Day 44: breakfast

Yuffie had died.

No, really. Seriously. She had actually died. Bleeding all over the place, making a horrid, sticky mess and scaring the hell out of Suzaku; she remembered it clearly. Kind of. Sort of. Through the blood loss, the pain, and the visions. Through Aerith's voice whispering in her ear, Cloud's stricken eyes, and her own panic. As bad nights went, it had been Bad, capital B and all the trimmings, and oh, god. She sat, trembling on the edge of her bed, eyes closed and hands pressed hard over her racing heart. The by-play between Landel—Landel!—and Lydia barely even sunk in. There was nothing in the whole world, any world, that could prepare you for something like…

Had it all been some kind of hallucination?

Had she imagined the whole thing?

No… She didn't think so. Nightmarish or not, Yuffie knew reality. But if it had been real, how was she alive now? That kind of pain wasn't something you could just cook up, was it? She thought about it all the way to the cafeteria, drifting behind her nurse without focus or intent. Maybe if she tried to stay clinical, tried to step back… But she'd never been good at that when things got personal. And every time she closed her eyes or blinked, she swore that the scenes played back to her, like an overused commercial on a crappy channel on a crappy TV, in a run-down dump of an inn that smelled like mothballs and yesterday's breakfast.

The scent of blood and damp, rotted wood clogged her nose. Disgusted, Yuffie shoved her bowl of cereal—handed to her by a clucking Plucky—off to the side so that she could melt into her chair, palm heels scrubbing against her eyes. Too much. This was… Too much. She couldn't even paste a plastic smile on her face to make herself feel better. Her usual shield, the white noise of inane babble that could filter out almost any crisis, was in tatters all around her. Five minutes, she gave herself.

Five minutes (not) to think, five minutes to get her act together, because there was no way she could let herself shatter here. No way…

[Closed to Sheena]

[identity profile] icy-demise.livejournal.com 2009-09-21 04:54 pm (UTC)(link)
When the other guy sat down, SubZero spent a brief moment glaring at him before it became apparent that the other guy was almost as angry as he was and not really paying attention. He went back to his own food, and was a few bites further into his breakfast when the guy decided it would be a good idea to talk. He had more than enough time to to finish chewing and swallowing the food in his mouth while he figured out what the guy had just said.

SubZero was pretty sure the guy was speaking english, but that hadn't really made much sense. Although it was close enough to a phrase he was familiar with for him to get the idea. "Some idiot calling himself an assassin cost me an entire night of progress, and had the nerve to lecture me about professionalism and acting like an adult just before abandoning the mission. We hadn't even gotten close to our destination." SubZero got even angrier as he talked about it. He took a quick look around the cafeteria, but didn't see Venom's distinct hair anywhere.

[identity profile] number-crunch.livejournal.com 2009-09-21 05:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Assassin, huh? Cold-hearted number-cruncher of the most final type? Well, not from the sounds of it. That sort of garbage was why Sho never worked with others; they just couldn't be counted on when you came to the bottom line.

"That zettabytes," he admitted grudgingly, what little sympathy he had coming from his own experiences with incompetent help. And that Konishi was always on his case too. "That's why I prefer to stay monomial; the group's a product of its lowest factor." He wolfed down another piece of french toast, chewing thoughtfully. "Not sure if that's quantifiably > or < getting my planned performance interrupted by some goop-shooting gigawatt."

On the one hand, having your formulas deconstructed from the inside to out (didn't they know it was Outer then Inner!?) was the apex of suck, but on the other hand, well, it wasn't his problem. Besides, what about his megaphone!?

[identity profile] icy-demise.livejournal.com 2009-09-21 05:31 pm (UTC)(link)
While the guy sitting across from him continued to speak what was nearly gibberish, SubZero did manage to figure out some of what he was saying. At least he figured he was interpreting the lowest factor part correctly. "The masked guy in the sunroom? Yeah, we managed to sneak past him, although the guy I was talking about wasn't sneaky enough and got a painting thrown at him," SubZero was pretty sure he'd interpreted that correctly. Unless there was more than one person shooting webbing or whatever it was at people.

Maybe it was just a sign that he was growing accustomed to this place that he was able to figure out what the other guy was saying. Parts of it, at least. "I'm SubZero. What's your name?" It'd be nice to have a name to associate with the weirdness.

[identity profile] number-crunch.livejournal.com 2009-09-21 07:59 pm (UTC)(link)
"Yeah, the zeptogram in the red and blue tights," Sho confirmed. It sounded like this hack he'd been working with was all sorts of bad news; it was probably better that the guy split. "I was just trying to have a friendly fight with some 47-centiliter-sized (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=1+pint+in+centiliters&aq=f&oq=&aqi=) psychic who thought he was hot stuff when he came in jumping acrobatic arcs all over and spraying that awful adhesive all over my tools! A total tetrahedral." Couldn't the man see an artist at work? Instead of painting the walls red with the kid's inner fluids, the only thing heading towards the bottom of the visual spectrum was Sho's right cheek, which was still had its angry red rug burn and smarted to the touch.

"Subzero, huh? Nice negative name you've got," he said approvingly. "I'm Sho Minamimoto, Officer Reaper and future Composer of Shibuya!"

[identity profile] icy-demise.livejournal.com 2009-09-23 05:48 pm (UTC)(link)
The most SubZero got out of that was that there had been a fight with some strangely sized psychic that had been interrupted, and perhaps that Sho had a weapon. At least HK's weird style of speaking was easy to understand. In some cases very informative, especially when he tried to deny something or tell a lie. This was like listening to someone speak half his words in a language SubZero didn't understand.

Sho's title and name made this even more confusing. If he'd actually been speaking Japanese SubZero would have had an easier time understanding him than this weird english. "So, you're Japanese?" That was the only thing SubZero could think to say at the moment. This was the second day in a row he'd sat down next to someone with a Japanese name. In fact, there seemed to be a lot more people here with Japanese names than SubZero would have expected.

[identity profile] number-crunch.livejournal.com 2009-09-23 08:15 pm (UTC)(link)
"Born and raised and died," he said with a proud grin. "Shibuya's still lightyears from being equivocal to my formula for the future, but it's at least a full iteration closer than anywhere else on this sphere. Ain't no feeling that comes within even a standard deviation of standing on top of Pork City and just vectorizing the infinite visions of the finite masses. They're all garbage, of course, but when I'm done deriving them it'll be pure art."

The look in his eyes was almost dreamy, not unlike a child imagining the perfect ice cream cone, or a serial killer imagining the perfect crime.