voidseeing | Appointments Post

Ah, I see. Well then. [Elizabeth fishes for a moment with her toe, finally bumping Gai's calf. She read about this during her brush with The Most Awful Writing Ever.]

Do as you please. [She grins and retracts her foot.] I would like a glass of wine, though.

[... hello there. If it weren't for the very suspicious timing of that little move, he would assume that it was an accident. Given the look on her face, though... his eyebrows might go up just a little bit, and that grin might get just a little bit wider.]

Of course. Red or white?

[He's already listing off a few dishes to the waiter with a note to keep them small, since this is going to be a sort of sampler set.]

Mm... red. [Of course when it comes to alcohol, Elizabeth really doesn't know what she's doing. But she didn't have wine at the bar, so she's trying it now. Also she's realizing that she may need a bit of liquid courage if she's going to keep up with Gai's innuendo.]

[Fortunately for her, Gai plans to keep a firm control on the alcohol supply this evening. A little bit to loosen things up, sure, but more than that would spell disaster, which he'd rather avoid. He wants them both to remember this evening.]

... and two glasses of red wine.

[There. The order now given, they can relax and wait for their food and talk about something OTHER than detonating various food items in the microwave.]

Now, I think somewhere along the line we managed to skip most of the basic "getting to know you" parts of an introduction. I'm not complaining, but I am curious to know more about the things the two of us don't have in common.

[The implication there is obvious: depressing topics are off-limits for the evening.]

[That's... absolutely true, isn't it. It's a little sad that the two of them had bonded over shared hardship, but it did get the harder topics out of the way. Now it was just hard to find something else to talk about.]

Well, I'm fairly certain you don't come from a flying city. I think I've got that one covered. Columbia is a collection of structures suspended in a... grouping, I suppose. They stay above the clouds due to the 'Lutece Field' generated by machine. Mr. Lutece's sister developed the technology.

The entire city is suspended in the air?

[He sounds duly impressed by this. His world may have the technology for things like Endlaves and spaceships and all of that advanced stuff, but he's pretty sure they haven't figured out a way to create a flying city just yet.]

... I hate to think what would happen to anyone who was unfortunate enough to be afraid of heights. Or does the city have walls?

...well, houses have walls. The rest of it you just have to be careful where you step. [Little bit of gallows humor there.] Honestly I have no idea how the city supports so many people, but it happens. Somehow everyone lives there without falling off the edge every three seconds. Or having a nervous breakdown over how high up the city is.

The people of your world must like testing fate.

[He grins.]

Sounds pretty exciting to me. Everyone in my world is still stuck living on the ground. The best I can offer to compare would be Endlaves-- think a giant mechanical suit of armor that's controlled by the pilot's brain waves. Because of that, they don't even have to be in the suit to control it.

[Elizabeth's turn to look impressed. She's imagining a giant Handyman without the man inside--piloted by brain waves.]

So are there... nodes inside the pilot's skull that direct how the limbs of the suit should move? And isn't there some kind of danger of the signal getting interrupted if the pilot isn't inside? Like a... fuzzy radio signal.

Not inside the skull, in a helmet on the outside. It would be less than convenient otherwise-- there's an emergency bailout system that shuts down the connection if the Endlave is in danger of being destroyed, to keep the pilot from getting hurt from the backlash.

Think of it as working like a sort of remote control.

[... wait, she probably has no idea what that is.]

... or a radio signal that's strong enough to avoid interference.

[It sounds to Elizabeth as though Gai's modes of technology focus more on keeping people in one piece. Nice to know the future seems better equipped to combine man and machine.]

Oh... [She nods. That makes sense.] We had something similar in Columbia. They were called 'Handymen'. Some people with various diseases actually volunteered to be permanently combined with a large metal body. They were stronger, hit harder, and had some electrical discharge capabilities. But you could see their heart through this little round glass window... and it always made me shudder a little.

A cyborg, huh? That kind of thing was still fiction where I'm from. The most we could do was prosthetic limbs that operated like real ones, not actually combining an entire human body with a machine.

[Though he can definitely understand why some people would volunteer for something like that, especially on days when the virus was really acting up.]

If you ask me, that's the sort of thing that should stay in the science fiction books where it belongs.

It wasn't nearly that elegant either, believe me. [Elizabeth gets a visible chill from it, but brushes it off in the next moment.] I think so too, though. I don't know what kind of life people would lead when more than half of their body was a machine.

[Though his face remains neutral, Gai's eyes darken briefly as his mind strays to the crystals mostly hidden beneath his clothing. This discussion is straying far too close to dark places for his liking, making it time for a subject change.]

... now that I think about it, I never asked you how old you are, either.

Really? How many basic questions have we missed? [Elizabeth laughs and rests her chin in one hand. She can roll with this subject change.] I'm twenty.

More than both of us thought, but given the circumstances, I'd say it's understandable.

[There, much better. A nice, normal conversation topic.]

I'm eighteen.

[Cue surprise in five... four... three... two... one...]

Eighteen? [She does look surprised. But then again, Gai was in a situation where he had to grow up quickly. Not that it matters Gai is younger than she is--it's just a number.]

Your mother isn't going to come after me with holy water, is she?

And here I was worried about your father coming after me with a shotgun.

[~~IF ONLY HE KNEW. IF ONLY.~~]

[~~AND IF ONLY SHE KNEW...~~]

Sounds like I get the better end of that deal. [She laughs and sits back a little as the waiter comes by with the wine.] Is it hard leading your group though? I mean, I'm guessing some people have problems taking orders from someone who's younger.

They learned quickly not to underestimate me. [His smile now is edging on a smirk.] And it helped that I had Shibungi to vouch for my abilities in the beginning. Other than that, people tend to assume I'm older than I really am.

[Which is... not exactly hard to see why. He's got the composure and bearing of someone nearly a decade his senior.

Doesn't hurt that he's 6'1" at his age, either.]

I assumed you were older than I was. I couldn't really put a number on it, but just... vaguely in the realm of 'older'.

And who's Shibungi?

My second-in-command. He was the first one to tell me I had potential.

[Relaxing into his chair, he sips at his wine.]

He's also always the first one to get in a jab at me.

[But it's clear from his smile that he doesn't mind.]

[Elizabeth is slightly confused by this though.]

A jab as in... he actually punched you?

[Elizabeth isn't sure she'd want someone who attacked her to be her second-in-command, but military-style organizations seemed to have strange standards.]

[Did she just--

-- oh goodness, she did. That's sort of ridiculously cute, even if he is resisting the urge to laugh.]

I meant that he's always the first one to tease me. No actual punching involved.

[Well, still odd, but she can go along with this a little better.]

Really? Someone who isn't me teasing you? Over what? [She grins, this is something she has to hear.]

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