2022-11-03: White Tea and Orange Robots
- Cast: Alouette Pommier, Namiko
- Where: Tsutsujidai - Tea Ceremony Club
- Date: U.C. 0096 11 03
- Summary: Alouette meets someone new at the Tea Ceremony Club, and discovers that some of her old friends may be lurking Tsutsujidai as well.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
School day - Alouette is getting really quite used to the daily routine. Some of the exam scores came back - Alouette performed about how she would expect. But now that she has a lot more free time available to her, she considered venturing out to the beyond and.. checking out some of the other clubs Tsutsujidai High has to offer.
And so she stumbles upon the "Tea Ceremony Club". Doesn't sound like much is going on inside there, but that's fine, and Alouette happens to really enjoy tea.
As she expected, the room is incredibly tidy, and mostly totally unoccupied, except one girl, who doesn't look at all like the type of person who'd stop by the Tea Ceremony Club, but appearances sure can be deceiving.
She briefly "scans" the girl.. that's one of Rikka's friends, Namiko.. Lastname? She doesn't remember if she gave one. And also.. "you were there when the Glowing Cloud stopped by Tsutsujidai," she says, faintly, more thinking to herself. But it's within range of Namiko's hearing.
This is a tea ceremony club, though, and Alouette imagines respect might be important, so she also introduces herself before sitting down. "I'm Alouette Pommier, one of the new transfers. It's nice to meet you," she greets, flatly, but still distinctly friendly. "What kind of blends do you make here?" Alouette's not sure she has a favourite: she appreciates all tea for the calming effect and health benefits.. the refined nature of the drink helps.
<Pose Tracker> Namiko has posed.
Namiko is a smart cookie and also did not transfer in like two weeks ahead of exams so she did, you know, fine. ...fine. Lucky thing she's got Hass and Rikka as study buddies, though.
The tea ceremony club is not an enormous club, but there's usually more folks here than this, at least. Slow day! Some days it's like that. The girl awaiting is just in the school uniform - inasmuch as Tsutsujidai has one, anyway, with the uniform skirt and shirt, which she's paired with a full-length tie colored in a vibrant red and black pattern; around her waist is a light jacket, red in color with double-banded white as the trim, with the arms tied around her waist. Conspicuously not being worn. Who'd wear that!? Have you even looked at the thermometer in Tsutsujidai?!
Namiko is currently quietly whisking water into a bowl of tea leaves, but looks up when Alouette enters.
Her answer to Alouette's quiet murmur is "Eh?" ... "Oh, was that that like, flash mob the other day? Down in the park, right?"
She straightens up, but maintains seiza, perhaps impressively. "I guess we haven't talked yet, huh? My name's Namiko! It's nice to talk finally! Hass wouldn't let me hear the end of it when another person in all red and black showed up." She grins, though, a cheeky, friendly thing.
"Ah..." she laughs. "Well, tea ceremony specifically always uses a powdered matcha, actually, but I happen to be preparing some stuff I got for myself the other day, if you'd like to take a seat."
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
A flash mob... What? Of course, Akane's kaiju erase or replace memories of particularly unusual events occurring in Tsutsujidai. Despite now being a resident, and somewhat of a dreamer though, Alouette still remembers the happenings of the city. "Umm.. yes! That's what I meant. Sorry, my Japanese isn't the best, hehe... I'm from France." Alouette is awkward and bad at lying (her Japanese is perfectly good!), being used to utmost honesty. But it would be best not to confuse this girl anymore than needed.
"Yeah, it is. I'm glad to make some new friends," Alouette smiles. She briefly looks down to her red jacket, and black undershirt, paired with the uniform skirt. "If you want to point fingers at someone, it should be Akane. She picked the outfit." Alouette jokes back, hand on her hip. "I actually used to wear a lot more blue until I changed up my style just a little."
"Oh, I see.. It seems like I have a lot to learn about tea ceremony." Which is absolutely fine, because Alouette loves to learn about new things, especially about the customs of her new home. She politely takes a seat next to Namiko and begins to watch the process.
<Pose Tracker> Namiko has posed.
"Akane rejected my claim to an entire color," Namiko says, lightly. "It's tyranny, I tell ya! If I can't get the class beauty on my side, I'll never convince parliament."
She has retained seiza the entire time she has been saying ludicrous words. "Yeah?" Namiko says, and draws her eyes away from her work to look at Alouette properly. Straight on, the red charm hairclip she uses to tuck her hair aside is more obvious. "Hm. I can see it working," she nods. "With like a half jacket or something? Yeah, that'd be cute!"
"Well, we're a ways in here, but..." Namiko hedges. With an audience, her posture changes; straighter up, taking more care with her whisk. "This," she explains, and her voice is a little distant, focused on her work, "is a white tea that's supposed to be from the Zeon heartland. Picked it up with some others from a specialty shop out on the edge of town a couple days back." She lifts the bowl and moves to gently place it in front of Alouette, face side toward her. It's far short of what a normal teacup would hold, though Namiko nonetheless says, "Put in a bit more than usual, since we're playing with the formula anyway."
When she withdraws into her own space she winces, hand going briefly to her side. "Tsa, stings..." she mutters.
She continues on, preparing another bowl. "This isn't normally how you'd even prepare stuff like this, honestly, but I like practicing, I guess."
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Alouette laughs along with Namiko's joke, although she can't help but notice the wording of class beauty. "Guess we'll have to make a whole new club for people who wear black and red," Alouette follows-up.
As Namiko takes the moment to look at Alouette's outfit, Alouette does the same to Namiko. "I like the tie," she compliments. "The hairclip is really cute, too." Alouette normally wears a quite distinctive blue ribbon headband in her hair, but since moving to Tsutsujidai, she swapped to decorative red sunglasses. The very first thing Akane picked out for at the clothes store.
And when Namiko hands her the bowl, Alouette takes a sip from it slowly. When Namiko explains what it is, Alouette is a little surprised they even have that in Tsutsujidai.. although it's probably no trouble for Akane to imagine rare items into a specialty shop. "It's good," she nods. "Thank you."
Namiko's pain isn't lost on Alouette though, and when she winces and grasps her side, she immediately notices. "Hmm? What stings? Are you okay?"
<Pose Tracker> Namiko has posed.
It might actually be from outside, even? It's not like it's impossible...Namiko wouldn't know that it's worth checking, at any rate. She grins. "Normally," she explains, "there's all sorts of ceremony about how you even touch the bowl, but we'll skip all that."
"Ah?" she says. "Oh, yeah. Stuff got rough with my new boyfriend," she says, straight-faced, whisking her own serving of tea together swiftly.
... she lets that sit for like fully five seconds before breaking out into a giggle. "Kidding! No, I, uh, made a new friend out at that mall and we sort of whimsically tried out the airsoft game they had at the same place. He's really cool! Very enthusiastic and fun. Not even really sure what his deal is, honestly, but I hope we see him again."
She sets her whisk aside, reaching for her phone. Realizing she has just made a kind of scary joke, she produces her receipts, in the form of a photo of Namiko, a little banged up but grinning widely, doing a V-sign with the hand that isn't holding the camera.
Her partner in the picture is a good ways behind her, because he is something like ten meters tall! A robot, a big round faced one with a funny graphic on the LCD display of his eyes, and a soothing dawn-colored orange on orange color scheme, and--it's Mic Sounders the Thirteenth's Cosmo Robo Form. Gently shedding the light of Triple Zero.
Namiko grins, guilelessly. "Kinda wild, right? Rikka and I were thinking there must be like a secret base here or something." She tucks the phone away like it's no big deal.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
"Maybe I'll come back another time and you can show me all of that," Alouette replies. "I don't want to be disrespectful. Tsutsujidai is my new home, and I'd like to adjust to it properly." And she means that; if she's going to do something, she may as well do it right.
"Your boyfriend...? Is that really okay??" Alouette looks concerned, since Namiko seems like she got hurt. That's not what love is, Alouette thinks
A joke... again! But the truth is honestly disturbing in an entirely different way. That's definitely Mic Sounders... Alouette remembers when she was a kid and Swan and Stallion brought in Mic in the cute Cosmo Robo form. (She even got to keep a plushie of him courtesy of Swan, after she lost her memories). "Why is he HERE?" Her eyes jolt up to the phone screen, and there's no hiding it - she's clearly distressed, even more than Rikka was. "I mean.. they have those types of Super AI back in France. I'm kind of surprised they have them in Tsutusjidai too!"
But beyond the emotional kneejerk reaction of seeing a childhood friend of sorts, she thinks logically about the situation. For whatever reason, the Ruin Apostles are here in Tsutsujidai.. are they here for Renais? Alouette doesn't consider them enemies, so it would make her very upset if she abandoned the fight just for them to follow her here. But Mic interacting with a civilian like Namiko.. it's the friendly, fun-loving Mic, but maybe the Ruin Apostles are simply here to observe?
<Pose Tracker> Namiko has posed.
Namiko's perceptions are well dulled by the maintenance kaiju. A native Repli-Compoid through and through; the truths of this place, the truths of the places beyond it, gently washed away in the nightly fog.
But she's not a fool. She blinks at Alouette's sudden alarm. "Eh? You know Mic?" she asks. "Is there something wrong...?"
Worry. Genuine and deep. Namiko is a person who senses and cares. She's also a person who feels strongest through her hands, and she gently reaches out to touch Alouette's knee, transmitting simply her calmness of presence.
Alouette makes her excuse, but Namiko looks dubious for a long few seconds, head tipping. "Yeah?" she says...
And then relents, sitting back down in her own space, finishing up her tea preparation for herself. Akane told her some of the new folks had had a rough time before coming here, but...no matter how she turns it over, she can't imagine Mic hurting anyone. He's such a goof! "I'd heard about stuff like that. Tsutsujidai's exactly the kind of sleepy place you built some secret AI lab, right?"
She is basing this on movies, probably.
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Alouette wasn't particularly expecting her excuse to work very well, but for everything it's worth, Namiko's presence is genuinely very calming, and Alouette can feel her care pulsing through her hand as it touches her knee.
There is absolutely no way Alouette can explain the intricacies of Triple Zero as a phenomenon without overwhelming Namiko, but she can explain her feelings in relation to it. So she tries.
"I knew him when I was small, actually. Please don't worry, he didn't hurt me or anything close to that. But..." She stares at the orange gleam that seemed to shine even through the phone screen. "He's not supposed to be orange." That would be a rather simple thing to freak out over, but she continues. "Mic and a lot of my other friends from back then were filled with an energy that seemed to change their behaviour." It's vague, and it may be more apt to say that it changed their core beliefs, but again, she's not looking to make a comprehensive lecture on Triple Zero. "It really must sound like a movie, right?"
Looking Namiko closer in the eye, she concludes, "That's the reason I moved here: so I wouldn't have to fight against Mic and the others. And so, I was certainly surprised he was in Tsutsujidai."
All in all, Alouette isn't sure how much of this will stick into her unawakened Repli-Compoid brain, how much will be erased by the Venora, or if it was even a good idea to tell her this. But she was worried, she cared, and Alouette felt like she owed it to her not to run away from this care.
<Pose Tracker> Namiko has posed.
Namiko is not particularly expecting it, actually! Rikka, her very best friend, has been quite secretive about what Namiko suspects is something heavy, so she's not really expecting Alouette to lean into it even when help is offered. And the nature of the explanation is...
Namiko tips her head. She rotates her tea bowl thoughtfully, quietly, working through it. She pulls her whisk back out and brushes through the lightly frothy tea, its yellowy translucence showing clearly the grains of tea uncracked inside. "Akane said some of you guys had had kind of a rough time before. I guess I didn't expect how bad," she says. "Uhm..."
She scratches her cheek. But having been accepted, she doesn't want to turn away now, either. "Well...I guess that's all a bit beyond a girl who thinks tea club is a good idea." She chuckles. "But...for what it's worth, he really was very sweet. The scariest thing he did was be ten meters tall within arms' reach, you know? I guess if you didn't wanna see him, I can tell you where I ran into him, if you wanna avoid it."
She brings the tea up to her lips. A little fruity, she thinks. Good. With the warmth hitting her belly, she's able to give Alouette a bigger dose of her big smile. "But I guess if you need someone to lean on, or just hug it out with, I'm good for that, OK?"
<Pose Tracker> Alouette Pommier has posed.
Alouette, normally, is much more similar to Rikka when it comes to these things. In this state, however, Akane has provided an environment where she can be open about her problems.. almost suffocatingly so. Too many instances in Tsutsujidai have reminded her of the past, even if it's supposed to be a safe haven.
Still, although Namiko tries her best to process and information and be of help, the true gravity of the situation still largely goes over her head right now. Which is probably for the best right now, Alouette thinks. She genuinely appreciates her trying to help, anyways.
"I bet he was very sweet... and if that's the case, it might not be a problem after all." She takes another sip of tea. If they're just here to visit.. maybe she doesn't even need to avoid them, so she leaves that offer untouched.
Alouette takes a deep breath. "I don't think I'll push anything else on you! But I'll definitely stop by the club more often. See you around~"