deercountry | Sun rises, night falls, sometimes the sky calls...

She nearly spit in surprise.

It was still an adjustment, having people show this much of an interest her. Probably because she'd been trained so well to be invisible, back home. That and Humans in general seemed to enjoy talking about themselves, more than anything else.

Ariadne shook her head. "I'm not sure what to say," she admitted. "I come from a world that no one's ever heard of. And I'm the only one here. Anything I do, people either think is quaint, old-fashioned, quirky, or just weird..."

It earns a smile, soft and weathered.

"Well, I don't know. I like old-fashioned, myself."

Understatement of the year, really. Something of a self taught scholar, he's made up for his lack of education through quelling a thousand restless nights buried in a book.

"That's a harsh judgment on you, though. Everyone's worlds are so different. There are people here from space. Blows my mind."

"Right?"

She sat up, eyes wide, her smile a little lopsided. There was a lot that Ariadne was willing to accept. Different times, different places, different worlds. But it was still a wonder to think that so many of the people she knew just...traveled the stars. As easily as sailing away on a ship.

"I can't imagine what that's like," she said. "Being completely surrounded by the stars? It seems like something out of a dream!"

He nods along with complete agreement. He wonders sometimes if they could have gotten closer to space travel if the kaiju never came... but he doubts it. Humans are far too interested in greed. The only reason they got jaegers was because of war. Without that the concept would only live in storie and he'd be hanging around with the rest of his Tide pod eating generation.

"Must be beautiful. I'd love to see that one day. We're barely there yet in my world."

Edited 2022-02-06 19:49 (UTC)

"We'd never even dreamt about it in mine."

At least as far as she knew. In all fairness, the Elves were never as interested in science and in pressing deep into the unknown, the way some of the other humanoid races were. And she'd grown up among them. Perhaps if she'd been raised differently, she might have known a few souls who looked up to the sky and wondered.

But things were the way they were. The multiverse was enough of a headache, without considering other versions of the light she might have known.

"I wonder if it's within our reach here? Or if Trench would just drag us back down to earth, like Deerington. Wouldn't it be fun to go flying?"

"It would be amazing to go flying," no hesitation at all.

"I've been up in the atmosphere before.. during battle? It was terrifying but exhilarating. To feel so weightless and strong like that. But I would love to be a bird. Is that weird? Just... chirp and soar around? What a life that might be."

More than once, Ariadne had dreamily wished to be a bird. Not forever. It wouldn't be fun to live without having the occasional conversation. But she missed her wings so much. Sometimes, it still startled her how much.

At any rate, she didn't think it was weird. And shook her head a little bit at his question.

But there was something else more alarming in what he said. "What kind of battle led you to rise so high up?"

"Oh- pff.." he looks bashful for a spell and thumbs his jaw. He doesn't mean to bring everything back to the war but it has a way of working itself into his conversation.

Into his everything.

In many ways Raleigh is still there. In many ways, when his brother was lost to the ocean, he, too, stayed in the blood thick depths. So profoundly affected by that loss, the anniversary of which is quickly approaching, the wound infiltrates his every action both waking and asleep. There isn't a day which goes by that Raleigh does not think of Yancy Becket. Most days, like today, he sees him just out of the corner of his eye.

Now, without looking, Raleigh knows his brother is standing behind him with a pinched expression, inspecting one of the mobiles. He's drawn the the pieces of blue and amber glass in particular.

"Where I come from, we faced attack by an alien race looking to take our world for their own. They opened a rift between our universes deep down on the ocean floor and one by one, they came. These.. enormous beings we didn't have any idea how to fight."

A pause. He wets his lips.

"We found that the only way to fight a monster was to make monsters of our own. We called them Jaegers. It means hunter. The body of a machine piloted by two humans through a psychic bond. There are things you can't fight.. hurricanes, acts of God. But when you were in a Jaeger, you could fight the hurricane, and you win. We got pretty good at it, too."

It's said with a bittersweet tone. He, of course, was the weak link. Yancy was the one with the real talent, but he needed a co-pilot and was only compatible with his brother.

"One of the kaiju- the monsters- had wings. Towards the end of the war. We- my second co-pilot and I- realized we could freeze it by taking it up into the outer reaches of the atmosphere. We didn't know if it would work but it was kicking our ass and we had to do something."

That was...a lot to take in.

Ariadne had come to a place where she could accept fractures in the onion skin between universes. She was living in a hub of the multiverse, after all. And she knew monsters were real, of course. Both the kind in storybooks, and the kind that poisoned the souls of people.

But the machine part? With a psychic link?

Yeah, that...that was new.

She scrunched up her face, trying to picture it. Obviously, it was a bit of a struggle. "So you used metal monsters to fight flesh monsters?" she said, trying to piece it all together. "And your metal monster could fly?"

Raleigh rolls his shoulders, remembering very acutely the way Otachi's talons crunched into Gipsy Danger's spine and torso as she grabbed them and took to the air. The electrical relays in his circuit suit had sent the feeling directly into his body.

"No.. but the monster could."

It occurs to him then that he's said the wrong thing entirely.

That isn't what happened, Rals, and you know it, Yancy says from across the room, not looking away from the mobile.

Stop trying to sound like a bad-ass, Otachi did all the work.

Embarrassment crawls into Raleigh's cheeks and he glances down at his hands, focusing on the porcelain of his mug against his thumb. The heat of the tea. It's grounding. He takes a breath and lets it out slowly.

"Sorry- I- My memory scrambles sometimes. We froze it's tail with coolant.. She grabbed us and took us up. We were running out of oxygen, our plasma cannons were shot.. Probably would have died, but Mako had a trick up her sleeve and she pulled the secret weapon she'd built into our Jaeger. A sword. And she cut that ugly bitch clean in two. I remember now."

More words to parse out. Words that had very little--if any--meaning to Ariadne. It was easy enough to assume that 'Maki' was a person. And that the ugly 'bitch' was the monster they were discussing.

Coolant, oxygen, and plasma cannons, though, were a little much for her.

She would just take it for granted that the situation was...bad.

"That sounds...very frightening," she said, sweet and nonjudgmental, not accepting his apology because there was really no reason to apologize.

It matters to him. Even if it's embarrassing, he doesn't want to give the wrong information. Brain damage is wild.

"It was. But.. yeah, for a moment it was weightless and pretty fun. I probably shouldn't admit that. A bird would be better."

A beat.

"Would you like to see her? My big metal monster."

..

"That came out wrong- Gipsy. Gipsy Danger. My Jaeger."

The question was almost as unexpected as when he asked about her life. But not quite. She had, after all, seen many people's extraordinary mementos from home. Why should this be any different?

She tilted her head to one side. "It sounds very intriguing," she said. "But only if it's not too much trouble."

The last thing she wanted to do was be a burden on anyone.

"No burden at all," he answers, still reeling from stuffing both his feet in his mouth at the same time, what the fuck Raleigh!?

Can the Earth open up and swallow him for a while? Is that an acceptable thing to do right now? He'd like that.

No mercy arrives, so he shifts and takes out his Omni, flicking through his gallery to get to the good stuff.

"I don't have her here for real.. but I have photographs. Here-" he passes it to her across the table. There are a few, the hard copies safely at home in their ever increasing stack, but he's digitized a few.

"Just flick that way."

She took the Omni, pleased that it was at least a technology she knew how to operate. More or less. She still hadn't figured out the whole 'user name' thing. But looking through photographs? That she could manage.

Hopefully.

Following his directive, she started to flick, immediately amazed by the sheer size of the Jaeger. "How long does it take to put one of these together?" she asked. "It looks like...a thousand years!"

Having been gauging the situation since he handed over his Omni, Raleigh relaxes a little bit. It seems Airy either missed his stupidity or is being kind enough to pretend she did. What a pal.

And so he gives a soft laugh and shakes his head no, eyes bright as he speaks. It's so rare he gets to talk about her.

"The first generation went together in fourteen months. Gipsy here is third generation. She took a few years and over a hundred billion dollars Two hundred and sixty feet fall, almost two thousand tons. My lady love."

"You talk about her the same way captains speak of their ships," she said. Which, she assumed, meant that he was also probably a little bit married to his Jaeger. A pity for his partner, she supposed. With a small smile, hidden in the corner of her mouth.

It had to be hard, being away from something that meant that much to him. Even if it was an object.

"Why did you name her that? Gipsy?"

"I didn't," he answers with the same fondness from before. She would be very correct that he was very much a little married to his ship. Luckily, his partner is just as bad.

"There's a whole naming procedure I wasn't a part of but it's perfect. I think so, anyway. All the Jaegers had names like that. Striker Eureka, Nova Hyperion, Coyote Tango. They were really something. Made you feel like a part of something so important."

They were colorful names. Striker Eureka, Nova Hyperion, Coyote Tango. Ariadne didn't understand them, but they were memorable. Which she imagined was part of the point. Names that could be whispered and celebrated and remembered for all time.

But her smile faded a little as he went on.

"Machines are just that. It's the people who operate them that are a part of something greater."

And if he thought otherwise...then Trench was going to be hard for him, wasn't it? There were no Jaegers here. He had to rely on himself to feel...part of anything.

Gratefully, or perhaps not, Raleigh is a believer in humanity. He hates people, but he loves humanity. And there's plenty of that here, across all worlds and species if you'll give him the stretch.

"I agree with you completely. You get it."

"I get it."

She nodded, and smiled. And hoped very much that it was a good thing. A compliment. It felt like one, anyway.

Ariadne gave Raleigh a smile. "I'm glad I met you today."

"Me too. It's rare to find another kindred spirit. Thank you for giving me your time."

But that feels too much like a goodbye.

"We should start a seed bank. Ask the city if anyone brought some in with them and pool our resources. The ground in Ache and Feed is fertile, it just needs protecting."

"I love that idea!" she said. Variety improved the soil's fertility. She wasn't a farmer, but she knew that much. "It's not only efficient, but it could go a long way to making people feel better, if they get homesick. A little piece of home, in the earth with them."

Admittedly, not everyone was as sentimental about plant life as Ariadne.

But still.

Raleigh certainly is. He misses his sunflower fields from Deerington terribly. He never thought he would get so invested in farming but here we are.

And Ariadne nails it on the nose.

"Food is important to people. For a lot of us it's the only connection we have to home."

"Exactly. The more we can engage sense memory, the more we can help anchor people when they're feeling..." She made a vague gesture, unsure of the right word for it. Not homesick, although that certainly was an important element to all of this. But she was thinking about Trench now. And about how the corruption sometimes seized old of people and made them...

Made them...

Well, almost out of their minds, it seemed.

If it were to happen to her, she tried to think of what might snap her out of it. And for some reason, the first thing she thought of was the scent of her favorite plants from Valeria. Smell was connected to memory. And memory made someone a person, instead of a beast.

Ariadne shook her head. "When they're feeling overwhelmed."

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