ripples in the ocean (open post)

[nishizono]

Who: tetora nishizono & (open)
When: fluid
Where: generally the ingress complex
What: when you miss your band of misfits from home, you end up with some pretty bad decision-making.
Warnings: PG-13 language

a) chicken scratch
He hasn't learned to write.

This is an interesting realization to come to when up in space, and a pretty frustrating truth to come to terms with. The facts haven't changed since his "awakening" - he's a delinquent raised in thinly disguised captivity, and when he's not being poorly managed, he's skipping out on basic education to murder politicians. Kind of hard to fit maths and basic kanji in a schedule like that.

Which is why he's sprawled out on the floor with a cheap notebook and fat marking pen, struggling with his own name. He's written it before. He can spell it out with the English alphabet. Ironically, pinpointing the locks and buttons that isolate him from - well, himself - also means he's not accessing the wealth of information the identities have made easy for him to use. Add that to the list of fuck-ups, he thinks wryly to himself. Writing is hard.

"Hey!" He calls out at the first humanoid-shaped thing that crosses his peripheral vision, ever the rude person that he is. "Do you know Japanese?"

b) drop the beats
Rigging up a mixing console from scratch is exactly as tedious as it sounds. Relearning the technical parts took the better part of a handful of months, and in the end Tetora's only managed to build a bass-treble amplifier, with a switchboard for mono and stereo audio channels. There isn't even a panning slider, or a reverb unit; just switches from option A to option B, some volume controls.

He's stupidly proud about himself for something so basic, though. He loves music. Whether or not Lucy Monostone has anything to do with it is a can of worms he's not going to acknowledge, but for all it's worth Tetora knows he's always going to be captivated by music no matter where he goes. He doesn't know how to play any instruments, or maybe one of his versions did and kept it to themselves, but Tetora had inherited Ooe's skillsets and nurtured it whenever he got the chance. Just like he's doing now.

The growing collection of handmade tools are scattered around him on the long bench he's commandeered for his work. Screws, wire clippers, a soldering gun running on batteries and held together by tape. If anything, Tetora's been resourceful.

Unfortunately, he also only has two hands. He looks up and stares at the first person he catches staring back, before asking (somewhat politely): "Wanna hold this?"

C) make your own adventure
[ Leave a prompt for him, anything goes. ]

Comments

for prorenataa

[nishizono]

[ continued from here ]

[prorenataa]

[ It might take half a day, perhaps even leading Tetora into thinking the old man had done a fade on his promise, but eventually Adrien came strolling along.

He looked thoroughly unimpressive, a small figure in dark trousers a dark shirt and a leather jacket. There was even a growing amount of silver in his hair, to further lend to the whole 'gramps' thing that Tetora liked to needle him with.

His hands were tucked into the pockets of his trousers and his face set in a perpetual scowl as made a turn to bring him directly to Tetora. The turn was confident and suggested a certain level of familiarity with their location; even if Tetora had never seen him up here before.

Eyes flicking over the immediate area, they eventually landed on ... ]

Fucking Fates, you're younger than I thought. Am I going to get my ass pummeled by your older siblings later?

[nishizono]

...Well, all my siblings are either dead or trying to kill me, so really you'd be doing them a favor.

[ Looks like they're off to a good start. Somewhat. He's not lying about the family, at least; most of Tetora's "siblings" are dead for good reason. (Except Miwa. Just as he's the exception to the rules, so was she.)

The man - an Adrien, if he remembers the user ID correctly - is shorter than he'd expected, too, so as far as expectations went, they're one for one on surprises. Tetora, in a loose cartoon-print jumper and skinny leggings, looks more in place at an indie pop concert than a fistfight, but he bends down and takes out a couple knives from the lip of his boots - and offers one, handle first, to the man. ]

You didn't say no weapons, so I brought my own. You want?

[prorenataa]

[ Adrien wrestled a little with his barely existent conscience.

It was still hard for him to see children as a threat. He understood it was a blindspot and one that would get him killed one day if he didn't take steps to crush it now. Reminded himself that he'd been ready to kill the three children who had kidnapped Elena, so sparring with one now shouldn't be a problem.

Still he had to take a deep breath and roll his shoulders, forcefully shoving the instinctive tension out of his limbs, even as he shook his head. ]

If I decide I want one, I'll take it from you. [ He said, in a deceptively mild voice. It wasn't senseless smack talk; merely a statement of fact.

With that, however, his posture changed to one of more readiness. There was no taking off of the boots on his feet or shrugging out of the jacket he still wore. After all, true fist fights rarely gave you time to get dressed for the occasion. ]

[nishizono]

Your funeral, [ he shrugs, tucking the knives back into his boots.

Adrien's right, at least. Fights don't leave much room for preparedness, and Tetora keeps learning that lesson over and over (and over) with little reprieve to breathe. Not until recently, when he found his way to this starry-sky fever dream.

He cracks his knuckles. Taps the tip of his boots on the ground, then makes a slow circle around the man. He looks human, but of course that's nothing useful. A lot of things look human here. Tetora shrugs when he finishes a loop. Nothing for it - he runs up to the guy, nowhere near his top speed but still more agile than one might expect from a person Tetora's size. He throws a few jabs and low swings, mostly aimed at the face - he's gauging Adrien's reach. ]

[prorenataa]

[ Despite all their smacktalk back and forth, there is nothing personal about this session for Adrien.

He's not here to prove a point or any of that nonsense. If Tetora proves to be someone who is hiding special abilities, well it won't be the first time that Adrien's tangled with someone stronger than himself. Fates' sake, he's used to those uneven types of bouts.

In the opening moves, he allows Tetora to circle him, watching him from the corner of his eyes and allowing his other senses to track him when the younger man goes briefly out of view. He's had to do this so many times, it's instinct now, the way he can feel the chill of fingers up his spine when he has a threat behind him.

When Tetora moves Adrien spins into the attack. His own opening salvo is defense based, giving away as little as possible; he's learned to guard his secrets. He gracefully weaves his shoulders back, spine straight as he gives at the waist, maintaining his balance on his feet even as he dodges the jabs thrown in his direction. Tetora does eventually force him to move his feet when he presses and when the 'reach' comes, it's in the form of attempting to use his opponent's own offense against him.

His counter is an attempt to grab one of those jabbing arms, twist and throw Tetora over his hip and down to the ground. ]

hold this

[nishizono]

[ The grip would be easy to get out of, by Tetora's guess, but he rolls with it - literally. He's flipped onto his back, but he twists and attempts a low kick to Adrien's gut with the heel of one foot, before using the momentum to roll back on his hands and push up onto his feet. ]

[prorenataa]

[ When he feels the younger man move into the roll, rather than the instinctive resistance of someone who wasn't prepared to counter, the doctor is already taking his own evasive action.

Where he might have otherwise followed-up with a second attack, he's forced to drop back in order to avoid the kick to the gut. It saves his abdomen but leaves them kinda at a zero sum for the exchange. ]

[warandpeace]

chicken scratch.
Do you know Japanese? Is what Kaz hears, shouted at someone else but in a voice that he knows and hasn't heard in a while. Miller's had to make a lot of trips between Chioni and Kauto, using the Ingress complex to do so. Lucky him. It's been a while since he's been able to check in on Tetora.

He approaches the boy from the side, clearing his throat in warning so he won't surprise him (it's unlikely that he would anyway, but he has every bit of a reason to be wary).

"I know someone that runs a school for gifted youngsters. I could talk to him about securing you a place there." Sure, it's not as if Tetora is any sort of mutant, but he's far from typical in history or skills.

"But in the meantime, would you like some help?"

i forgot to hit post

[nishizono]

Truthfully, he's been avoiding.

Not Miller, specifically - the whole sitch from before about being restricted to a limited scope hadn't sat too well with Tetora. It's a familiar beat. Look at the world, it's his for the taking, but only as long as he's under Gakuso's thumb. If not, then the world's a giant cage that he can never escape from, because Gakuso is everywhere, and Machi is everywhere, and the whole fucking project can be anyone he meets out on the street.

He's started to build bombs again, under the pretense of boredom. Truth is, he doesn't feel safe again, and the only way he knows to soothe the feeling is by killing people. Not the best thing to do here. For one thing, he's pretty sure Miller would be disappointed.

And speaking of—

"...Hey." Something unfamiliar curls around Tetora's belly: embarrassment. He does scoot aside, at least, offering space if Miller would want to join him on the floor. "I don't wanna go to school, I just wanna write my own damn name.

"That 'gifted youngsters' thing sounds like a freak show, anyway," he adds, but without much conviction. "Are you headed out or coming back?"

[warandpeace]

"Nothing wrong with a little school, and the guy running it seemed fine. I offered to help tutor people in history." Because Miller couldn't possibly have enough work ever. He likes helping out kids, and in this case he wants to help. It's a simple enough request.

He finds a place to sit beside him. "Coming and going. I just went to see an old friend." He digs in his pocket to retrieve a pen and a tablet. "There's more than one way to write your name. So I'll write down some examples and if you see one you recognize we can practice that."

He considers it carefully, because 'Tetora' is an unusual name, before writing a-

手

-he doesn't even think of the actual one. Not at first anyway. Instead he erred towards common. But then gives him some options for the 'tora' part.

手 虎 彪

He taps his scruffy chin as he looks at the options and waits on Tetora's input. "Any of these look familiar? ...Wait." He opens up the TAB to see what translations of Tetora's name they had used when logging his information.

[nishizono]

He tilts his head a bit, peering at the characters printing out on the screen. It looks wrong, but he can't pin exactly how he knows it's wrong. The knowledge is right there, in the back of his mind, but it's shut out right now - it highlights one of his biggest fears, this way.

Who is he without the combined efforts of everyone else he's taken over?

Tetora's not sulking. That would be juvenile, and uncool, and there wouldn't be a real reason to sulk anyway. He can write - just not with this writing system. It's better than nothing. "There's more squares," he comments; the uncertainty bleeds out clearly in his voice and it annoys him further. "It's more blocky. I don't know how I know, it's just that way."

He's looking over Miller's TAB anyway, any pretense of manners now discarded. Nosiness has always been what he has instead of a hobby. "...So how many friends do you have?"

[warandpeace]

"Friends?" He repeats as his own question, before he answers. "More than I did. About ten years ago I had a lot. Then I went a while without much time to spend on them."

He figures out what the first character is, and then shows it to him. "Okay you start off by doing this. Now you try it a few times so you get the hang of it."

He hands off his tablet and watches.

"People don't usually come in 'friend' or 'enemy'. You get shades of acquaintances more often than not. People you know that have generally positive interactions with, or vaguely negative ones. I've had plenty of people I've regularly talked to with no ill-will towards, but they're not friends. I wouldn't ask them to have food with me or seek out their company if I was unhappy or ask their help if I was in pain." The latter is pretty frequent.

"I consider you a friend. But I'd feel like I was inconveniencing you if I needed anything. You've got enough to worry about."

[nishizono]

He's a quick study, at least. Copying characters is easy enough - it's visual recall, Shinji had been really good at that, and since they're the same person it's transferred over to him. Single strokes, clipped and efficient - he writes the character over and over, until the shape of it becomes clear in his head.

People go to school for this. Spend years just memorizing entire books of characters for this. Tetora can already feel his teeth on edge over it; he knows the limits of his own patience, tested to the brink as it's been all these years.

Regular people are insane.

"No one's asked me for help before," he comes to realize, and says out loud. There was Kitou, that one time, but it had been a mutually agreed thing. They were both after the same man, and the enemy of enemy is more tolerable than fighting at two fronts at the same time. "I had allies, I guess you could call them that. They weren't mine in the first place, too. Not really."

Setagaya didn't count. Tetora doesn't want for him to count.

Tetora hands the tablet back to Miller, blowing his cheeks out as he wrinkles his nose. "You should ask me if I can help with anything.

"I wouldn't mind." You're not terrible, he thinks to himself. You're okay.

[warandpeace]

Kaz holds the tablet over, using a blank space to make the two characters together. Where as Tetora is short on patience, Kaz has it in spades (sort of). He likes to push people to try harder, to better themselves in any capacity they have. Because he's a normal that's been forced to adapt to a world of elites, he can never slow down, and he has to be patient enough to acquire new skills.

"I'll keep that in mind. But it might be something like, 'play with my dog while I'm busy'. I tend to be a little bit of a workaholic."

And also he's been injured enough times in the past two months he's been forced to acknowledge he might need more help than usual. His chest and back still hurt, and he was laid out for at least six days where otherwise he'd be working whenever he could.

"Okay, try them both together like this."

He hands off the tablet again and waits, considering how much Tetora knew about repair work. "You actually pick up things pretty quickly. How much can you read?"

b.

[alterplex]

Sometimes, the simple binaries are enough. On and off, up and down, back and forth; psuedo hind-brain functions that cut the complications out of a passive hobby.

Venom's cassette player is just as primitive as the console that Tetora is putting together, albeit slightly more compact. It sits snugly against the hard outline of a handgun, humming in that retro white-noise whir of plastic against tape. Just beyond the translucent strip on the player's face— scratched and scuffed with wear— is the label on the currently-turning cassette. "The Man Who Sold the World."

The playback clicks to a halt, and the same hand that stopped the device reaches out to take whatever is that Tetora is offering.

"Nice setup."

[nishizono]

"Thanks." Tetora gently taps the open circuit board with a multimeter's stylus, the tool beeping as it reads out the power supply flowing through each point. "I made it."

With his fringes falling across his forehead Tetora can mostly hide the quick visual assessment he makes of the stranger he just handed a soldering gun to. The sidearm is impossible to miss. The juxtaposition of a cassette player resting against it is almost funny. The strip of frosted plastic with the label is barely visible from his place down on the floor, but Tetora recognizes the individual letters from the English alphabet.

Discreetly, he folds one leg up, tucking his foot against his high.

He always has a knife tucked in a shoe or trouser leg. Call it a habit.

"Nice player," he starts, as nonchalant as he could while holding out a hand for the gun again. He's muffled, what with biting on the multimeter's attached lanyard to keep it within reach. "What you listening to?"

[alterplex]

Venom looks about as composite as Tetora's project does: a multimedia nightmare, metal arm and shrapnel and suture marks and all. His single eye is gunmetal blue, patient and appraising as it fixes himself on the trajectory of moving hands. There's always something calming about watching a person at work.

When he hands the soldering gun back to Tetora, the action is accompanied by a slow bend, deliberate but careful. Like kneeling in front of a stray or a plastic explosive, as if an errant move will send the entire console up in flames.

"—Bowie. 'The Man Who Sold the World'." He untangles one headphone from where it's noosed around his neck in silent offering. "A cover, but it's still good."

[nishizono]

Bowie - an English band, right?

"Never heard of them." He's finishing up, at least; Tetora just has to make sure the audio jacks aren't in a weird position and he can screw the covers on. The jacks aren't split up to a five-channel set-up, but a two-channel one is better than having it all pipe through the one hole. Heh, he chuckles to himself.

Plugging more than one hole. He's still got that crappy teenager humor, good job.

"—What happened to your eye?" It's not the most interesting thing about the guy - the gun would be that, purely because Tetora knows how lethal it can be - but his own relationship with eyes is... complicated. The tattoo on his right eye is never going away, the one gift from Machi and company that he can never get rid of even if he could. It was his calling card of sorts.

All of the Gakuso clone kids had one, after all.

"Did you lose it in a bar fight?"

[alterplex]

His headphone cord flips back around his neck, narrowly missing the strap of his eyepatch in its trajectory over his head. One year into his stay in space, and he's finally come to terms with the fact that some people here don't know who David Bowie is.

(there's one inch of his security blanket, gone.)

Venom shifts from kneeling to sitting, one leg straightened and the other hiked up. He fields the question with all the ease of someone who's done it a hundred times before, in varying situations— his mouth quirks a fraction of an inch upwards, tugging at the scar that bisects the lower lip.

There's two variations on the answer: they're both true, but one isn't his truth.

"You cut straight to the chase, huh." This first, though. He's inclined to sound vaguely amused. "—How do you think I lost it?"

[nishizono]

"I'm shit at small talk," he throws back with a half-smile, peering up at the man through his fringes, hands still busy where he's now moved on to screwing bits of metal onto the board. Tetora considers the question for a few seconds, though.

How would a man like him lose an eye? The gun indicates some training, at the very least; he's sure they're both aware that they both know this, given the gun is holstered visibly. He's not too old to be in retirement (he thinks, he has no idea how old most people retire usually). The eye patch itself looks well-used, and there's small indents around it, like one might expect from frequent use. And the scars - there's a fair number of them.

Old wound, maybe?

Tetora makes the final turn on the screw and sets his tools down, finally raising his head proper to look the man in the face. "I think either someone tried to kill you and missed, or someone took it out of your head to keep you alive."

"You don't look like the kinda guy who loses bar fights, anyway."

[alterplex]

For someone who's so physically imposing, Venom Snake doesn't seem to take up much space. He's an oblique mass of carbon-black and sun-warmed tan, like a raincloud hovering on a clear day.

His mouth is the softest thing about him, and it remains slanted.

"You're not wrong." The joints of his mechanical hand click in time to his thoughts. A steady one-two staccato, as the red fingers bend from knuckle to knuckle. "On all counts."

Someone did try to kill them, someone did ruin his eye to keep him alive, and he probably will not, in his life, ever lose in a bar fight. Smart kid.

He almost leaves it at at that, but he figures that it's better to throw Tetora a bone.

"—I lost it on the day I got this." A tap against the horn-shaped shrapnel lodged in his forehead. "You win some, you lose some."

A, 7/25-ish?

[notglitching]

The halls of the Ingress Complex aren't usually a place for sprawling, but considering his own use of the vent system, Rinzler supposes he can't complain. He is, in fact, completely ready to just pass the user by when it calls out to him.

Japanese? Not by creation, certainly... but the Moira wasn't the first user system Rinzler's been to. He has vivid memories of a small, enclosed glitchpit called Inugami—and the language packet it uploaded on his import.

He stops. Turns. Tetora will have a clear view of a dark shape, clad in head to toe in flexible armor with small red-orange lights. Noise ticks out in a continuous mechanical stutter, like a damaged hard drive cycling without a pause. The opaque helmet fixes on Tetora, examining him for a long moment before offering a nod.

[nishizono]

He assumed, at first, that it was a robot.

The signs are all there. The lack of a visible face, the mechanical SFX he can hear even from the distance between them, the uncanny valley look of the body suit. It's every otaku's dream experience - meeting a proper android, or at least a cosplay of one that is so convincing for as long as it takes to shatter the illusion.

Up in space, though, the odds are in favor of the other - what's the nomenclature for this? it? they? - being as, well, being an actual robot. Android. The details of nerd talk escape him at the moment.

Tetora waves him over, not particularly keen on having a conversation from about a meter and a half's distance. "How good is your Japanese?"

[notglitching]

A meter and a half being plenty of personal space for Rinzler, he'll answer that wave with a skeptical helmetstare and a reluctant step. Say, about half a meter closer. He will, however, sink into a crouch... and reach for his TAB, calling up a holographic interface.

The initial view is of a cursor and textbox, projected out toward Tetora. A few quick manipulations replaces it with a blank sreen. If Rinzler is plenty familiar with his own uploads, he's had less opportunity to test the TAB's, and he's not interested in fighting the translation protocols just for a conversation. He traces out the symbols by hand instead, letting them project onto the external display.

機能的。

[[ooc: the player's Japanese not being fluent, this is brought to you through the power of google translate! Prod freely in the (likely) event of mixups.]]