2022-10-06: Persistence
- Log: Persistence
- Cast: Sayla Mass, Anti
- Where: Mass Villa, AEU Spain
- Date: 2022-10-06
- Summary: Anti sets himself on the trail of one of Akane's kaiju, but not before learning a few things about Sayla, first.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Villa Mass has been busier than usual. People have been coming out, collecting things, bringing things in. But right now at approximately 4AM, Sayla has... given up and gotten a beer. The window is tricky but... After that nightmare- after Torrington- she needs something. And a twist top is easier to manage than most things, and nothing of value is lost if she spills it.
And right now she's outside, looking up at the starry sky.
For the first time in three years, she reaches for it. For the site of the Rainbow.
She can't feel it. Even right now, with her walls crumbling... The so called miracle is gone.
She slumps against the railing, and drinks. It's a dark beer, but not as strong as the spirits she normally drinks.
"Now would be a splendid time for you to talk to me, you know? What the hell happened out there, I KNOW you were watching." Her voice is quiet, not to wake Leina. "But you only ever talked to them, even though you made me listen." The blonde looks mournfully into the dark. "Selfish bitch."
Sayla Mass is not doing well. Even worse than usual. But no one in the house is right now.
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Calibur took his photos, and then Anti chased him off, because he is still uncomfortably tangential to an enemy, and Anti has no intention of letting him linger around the place he sleeps.
He owes these women that much.
He is developing the concept of debt.
He has not, as yet, developed the concept of a sleep-wake cycle. He sleeps, certainly, and frequently, to the point that a human child would be suspected of depression. (And Anti claims, at least, that he is still a kaiju.) He doesn't quite comprehend, though, how the morning works.
He just kind of activates sometimes. Sometimes at unfortunate hours. Sometimes right alongside the other cats.
Right now, though, he isn't active in the house.
... because he was outside the house. All a sudden, the railing rattles, and it's because Anti has jumped up onto it, all a-balance there on the barrier. He perches there, knees bent, arms to either side of him, fingers curled and grasping.
He blinks. He stares.
"Sayla Mass."
Sniff, sniff. He doesn't say anything about the beer.
He scowls, balancing there. "... you're talking to yourself." Even so, he's still stating the obvious. "Are you hurt." And it's not a strange question to ask, under the circumstances -- given he's heard Akane muttering to herself when she's in trouble, just the same.
If there's anything else to it, he is frustratingly oblique. Even now he has a human heart, his veins track through a kaiju's body; the fact that Anti is concerned might be apparent, but the details are, as ever, elusive.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Anti's arrival startles her, and she starts to try and move her arm in a sling, only to wince because that is a terrible idea when you've an arm with multiple fractures. It takes her a second to realize that is in, fact, the house's honorary cat. "Anti!" She catches herself shouting, and gets frustrated by this too. In all the clatter, the beer falls to the ground, pouring onto the wooden slats of the outdoor area.
She leans back against the railing. "...I am and I'm not." She says, a little frankly. It would likely be too much to explain but right now she's also too tired to try and explain it away in a sensible manner. "I'm trying to talk to a ghost. But she's never listened to me or answered back, so for all intents and purposes I might as well be talking to myself."
The second.. question? Statement? "...I am." No point in lying to Anti. He doesn't have the context for lies to fully matter yet. "Physically, I'm waiting for the bones in my arm to heal." She pauses. "The rest is emotional and mental."
She pauses for a moment. "...Did you... transform earlier?" She looks a bit confused. "I heard the footsteps of something big, but I assumed it was a natural kaiju roaming since it went away from the house." She reaches for a drink she doesn't have any more. She looks at the beer on the floor. "You shouldn't drink that," indicating the beer. "That's something for human and zentradi adults."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti rocks backwards on the balcony railing, at Sayla's startling, in a way which would feel extremely precarious if he were anyone else. He feels the clatter, hears the noise, and there's a moment it might look as if he'll spring right back off the railing and into the night again.
Even so, he persists.
Even so, he stays perched on that railing, even as Sayla leans back against it again. A ghost, she says. "What's a ghost," Anti says.
He grunts, and shakes his head, once. "It wasn't me." It hurts that it wasn't him, though it's not something he communicates well through his frown and his clipped words. Perhaps it can come through, anyway. "But it's gone now."
Which might explain why Anti came in from outside, if he was off chasing a kaiju down the street. He does chase strange animals around sometimes. Being fair, they're usually more the size of dogs, but it's much the same principle.
Finally, he regards the beer.
"I can't drink that." Anti points out. "It's on the ground. Leina Ashta said I can't eat off the floor." And it is, at least, a certain kind of logic.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
"Someone who died, but is still able to interact with the living." Sayla looks over to Anti. "Lots of people think they don't exist. Some days I wish I was one of them." She notices, belatedly, that Anti didn't make himself scarce. Good on him.
She pauses. Understanding a kaiju, even one as human as Anti, is tricky. But she can get pain. Not clear, easy pain. But pain. "Did you go after it?" It makes sense. It had not actually registered as a threat to Sayla. So why did it to Anti? "Could you tell me what it was?" If it's going to be coming bnack, she may need Nidaime and Anosillus to assert territory.
"That's... a good idea." She takes a little longer to think. Her brain is tired, and out of it. "Do you do everything Leina tells you?"
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
"Oh." Anti is perfectly credulous about a lot of things, including, apparently, ghosts. "Yeah." He doesn't say they're fake; he doesn't know if they're real or fake, but in any case they're causing real problems for Sayla, so they can be classed as functionally real.
He listens to the rest of what Sayla has to say, and his first response is: "Yeah. I don't always get it, but it seems to make her happy." Leina, that is.
He stops, and thinks, a span longer.
"Yeah." The same phrase, a third time, because he has no need to vary it. "It was Akane Shinjo's kaiju... but it didn't render properly. I tried to stop it, but it went away on its own." Anti frowns, into the middle distance of the night. He isn't inventive enough to call it a ghost, which is really a shame.
"I thought it was going to attack. Seems it won't. Maybe I'm not worth destroying."
Does he think...
"But it might come back. You're hurt... so I shouldn't stay. I have to convince her, anyway." Different 'her.' (Different conviction.)
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Anti is in many ways an awful listener and an excellent listener. He may not understand, but he takes it in for when he will. Sayla's mind is still gearing up slowly. "...When we fought her in Paris, Akane seemed to have given up. I wonder if this one is hers, or one Alexis gave to BioNet." She slumps again. She's trying to connect through a fog.
Sayla's musing shifts lanes like a sleep deprived driver who just woke up. "Leina's been the sort to follow the rules most of the time I've known her. And as a kid she was used to not being listened to." She's trying to contextualize, but she's struggling. "But you need to understand the rules so you know which ones you should break when the time comes to break them." She sighs. "Just following the rules isn't enough to get by. Otherwise, when bad or cruel people make the rules, they use them to hurt people." What the fuck is she rambling about now? He doesn't need to hear this. "I mean... I guess it's okay to track mud in the house it's because you're trying to pull someone out of danger. Does that make... sense?"
Sayla winces. "Fuuuuuck, my head hurts..." In front of an impressionable Kaiju. Still... she laughs a little. "That means you've got an advantage. If they've written you off, anything you do is something they haven't taken into account."
Sayla pauses at Anti's comment. It doesn't make sense... "Did she even know you're here? We've been pretty secretive..." She sighs. Maybe Akane knows where her creations are. "Normally, I'd be pretty upset at you saying that. But right now I'm a goddamn mess, and I can't put my attention on Tsutsujidai right now. So anything you can do is a help." Sayla finally pushes herself off the railing. "Leina's brother and his partner are going to be with us, so we'll have some protection in the mean time. But... I'd like you to wait until after breakfast, if that's alright." She turns to look Anti in the eye.
"There's been enough partings without saying goodbye, especially for Leina. It would be better for both of us if you let us send you off with a meal. Does that work for you?"
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
Anti shakes his head; he doesn't know.
(There's a spike of -- something -- in his heart, thinking of Alexis giving kaiju to BioNet. He remembers, remembers something, and it falls to the gutter and it dies. It's shaped like guilt, but it tastes all wrong. He gives no explanation.)
Still, he listens, as Sayla tells him about breaking rules. He looks a touch baffled, all carried in the little tilt of his head, the scrunch of his lips. The rules, he says with a glance, are the rules; he's not given to breaking them.
But... he doesn't tell Sayla she's wrong, either. He's not about to just ignore a lesson.
"Why?" He asks, when she exclaims about her head, which might give some hope he at least hasn't learned the wrong lesson.
He frowns. "Akane Shinjo... she's out there. If she's human, I'm sure she knows me, too." He has no words for awareness, the way he's conscious of her existence and her pain just by thinking of her; he's picked a good place to not know how to say it.
"Tsutsujidai is my problem. Your problems are your own. I won't ask you to do any more, Sayla Mass."
Anti pauses, and presses his lips together, as he processes the lesson Vit taught him.
"... thank you."
Which means that not so long ago, he learned a new word!
With that, he swings his legs around, to sit on the railing like a normal person, instead of perched there like some beast soon to leave. "All right. I understand." He's still such a serious boy, but at least it's a clear enough signal he's not leaving yet.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
Sayla blinks at the question of why. She wasn't prepared for it. "Huh?" It takes her a second. "Oh, my head. Well... I'd say part of it is that nightmare, part of that is being in a lot of pain after that fight and part of it is..." She looks down at her feet, trying to hide her eyes. "Part of it is a man I loved and thought was dead has come back and has a need to put an end to the entire universe and all life in it." She's definitely crying, as much as she tries to hide it. That's the pain she is hiding in front of everyone else. "...I guess we're both trying to convince someone that the view they've had forced onto them is wrong."
She pulls up with a sad smile. "...You have a bond. Not quite like newtypes but... I had something like that with my brother. I could tell where he was within a certain distance... But he couldn't do the same." She hoped that he couldn't do the same. Because if he could...
At least it means he hasn't come back. She's clinging to that.
"...I suppose it is. But when my problems are under control, I want to help you with yours. You're not the only one who wants to mend Akane's heart, remember that." She's so tired. "And I made her a promise, too. I told her I'd make sure she'd make it through this- and deal with the consequences." There's no menace in her voice. "And maybe then she can move forward."
She smiles. "You're welcome." The fact that he understands her request, she appreciates that too. "Thank you." Sayla starts to stand up properly. "Just remember... If you want to come back here, you can. We'll keep your room for you." She smirks. "And I'm sure Buer will want to see her favourite adopted kitten again."
<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.
"It's raining," Anti says, watching Sayla without looking away. It isn't. "You should go inside. Since it's warmer."
Anti both is and isn't an excellent listener, but he's still trying to figure out how to express himself. The concepts he expresses are all factually true, and all connected to his experience. The point -- that isn't quite so literal.
"A bond... all right." He looks down at himself, at the place his heart must be, now it's beating in his chest.
He blinks, looking to Sayla, with that same slighty-too-intense expression. "I'm not turning you away." He says, finally. "I know you're not, either. But there has to be something only I can do. It must be the same for you, too." He tips forward, his shoes hitting the ground of the outdoor area. "Those are different things."
Anti straightens up.
"Buer taught me how to talk to birds," he says, with a straight face.
And all a sudden, the teeth-chattering chompy noises at six am might make much, much more sense.
<Pose Tracker> Sayla Mass has posed.
She can't quite make the connection Anti is making straight away. It takes her a few seconds to notice the water from her face. "...I think you're right."
Sayla blinks again, as she straightens up to walk inside. She nods. "You're right on that too... You're growing quickly." She doesn't mean height. "I think you'll make it work, Anti. I'm looking forward to the day you convince her."
That gets a laugh too, but more cheerful than her earlier one. "That sounds like her." She opens the door, and holds it for Anti with her good arm. "I'll see you at breakfast."