2023-06-16: If I Hadn't Met You
- Log: If I Hadn't Met You...
- Cast: Permanence Pasternak (NPCed by Ruri Hoshino), Christina MacKenzie
- Where: The Ra Mari II
- Date: 2023-06-16
- Summary: Permanence comes across Chris, and shares a drink and her story with her. She's able to tell Chris about Wira's ultimate fate -- and Chris is able to tell her about her fate, after learning about Leina. But even if it's hard for them, they can still have a drink together. (It's ginger beer, of course. Labrats and depressed women alike struggle with alcohol.)
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Today, Permanence Pasternak, one of the Ra Mari II's resident custodians... is doing inventory. Going from cleaning office to cleaning office with her tablet, she ticks off the supplies they do and do not have in stock, so that the ship can get the supplies it needs where it needs them.
She's never going to stop pointing out how big this ship is. She is NOT going to the other side of this thing just to get some bleach. That's not happening.
Anyway, she's in the residential block right now, moving from office to office. She's tapping away at that tablet even as she's walking, putting in orders and confirming forms. In her 3SA uniform, straw hair all pulled up into a neat bun, she certainly fits in.
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
Christina MacKenzie, restored and refreshed, and now reunited with her partners in the Residential Block, thanked Anita yet one more time on her exit.
"XAIRO, MAIRO, thank Miss Rosetta for taking such good care of you.
"Thank you! Thank you! MAIRO like Anita! Fun! Fun! Friend!" the glossy, polished Haro said, before his younger, larger sister more shyly added, "XAIRO... Family, back together... Thank you. Thank you."
Gratitude expressed, Chris worked her way down the hall, nodding to the various crew members out and about. She's already given a friendly smile to the approaching woman before she quite realized exactly whose face is tilted into that tablet. Had they not met gazes on the Garuda less than a week ago, she might not have been able to draw the name from her memories.
--"Miss Pasternak, that wouldn't happen to be you, would it? We met...Well. We met back in February..." She paused, and offered, "I never expected to run into you on a colonyship this large, how are you doing?"
The Haros both rolled out from behind Chris, peering curiously. "Hello! Hello!" Permanence may have seen them on-site in Sri Lanka on the way out, but if so, hardly for a moment's glance in the rapid exfil. But she may also have seen them tagging along with Anita occasionally, around the Ra Mari these past two weeks.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
When one's consciousness has been wrenched open, one tends to recognise people by their vibes. Chris may have been going to efforts to hide herself, back then, but even so --
Permanence looks up, in response to her name, and her attention focuses on Chris, grey eyes focusing. "It's you," she confirms, a second time. "I remember. What's your name?"
She smiles, to the Haros, and adds: "Hello," before she looks back up to Chris. (Well, down at Chris, once she's straightened up again. She's a good six inches taller than her.) "I joined the crew, after what happened. Custodial staff -- I never much fucked with the active engagements." Which might explain why Chris has never seen her. She hasn't been going out and fighting, like so many others.
"But -- it's nice to see you again," she says. With a light sigh, "I should have tracked down everyone who helped out, back then... you know, I always think, I have time, I can do it when I get some time to breathe. But here you are, huh?"
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
Chris gives the woman a small wave and offers her hand. She's no stranger at this point to looking up at her interlocutors, for better or worse.
"I'm sorry, we didn't get to talk last time we met. Christina MacKenzie, just Chris is fine. MAIRO here helps me with repairs, and XAIRO helps people in natural disasters."
"It sounds like it's been a good fit for you. Captain York is a wonderful person, and XO Rezza cares no less about everyone who's made this place home."
"I'm glad you haven't had to fight... Please, don't worry about that. I was just glad you got out. But I'm glad our paths crossed again. You really helped Banagher, back there... I wish I could have helped you more."
She doesn't let her face fall for long. She isn't going to dwell on those regrets anymore.
"Is there anything I can help with? Make your next breather come a little sooner, maybe?"
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Chris," Permanence affirms, and grins. "Nice. Suits you." How can a name suit someone? Some psychic nonsense, surely. "And hello to you two," she adds, to the Haros -- a touch awkwardly, really, but clearly Chris thinks of them as pets of some fashion, so she can make some effort to humour it. ... Permanence doesn't really talk to machines much.
(We remind the audience that she was stuck in a lab before the first Haro came out in '78 -- so she's a touch baffled by how attached everyone is to their toasters, now she's gotten out. Politely so, but still.)
"I admire the Captain," she adds. "She's never pushed me to fight... she would have been happy for me just to stay here and not work, probably, but I would've gone completely stir-crazy about it. As for Banagher..." Permanence sighs, a hand sweeping back over her head, to check for stray hairs. (Everything's in place.) "... well, I shouldn't have blamed him, back then. Not that I could have put the blame where it belonged, at the time... kid's dealing with a lot. That's why I want to help him get through this one."
She laughs, gesturing to the tablet. "Oh, I'm just doing stock right now -- super-boring, but you gotta have shit stocked in a ship like this. I can take a break, though -- you want to get something to drink?" She starts walking, anyway, perhaps assuming that Chris indeed wants that. "... the breather's more on account of therapy and all that garbage, really. Like -- real therapy, this time. They say it's gonna take years to sort this out... but I'm doing better than I was. I have more good days than bad, these days."
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
"Does it? Thank you, (I think)," she laughs, feeling somehow at peace to see Permanence smile. It's a much more suiting expression than their first meeting and parting.
MAIRO beeps softly and flaps, and XAIRO rolls behind Chris.
"I do, too. If there had been more people like Captain York during my Federation days, maybe things could have gone differently. But that's what makes her special--there aren't many like her. I'm glad she understood and let you help--I can't stand to sit by either."
With Wira... Banagher fired the shot because Leina was in danger. "I blamed myself, too, for being too slow to change anything. But Sayla reminded me regret doesn't leave much room for hope."
Chris doesn't even finish the thought of a good drink right now when Permanence already seems to have known her answer. "Well, then, if you're fine taking your break with me. I actually feel up to drinking, now that I've stopped crying!" Chris laughs empathetically; Sayla definitely insisted on some good mental health practitioners in the early 0090s. "You too, huh? I can't imagine how much more exhausting it must be to walk backwards though those years..."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Sayla? A friend of yours?" Permanence, who is still catching up, doesn't know the big names most people know, in the Earth Sphere. She's probably heard of her, especially given recent events, but. Well. "Regret can help you do better by the world, but too much of it will just choke you out. You just have to ask... am I learning from this and changing my approach, or am I just using it to kick my own shit in?"
She shakes her head, and adds: "Not that I don't get it, but there were enough people who wanted to wreck me, in those labs." Labs. Labsss...sss. That's a... that's a plural sound. She did say they came from Bailuo Laboratory, but... "Wasn't much point doing their jobs for them." When people deal with human misery on that scale, not eating yourself up inside is itself an act of rebellion.
"Let's see, if we just duck in here..." There's a little lounge, off the way, a communal sitting area with a vending machine. "Here we go. Ginger beer's fine, right?" After a brief pause, she slips her card in, and grabs a couple of cans, handing one over to Chris. "I'm not much for, like, booze -- still need a fucking array of meds, but that's normal, for people who were mauled as early as me. The real medical wonder is how I'm still alive." She laughs, and heads over, to go and sit down on the couch. "I mean... they say my life expectancy's shot," she adds, with a brief frown, "but, like, I still got a good fifteen, twenty years left in me. At least! So I got time to do the work fixing myself up, here." Her smile returns, as she cracks her can open. "... the Captain's really showed me that's possible, you know? So I'm not too worried."
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
"Oh, sorry, ah, Doctor Sayla Mass, she was the blonde that hugged Banagher and Audr--I mean, and Captain Zabi. Leina is her...charge. Sayla and I, ...well, we go way back." For Chris to be thinking of the 'way back'... depending on how sensitive Permanence's psychic antenna is, it may be anywhere from a bit embarrassing to a tangled mess of shame, guilt, and even shyness.
Chris's eyes wander to the ground for a moment, in thought. "It's true. The people without any regrets are the ones that stole your life from you and turned my home into a battlefield. I'll...try to find a good balance."
The labs come up. More than one...she heard from the briefing that the researchers in Sri Lanka had escaped prior raids. Those clones of Yuliana, killed because they were inconvenient to ship.
"I'm glad you survived, Permanence. And if you're open to it, we might need your sturdy heart in the days ahead... If you still want to help when we get Leina home, of course!"
Chris follows her steps, XAIRO and MAIRO bobbing around behind her, quietly getting distracted by the passerbys.
"Oh, ginger would be great. I've been a little under the weather recently." She sees Permanence raise her card and pipes up, "Oh, no, you don't have to--" Beep. "Ah, well, thank you, you're too kind."
She finds a place to sit and opens her can. The Haros start to wander around, and Chris lets them until they start crowding curiously at a crewmember with a book in hand. "Mind your manners," she calls out, before turning back to Permanence. "Oh, I hadn't thought of that as a hazard..." She thinks about what Yuliana said about her tea and her regimen. "I only have a few friends with fragile health like that," and other than Yuli, they're not especially apt to talk about it. "I enjoy my liquor when I'm already feeling alright, but I've been in...dark places lately. Don't like giving my ghosts ammunition."
"Well, I'm glad that I have a new friend to learn from in the Second Universal Century, then--I'll be looking forward to it, Permanence."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Permanence's psychic antenna is quite sensitive, but the trick is that she doesn't need any of that extra information to pick up on the way Chris's sentences... just suddenly... start... to trail... off, and, ah, skip about, with all these -- hesitations. She smiles, and she is sympathetic. "Sounds like she cares for you," she points out, and she doesn't need any of the horrors done to her to know that, either.
Chris seems like the sort of person who habitually lives in her own head, and she did just talk about the way Sayla told her to make room for hope, after all.
"I'd love to," she says, of helping Leina. "The REA used indoctrination pretty heavily, no matter where you went -- authoritarian states, you know? -- so I know a thing or two about being made to think a certain way, and thinking that's just the choice you made. Pretty fucking sick, but it's effective."
She lifts her other hand, to forestall Chris's protests. "No way. I owe you at least this much -- let me buy you a drink, if nothing else. Come on, sit down," which is all the more important, if she's not feeling so hot, right now.
(She makes a note to ask Banagher whether these toys actually have manners they can mind, later. It would be a shade intrusive, right now.)
"Dark places, huh... yeah, I've heard you want to avoid the drink, at times like that." She pauses, and tilts her can towards Chris, with an open gesture from her free hand. "Want to talk about it? I've got time."
They are, after all, friends now, so it's not weird to ask.
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
Chris is more than capable of keeping secrets about industry research and 'extracurricular operations', but her feelings are a different story. It's not so much that she means to let people see her heart on her sleeve, but she isn't someone who can be anyone else. Even still, it takes a sharp eye to really trace her inner shadows and lights quite so precisely.
"She cares, almost too much; I'm lucky she's my best friend." Sayla's conviction and strength have chased away the helplessness and fear she'd felt since Dakar. She's absolutely the type to dwell and ruminate, but she's unusually renewed now. --Maybe that 'unusually' is the very problem; that this is the exception, not the baseline.
"I suppose you're right... I've done some aid work in Siberia and Liangzhong, and a larger scale operation in Thailand... It's not that people were unkind, but you can see the exhaustion and distrust of outsiders when you're there long enough."
"I don't see how you owe me, but...I'll trust you on this one." Mollified by Permanence's insistence, she accepts the drink without further challenge, and settles comfortably. "I guess it can't hurt to share."
"It's a...Well, I guess it isn't that long a story. Fought Zeon in my hometown, killed a friend. Fought Titans in the streets, got picked up by Sayla. Learned some bad news and isolated myself. Got saved by Sayla again, and met Leina. Been living for the two of them ever since."
"I'm a fighter, I always have been. The last two weeks... Being told that if I fight to save my family, I'd lose my family? I went...a little mad. Burned up on an island middle o'nowhere. Seeing her so weak, so hopeless, so under Vist's thumb? It took Sayla saving me from myself a third time..."
She trails off, still finding it difficult to admit quite the level of violence that had rooted itself in her heart.
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
Permanence smiles, hearing and hearing Chris's feelings for Sayla. "That's great," she says, and means it. It's wonderful that she has such a good friend.
"Yeah," she agrees, of the indoctrination. "You see it with the citizenry, too... it's in our goddamn schools. So it's the natural thing to turn up to eleven, when they cram you in a lab." 'I'm loyal to the Republic!', one young woman had insisted, during the raid. That sort of thinking...
A little laugh, as she says she doesn't see how she owes her -- but Permanence doesn't see the need to beleaguer the point of how she helped save her from Hell. If she can't see it, that's fine. Permanence does.
She quiets, instead, to listen to Chris's story, leaning back on her couch, one leg folding over the other. (She's having a pretty good day, today, so those movements don't really hurt her.) Oh, there's so much violence.
"So you've just got this great hammer, and all a sudden someone not so far off your niece looks a lot like a nail," she summarises, with a light sigh. "Yeah, that'd fucking suck. It's one thing to see that kind of personality shift in strangers -- another entirely when you know what they were like before the wool got pulled over their eyes. And with Vist holding her hostage..."
Permanence takes a sip of ginger beer. It's carbonated, bubbly, and cold; she takes note of all these things, as it heads on down her throat. Orient to the details. "But scientists," and she says the word in the same way one would describe cockroaches, or maggots, or an unpleasant smear on one's shoe, "bank on the power of hopelessness. Everything involved in human experimentation is designed around convincing you there's nothing you can do about it. And you've already demonstrated to yourself that's just fucking wrong," she gestures, to herself. "Because I'm here, talking to you, after you razed the Institute to the ground."
A light pause, and she goes on: "We'll save Leina, too. I'm not a fighter -- I was just made to be -- even so, I'll be there, too. If it's for something like this..." Permanence takes a breath, eyes closing, briefly. "... for a long time, I thought the worst of humanity was all it had to offer. I thought shit would never get better... but you know, things are getting better, now I'm out. It'll be that way for Leina, too," she assures her. "You'll see."
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
"In the schools..." A terrifying notion, but it fits with what she's seen in the field. Whether through mulching or more mundane control, why can't there be even a little more room for children to be innocent, in this, the so-called Universal Century? Permanence may see her face tighten a little, and feel her anger briefly swell and ebb. Children are one of the topics sure to get Chris worked up, for better or worse.
Permanence is right, it's the contrast that really hurts the most. "She...Leina, after the institute, after I killed those guards, she asked what I was fighting for. Me...I didn't have any hope that the world could change. But I could fight so that she could change the world. Now she--now she doesn't think there's any point in fighting. Like there's no point in demanding people like her and you can live your own lives," she mutters, biting back the pricks at the corners of her eyes. But Permanence continues, through both the dark and the light.
"Meeting with you, seeing you here... makes it easier to believe I made a difference. That it was worth it, even when I couldn't bring a tomorrow to everyone. I wish I could have saved Wira, too... both for him, and for Banagher. But," she smiles, and sighs. "Sometimes you have to lose something even if you want to save everything."
"Leina--this Leina, but even Leina before--thinks Miracles cost more than they're worth. But even...every day life costs more than a heart can bear, sometimes." Permanence might notice, on both layers of reality, an echo of grief and sadness. Of Bernie, and of others... "Why should Miracles be any different? We'll bring her home. Whether it's a miracle or not. I'm glad you're with us, Permanence."
"And once this is over, I'd like your help, if that's alright."
Chris gives a moment for a response, gives room for the reasonable question.
"Help finding, clearing, and bringing down the walls of every place like the Institute. Every single one."
"After all, I've got a great hammer."
<Pose Tracker> Permanence Pasternak has posed.
"Yeah. They tell me it's the same in Britannia... whether you're to the left or the right, politically, authoritarianism's all the same." Permanence sighs, eyes tracing to the door, for a moment. Out, into the Ra Mari II... "Even so, I grew up in Moscow. Me and my sisters, Provenance and Pursuance," she doesn't know she has a brother, now, "... Zaftra was our home. The Ra Mari II's my home, now, but I can't bring myself to think of those snowy streets too poorly. My neighbours didn't know shit -- before they took me, I didn't know shit... it's not the people's fault, you know?"
You might say, even now, she still reflexively defends them. You might say that it's normal for someone to love the place they were raised. You might be confused which is which...
... and yeah, that's the trick.
Permanence listens, sympathetically, as Chris talks about what Leina told her. Her grey eyes shut, briefly, as she thinks of Wira. (She didn't know him for long. They were of a common cause, together. She wanted him to get out, the way he thought he would. Even if the game was rigged...)
"Maybe... one day I'll be strong enough to take that on," she says, first, and slowly. "I really can't stand how it keeps happening... I want to put a stop to it. Right now... right now, I have to focus on getting this one girl home," Permanence's eyes flutter closed, briefly, again. Her other hand curls, around her can. "It's... hard, to see one of those girls who saved me get eaten by it all, herself. It's difficult to bear. But it's even worse for the people who she loves most... I owe it to her to get her through this."
She shakes her head, and smiles, to Chris, a little desperately worn. "The rest -- the rest will come, in time. This doesn't just come down to you, you know? There are -- there's a lot of people, working on this shit. I'm glad you have a hammer that strong, but that's not all you can offer, Chris. I hear how you believe in Leina... but you've gotta believe in yourself, too."
Her hand lifts, from the can, to gesture to her. "... even if you've killed people. Even if you've made mistakes. It's hard for you to imagine you did anything without seeing proof, right? But sometimes, you'll never see what you did. This is a huge fucking ship... if I hadn't gone to the Garuda, that day, we might never have met again." She sighs, and the finger of her right hand taps, against the aluminium. "And you know, even if you never had -- reality would still be the same. You still would have helped save me from hell. Things like that... matter, observed or unobserved." For all their experiments plagued her -- at least Permanence is so much better, now, at observing what is hidden.
"Lots of things have costs," she shakes her head. "There's the cost of pretending to be ill when you sense you're being checked over for a fatal experiment... the cost of seeing someone else go in for it, instead. The cost of following orders... the cost of telling some fucking shit-ass doctor exactly how fucked they can get. Some of those things cost more than they're worth, maybe. But you can't know that, before it happens. Not even if they pried your brain open until all the insight floods in." Permanence is a shade melancholy, as she considers the idea. "It's a real rare person who can see the future. Most of us have to make our best guess, and do what good we can, and if it fucks up, well -- we just deal with that."
She's silent, for a moment.
"Wira... Banagher showed me what happened," Permanence adds, a shade distant, gaze tracking off to the near wall. "His spirit reconciled with him, I guess... helped him with one of those Miracles of his. Seems like he's found some measure of peace, so... you know, I think it's important you know that, too."
<Pose Tracker> Christina MacKenzie has posed.
"I suppose I lucked out. I grew up in a place whose identity was...well, nothing. Too spacenoid to give up dreams of independence, too cowardly to stick to it. Liked Zeon money enough to let Flanagan set up his butcher shop, and Feddie money enough to set up the R&D that almost got my colony nuked. It's not the peoples' fault...the leaders making the decisions..."
Even now, she resents the systems that made her put her own home in danger. Yet, she was employed by and benefitted from that very system.
"I want to put a stop to it too. We'll get there, Permanence. And we're going to save her. I'm not going to accept any other future. We'll find her and we'll bring her home."
"Maybe it doesn't come down to me, but...I can't just sit and wait." She listens, earnestly, to the older woman's words. "For our paths to not have crossed...but I still would have saved you. You still would have been living a completely different life."
"You can't know the cost before it happens... I think, even Rita can't do that, not really... She gets close, but not really." To Chris, this is the temptation to burn herself to ashes to accomplish things with her own hands...but that's the wrong way to do things. "Even if I've made mistakes...I can still carry on. I can still do better for people when I'm still here... And so can you. I'm glad that I was able to help."
"What? He...he did? They...could speak again?"
Newtype happenings were still such a mystery beyond her ken, yet she couldn't stop wanting to understand--her curiosity came from her love for her family. "I'm so happy...oh, I'm glad that they..."
It was a weight off her shoulders, a lightening in her gut. Even with happiness replacing the lacrimosa in her eyes, her shoulders straighten a little bit.
"Thank you, Permanence. You'll have to introduce me to your sisters some time. We happened to meet, not once but three times, in this enormous universe. I, for one, don't want to waste this opportunity."
"Would you like another round?"