2022-10-01: Ring
- Log: 2022-10-02- Ring
- Cast: Shota Hebikura, Akane Shinjo
- Where: Tsutsujidai High School - Rooftop
- OOC - IC Date: 0096-10-02
- Summary: The Illusion Demon, Jugglus Juggler, presents himself to Akane once again. They have what Akane thinks will be their last chat.
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
STORAGE didn't have the resources to follow Yuka's sudden 'leave of absence' in the wake of everything else. Hebikura hadn't learned about it until he returned to HQ and found an empty desk and a confused Yoko and Haruki.
After one too many 'OSU'-shoutings and suggesting that perhaps Yuka had been 'abducted by aliens, or worse, her relatives', the team had dispersed to look. The Captain had made personal inquiries, but what little signs he could find led him to believe that she had gone spaceward.
Too far for the Special *Aerial* Armors to reach. And the world would not produce something powerful enough for its defense to leave the cradle without a biometric lock to some bright-eyed youth (or in the alternative some colorfully haired psychopath), and so Shota Hebikura remained bereft of super fighting metal hero.
It fell to Jugglus Juggler to reach into space and land upon the strangely transposed city in a bottle that was now all too literal and analog.
The roof has never contained Juggler, so he announces himself with a light tapping of sheathed sword against rooftop.
Dok
Dok
Dok
"..."
The silence stretches, right up until Akane opens her mouth to speak, and then it is Juggler's voice that jumps ahead of hers. "I am... trying to decide if 'you've been busy' sounds too cliche, or if it is called for. Because my, oh my, have you been. . ."
"Busy."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
The presence of an illusion demon in Tsutsujidai High School meets with a little more hubbub than it used to. It's the kind of hubbub that leads to people booking it away rather than challenging him, mind -- but people don't just slump their way through it.
Akane turns to face the source of the tapping, mouth still wrapped around the straw of her juice box. "Aaeh?" she starts, a mumble around it; only once she's fully changed her facing to meet Juggler and started looking like she's going to say anything does he speak, to cut her off -- and he sure speaks.
"Haha, guess nothing gets past you!" Akane admits, enthusiastic. "Yeah, I had a busy couple months, but only because my strategy was all wrong. Fighting Gridman and all his friends at once was the wrong play... who would've thought that Vessels of Light had all this backup, right? They bring friends, their friends bring mobile weapons, their mobile weapons have crew and operators... you're never really fighting just the one, right?"
Juggler has always presented as a viable sounding board, and as far as Akane knows, that hasn't changed -- nor is there any correlation between Jugglus Juggler and the STORAGE presence at her crack at Kabukicho. He knows the score, so she can stay casual.
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Juggler stands there, palms against the pommel of his blade, after the final tap. The hubub - the reaction of trembling, of shouting, of flight away, stirs young memories.
The roof clears, and Akane gets through her full, enthusiastic greeting, and the demon doesn't move, save for his head, following the movement of Akane, and his hands, splaying open in waves and closing to click against the wrapped hilt of the pommel.
Uhu! Uhuhu!
"It's really very tiresome. The worst part of being a side of one. You aren't fighting a 'Vessel of Light' - the Vessel is just that. A container. A scoop-" The top hand comes off the pommel, rotating to grip the sword and pivot it about, have it roll away, out of hand, discarded in the same moment and motion, and clatter against the rooftop.
Kan!
patapatapatapata--k.
Juggler's sword separates out of the metal-capped sheath that held it, bouncing and pattering its ends before rolling across the guard and sliding to a stop. Loud. Physical. A cymbal-aggressive tremor across the soundscape of the world.
"-and terrible reality. Because you fight:" The demon's arms spread wide. "The whole world."
The armored devil's hands close. "Five Lord Monsters' power emerged onto the stage of the world. And the response was as great as it was to. . ."
"... your Kaiju, that you carved and tinkered with care. You've drawn such threat. Does it serve your purposes?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane listens to Juggler's explanation of the way these things go -- as he pitches the sword away and it plummets to the ground with a clang and a patter. Vessels aren't alone -- they represent the entire world. Is Akane willing to fight that? Does it serve her purposes to fight the entire world?
"Honestly? In the long term? Kinda, yeah," Akane agrees, with the idea that it serves her purposes to fight the whole world. "I mean, the whole world sucks! So I'm not gonna get cold feet just 'cuz there's so much of it to fight. Buuuut... different strategy! New one." With a playful smile on her face, she notes, "Way easier one, too."
Stretching out with the arm not holding the tomato juice, she says, "If I had it to do over again, I'd skip straight to this part! But it made it pretty obvious who my actual enemies are to do it this way, and I needed to know that to do this part anyway, so... maybe not."
Curiosity gets the better of her and she asks: "What about you? Has your Ultraman shown his face yet? We've had a couple of those, but it's not like I recognize them on sight or anything."
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Juggler's crescent-chin dips, the slit-eyes fixing and then rolling through a shrug. "I heard that they... shouted your name. As far as Lord Monsters go, you've done a worthy job terrorizing them, breaking their things, harming them. Yes, 'the world' does contain suffering."
Juggler pauses, waiting. He lingers, waiting, he looks, to Akane, and seems to expect--
"Is... that it? I'm curious as to your message."
He walks forward, then, called to challenge, and as he steps, the distance between them shrinks until Jugglus Juggler sits at the edge of Akane's roof, overlooking the now-all-too-real school. From above, the armor of his back seems much more organic. The front could almost be a twisted and melted suit of armor, but the back has such intricate, spinal designs that it does not seem to come away from anything. It simply is.
"No. Ultraman Orb has not appeared. But I have sent no monsters to the Earth's surface, made no proclamations. I am simply some functionary here, and the vessels of light that appear before functionaries have whole names. I recognized one that fought you - the young Geed - but he chases Belial, and I am not Belial."
"I tired of proving points. I wanted power, because power feels good to use. I wanted a specific power, because that feeling was the best one."
'And you?' His words imply, but do not ask directly.
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Juggler presents his back to Akane. She glances -- though it becomes more than a glance, after a moment. His -- 'armor'? 'flesh'? ... It's hard to know -- is actually kind of fascinating. ... it definitely cuts an impressive figure, across from someone whose shell is as unassuming as her own.
She has no answer as to her message -- mostly because... well, she's in a bit of a place right now, even if she's managing to feign being smiley about it. Her own message is jumbled even in her own head, so clarifying it is beyond her. The other topic is more interesting, anyway.
"Huh! I think that makes us kind of the same," Akane muses, at the idea of wanting power because it feels good to use. "That's kinda the thing, right? It feels great to have power! It sucks to feel powerless. In the end, you can't depend on anyone else, so..."
Akane scoots over a little closer to Juggler; she stays on the part of the walkway that has a railing, for now, giving Juggler at least a little space. "Well, okay, that's not entirely true, I guess. You can depend on people who understand you... but getting them to that point is the hard part, usually."
Something nags at her, though. "What power did you want?"
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Juggler sits there, looking at the city that spilled from the bottle, resting. Akane stands over him, can peer down all she wants. He peers down at the world, contemplating. "The people here became more real." An untaken breath hums about the crescent-faced devil. "And I thought there was still time."
He turns his 'face', green slit finding Akane's eyes and the cock of his chin implying the lunar edge of his smirk. "I was going to show up in a suit and teach a class. But now, ah--"
The grin-plication falls back to the horizon past the bottle's end, and space, beyond. "--The world is vast, and protected by more than a single giant called... Gridman." Griddomahn.
"If we are the same, then let me give a younger me some advice." Juggler begins, reaching up a hand towards Akane's front, still seated. "Come here, a secret."
If Akane drifts within the armored devil's reach, he grasps arm or front of clothes to guide Akane close, remaining seated. If not, he simply reaches.
Turning his face, he gazes with unblinking points of emerald. "Beware empathy to hungry mirrors, and the taking of honest will for dishonest slavery." Juggler states, directly, intently. The touching and reaching grows less pointed, less insistent.
He shifts to answer, after, hand returning to the rooftop lip. "The planet produces vessels, this one more than most. And the vessels are a power. Who says they must fill with light? Perhaps I'll pluck a vessel for myself, and pour into it."
Shoulders shifting, Juggler returns to uhu-uhuhu laughter. "You're playing at similar, but it isn't satisfying you at all. Is it?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
When Juggler says that, Akane envisions him -- still spikey -- in, frankly, a slightly more ridiculous suit than he himself would probably wear. (The colors are more garish -- they need to contrast with his current form, after all.) Akane flinches from the reach -- but not enough, with that baggy hoodie. She freezes up for just a moment when grabbed -- but she does move to get down there with him, just the same.
Akane performs the mental transformations necessary to take Juggler's warning in the worst way possible, of course. Miscasting the play is a trait Alexis and Akane share; when she sees herself, in the present moment, she sees chiefly her desperation wielded against people who see themselves in Akane.
"Ahahaha... I want to ask whose side you're even on, but you already kinda told me that one the first time," Akane answers him -- and there's a moment where it's plain to see that she's genuinely unsettled, unsure. ... she doesn't linger in it, though.
"Well, we'll see!" comes her ultimate answer, to that last question. "If it works, I'm not gonna knock it, and I've only given it a few tries." The idea of Juggler playing at the same kind of thing she is, though... hm. "That does sound kinda interesting... and given you're usually a step ahead of me, I get the feeling you've already picked out a vessel to fill up."
Last time they talked, Akane was still very much just coming into her own power; she addresses him more as a peer this time, as she notes, "When you try to fill something up, though, you gotta make sure it's really empty first! Sometimes you can get them to do that part for you themselves, though."
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Juggler does not shove Akane away, or push her, or send her sprawling. His hand, which catches baggy hoodie, tugs the girl close enough to hear his completely unveiled, clear answer, and for it he receives--
'I want to ask whose side you're even on, but you already kinda told me that one the first time,'
"It doesn't feel safe to say, does it?" He cuts her off. "To wonder."
He does not mean about the suit.
But the conversation shifts to becoming and vessels, and he does not press another step beyond that - just the one. He shifts topics to Akane's questions. "'Someone like me' should already know what I mean, if I explain it: Pouring yourself entirely into an empty thing - is just sloshing and leaking and pouring about and making a mess. Even if you make something huge..." Grand, manic amusement. "The *tiniest* of needles can still pop it, like a soap-bubble. A sturdy bit of simple wood, and your dreams will be splinters." His hand comes up, to present a card, foil-slick in a rainbow of colors, showing a great serpent-beast on the fore. A familiar sight and card. Maga-Orochi.
He waggles the card, and an unbidden ill wind gusts it from his grasp, wicking it into the air.
"There is no purpose transferring yourself wholly from one vessel into another like some shell-trading crustacean unless you truly feel the need to change shells. The substance of the vessel matters. What exists already matters."
The card tumbles through the air and sticks in the roof, down besides the fallen and half-sheathed blade that remains where it was tossed. "Of course, the form matters, and what is inside. You know this."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
Akane's expression starts to get a little bland as Juggler walks her through something. She can see the shape of it, when she thinks about it -- remembering that as quickly as she's developed, Juggler is ahead of her by many steps helps. As Maga-Orochi's card appears yet again -- a calling card of Jugglus Juggler, a line to his past -- Akane watches it... and watches it fly away.
"The metaphor works," Akane agrees, thinking about her kaiju. Barring the time it was stolen by Celebro... those, too, are vessels, aren't they? At least by Juggler's definition. Not Vessels of Light, to be sure -- the madder-colored sunset behind those eyes is infinite darkness. The Bio Devizer had reminded her of that much -- both times she'd used Go'yavec, actually.
"The form matters," Akane reflects, "but... you're not supposed to see what's inside. Whether they're big or small, as long as they're part of the same system, once you get to the last one that's pouring out into all the others..." She thinks back to the holes Gridman has left in her kaiju -- tearing off Ghoulghilas's head over and over again, exposing the neck, and the wires, and --
"... it's just hollow inside," she finishes, with a little shrug.
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Overlooking the spilled bottle world of high school that never ends, and past that, stars and emptiness, Jugglus Juggler finds his silence again. Akane recites, and the armored demon remains seated at the feet of the god of the space.
The shift is visible in the way the sunset breaks on his shoulders, reflecting an orange ending on hues of tarnished metal, or polished chitin.
They are the same, and neither. "The form matters." Juggler repeats. "And look is a single part of form." He answers. "Important, but not ultimate. Say."
The demon's crescent turns, and he rises up onto one knee, to pivot on the precipice and reach eye to slit-green gaze. "Kaiju aren't a wrapping. They are as much a vessel..." Uhu. "As they are made to be. From one 'person like me' to another: Focus more on the internal substance. You'll plateau if you just focus on the outside 'look'."
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
"Important, but not ultimate..." Akane muses on that, too. Juggler is always a challenge for her -- there are ways in which they're similar, and Akane understands that, but sometimes she feels like he's impenetrable. It's the last point, though, that bothers her the most coming from him -- that she ought to focus on the internal substance.
It's not that that's provably wrong, and indeed the opposite -- the reason she was able to track what was even happening was because she focused on the internal substance of one of her kaiju. (Wait, but her kaiju don't have...?)
Uugh, this is a mess, actually, so Akane turns it toward a completely different line of reasoning entirely. This one, she doesn't voice, in part because she knows her understanding diverges from Juggler's... and right now she honestly can't metabolize being told she's wrong.
"It sounds like I have a lot to think on," Akane says, with a nod. "Nice of you to stop by again. You even actually went to school this time!" ... granted, that's only because for once he wanted to stop by when she was actually attending, instead of having a nice round of sucking and dying in her room as is the custom.
"Just so you know, this'll probably be the last time we meet," she adds, hastily. No sense dressing it up -- her current strategy is working, even if it could stand to undergo some refinements from (a profound misunderstanding of) this conversation. "Good luck when you finally make your play!"
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Expectancy, again. The anticipatory energy of someone genuinely invested in an answer. A tilt of the chin, an eyes-on look, and the silence. Even if Akane isn't fully verbal when talking out the feeling, the time stretches and expands before her. She can pull it out, if she just tugs it free from the swamp. She has her hands around it, and--
Doesn't even tug at the handle. She barely reaches for the ring of understanding.
The demon's gaze falls, back to the spilled city in the last struggling throes of a colonial sunset. A bigger vessel, sloshed about and spilled.
Still a bottle. The crustacean hadn't moved far.
Certainly not far *enough*.
Juggler takes the notes of thinking as he had every comment prior, a clear attentiveness that falls away to the object of his current attention - the school, the city, the master. With Akane's demurring of understanding, the demon returns to the city for several silent clockstrokes. Then Akane speaks more. 'Just so you know,'
No, don't.
'This'll probably be'
You don't have to say it.
'The last time we meet,' She finishes, hastily.
It's said.
Juggler rises, from his kneeling, head turning to fix Akane Shinjo with two flat emerald slits. Like a cloud passing overhead, for a moment, the slits darken with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it waver.
"If you will permit me," Juggler emits a hum-toned sigh. "Since I have frittered away the time, an indulgence or two?" His expression rises. "I will pay for the first."
Rising to stand, Jugglus Juggler extends out his right hand, and in it is a card, this one's face more angled and skeletal, with bracketing tusks, thick spines, and little slit-yellow eyes.
'GRIGIO' is the name upon the card, in text that Akane may have learned to read. "I have seen into your room, though you wished I hadn't." He reminds, oil-slick foil card shining in the last rays of color in the sky. "You are..." He doesn't giggle, quite serious. "A modeller." He pauses for effect. "So you should know. When you take form into your own hands, to shape it, pay attention to the... ah..." He waggles the card. "Skeleton. The organs. The heart that beats inside."
Then, he finally breaks, giggling just one little indulgent 'huuu', that he sighs out in a restrained hum. "Like the joints, when the ball-caps are not the right kind for the kit. It ruins the whole experience if something as basic as moving is off." A reference Akane will understand. Juggler offers the card forward, tucking it in Akane's hood if she won't take it from him.
The one he paid for. So there's one more. Juggler turns away from her, walking to his sword and wind-tossed card, lifting both with his back turned towards Akane. Rising, he does not turn back towards her - does not face her, is no longer paying his direct attention to her. His final, parting lesson can be received or ran from. He is not paying for it.
"Akane. What gave you the idea I have spoken to you in metaphor?"
<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.
If it is the last time they meet -- then why not permit Juggler those indulgences he so requests? Akane nods, taking a half-step back to allow Juggler room to rise, to shift his weight as he will as he returns to his full height.
"Oh, yeah. Kits, suits -- they're all like that," she agrees, on the topic of the skeleton. "Even if you're dealing with something totally static like a clay model, it looks lifeless if you can't see how it could move!" Attention to that kind of thing is the height of importance -- the thing that differentiates a work of art with life and intent from something hollow and empty.
She takes the card; she hopes she won't need it -- that she can peel off every last one of Gridman's allies, and bring even Gridman himself to heel. The time for giving kaiju additional power has passed. ... She never did learn to do it herself, either.
... When Juggler offers her one last lesson, though -- the one he hadn't paid for, the one she has no obligation to -- she stays to hear it.
'What gave you the idea I have spoken to you in metaphor?'
Akane's answer to it is a simple one:
"Uh."
(Itself a faint echo of similarly surprised 'Ope.'s from Alexis Kerib in the past.)
If she's really to have taken everything he's said up to this point literally -- as he seems to be implying -- she has to fully reassess literally every answer she's given up to this point and completely reassess the questions themselves. That, of course, is a task that she cannot let herself be observed doing. Reassessing is miserable.
So that's the last Akane says to Juggler, as she now moves ever more the way Alexis does and ever less the way a human being does.
<Pose Tracker> Shota Hebikura has posed.
Jugglus Juggler stands on a roof, alone, in a place that is real: A real high school, specifically, where someone has called the cops because a strange suit of armor with a sword was considering the skyline.
These things happen, sometimes, in the Earth Sphere. You can read about them, if you know the right books to look in.
Looking down at his hands, swordless but not cardless, the demon looks down at the rainbow-slick foil imprint, and thumbs the face.
"Tell me, Lord Monster."
"What is the difference..."
"... Between these two wishes?"
"*I* want to destroy Gridman."
"...and..."
"I want Gridman *destroyed*."
Juggler releases the card from between his fingers, and the ill wind flutters the card away again, stealing it from the demon's grip.
"She never reached out to touch the ring." Juggler observes, flat and neutral, head tilting. "Maybe next time."