damned_institute | Day 28; Bus 3

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Day 28; Bus 3

There was, Naomi decided, some sort of cosmic irony in all of this. Not that she was trapped in a deranged and possibly other-worldly asylum with a man she'd idolized for years and a boy who was being investigated for - among other things - the murder of her fiance. No, at this point, those were perfectly normal occurrences. Rather it was the soft, pretty, feminine pink sweater dress she'd been stuffed into in the morning. A chance to wear normal clothes, and she looked like a soccer mom. The white blazer and white boots only made her look like a soccer mom who maybe hadn't given up gogo boots.

It was humiliating. Why couldn't she have jeans and a sweater? And sneakers? Something she would conceivably wear? Not this damned pink monstrosity. And her nurse kept saying how pretty she was.

She didn't care if she looked pretty.

Grumbling to herself, and taking it out on her muffin, Naomi was shoved onto an empty bus and told to 'sit tight'. Oh, she'd sit tight alright....

At least she was relatively certain L was alright. She'd spent the whole night with him, and other than falling on his ass, nothing had happened to him. And hopefully nothing would happen to him in town, either....

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"Really?" he asked. "It's normal where I'm from." But he had to keep in mind that not everyone here was from Amity Park--or even America. Maybe where she was from, people wore big fluffy dresses all the time or something like that. Danny wasn't very up-to-date when it came to culture.

He leaned in a bit to see what the lady had pulled out of her bag. It was a juice box, the same exact kind he had in his own bag. He pulled his own as well and pointed to it. "Uh...that's a juice box," he said plainly, somewhere between confusion (as to why she didn't know what it was) and slight condescension (wasn't it obvious what it was?).

"Is that so...?" Celes said, peering at the little box. How odd. From there it was easy to figure out - the little directions on the box helped. "Where I am from, we do not have these." They had a lot of high technology, such as magitek, but smaller things hadn't yet been conceived. But they'd been originally on the drawing board, Cid had said once. In that way, Celes could understand a little of what her Emperor might have wanted... before he'd gone insane with power mongering.

The juice inside wasn't anything like an apple's, too sugary for one, too warm for another. "Augh, it's too sweet."

"Really?" he asked. He'd never heard of a place without juice boxes, even though he was sure there were places without them. "Where are you from?" he asked. Did that place Faust come from--Germany, right?--have juice boxes? Maybe they had juice pyramids, Europe was just that weird.

"Huh?" he asked, pulling out his own juice box and taking the straw out of its plastic. He stuck the straw through the hole and sipped a bit of the juice. "Well, it tastes fine to me. Maybe it's just that box," he said.

"I was born in Vector, the capital of the Gestahlian Empire," she said. "It's on the Southern continent of my home." Celes sipped her too sweet juice (she didn't have much of a ladylike sweet tooth, sadly) thoughtfully.

"And you?" she turned the question on to Danny with inquisitive blue eyes. "I take it this item is common where you're from?"

"Born in the Gesta-whatawhatwhat?" he asked. "Where's that, Austria?" It certainly sounded Austrian. Or Turkish. Or Hungarian. Or something obscure like that, how was he supposed to know??

"Oh, well, I'm from Amity Park," he said. "It's in America, and I think that Landel's is in America too..." It looked like it. Well, anything looked like America to him, really, as long as the sky wasn't swirling green and chunks of rock floated around. "But yeah, we have juice boxes here." He confirmed his statement by nodding a bit as he took his own sip from the box.

"Gestahlian Empire," Celes repeated plainly. "I've never heard of 'America' myself, so I suppose that makes us even, yes?" She looked out the window, again, as if looking for a familiar face.

"What is your name, if I may be so bold to ask?" the woman kept her voice low. "It seems odd to have this sort of conversation and not know you're name."

"Geshtarli--yeah, haha," he said, laughing lightly. "I guess we are even!" He had no idea where the heck these places were (except for Germany), but whatever. He could deal with not understanding where people were from. As long as they weren't out to kill him or something.

"Oh, ha," he said, laughing once more to contrast with the lady's rather serious nature, "I'm Danny. What about you?"

"Celes, Celes Chere," her name was said with just the slightest accent, and proudly. The Vectorian general smiled. "You will have to forgive me my manners. It had quite slipped my mind that I had not yet introduced myself."

Her long legs were beginning to suffer in the small space between the seats, and the idea that the "bus" might just be a daytime torture device crossed her mind.

"Celes," he repeated, without the accent, sounding ridiculously American. "Nice name," he replied, grinning. "And don't worry, I've seen worse manners." He grinned at her, feeling a bit more comfortable now that she wasn't so uptight and they'd 'bonded' a bit. But he had to admit, talking to a woman who could be old enough to be his teacher was still a little creepy.

He waited for Celes to say something again, but it didn't really seem like there was much else to talk about. Before even ten seconds had come to pass (to Danny, it had felt like ten minutes. Ten sweaty minutes.), he began talking again.

"So, uh," he started abruptly, looking more to the other end of the bus than Celes. "Know your way around the town?" he asked, more to fill the silence, but if she knew where things were, that would be nice too. Danny wasn't keen on getting lost in wherever-it-was-they-were-going.

"Not in the least," she replied easily. Whatever stilts in conversation Danny was having did not seem to have the same effect on the general. "I've only been here two and one half's days." In which she had accomplished little more than keeping Edgar off her tail and bonding with the Emperor and his bodyguard.

"I'm afraid we are both fish out of wa---aah!!" Celes made a rather undignified squeak as the bus set into motion and turned red. Airships, Magitek Armor, the occasional Wild Chocobo, Celes had ridden a lot of things, but nothing that quite like this. She wasn't about to admit it (and certainly wasn't the only that made a noise), but it made her nervous.

"Oh, that's not much longer than I've been here," he said. But it seemed like everything was dragged out around here. He could've sworn that last night actually took three weeks or so, it was so long.

He leaned forward to look out the window when Celes squeaked to check what she had seen. He was expecting some kind of monster that the staff had forgotten to lock away from last night, but no. The bus had just begun to move.

"Uh, Celes? You okay?" he asked, a puzzle expression on his face. "It's just the bus moving..."

"Fine, I'm fine." Celes said, despite the two pink dots on her cheeks. Surprised thus, it shaved years off her maturity for all of .35 seconds before she regained her composure.

"I've never ridden on a... 'bus' before. Magitek or a chocobo are much different," she explained, surprised at her excitability. The general chalked it up to poor sleeping habits. It would make anyone jumpy, even her.

"Oooookay," he said, not believing her. "Whatever you say, Celes." He dropped the matter at that, since Celes probably wouldn't talk about it anymore anyway.

"But what's a...ma-gi-tek, or a chocobo? I've never heard of those." Surprisingly enough, he noted, he actually pronounced the names significantly closer to their actual names than he pronounced 'Gestahlian.'

"A Magitek armor? They're, well, for lack of a better word, weapons." Of mass destruction, though, as he'd never seen one (or heard of a chocobo! Some places didn't have chocobo?! Alarming!) it would be difficult to explain, though she tried anyway. "They're machines that are on two legs, and a pilot sits inside of them, controlling the various methods of attack. They're really rather revolutionary. As for a chocobo. Well, they're a very large kind of bird that we've domesticated on my world.

"Oh," he said, nodding. So it was like that robot-thing his parents had developed to fight off Pariah Dark a while ago? They sounded sort of similar, in the sense that it had a 'pilot' and they had two legs.

"So...chocobos are like chickens," he said, nodding to himself as it all made sense. He still didn't know how a chocobo fit into the scheme of things though. It sounded as though Celes rode chocobos, but didn't you eat chickens? Maybe they were more like horses...or a mix? Sheesh, Sam would have a big party over this, wouldn't she?

"Similar to a chicken. They're actually rather docile, really. Chocobo don't spook easily, so they're actually very good for battle." Celes herself was rather fond of the easygoing birds, her first command of a Chocobo Knight squad had been at sixteen. had it really be only two years since that event?

Celes smiled briefly in memory.

"Battle?!" he asked, if a bit loudly. Who made chickens fight in battles?! He never heard of warrior chickens, with spears and armor or whatnot. Well, obviously not, but still--chickens in battle. Not to be mean to the chickens or anything, but what would they be able to do?

"Whoa, okay, when you say 'similar to a chicken,' you mean similar how?" he asked. Right now he was having very strange visuals of chicken wars, and they were probably really really wrong.

Celes suppressed a peal of laughter. It would be wrong to laugh at someone who didn't know what a chocobo was, really, it would be.

And yet.

Celes pinched a bit of her muffin off and ate it daintily, mindful of crumbs. After a moment of silence she replied, "As in they're rather large, yellow, like a chick. I suppose that's where similarity ends, though, as chickens are much smaller. They're some of the fastest transports on land, though really, the best way is to go by airship."

And if that damned Gabbiani would let her have it when she was home again.

"Ohhhh," he said, nodding a bit. "That makes more sense, yeah." He could more easily imagine chocobos fighting and working as transport now. "Is an airship like a regular airplane?" Or was it something else? After all, if they didn't have cars there--he assumed--then would they have planes? Or did they put large wings on chocobos?

"Er, if you know what an airplane is, I mean," he said, making sure not to get Celes confused or anything.

Celes gave him a blank look, answering his question. "An airship is..." she wondered how to describe it. "Well, there's only one in the whole world that works properly, otherwise, we have short-range fliers. But, they're really rather large, can hold a full crew of men..."

"It's rather hard to describe what Vectorian technology is like. You could ask my companion, however. His country is quite adept at creating things. His castle sinks into the sand."

"Oh, so I guess it is like an airplane," he said, shrugging a bit. That Gestah-whatever place Celes was from seemed to be a bit behind when it came to technology. That wasn't too strange, he dealt with places like that before.

"Whoa, it sinks into the sand?" he asked, looking shocked at her. "That's...pretty awesome!" he said, his shocked look turning into an amazed grin.

Celes looked up for a moment. "Please don't let him hear that, I'll never hear the end of it, and neither will you." Really, when it came to technology, Edgar was rather like a hyperactive cactrot, spewing out ideas like needles.

And more often then not, trying to 'improve' his already deadly array of weaponry. "What about your world, how do you travel?"

"Haha, really?" This guy seemed a lot like his father. If that was true, then he could definitely handle not mentioning it to him. He knew of the consequences, and he'd rather not deal with them, not in this setting.

"Oh, I'm from this world," he said. "I think. It looks the same." He shrugged. "I'm used to buses and cars and stuff. That's what we're riding on right now," he added. "Aaaaand we have motorcycles and airplanes and jets and boats...and if we wanted to ride on animals, we have horses." He looked up to the top of the bus in thought. "And there's more, but I can't remember all of them."

"Mm," came her reply, and she pinched another bit off her muffin. "Then you are far more versed in what I can expect in a town like that. Or are all small, mountainous towns alike?" Celes wondered aloud and looked out the window again at the quickly-passing scenery.

Tree. Tree. Rabbit. Tree. Tree. Tree. Bush. She wondered how quickly time passed. The general rested her elbow on the thin ledge between her and the window, setting her head on her chin.

"Actually, I can't guess what that town's like," he mused. "I mean, you can't expect a normal town to be around a place like this," he said, motioning to the whole of the bus even though he really meant the building of Landel's Institute.

"Even so, towns are usually different based on where they are. This town won't be like home, I don't think," he said, shaking his head.

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