exsiliumlogs | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Date: February 1st
Location: The Initiative Hold & Courtyard.
Characters: Everyone.
Summary: New Transports have all arrived and have been shuffled into the Courtyard after their initial briefings, while older Transports are returning from the mission to Uruguay.
Warnings: None.

While those who have been guests of Exsilium since at least the last wave of Transports return from their desperate mission and are pressed out of the Transporter room and into the Courtyard, the Initiative prepares to receive a second wave at the same time. And if you're in that second wave, the fresh meat, then you've just been hustled and bustled through mazes of information and literal, wide corridors of the Initiative Hold and you've been equipped with your weapon—be it a gun, a sword, or even your existing powers. They've handed you this light netbook and a small pouch of coins (or a debit card, if you're more inclined), and there are several Transports before and after you going through the very same motions. You can hear the Greeter's voice as she walks alongside large groups, telling them all about the history of this place and sharing with you your purpose here in a hurried and urgent tone. "You're in luck that we have enough rooms for all of you; the housing building is getting awfully full. Please, let me show you into the courtyard."

You pass what looks like huge gymnasiums, all with dummies and targets strewn and splayed around the room. Training areas. There are even classrooms, and a few small offices. You're rushed past a large library while the Greeter informs you that you can find almost all your information there, if you've got the time to look—and trust her, you'll have time. You don't spend a lot of time in the bank, and it's a bit of a blur of exchanges with more and more of these strangely-accented and oddly polite-seeming members of the Initiative.

Soon enough, you're in a massive courtyard bustling with all the other Transports. It's not exactly what you'd expect, and it looks more like barracks than anything—huge walls of concrete and stone, separating you from all of the hallways you'd just passed through. It's raining heavily, and dark clouds loom in the air, though it hasn't turned to snow. It's a chill cold, and there are shelters—long cloth hangings that extend from the walls of concrete to house you from the rain, but not enough. Most notably, the courtyard is filled with a marketplace. Even in the cold and the rain, there are several citizens seated at their covered booths and tables, bundled up against the weather. They're selling all manner of their own handmade goods and foods, and citizens and Transports alike are traveling from one small covered shop to another in search of all manner of necessities.

The Greeter's voice has become so faint now, but you swear you can make it out in the back of the crowds as she tells you, "Good luck. Be safe!"

Her voice is drowned out by the busy marketplace, though even the transactions taking place are somewhat subdued. Nobody is overly happy, really, though most citizens can be found with smiles on their faces. It doesn't seem like they're that shocked to see you, either; even if you're not bound in tattered rags and wrapped in heavy shawls as they are. You're welcome to walk up to a shop, and find yourself something to eat—hey, maybe you'll even find something akin to a raincoat. Or, you can join the others under the coverings against the walls. Where am I? What war? She was talking so fast, and it didn't all make very much sense… did anyone else catch it all?

Welcome to the courtyard. Welcome to the Initiative Hold—and most importantly, welcome to Exsilium

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Kanaya's neutral-to-friendly expression changes to a slight frown as Haruka calls herself too weak to so much as go to her apartment right away. It might be true for all she knows (humans are weak and soft - physically), but it bodes very badly for her fate in a battle if that's the case. Maybe that's how she got herself out of some grief in bad enough shape to need an eyepatch. She might be argumentative enough to get someone from a less kind culture than Alternia's provoked, considering she had already outright rejected

Humans are usually like that, abhorring conflict so much they end up causing it in blood, but Kanaya can tolerate it.

"I should warn you, if you really think it will take you a long time to feel ready to get there, it might be best to just go as soon as you feel you can get up and then rest as much as you need to once you get there." Kanaya doesn't think for a moment that Haruka might actually consider these accommodations poor relative to what she's used to; aside from the roommates and perhaps the size, she can't think of any discrepancy between this area and what she'd expect of Earth's less advanced civilization. "The rain won't let up, and neither will the temperature, and also the pavement isn't about to transform into comfortable furniture, which I can guarantee your apartment will have."

"I'll be fine, I promise." The smile is polite enough, but there's a tension edging at the corner of her mouth. "I don't mind the weather. I've had a very long time to get used to this, so I know how much of any one place I can tolerate."

At least she was already dressed for winter; the thick fabric of her (fitted, woolen, princess-style cut) coat repelled most of the rain; it only seemed to cling to her hair.

"It's very kind of you to be so concerned for me, when we've never met before, but I'll be alright."

Haruka has a point there: she is a complete stranger to Kanaya, and the routine so common in Exsilium of losing that very quickly in situational solidarity... is not taking place. If she thinks of this as an interspecies contest of hospitality, then allowing her assistance to be abjured will constitute a defeat. Maybe she shouldn't fall into the pattern, again, though, of lavishing help on hurt girls who don't appreciate, or even think they need, it.

She looks at the human girl silently for half a second before she takes a slight retreat. "I'm sorry. You would know much better than I, wouldn't you?" The sentences, tag question and all, are crafted for self-effacing social levity, but her face outside her painted lips is moderately rebuffed. Letting their encounter end so soon, with Haruka affirming that Kanaya never should have bugged her in the first place, won't do... She has to come up with some way to at least have been helpful.

"However, if you're that opposed to strangers meddling in your affairs on the grounds of Transport solidarity, don't bother introducing yourself on the network."

It seems to be enough to do the trick; at least, the sudden change of expression is the most honest Kanaya's earned from Ruka the whole conversation.

It's probably unfortunate that the look she wears is of weary dread, as though knowing some horrible fate is to befall her, and there is nothing she can do about it.

"Don't tell me I'm gonna get people trying to adopt me, am I?" Her tone has even lost most of the kind politeness, and has instead dropped slightly in pitch to something near tired disdain.

(Despite the easily acknowledged weakness, someone is clearly not a fan of hypothetical impending familial units.)

Kanaya's never actually heard a human use the word "adopt" before this moment. It's interesting to see Haruka regards the concept with contempt. From what she knew of human familial units they were a far from desirable structure mostly based on tentative reproductive links that were never meant to be developed into cohabitation and custodial, even conciliatory, caring. If Haruka knows what adoption is, on the other hand, that reinforces the prior colony child theory...

"Oh, good heavens, no. I know I'm an alien, and I know your species seems to consider the age of majority to be some absurdly high number of your years like twenty, but the Initiative doesn't take in anything like lusus naturae." The discussion of a contempt they both share brings out in her the Alternian sociolect already, and she decides to leave the word unclarified. Maybe this will reveal whether Haruka is familiar with a halfway-decent culture after all.

Her hands cup briefly over her face, the heels of her palms pressing against her eyes—or at least where an eye should be, anyway—and she exhales, harshly.

Right, she's not supposed to know what that means.

"I'm guessing that's something from your home," she injected, still working on keeping her breathing steady, "but I'm more concerned about other people brought here." That, coupled with the realization of mandatory roommates simply has her sighing, again. Even the Arcadia Movement seemed like a step up from possibly being foisted into close proximity with some middle-aged humans with preconceptions about how children should be raised and subsequently aim to control her life without ever listening to a word she said edgewise.

She'd admittedly avoided the worst of that in the City, but the potential had been looming over her for more than a year now.

Oh. Well, the race had died out. She was silly to suspect anything. Kanaya lets it pass without comment in concession to Haruka's statement on priorities, but she's internally disappointed - just one more of humans by the dozens around which she has to censor herself. Some of them are sheltered enough that Kanaya does it out of kindness, not wanting to trouble their pretty little pink heads; others because they are stupid. She would like to hope for Haruka turning out to be the former.

"The adults are..."

Human adults are weird. Kanaya has trouble collecting her thoughts on them. Some have been extremely nice to her, mostly queer women; others have been absolutely sociopathic, mostly doctors. Patterns of behavior are difficult to deduce, but that's the human race to her: Hemochromatically homogenous, sociopolitically diverse.

"Adult humans as always deny at first youth their autonomy. They're getting used to the notion of us being able to take care of ourselves just fine as they meet children who've been free enough from their coddling that they can. The fastest way to attract their condescending attention is to admit you can't fight, though."

She knows exactly what she's saying with that. Poor Haruka. The first human she's met sensible enough to avoid adults as an adolescent, and she might be weak enough to actually merit their special treatment after all.

Her hands leave her face, finally, and once more she simply looks tired. "Yes, that sounds right. People are the same most anywhere." At least, she thought, the recently-acquired totally legitimate identification information in her bag slated her as seventeen, rather than her natural fifteen; in a few months, she would be an adult under the law, so she had a good chance of avoiding that form of care-taking. For now, she supposed she only had to worry about the type of roommates she had.

Her attention darted back to Kanaya, something of a bashful smile on her face. "Are you living in that complex, too? I'm going to feel pretty silly, worrying about something like that happening, if it turns out we're going to be roommates."

The law? Humans have law? Haruka has if nothing else a sense of humor Kanaya will appreciate. The only thing that's different about people is whether they're funny and whether they lie about it. (Though how many lies does she tell herself? Less than the average human, anyway.) She feels like she played her cards correctly if Haruka is at least more amenable to the notion of rooming with her than the alternative.

"Virtually every transport lives in that complex for lack of anywhere better to go, but I'm afraid you're not going to be with me. I already have two roommates. I'm fortunate; both are girls my age, and they know each other. They're also proof it's possible to subvert the system if your assignments are that awful. One of them moved into the other's room as soon as she arrived and it was weeks before her changed location was formally acknowledged, but her deviation had no consequences.

"So it does happen that there's an empty respiteblock in Unit Seven Zero Five." Another troll word - right, she's trying to be helpful... "I mean room. Though that is not actually an implication of any kind, and would not become one unless in the future you both became not a stranger to me and strongly incompatible with your assigned roommates. I shouldn't have even clarified that, should I have."

It's her turn to smile bashfully. "I'm just. Still getting used to your planet's brand of verbal irony."

That was definitely something to keep in mind. Squatting, just by the principle of it, was never really something Ruka considered in her daily life back in the City (and had never occurred to her as a thing that existed when she still lived in her own world), but if it was the difference between 'living in misery because of people' or 'living in misery because of a lack of locks,' she was, sadly enough, inclined toward the latter.

"It's alright." While, on the one hand, the Kanaya that Ruka had known before probably hated Ruka on the principle of conflict between Ruka's boyfriend, Kanaya herself, and that girl that she usually seemed to be gossiping with, which frequently erupted in violence; on the other hand, the idiot that Ruka lived with (that wasn't the one that Ruka was sure was going to, at some point, try to kill her) seemed to think really highly of her, and while he admittedly had the poor enough taste to consider Ruka his friend, he otherwise wasn't godawful.

On the third point (which could no longer be a hand because Ruka only had the two), the Kanaya before her was not the Kanaya she had known, and who was to say that anything of their pasts, personalities, or futures were the same, other than the (even now only presumable) trolls from Alternia origin?

At any rate, she smiled, forcing one shoulder to shrug in something that looked like a natural gesture. "Humans are hardly the easiest to understand, even on a good day. And I really appreciate the offer."

A good day. There aren't many of those in Exsilium but certainly more than there were in anywhere else Earth-related she's ever been. There's a strong cognitive dissonance between her views of humans and her views of the Transport community.

She feels misunderstood and her mouth goes crooked as she blinks again. This goddamn green makeup is going to get in her ocular globe one of these days (but she knows for sure the other Kanaya never wore it, that girl who put her into such an inconvenient situation, and that has an immense appeal to her). "It's not--" an offer? What she should say next is a mystery. Haruka constitutes a mystery. She's already turned the tables on Kanaya by inducing the sort of omnidirectional friendliness that she somewhat disrespects as arbitrary in others.

She just hasn't seen a girl with an eyepatch for over a year. She hasn't interacted with her old emotional surrogate for months, and her new one - is a doll but gets worked up over being called that and doesn't have an eyepatch.

"Species aside, adolescents have to stick together. As Transports are supposed to anyway. That's all."

Kanaya seems flustered, which wasn't Ruka's intent at all, but she does hide her mouth behind her hand to shield the worst of the smile. It's strange, how easy it can be to slip into something so casually... congenial. But then, the lying helps.

"I suppose that's true... and is that what we're called? 'Transports?'"

"Yes." Kanaya plants her feet a little more, feeling herself settle into the obligation to act as expositrix. She's torn between loving and hating the duty, but leans away from the former because at the moment it's an excuse to feel she managed to be a little productive, helpful to Haruka.

She points at herself with both fingers. "You and I are Transports." She extends her open hands forward, nowhere remotely near touching the other girl but implying the abstract connection between them. "We work for the Initiative." She spreads her hands apart to encompass some of their surroundings. "Our current location is Exsilium."

Simple enough concepts; the nouns are different, but the script is essentially the same. At least, on the surface; it was a bad idea to assume more similarities than she found herself, and for now, the best way to learn that information was to pry that information out of those who had been here longer than she.

And hope she didn't make herself sound suspicious. (But then, even when suspecting her was the right choice, how often did it ever happen?)

Her expression grows more thoughtful. "And if we... don't work for the Initiative?"

The notion that Haruka does not want to work for the Initiative is a saddening one to Kanaya. She's not about to cry, far from it, but as she describes the options available for a girl who does that, it's clear she thinks none of them are very good.

"Your entire planet is different now so you have no viable means of going to your home as you probably understand it." Though she thinks Haruka is in all likelihood lucky, relative to her - she couldn't go home if she wanted to anyway. "The Initiative makes accommodations for each transport as they can but won't let anyone outright stay home from any major mission. We always go as a group. And any rebel movements are led by the kind of boors who don't take their interdimensional predicament into consideration when making their demands."

She listens to Kanaya, but from the first phrase she closes her eye, hands folding once more on her knees. She listens to it all, and remembers it—she's hardly one to incite violence (certain #problems aside), so the line about boors registers merely as an assessment of some of the other 'transports' inhabiting this this place. That doesn't come as a surprise to all.

But she shakes her head, mouth tugging once more. "Even if it calls itself 'Earth,' this isn't my planet." Looking up once more at Kanaya. "Unless you mean to say, my having been brought here has changed the fate of that world?"

She closes her mouth and raises her eyebrows at Haruka's impressive insight. She'd be very surprised if Haruka's history didn't have an interdimensional element.

"You're definitely right about the first, but I have no idea what to tell you about the second, even after all my experiences with interdimensional grubnapping. Kidnapping." Dammit. "The Initiative, as you probably were told, would have you believe our worlds are under just as much siege as the United Earth itself. That said, we have too few ways of knowing for sure what goes on there in our absence - whether it's an absence at all during which we'll be missed, or for that matter if discrepancies in the timeline are resolved by compliance with immutable fate or branching.

"I'm fairly certain myself that we return to the exact time that we left and conduct ourselves as we would, causing various timeline divergences in some cases. How much of that is based in evidence and how much in wishful thinking, I can't say."

That was interesting. Not the stuff about United Earth; she doesn't buy the your world is threatened line for a moment. Her world has threats, and her world has protectors, and even if she is one of them, she's nowhere near the most capable at anything, and if they wanted Signers really capable of fighting on this scale, Ruka thinks she would probably rank somewhere under the severed arm in a canister.

No, what's interesting is Kanaya's conclusion.

"What do you mean by that? Timeline divergences."

She slowly draws her lips over her teeth to make sure only her two main fangs show, which is synecdoche for her realizing how very closely she is flirting with exposing the absolute core of her primary predicament in undeath. The pain--

Is something she can only mitigate by professing that timelines diverge in the end, dooming herself in the process.

"Well, in many cases the Initiative has taken transports whose fates and personal timelines are closely intertwined, so - it does take a while to think about it." She's going to need to make more gestures for this, and extends her right forearm in a straight line. "Imagine the timeline," as she moves her first two fingers along it slowly, "where nobody has ever been taken and everyone proceeds with their uninterrupted joyful or joyless lives." Her fingers reach the base of her right hand, which opens from a tight fist into a wide burst of five splayed fingers. "But then you have the dubious luck to arrive here and stay for a year." That occurs at her right thumb. And at her middle finger-- "Where you find your friend who remembers leaving two years ago and has been here for six months.

"Do you remember their having been kidnapped, or suddenly returning rabid against the United Earth? Or for that matter, do they remember all the things that have happened in the meantime to you."

The swirl of information runs through her mind—rubber bands and fractured hearts and a twin brother, a decade her elder, spinning stories of the life they would lead once she returned home. She knows that there are alternate worlds and alternate times, but as far as the City was concerned, it never broke a timeline on its own. If people returned to their own worlds, it was at the same age, the same physical body, the same set of memories they possessed when they left. It had happened to her, once, years ago. The best anyone could hope for was half-forgotten dreams, and even those were rare. If she returned to Neo Domino City from there, she would have shed the long years and the hurts and every bond ever formed.

If she 'returned' to Neo Domino from the City, she, as she was, would simply cease to exist.

As she thinks, her left hand moves in familiar gesture, to press the heel of her palm against her eyepatch, against the false eye that lay behind; the pressure of solid metal and all the misery it contained helped her focus away from her own feelings, and to other matters.

But that gift of an eye was gone, too; the fabric nearly folds concave under the pressure. With a startled jolt Ruka thrusts her hand back, away from herself, breathing staggered. A swallow, a shaking exhale, and her hand instead moves to settle against her brow, fingers combing into her hair.

Breathe. "That's... that's a lot to take in." Inhale. Exhale. "I'm not sure if I fully understand it... that is, your explanation was fine, but I think... that's something I need to think about to get."

Her attention is drawn to Haruka's eyepatch again in spite of herself - she's an alien. She should know to hate staring. She doesn't understand what's going on with Haruka's hands. (Sometimes she might run her nails, her fangs, her lipstick as just color and not lines, down along her "brother's" face; sometimes, when she's to have kicked her other shameful nightly habit, she clasps a pillow in her arms and tests if she can pretend it has piercings. Most of the time she feels ashamed of the fractured way she is now.)

"There are some people who think our original fates are immutable, of course, but--" She flashes a sparkly smile. "That's physically impossible, Haruka, isn't it."

Her hand combs through her hair, breathing steady, but the smile—the way Kanaya's been showing teeth, the emotion behind her face, the color of that smile—leave her uneasy.

The question isn't spoken like one, but it's loaded all the same. She feels like she's walking into a trap. "Because we're here in the first place," she offers in return, watching Kanaya's face, "or something else?"

"Mostly---" She falters. Thinking about her status makes it so damn hard to smile. She's got to play her cards close to the chest. She hid the truth from Karkat for... fewer months than she thought she did but more than she would have expected; this should be easy.

"Mostly our location. I personally couldn't bear it if I went through with my ordained destiny, but you don't want to hear about something which is just that ille est personal.

"But we are here in the first place growing older and interacting across various timeline differentials so the notion that we wouldn't remember and act differently if we ever went back is really just kind of stupid."

"Mmm..."

The simplest solution is, of course, one of the most depressing, and definitely not suited to a first conversation, fatalistic as it is. "You are right. The aging, I mean, that's the tricky part. At least, that's how it seems to me. But, I don't really understand this sort of thing at all; it seems impossible from the start."

"All of it does, doesn't it?" Ahahaha. She doesn't laugh though. Nope.

"You get used to the cognitive dissonance. It's the only way possible to survive in the end." Her eyes narrow thoughtfully as she gets a thought into her fussy think pan.

"Speaking of possibilities, can you walk now."