2023-06-15: Permanence's Insight
- Log: Permanence's Insight
- Cast: Puru Two, Permanence Pasternak (NPCed by Ruri Hoshino)
- Where: The Ra Mari - Hangar
- Date: 2023-06-15
- Summary: Puru Two -- Callisto -- appears in the Ra Mari II's hangars, just as Permanence is due to clean them. She ends up helping Callisto clear her brain out a bit, instead. After all, Permanence owes her, for helping rescue her from the Institute... and she's got plenty of experience which she can offer confused and angry clone girls, now.
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
Let's not worry about the date, or the time. Such things are malleable, and 'tis best not to grow overly attached to the sense of when. Live in the moment. Timestamps are not praxis.
That is why this scene begins with a fade-in to the towering primary hangar bay of the Ra Mari-II. A far cry from the cramped steel cage of a Federation warship, this cradle was built for much bigger babies. The war-machines of those spindly little Humans scarce reach halfway to the ceiling, but that just means there's space for more of them. Even the biggest ones are but humble little worshippers here in this cathedral of struggle.
Upon a railing leans a sole Human figure, clad in a form-fitting plasteel suit of black carbon-fiber, right down to the oh-so-chic grey and black checkerboard pattern. Such a pattern warns the onlooker: beware, the bearer of this garment is clearly of a high speed. Puru Two stares into the inky black of the hangar with half-lidded eyes. Her pupils are somewhere else, her eyes blank discs of cobalt. She isn't looking at anything on this physical plane. Her return to the Ra Mari-II was long overdue, and she still bears the scars of one who has danced too closely with death in the recent weeks. Like the glow of waning moon, the fear of approachness nothingness still lingers in her mind.
Leina Ashta: this is your fault! Partially!
"Power." she mutters, standing back from the railing and looking at her splayed palm. The checkered glove curls to a dully-lit fist. "I need... more..." the teenage clone lifts the fist to her lips. Her mind roams the cosmos, far from her body. Her thoughts are a turbulent sea of contradictions. But at the heart of that storm lies one truth: if she were strong enough, -mighty- enough... none of this shit would have come to pass. None of it.
Yes definitely a VERY healthy individual and not at all a shining beacon of fucking trouble that anyone above Awk1 would identify as a ticking timebomb.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
What time is it?! Time... to sweep the hangars!
One might imagine a broom here, and yes, there are brooms for the mechanics to use, if something falls and breaks. But as for actual floor maintenance --
Permanence Pasternak directs one of those ride-on floor-mop-clean-sweep devices in big ol looping circles, because, again, for the third time now: Ra Mari II is big. It's REAL big. It's SO big, they have tools in place to help with managing such a large space. Like heavy machinery to keep the floors clean and free of chemical spills or bloodstains or whatever else goes on in here.
The scrubber-drier (as it's traditionally called) merrily chugs along, and she gets out, every so often, to put out WARNING FLOOR WET signs. Slip hazards are important to manage! And she's gotten quite good at managing them, over the months she's been here. After the Institute for Continuing Study was raided and razed to the ground, Permanence Pasternak didn't much feel like going to another facility which everyone claimed would help her, this time -- so she followed some of her rescuers back to her ship, and asked Captain York to take her on, instead.
(The custodial work was her idea. She really hates sitting around and not being any help. ... she used to pilot, but she hasn't since she got out.)
Anyway, the scrubber-drier enters into the ground floor of the primary hangar bay, and all at once Permanence is hit with an OUTRAGEOUS wave of rancid what-have-you. She's a powerful psychic in her own right, or at least she is now, after years of experiments; it is deeply difficult to miss.
With one more lazy loop, she tucks the scrubber-drier by the wall, and turns it off. As she dismounts, to saunter up the hangar in her Three Ships custodial uniform, something precedes her:
...?
There's not really a good way to pen down a psychic query ping. It's somewhere between knock-knock and FPWING.
Well, it's an invitation, anyway.
We'll see if this girl wants to walk all the way back to present reality to take it. Anyway, between all that psychic nonsense and now, Permanence makes her way up to the railing, and says with her human words -- human words with a pretty heavy Zaftran accent -- "You wanna pack a lunch if you're going that far out?" Which might not make any sense, since she's BACK, not GOING.
But she's not talking about where Callisto physically is.
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
There's no denying that the Ra Mari-II is big. It's so big, it beggars belief. Sometimes the best way to deal with how big it is, is to not think about how big it is. One day you're holding onto the zip-grips (I forgot the real name) on a Federation sloop in zero-gravity, and before you know it, you've got so much space to spare that people are begging you to do start a hydroponics garden in the unused former-barracks or take up pottery in the shooting range, or something. It's insane. Anyway, the point here is that expecting anyone to start undertaking maintenance of this space without mechanized tools would be insane. You're damn right cleaning the floors would require a proper scrubber-drier. And this is the future, so it probably scrubs (and dries) an entire corridor in one pass. With -ions-. You ever cleaned with ions? Best recognize.
Puru Two's brain might still be inside her skull, but her mind and her presence are deep out in space. Her consciousness floats somewhere in the emptiness beyond the hull, a vaguely humanoid shape wearing a cloak of thorny vines. Best not think about it too hard. Unless you're a Cyber-Newtype who has suffered almost every imaginable travesty at the hands of greedy old men in search of power. In that case, it's all too obvious. A lonesome, teenage girl whose heart is locked up under chains, struggling to make sense of the world. She's come to the conclusion that the only answer is to go full maximalist fuck-psycho, turn into a damn sorceress, WORK that sixth sense.
But--alas! That's a dream, and this is reality! There's a disquieting 'shwoop' of a sensation, if such an onomatopoeia can substitute for a real explanation, as the girl's spirit recoils into her again. External stimuli remind her that the world is happening around her, even as she bathes and soaks in the poisonous lust for might that the Earth Sphere and its toxic politics impart on people.
"Huh...?" Puru Two half-murmurs, half-gasps. She turns around at the same time as Permanence reaches out to greet her, asking her how far she's travelled. The cognizance in her eyes is clear: she knows she's been caught, called out, with singular precision. "I'm... just thinking." is her defense. And it's slightly defensive, if not unpleasant. A young adult trying to excuse childish impulses. "Was it that obvious, miss?"
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
There are SO many ions. Just don't ask Permanence how they work; they pulled her out of her last year of high school.
Permanence gives her a little space -- both out of courtesy and practical sense; don't sneak up on a deadly super-soldier, that's like, lesson ONE from the horror labs. (Okay, the first lesson is more dire than that, but it's definitely one of the first things you learn.) "Interesting way to organise them. Is each vine a different train of thought, or..?"
That's not entirely a joke. It very well could be.
"Nah, nah," she shakes her head, moving over to lean on a section of railing herself. "You just looked like you were zoning off, there. But I'm one of the ones you picked up from that business in Sri Lanka," she explains, tapping the side of her skull. "Cheating!"
(Sri Lanka, of course, is where the Institute for Continuing Study was located. ... Permanence only really figured this out after she left.)
"Permanence Pasternak," she introduces herself, turning to Callisto and offering her hand to shake. "Now, you can tell me to piss off and mind my own business, if you like," she offers, straight-up, "but it seems you've run into some trouble, yourself -- and unless I've wildly mismatched the psychic fingerprints here, I reckon it looks like I owe you. What's going on?"
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
Permanence asks a pointed question, though her tone may be anything but. What are all those psychic vines, girlie?
That's what scares Puru Two, pals: she doesn't know. What *are* all those things tangling up her thoughts?
Her back is to the railing now, using it as leverage. But not quite fully resting against it. She doesn't look to be disassociative or anything, despite having been somewhere far out of her skull mere moments ago. A sterling recovery. Her pupils have grown back to Human size. Her gaze no longer glassy, the pallid hue of her skin once more flush with colour. "I was... thinking." is her half-hearted explanation. Half-hearted for she, herself, knows that her thoughts weren't so pure. "I was thinking... nothing good. How I'm always feeling powerless after something bad happens. Like I need bigger Mobile Weapons," her gaze travels briefly to Mechs in the hangar. "Or ... guns, or a magic sword, or something."
Stated as simple as that. She seems not to hide from owning up to her own confused thoughts. Callisto takes a firm step forward and shakes Permanence's hand, despite all of her mental misgivings. You'd never know it from her grip. That's a good handshake. But good handshakes can be taught.
"I'm not hiding it. It's just... I'm getting lost in those thoughts. More and more, lately. Like I'm getting angrier, with no way to vent it..."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
They might be a metaphor, but in a world like this, can anyone really be sure? Stellar recovery in the whole 'existing in the physical world' bit, though. Permanence has to give props, there.
"A mobile suit with a magic gun that's also a sword, maybe. Some kind of... gun-blade..." She pauses, and shakes her head. "Nah. It'd never catch on." Who would cross a gun and a sword?
Thankfully, Permanence has gotten a better hold of herself, since her conversation with Banagher. She was rocked more heavily than she let on, seeing Wira's last moments -- but she's applied her coping strategies, and talked to her therapist, and she doesn't leak the universe out between them as she shakes Callisto's hand.
Which is handy, given how much she seems to be having a bad time, right now. It's easier if people take turns falling apart. This is her Cyber-Newtype Aunt's Wisdom.
"Yeah," she agrees, turning to the hangar. "I get it. Saw it enough -- went through it myself... you just end up pacing around inside yourself like a tiger in a cage. But you're not in one, now, are you?" That's not a rhetorical question. It's entirely possible she's trapped in something Permanence can't see.
"Gim told me a story, once, about how if you put a chain around an elephant's foot, it'll break free and cave your shit in. But if you put the chain around its foot when it's a baby, it learns it can't break free... then, by the time it's an adult, you can just tie a string around its foot, and it'll stay right there as if it were chained down. Sounded like the kind of story that'd been passed around the Institute for years, but... you know," she shrugs, tapping her fingers on the railing, bringing herself back to the sensation, "you kinda get why they're saying that shit. You learn you're powerless, you learn how you get some measure of power, and from then on that all makes sense to you."
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
Puru Two squints briefly as her brain constructs at least six, maybe seven different possible constructions of a gunblade-wielding mobile suit. Most of them wind up looking like the Gundam Double Zeta with an oversized revolver. "A magic gun?" she echoes. "If only..."
Despite the world of troubles heaped upon the teenage guard-dog, she seems to return to equilibrium quite quickly once offered a source of interaction. Permanence's character forces her to pay attention. The brightness of that tone eclipsing a painful past, it commands respect in a game-recognize-game kind of way. "Caged? Me? No... not anymore." she muses as their grip drops. "The guy who built my cage is dust. Blown to bits."
Point of clarification: she's not very melancholy about that. Glemy Toto, greedy Scion of Neo-Zeon royalty, is never remembered for being anything but a predator.
Big eyes full of expression--and emotion--watch Permanence's every move. Though she may not know her life story, common threads between them weave together into a tapestry of understanding. Swift and secure. Puru Two shifts her weight, the railing taking the brunt of her mass, palms coming to rest atop a steel bar keeping soft Humans from falling into machinery. "How'd you... deal with it?" she asks, right to the heart of the matter. "I thought I'd put it all behind me. You know. Being a weird... being a weird weapon that someone made, I thought I'd found a place to belong and was doing good."
Her lips press together, squashing a complaint. Turning it into something more substantiated. "Guess I don't like being reminded of that string around my foot." she brings it full-circle to Permanence's excellent example. "But you sound wise about it, where... I just... want to start..." she pauses, struggling with each thought and word. Palms turn and fingers slip around the railing, gripping it harder. "--want to start burning things. Hurting people. Making them pay."
One wounded Cyber-Newtype looks to another, suddenly desperate for guidance. "How'd you ever reconcile that...?"
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Good," Permanence says, when Callisto -- she's still thinking of her as Callisto, she's absorbed the ship's chatter, she knows that's the name she came by later -- says that Glemy Toto is very dead.
She doesn't bother hiding the fact that she is legitimately pleased to hear a man got blown all the way up. He's dead, and that's great. She's glad he died.
Permanence leans on the railing, looking up to the uniform lighting, above. (Which has surely all been secured so that Zentradi heads won't bang into anything.) "I tried to take care of other people, and I pretended like I wasn't so fucked myself. But you know, the only reason why it's Wira who died, back then, and not me... the only reason is that the Institute hadn't had time to reprogram me with their dirty tricks." Back then, she watched, numb, as Wira jumped in front of the bullet.
But she didn't jump.
... because she'd only just arrived a month or so prior.
She shakes her head, and smiles, looking back over to Callisto. (Her eyes, meanwhile, are grey; it's a type of blue, really.) "They first put me through the wringer for the Second Huffman Conflict," she says. "Back then, they weren't even Cyber-Newtype experiments... not for a few years, anyway. Well, they dragged me out of my gifted classes when I was seventeen, and from there I got shipped from lab to lab until you guys dragged me out of the shit. Twenty-three years of it... I had to figure out some way to cope with the anger, or it would've poisoned me, inside out."
She gestures, with an open palm. "I connected with the other people they were victimising," she says. "I got real good at -- reaching out. Making myself known. Like I did, back there, but also just with my words... a lot of places in the REA, they experiment on cyborgs, too, so there's a lot of people I'd miss if I was just sparkling at people. Fuckin' everyone was alone, scared... yeah, like I said, keeping them together kept me together." Permanence reaches up, to smooth her hand over her hair, and check for strands which have escaped her straw-blonde bun. None have, of course. She's having a good day again, so she was able to do her hair properly.
"But it's not until I got out -- came here -- that I got to start working out a lot of the shit I couldn't look at head-on. And I mean -- you get it, right? You're treading water, in Hell. Your job's just to keep your head above water, and maybe someone else's, if you can manage it. No one's ever gonna sort shit out when they're getting tortured." She sighs, and folds her arms, loosely, across her chest. "And you know, it's hard to do when your brain's taking you back to that same prison. Really feels like you're in survival mode, right now... it sucks, but the only real answer to this shit is to give it time. Give it time, and talk about it. Sunlight disinfects, you know?"
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
Well... there's the rub, no? To the heart of the matter: Glemy Toto was a man with ambitions, with dreams, fears, failings, and reasons for what he did. No doubt there was no dot left unconnected, you could probably quiz his ghost and find out there was possibly a very good reason to traumatise and prey on a whole classroom of impressionable children with machine-spun killing instincts and carefully-sculpted patterns of paternal longing.
And none of that matters. On this topic, Puru Two is already at peace: any doubt she feels is the result of complicated syndromes and complexes. But she maintains her belief that the blonde bitch who fancied himself a princeling deserved to boil into dust beneath a beam of concentrated exotic particles. Fuck him, now and forever, and piss on the ashes.
Amen.
"So back then, they took regular kids and did the same things to you as they did to me, huh...?" she muses, equally mournful and inquisitive. That Permanence engages with Callisto here is important to note. Because she's here, just as much as Puru Two is here. One seeks to make sense of the world that hurts her, the other just wants to fuckin'... fuckin'... pay it back. Tenfold. There's still an angry 12-year old who never reconciled things living in this girl's heart, but she's polite about this twisted arrangement. She doesn't take over. A wolf overlooking the cub, that's what's going on here. "That sucks."
The fire gutters in her spirit, a touch. Smouldering embers of unease, more than a flame of rage. "That feels even worse. At least I..." a glance at her own fingers, uncurling once more. "Neo-Zeon freaks cooked me up in a test tube or something, so I didn't know better until someone broke me out of there. I think I'd break if I'd gone from living a normal life to all that... you're strong."
A sigh follows.
To talk about it, ah, there's that old lesson come to roost. Memories of a therapist's room, similar lines of inquiry. Incremental progress. A glimmer of 'normal' life. But always stopping short of a full recovery. "It sounds simple when you put it like that. I think I was... getting better once. But then I tried to make a difference. And I'm slipping, like--the water's cold and I can't keep my head up for that long."
She's really going with the examples, huh. How powerful a sweet word is.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Amen to that.
"Not entirely sure I was regular," Permanence sighs, extending a hand out to examine her fingers. (There are scars, on her wrist -- circular, though. Old port entryways.) "Though back in the '70s, no one would have thought to say the word 'Newtype'... I just always had a sense of when I was in trouble, so everyone'd say I had a cat's reflexes. I was better at spatial reasoning, too. Nothing like this -- what we're up to -- but, you know, it was... something. A little something." She pauses, and sighs, grasping the railing again. "So they took it and pried it wide open... I think that's why I survived. Back then, with the early experiments, they were real fucking --" Her eyes shut, briefly.
"No... I get the sense I don't have to tell you."
It's a matter of mutual recognition.
"I am," she affirms, of her strength. "But you are, too. It takes a big woman to get out of a tube and get out of a lab and move into the world. I had a normal life and forgot it -- but you've built all you have from nothing. I think you should be proud of that." Even if it doesn't always work as well as people who've had a normal life.
She tilts her head, curled fingers resting at her cheek. "Do you think recovery's all up and up?" She asks. "Just the other day, I could barely get out of bed because my heart decided it wasn't beating right that day, so my whole body got in on pain time... and not so long before that, I ended up leaking all my feelings on this kid whose only crime was showing me what happened after my friend died. Those are both pretty bad days, yeah? But, you know -- I'm back at work now," she gestures, to the scrubber-drier. "And I can listen to all the gnarled shit around you without getting wounds poked in my own damn side, too. Recovery's more like a rollercoaster... it goes up and down and sometimes you get thrown into a goddamn loop-de-loop and you throw up ever everyone. It's not about never slipping, it's just about... gradually learning how to get up after you slip."
Permanence reaches over, to clap a hand on Callisto's shoulder. "Right now, you just need something to help you float. And I can tell you right now that you don't need all that firepower alone. Leina, right? You're not the only one who's worried about it all." She smiles, reassuring. "I've decided I'm gonna ask the Captain to let me go and fight for her, too. No one person has to handle all this shit alone. You've got backup, all right? With this, and all the other shit, too."
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
Oh yeah. You don't have to tell her. Everything in the 0080's sucked just as bad as the 0070's.
Callisto's gaze travels to a far, shadowy corner in the hangar. In the darkness, the luminous patterns dancing in her vision twist and meld into memories, which leak into the surroundings. Plain as day. The whole shebang, it's all there. And not just the (comparatively) glamourous rush of adrenaline from being a child taught the values of action, tempo, and violence visited upon others! No, trust me, there's far worse. There's the nights spent writhing in agonized withdrawal from a nervous system craving another hit of research stimulants, the bruises and broken bones, of being choked to unconsciousness by men three to four times your size, of being glued to machines with hypnotic regimens that leave the user heaving and retching as their mind stitches itself back together.
In short: shit has sucked, and it has always sucked. In knowing this common journey, there is unity.
"Call me weird..." she murmurs aloud, blinking the images away. "But it feels... nice... to hear someone say it straight out like that." (she refers, of course, to Permanence talking of her -very- unplesant time as an experimented-on child.) "Am I fu--" she halts herself. Doesn't swear. Retraces her steps, picks another phrase. "--messed up? I know the Captain here is like us, and so are a lot of the others, but I never hear them talk about it so plainly." a pause. "But I'm always thinking about it... like the way you're talking about it. It's right there. Plain as day. No, wait, I guess you said talking about it is part of healing... so maybe..." she's having to knot together the logic step by torturous step, here. On matters of the heart, Puru Two is as dumb as a rock. "I guess that's why I've sucked so bad at getting better."
The clap on her shoulder knocks her from that twilight reverie, and perhaps for the better. She's jolted at first, but makes no sudden moves, there's no spike of anxiety or fear. "I guess... hearing someone say not every day has to be a good one helps too, you know. Nobody ever just says it like that. Kinda wish they would."
The thing here, Callisto, is you never -ask-.
"You're not afraid of getting back into the fight?" she asks. There's a spark of genuine, inquisitive surprise there. "... I guess I can't blame you there. I had a few normal years, finished school, and started losing my mind not using this power."
Every time she thinks of Power, or speaks of Power, there's a light in the distance. A Chthonic burning that steers an otherwise pleasant girl towards thoughts of crushing men in labcoats with mechanical hands, or raking their fallen bodies with sub-machinegun fire, or plunging knives into their exposed throats, or frying their synapses with some ill-defined Psyco-amplified scream.
"You seem cool. I wish I'd met someone like you when I was just getting out of Neo-Zeon."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"The Captain's been healing longer than us," Permanence points out, not unkindly. "And anyway, everyone's different. Some people don't want to look at it straight-on... doesn't mean you're fucked," a breath of a beat, "messed up about it." Apparently with greater age comes a greater inclination towards cluster bombs of the invective variety. Who knew? "It just means you deal with it different. And if that's how it is, you gotta let all the people who give a crap about you know that's how you work. They might think they're doing right by you, not bringing it up, when you really gotta chew on it out loud. Look, it's not that you suck at it -- it's just that you haven't all the way figured out what your method is, yet. Tell a fish to fly, and it'll just look at you funny, but they're damn good at swimming." What? Damn isn't a swear.
She gestures, helpfully, throughout the hangar. "A lot of people do, here, by the way. Care about you, I mean." Whenever Callisto isn't on screen, all the characters must ask, 'where's Callisto?' Except that people really were, even on a ship this size. She matters! "I don't know if it's hard to hear that, with all the screaming in your head right now."
Permanence laughs, a wan little chuckle, as she pats Callisto's shoulder. "I think a lot of people get embarrassed about their bad days," she says. "So they don't talk about them so much. And that just means people think they're way rarer than they are... sucks, right?"
She straightens up, clasping her hands in front of her. "I'm... pretty shit scared, really," she admits. "Every time I jumped in a wanzer and killed someone, it wasn't what I wanted to do... but I did it without complaint, because at least I got to get out of the lab for a while. Now... this is a fight I want to do, for my own reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not terrifying. But... that's why I'm gonna talk to the Captain about it. Make sure my head's on right. Make sure I'm doing this for the right reasons. That's all you can do, really -- check in with other people, get a reality check about it."
Permanence smiles. "Thanks. You seem pretty cool, yourself. I mean, I'm biased, you helped drag me out of Hell, but -- you know. Aside from that." She gestures, vaguely, in an 'all of it' sort of gesture. "Look -- it doesn't seem like people need the hangar just yet. You want to go get some lunch? I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you're the kind who gets lost in their head and forgets about, like, human sustenance. Come on, I'll show you this really cool thing they can make around here."
Spoilers: the really cool thing is salad.
Permanence is excited about salad.
<Pose Tracker> Puru Two has posed.
There's a faraway look in the clone-girl's eyes as Permanence points out the obvious: that people here miss her, they -think- about her. When she's missing, they're wondering where she is. They're planning on how to take care of her, when she's down, and support her even when she's up. It's not a sad or a whimsical look, it's far simpler: it's the guilty shame of a teen-ager who knows they've wallowed in some self-pity for a time, only to be hauled out of the mire with a little Human interaction.
"We could use more people who just... aren't afraid to come out and say it." Callisto muses, just a tinge of colour in her cheeks, her gaze averted. The shame-muscle hasn't been exercised much. It's weak, and not sure how to cope just yet. "It's important... to hear, I think. You did a really good job."
For once, Callisto turns down the idea of talking tech about making murder on people with her robot. For once, she wants to think about something else. Of making a new connection and learning more about someone who's been through all the same, or similar, hiccups she's been through. Stepped on all those cyber-rakes. She stands up and starts taking her gloves off. "O...kay. I'm pretty hungry. And it'd be nice to eat with someone for once." there's a simple smile on her face as proof.
Frankly? Salad is badass. Don't let the protein-chads fool you.