[open]

[heartsink]

Date & Time: Numerous dates throughout April, variable times.
Location: Exsilium city proper, here and there.
Characters: Ruka "Haruka" and you unlucky saps.
Summary: A situationally anti-social teenager girl tries to avoid talking to people or making friends, fails miserably.
Warnings: Who knows?? Also here have a powers permission post related to in-person interactions.

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[ 1: shop ][ You'd think, on a limited budget and an even more limited existence, that eventually a girl would run out of things to buy.

You'd be wrong.

Between that ever-depleting constant called "food," the never-ending quest for comfortable shoes that could keep out the rain, hair dyes that could mimic the color she'd worn into this world, paper worth drawing on, weapons worth carrying, and any excuse to spend time away from the densely concentrated population of ImP—scratch that, Transports—in case of a disaster, Haruka could often be found rummaging through the city's shops and stalls, bartering her way into this or that acquisition.

But really, what is she going to do with a portable coffee grinder, bottles of antibiotics, and a switchblade? ]

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[ 2: train ][ This is the worst cover story.

It's another mandatory training day, and once again Haruka is out on one of the long outdoor fields with her chosen weapon—an archer's bow in a more classical style. Across from her, her mandated targets. Beyond, and swung far off course, are her arrows. She has come to every mandatory training session, spending exactly no minute longer than required, practicing with her bow. With one eye, it's easy to claim that her depth perception is bad, that she simply can't pin the target to its proper location, but—like everything that comes out of Ruka's mouth—that's a lie. It's been a long year and a half since she lost her eye, and she's worked hard to compensate for it, even with her bow. It's not the distance that she has a hard time with, or aim, but judging the speed at which an object or a person changes distance planes in relation to her body. That's all.

But rather than improve herself there, she continues to hold herself to the declarations she's made from the start: she would do not one useful thing for the Initiative. She spends her hours as required, shooting targets in the rain, and deliberately misses her target on every fired shot.

Perhaps one of these days, she thinks, they'll notice. ]

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[ 3: learn ][ The library is practically useless.

It takes her days of digging to see the patterns, but the histories seem scrubbed down and sterilized; no matter how many she sifts through, there are few clear answers, no unbiased texts. Of course, there are differences between this world and the Earth she'd arrived here from, and from the one of her birth. Divergences, stretching back millennia, but no answers as to "why." Old world atlases hold no Domino City, Neo- or otherwise; relic globes reveal no Southwest Phoenicia. No Dolvania, and certainly no Kul Elna. This never was, and never would be, her home—either of them. She takes little comfort in the historical presence of the Nazca Lines.

Switching between skimming information on her Initiative-provided tablet (even less reliable, she presumes) and the small printed texts of old, old books strains her vision. When she's not lost in a text or lost in the stacks, Haruka often has a hand pressed against her good eye, surrounded by piles of books across her table and the floor around her, and she broods miserably about just how much she hates this place. ]

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[ 4: capture ][She may no longer be "Art Student" or "Concept Designer," but there's something soothing about pencil on paper. Converting scenery to lines and shadow. It's hard to find good places outdoors, what with the rain, but she manages the best she can. A covered awning here, a propped-up umbrella there; loitering indoors at windows of rundown cafés. Sometimes, however, she diverts from scenery to stranger topics: monsters and beasts, the twists of calamity.

The humans all have scratched-out faces.]

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[ 5: transition ][Even with so many, so few things to do, the hours stretch long every day. Cooking dinner for herself alone in a shared kitchen (how inconsiderate), the long walks in the rain to get anywhere useful, the longer breaks under overhangs to catch her breath and her strength, the treks through stairwells.To drift through unfamiliar hallways, and linger against the walls of large rooms. She haunts the corridors between the stages more than she does the rafter-lit scenery, and so can there be intercepted as well. If one desires, at any rate.]