in war crimes tribunals.
"Why do people keep thinking I'm like that?" Akane retorts and she doesn't realize she is retorting with the knife-edged sharpness she is, for a second; it seems like it catches up to her a little late. There's no mistaking the shift from a passive, disengaged flatness to a sharp, engaged flatness, though.
"I'm not a child soldier, and I'm not some exploited sad kid." Being observed, though, she has no answer for; she's starting to think that one is true. Not enough to be certain, but there's definitely a way and a timing to what Alexis brings up with her and when...
... no, she can think about that later. "Besides. If I'm a child soldier," she asks, tone noticeably hostile now, "who's the general? Laboratories don't run themselves either." Here, she smirks. "Or maybe I'm the one running the laboratory? If I told you I was the one calling the shots, what would you do about it?"
It's probably not lost on Ruri that Akane is cycling through emotional stances desperately in search of the one that works. (Works... for what?)
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
It's not as blind as it looks.
Ruri has had to accept that she's a child soldier, given how concerned so many people have been about it -- and she recognises all the same logic processes, in Akane.
Well, when she's in a fight...
But she isn't fighting, right now. She's just a person who naturally calls things out, even if she isn't, word-for-word, calling Akane a fool.
Ruri recognises the hostility in Akane's voice, though. She knows that Akane is larger and stronger than she is, and Akane knows the area much better than her. She doesn't think Alexis would save her from this one, either. But...
Even knowing all that, she resists her urge to step back, to clear more distance between them. She doesn't want to hurt Akane's feelings. (She isn't trying to hurt Akane's feelings.)
"I don't know," Ruri says, honestly. "Since Mr. Kerib is a salaryman, it really seems more like he's advising you... and I don't know much else about your situation. So I don't know who I'd say is running things. Given that, it could be you're the one responsible." She doesn't feel good about the idea of this girl running a laboratory, though.
She looks to Akane. "But you're a child," the child points out, plainly. "And you're thinking like a child soldier. Calling hesitation and an inability to do what needs to be done a weakness is actually very common amongst that psychological profile. I looked it up." Of course she did.
It's a very convenient way to escape saying that she's just describing her own feelings.
As for being an 'exploited sad kid'... Ruri hesitates, for a moment. "I think you might be more easily seen as sad than you'll admit," she settles on, carefully.
Ruri isn't a cruel child, not really, for all her bluntness. She heard the pitying way Alexis spoke of Akane, but... well, even if she told her, she isn't sure Akane would listen. She does think this is all very complicated, though, and she still isn't sure how to feel about it.
(Bad. She feels bad.)
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Ruri saves Akane's pride a little bit -- and then promptly stabs right into it again. Akane needs an offramp for this conversation sooner than later, she thinks, or she's going to... well, it could be implode or it could be explode, but it's messy either way.
"I'm not a child! I'm sixteen!" protests Akane. "If this world was as bad as yours, I could go enlist right now. Then I would be a child soldier, right? But I didn't. So I'm not." She can't quite get around to the defense of, 'this world isn't as bad as yours,' because, well.
Akane Shinjo's slowly coming around to the idea, bit by bit, that not only is this world as bad as the other one. After all, its God is from the other. Of course it would be like that.
(No, worse, actually; there's nowhere to take shelter, here. And where once that had made it easy for Akane to escape a world reliant on small kindnesses, and carve a world with no small unkindnesses... now it really does just make her feel guilty.)
It's at this point that Akane turns from Ruri, fists balling up. "In case you didn't figure it out yet, you're in another world. The trains will take you back home. You don't have to stay here. You shouldn't stay here."
A few things about what Ruri's laid out stick uneasily in her mind -- things to assess, things to... wonder about, perhaps. She withdraws into herself, sulking away. At least she got Ruri something to drink.
Someone who's bored and unhappy in a world designed to make her happy... really would be an ungrateful brat, she thinks.
<Pose Tracker> Ruri Hoshino has posed.
Hmm. Ruri is unwelcome.
She wonders, to herself, whether she's competing with Akane; trying to score points from her, trying to get back at her for taking what was rightfully Akane's in the first place. It's... not an entirely implausible reading of the situation, she'll admit, to herself.
But that's not... exactly it.
Everyone is worried about Ruri, dealing with Alexis. If they're so worried about Ruri, what does that say about Akane, who's been here for eighteen months?
It's... complicated.
Ruri can imagine standing where Akane is standing, if she'd met Alexis eighteen months ago. She can imagine lashing out, the way Akane is lashing out. Maybe it's something to do with the two of them, the flaws they share, or...
Despite saying so often that she should help people in trouble, Ruri turns away. She turns away, because it's too familiar.
Exploited sad girls... huh.
"You're a fool," Ruri insists -- with a spot of acid herself, finally. Stiffly, she remembers: "Thank you for your hospitality. I'll be going now."
She hurries off in the opposite direction to Akane's sulking, and, of course, promptly gets lost. Luckily, she's able to find her way to the train station eventually... but it's hardly on the hour.
Minato means to talk to her about it on the train, because she can tell something's wrong, but...