西園弖虎 | nishizono "anarchist antichrist" tetora (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nishizono) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisavrou_log2017-07-30 11:11 pm
nishizono) wrote in thisavrou_log2017-07-30 11:11 pm
ripples in the ocean (open post)
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
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. ]
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"It looks cool." It really is - it looks like dark stone, with edges hewn smooth in places from the passage of time. It's like a half-formed henshin routine. "Makes you look scary."
For his part Tetora always looks like he's best viewed from the corners of one's eyes. There's something a bit unnerving about him when viewed directly - like he's two people occupying the same space at the same time, and one of those people is trying to crawl through one's eyes. It's mostly accurate, at least. The code is always looking to infect - that was what made them dangerous to each other, more so compared to everybody else.
He pulls on the skin below his right eye, revealing what looks like a tattoo on his eyeball. "Did your eye have this too? The one you lost?"
no subject
There's something about Tetora that smells dangerous. Here's a teenager with his shoulders hunched over something he's made, restless but still, like there's something just under his skin that he's given up on trying to claw out. It reminds Venom of a person he'd lost to the Afghan desert, a woman with parasites glittering on her skin and a burnt-out lung that kept her from speaking.
He's a little vindicated when Tetora pulls at his face and shows him his markings, but not in a way that makes him feel remotely good about the state of the world. His expression hardens noticeably, and the rhythmic clicking of his bionic stops entirely.
"...No." The terse reply says everything that he doesn't: that's not normal, not where I'm from. "Someone did that to your eye?"
no subject
There's a long story to it. The eyes, the code, the whole clusterfuck that dragged him into existence - it's not something that he tries to hide as it's never mattered, given almost everyone he comes into contact with dies anyway. On the other hand, it's a story that he understands to be uncommon, to be kind about it. It's the kind of history that you stick words like "bad" and "horrible" and "inhuman" to.
In the end, he shrugs. He yanks both sleeves further up his arms - the skin unblemished and scar-free, the very color of health - and shrugs.
"Whoever made us gave us these," he begins with, screwing the top panel on then back off; the alignment is a few centimeters short on the lower edge, leaving a strip of wire exposed. "If you weren't good enough, you lost your eye, and that was if you were pretty harmless to begin with. If you weren't, the eye's the last thing to go."
Toguchi, bless him, pretended for so long that his own eye wasn't infected, that his code hadn't been rotting his mind away and stripping him of what made him human. And look where it got him in the end - shot to death on a rooftop he was trying to blow up, with Tetora finishing the little horror scene he'd started.
"It used to be a barcode, before." He needs a drill bit. Miwa's on the respirator again - no, that's already happened. Tetora winces a little at the slight overlap. "It was pretty cool, too, if you were into that sort of thing."
no subject
He watches the kid's struggle to align the pieces of his composite together. Reaches for the pile of tools that Tetora'd squirreled into his space, and hands him a drill bit that looks to be able to do the job.
In the process, he extends his bionic arm and shows his companion the various warning notes and labels stamped on the metal. If the words mean nothing, the serial code embossed on the artificial forearm might.
"Mm. Got one of those."
Because he's a hound on a leash too, to some extent. It says so right there, on his prosthetic: Property of Diamond Dogs.
"I'm guessing you're not in a rush to go back to wherever you came from."
no subject
When he looks back up, he's shed any pretense of softness. Amber-like eyes stare out with every hint of sharpness left out in the light.
He's not smiling anymore.
"They can't get to me here," Tetora says, the words said out loud in a measured pace, "and I can't get to them, too." It's an invitation to read between the lines. I've got unfinished business. The kind of business that doesn't get put on hold just because he's on vacation on a far away planet, but can't really kick off without him present, either.
Tetora takes the drill bit from the man without taking his eyes off his face, as he searches for some sign of recognition. Diamond Dogs isn't any organization that he knows, but Machi had hoodwinked the rest of Gakuso while pretending to be one of them - anything is possible. (Idly, he considers: driving a screwdiver deep into the man's flesh, just to see if the nerves under the skin are the same.)
(Without Miwa, the bloodlust remains well and alive.)
"You're way too old to still be around." Like the man said, he cuts straight to the chase. "How'd you manage?"
no subject
He's seen too many people with vendettas coded in their bones for Tetora's floodlight gaze to faze him. Turn to the right, and someone's making a speech about burning the world; turn to the left, and they're at his throat with a Renov and a combat knife.
Maybe it's good that neither Tetora nor the people he's dragging behind him can get at each other (you can't step on your own shadow, after all), but some open wounds fester a lot faster than others. Venom has sympathy to spare for Tetora's predicament, but he won't patronize by putting words to that sentiment.
So. He moves on.
"...I'm not that old." Don't be fuckin' rude, broseph. "But I'm guessing that the world's still trying to find new ways to kill me."
They haven't gotten creative enough to slam the lid on his already-made coffin. Maybe the world should get on that, pronto.
no subject
The oldest of them died at a nice early forties - in a hail of glass shards raining down from the sky, officially, but the true story is radiation poisoning in the saddest attempt at suicide that Tetora's ever had the honor of helping with. Poor Kitou. He could've been someone, if he hadn't been a walking organ freezer for the one man they all should've been aiming to kill from the start. Tetora can't kill Onihigita more than once, which is a pity - the man deserved more than one death.
After that, it was Shinji. Asshole didn't even have the decency to die the way the rest of them were supposed to; no, he had to die from getting shot by one of Mimegumi's goons.
That fucking dick.
If anyone asks, Tetora blames his actions on his age; for all intents and purposes he is still at the cusp of adulthood, physically and mentally. The multimeter gives off a small charge, at the right setting - and using the node on the stylus he zaps a very short burst of electricity at one of the exposed plates of the man's prosthetic. It can't be good design if it twitches from low-grade voltage, anyway, right? "Does it feel anything? Your arm?"
no subject
Even the friendliest dog balks when someone blows at its face. Venom is an old one.
The lines over his face cut around his stern expression for a fraction of a millisecond, but it comes and goes like an errant wave. When he lets his grip slack, it's with apology— a downturn of his brow and a work of his jaw. Sorry.
"—Case in point."
Wryly, as he pulls his arm back. "I can tell when people touch it. It's not a toy."
no subject
He's at the clear disadvantage - physically. The man's twice his size, possesses at least as equal strength as his bulk, and in terms of experience there's no question on who has more of it. Tetora's only good card is the one he doesn't want to play just yet — he could, in theory, just jump into the guy's mind and control him, like he's done with other non-barcodes so many times before. But it's the kind of news that gets out pretty quickly in a community this small, and Tetora doesn't want to risk it.
It's a big damn billboard's worth of advertising, complete with the neon lights. Look what this kid can do.
Mark him.
Tetora leans back, sliding down the wall at a painfully awkward bend. "You're not normal, are you?"
"I mean, obviously," he adds, joints cracking as he rolls aside like a cat, smoothly transitioning to a half-split and stretching down to loosen up his back muscles. "You've got a rock growing out of your forehead, that's not normal. But the arm and the scars, those are different. Those aren't freak accidents; someone made those."
"What are you?"
no subject
But Venom, on his end, is filling in the blanks of Tetora's transcript. One: desensitization to violence, to the point of fascination. Two: an innate curiosity, suggesting a limited scope of society at large. Three: champion of unpredictability.
The profiling ends with a brief summary note— loose cannon.
But hey, when has Venom Snake ever played it safe?
He's settled on the floor, a bulwark next to a feline. The implication that he's not strictly 'normal' doesn't ruffle him (because really), but he doesn't have words to describe who he is. What he is. In the end, everything he can think of to say is absolutely absurd.
So. Simply: "A mercenary."
Literally the most boring moniker he could've given himself, and also a huge lie by omission. Tetora's going to find out quickly that Venom doesn't exactly use his language for its intended purpose.
no subject
It's not the most benign description, to be fair. Tetora's downplayed his own peculiarities when needed, as grandstanding doesn't always have a place in every conversation. There's something a bit disingenuous about the way the man says so, though. The shape of it - vague around the edges - is inviting, and probably for the wrong reasons.
How does a man with a horn-looking thing end up where he does? What's the story behind that protrusion, anyway? What kind of mercenary is he? Is it all for the money, or are there a bit of morals involved in there, too? Is it something you aspire to be, from a young age? Tetora's never had aspirations loftier than surviving long enough to wipe out Gakuso, and he's certainly never thought of what comes after that, if he succeeds.
He flops onto the floor. The day's been very social, by his personal standards.
"My name's Tetora, by the way," he murmurs, staring off at a middle distance as his mind whirrs on the daily if-then-elses left unchecked. "I'm a clone."
no subject
Ask him about anything that has to do with killing a man in 50 different ways— ask him what it feels like to dig his knees into desert sand and line up his scope for a perfect headshot. Ask him to map someone's spinal column and point out which vertebra he has to damage to make a man never walk for the rest of his life. Those questions, he can answer with clarity. Those are objective facts.
Ask him for his name and his hobbies, and he's stuck. He almost wants to laugh when the kid next to him slumps and offers him a neat rundown of the who-and-what.
"Tetora," is the easy repetition. His single eye narrows in something close to wolfish amusement. Of course. "We've 'talked' before, then."
No visible reaction to the clone bit, save for a vague turn of his shoulders. Attentive.
"Over the phone." He motions to the TAB in his pocket. "You remember 'Venom Snake'?"
no subject
"'Poison snake or something'," he quotes himself, elbowing his way up to a better-seated position. "Miller said you're a friend. Told him it was really fucking weird for some guy to offer food but not give a name." It wasn't the longest conversation, but certain points stuck for the unintentional hilarity.
Tetora, accidentally getting "creeped" on. The jokes write themselves.
"So, Mister Stranger Danger." Tetora regards him with his head tilted a bit, casually pointing a lazy finger-gun at the man. "You're not stalking me, right?"