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srwug_alpha_rp2012-08-17 02:18 am
momentoftherose.livejournal.com) wrote in srwug_alpha_rp2012-08-17 02:18 am
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Now that White Chalice is flying over the ruined landscape of North America again, Doctor Zero senses some good to be done. Despite, or perhaps because of her killing The Stalker Fang (a fact which General Naga has committed an unknown number of brutal acts to suppress getting out, without her knowledge) she's still loyal to the Green Storm.
Here, perched on a rocky outcrop in the painted ochre of the Mojave Desert, where pebbles of glass that were once cities crunch under your feet, she's set up a little observation post with some equipment, her Stalkers, a high powered observation telescope, and some sandwiches and tea in a thermos. Most of her birds are wheeling around overhead nearby and she periodically dons a strange, helmet-like device to look through their eyes.
It's not strictly necessary though because what she's observing is visible to the naked eye: A larger traction city chasing a smaller one. Kicking up great plumes of dust in the distance, the behemoths wheel while their airships do battle in the skies above them. Soon the smaller city is herded towards some mountains, where it's trapped. The larger one release grappling hooks to hold its prey in place and the 'jaws' of the city are brought out, closing around it the smaller. The great metal teeth pierce floor plates that are meters deep. No doubt the snout gun of the larger city, trained on its prey, is enough to convince whoever's in charge that further resistance is a bad idea.
The scene should be a familiar one to anyone who's ever watched a nature documentary.
[1]
She speaks into a portable callbox.
"Fulfill The Vision Of The Wind Flower airbase, this is Chalice Death's Head. I am observing one large mobile city hunting another in the Mojave desert. Appears to be...Amadillo hunting RumbleTexas."
"Ryokai, Surgeon-Mechanic. Continue to observe but do not approach."
You don't have to tell her twice. She's content to remain there. But while the landscape is pretty in a desolate way, the work's monotonous.
[2]
Sometime after the newly fattened city has rumbled off, leaving behind the skeletal remains of its prey, and night spread its dark blanket, pricked by hundreds of small holes of light, Oeneone's watching the sky, leaning against the legs of one of the Stalkers.
She starts to doze off before too long.
[3]
The next morning, she awakes to find Chalice has left her behind and inwardly berates herself. She opens up a comm channel to the ship.
"Th-This is Doctor Oenone Zero. I'm very sorry about this but I d-dozed off. Can anyone come and p-pick me up? I'd ride on my Stalkers but i'm afraid of what that could do t-to the equipment. Thank you very much and i'm sorry again."
Here, perched on a rocky outcrop in the painted ochre of the Mojave Desert, where pebbles of glass that were once cities crunch under your feet, she's set up a little observation post with some equipment, her Stalkers, a high powered observation telescope, and some sandwiches and tea in a thermos. Most of her birds are wheeling around overhead nearby and she periodically dons a strange, helmet-like device to look through their eyes.
It's not strictly necessary though because what she's observing is visible to the naked eye: A larger traction city chasing a smaller one. Kicking up great plumes of dust in the distance, the behemoths wheel while their airships do battle in the skies above them. Soon the smaller city is herded towards some mountains, where it's trapped. The larger one release grappling hooks to hold its prey in place and the 'jaws' of the city are brought out, closing around it the smaller. The great metal teeth pierce floor plates that are meters deep. No doubt the snout gun of the larger city, trained on its prey, is enough to convince whoever's in charge that further resistance is a bad idea.
The scene should be a familiar one to anyone who's ever watched a nature documentary.
[1]
She speaks into a portable callbox.
"Fulfill The Vision Of The Wind Flower airbase, this is Chalice Death's Head. I am observing one large mobile city hunting another in the Mojave desert. Appears to be...Amadillo hunting RumbleTexas."
"Ryokai, Surgeon-Mechanic. Continue to observe but do not approach."
You don't have to tell her twice. She's content to remain there. But while the landscape is pretty in a desolate way, the work's monotonous.
[2]
Sometime after the newly fattened city has rumbled off, leaving behind the skeletal remains of its prey, and night spread its dark blanket, pricked by hundreds of small holes of light, Oeneone's watching the sky, leaning against the legs of one of the Stalkers.
She starts to doze off before too long.
[3]
The next morning, she awakes to find Chalice has left her behind and inwardly berates herself. She opens up a comm channel to the ship.
"Th-This is Doctor Oenone Zero. I'm very sorry about this but I d-dozed off. Can anyone come and p-pick me up? I'd ride on my Stalkers but i'm afraid of what that could do t-to the equipment. Thank you very much and i'm sorry again."
no subject
Kensuke tried to move away from her as she came out him with the first aid kit.
"Hey come on!" He protested for once in his life. "I'll be alright. Can't we do this later? I kind want to see if I can get over to that ledge over there." Kensuke had complete forgotten his reason for coming down here. The first was to take pictures, and the second had been to scavenge, a heap this big there was sure to be something interesting left behind besides rusted metal and broken glass.
But what he found was so much more. Now when he looked at it, it was one giant play ground.
"I'm not going to die here. I'm going to die in my Eva, and no where else." He said it as if he knew it was for certain. " Nothing less than an angel is going to be kill me now. You shouldn't worry so much."
no subject
Better, she thought, to do it with her Stalkers to help than let him do it alone, which is what he'd do if she tried to tell him not to.
"Otherwise it could easily contract MRSA or tetanus. Then, if you don't die, you'd probably be captured by a town coming to feed on these ruins, and anything you might have seen looks like a vacation compared to being a slave on the Great Hunting Ground."
She dared the liberty of being somewhat curt with him. It was a strange feeling, but it was necessary to impress on him that some things weren't games. Where was Valentine anyway?
no subject
"John the who?" Kensuke shook his head, he never had much of a mind for religion, and gave it very little thought most of the time, despite how steeped in it NERV seemed to be.
Kensuke didn't like it, when she spoke to him like that, but he probably deserved it. It was more so that... well, only one woman had even spoken to him like that, and he couldn't even remember her most of the time.
He wanted to keep resisting her, but the adrenaline was fading, and leaving white hot pain in it's wake. It wasn't enough to make Kensuke cry, he was a stronger man than that now, but he hissed when she got close to his skin and the tiny slivers of glass that had borrowed into his flesh.
"I'm not frightened. Right now, I feel like I could take on the whole world by myself. Which is weird... I guess."
no subject
"This might hurt a bit." She said as she crouched to be on a level with him, efficiently pulling out bits of glass from his skin. Blood pooled the indentations left behind, sharp and garish against his pale skin in the early evening light, like stage blood.
"This definitely will." She said, then brushed liquid bandage on to it. The burn he'd feel was its antiseptic properties, which would fade into a clear barrier over the cuts in about thirty seconds.
"There."
no subject
Kensuke did his best to hold still while she worked. He hissed and groaned as the picked the glass out of his skin, but he tried hard to keep the flinching to a minimum. Even though it hurt terribly, Kensuke didn't really mind. He kept thinking back to that moment frozen in time, when he hung somewhere between the earth and sky. The feeling that rose in his chest then, it was unlike anything he had felt before. And this pain, it was just a down payment for the joy of that moment, a moment he knew he would have to try and reclaim again and again.
When she applied the liquid bandage he cried out a little, reverting to his native Japanese to wince and cuss.
"Sore wa itai. ta-ta-ta-ta-."
Only when she was finished did he try and pull away. She rolled his shoulders around, glad to not feel any little needles of glass still stuck inside his skin still.
"My bag! I forgot it, I left it on the ground by where I first climbed up, you didn't grab it did you?" He had been so busy trying to fly he had forgotten his camera and his chicken, in this worn white messenger bag.
no subject
She turned to the Stalker she'd ridden in on. "Retrieval Program: Target Unit: Valentine: Level: Safe: Authorization: We are born with the dead. See, they return, and bring us with them." The mechanical man turned smartly on its heel, clambered back out the window and scrambled back down to the earth with a number of hammering and clanking noises. In a minute it returned in the same way with Kensuke's messenger bag around its neck, containing a chicken who seemed to find nothing unusual about its circumstances. It hopped out and trotted over to him immediately.
no subject
Kensuke felt strangely soothed when she responded in Japanese, even though she as clearly irritated with him as it was, her touched was warm and tender. It was only then did Kensuke begin to understand why she was so worried.
After all he had just thrown himself off a building and prayed for the best while she watched.
As the Stalker labored off Kensuke frowned a little, part of him had wanted to jump out that window again and get it himself.... but the need to not make Zero anymore distraught than he already had was stronger than his desire to 'go play'.
"Well that's one way to get it back." Kensuke sighed, and started to look around the hallowed out chunk of rusted metal, only now did his eye adjust to see the details of the room. It was much dirtier than he had original notice, thick grime hung on every surface.
"Maybe we should just get out of here, I mean, I uh... I didn't mean to end up in here, it was just a good place to land..." He pushed up his glasses, as the excitement started to burn away, leaving Kensuke feeling a bit raw inside and out.
no subject
"We can still explore the wreck. With two Stalkers with us we should be safe. Just please promise me no more leaps of faith?"
She gave him a little smile: see, no longer mad at you.
no subject
Kensuke kicked at the floor thinking hard before he replied, he may not be the most socially educated young man, but he knew a promise meant something.
"Alright, I promise I won't jump off anything else down. I probably spent all my luck points landing in here mostly unharmed anyways. I have sync tests tomorrow too, I bet they would be real sore if I got hurt now." He smiled a little, chuckled a little.
He went and took his bag back from her Stalker, pulling the strap over his shoulder, and wincing slightly as it's weight hung on his cuts.
"Man I can't believe I left my camera just laying there like that."
no subject
"It's not like you at all. If you want to see something picturesque, our best bet is the engine level." She said, opening a rusting doorway to a set of dilapidated stairs. She began to descend, one Stalker leading the way and one following Kensuke. They had no spotlights (and needed none, being able to locate prey in complete darkness) but she could still see the way from their glowing red eyes.
She suppressed the urge to ask how he'd gotten here, afraid that he'd answer exactly what seemed likely: he'd walked alone and unarmed (except for Valentine, which he didn't know about) across the Great Hunting Ground.
no subject
"Lead the way." Kensuke may a playful bow and followed in behind her.
"And to think this is just the left over scrap. I mean they took all the good stuff, right?" Kensuke couldn't believe it, that this was just trash. Why all this metal could be melted down and turned into other things! When he though of how much metal was in each mobile suit in the hanger... it was a bit crazy to think that it had all once been in the earth too... Kensuke thoughts where run through him mind in leaps and bounds, as he walked carefully down the precarious stairs, slightly worried he might go to slow and get run down by the metal zombie that was bringing up the rear.
" Do you think they will come back for more? I mean, you don't just bring this much fire power with out a reason. Also, this kind of reminds me of this horror movie I saw once. Only the monsters are on our side." He smirked and pushed his glasses up his nose in the darkness, he felt quite smug about the layered meaning of that one.
no subject
The stairs creaked with the stress they'd been under. Kensuke was right to be awed by the size and amount of resources even a small mobile city consumed, though most of the metal was cheap iron strips too low quality for even a first generation MS.
At the bottom they arrived at the engine room, a chamber the size of a Gothic cathedral. Cracked by the attack, a single cylinder of a mammoth engine lay there, smelling of petrochemicals and unused, a sad, dark, ominous, mute testifier to the brutal math of Municipal Darwinism. The rest of the place had been mostly stripped clean, though there were still papers, single workman's gloves and other bricabrac judged useless to the inhabitants of Amadillo lying about.
no subject
"Wooooahhhhh...." Kensuke's eyes went super wide as he fumbled for him camera on instinct, hurrying to get this on film. "This is incredible! Look at the size of that thing!" Kensuke perked up, even as the weight of the place seized hold of him, the littered remains of the people who where here not that long ago at all sent a chill down his back. He stepped forward carefully, trying to get everything on film all at once.
"It reminds me of the old parts of the city that got destroyed in 2nd impact. I used to explore them in the summer time. It's unmistakable... the look of a building on the inside when a something terrible has happened suddenly." It was haunting, here was a dented cigarette lighter laying under a pile of discarded paperwork. And here, coveralls, torn and hanging from twisted metal. He tried not to think about how many people had died when this room was ripped open.
no subject
While Kensuke filmed, Zero made sure to turn the Stalkers' to their maximum acuity. There could be survivors or wounded around and who knew when the scavenger towns would show up.
As she did, she remembered Fulfill The Vision Of The Wind Flower airfield telling her not to approach the cities. Too late for that now. The Green Storm was a military organization that protected settlements. Protecting one person (often from himself) was different and sometimes, she thought, much harder.
She leafed through papers rapidly becoming illegible in the fading light. A sign in book with the names of people now dead or toiling as slaves in the gut of Amadillo. She put the pages in her pack. One more to the voices of the dead she was obligated to.
no subject
Kensuke walked away from her as she talked, engrossed in finding just the right angle to capture this scene. He picked his way carefully through the rubble, doing his best to keep the camera from bouncing to much.
All at once he turned off his video camera and shoved it in his bag, pulling out instead, his still camera.
He seemed lost in the moment, completely caught up in his 'work'. With out a thought he laid down on the ground, and held the camera in front of his face clicking the shutter rapidly and muttering softly to himself.
"ow!" he said, started by the sudden intrusion into his artistic flow. When he looked down to see what it was that had poked him he found a shattered picture frame. How had this ended up here? The glass was all gone, the sepia toned photo worn and faded. A man stood with what appeared to be his son, their resemblance was uncanny. Kensuke pushed himself up and sat cross legged as he examined it most closely.
"Dr. Zero," Kensuke just couldn't bring himself to call he by her first name, even when she had insisted. "Check this out..."
no subject
"Kensuke...you should photograph this. I think it needs to be known."
She felt a kinship with this man who, if they were both alive, was undoubtedly trying to protect his son on Amadillo. She said a silent prayer for them.
no subject
Kensuke nodded, and snapped a few pictures, it was to important to bet on just one take. It was not unlike those hallowed out apartments he had explored as a child, filled to the fifth floor with water.
Kensuke shivered visibly, the harsh reality of the place, taking the joy and wonder out of the moment.
"Do you think anyone would mind if I took this?" It was a silly question, these men where probably dead, or worse, they didn't need this old photo when they had gone.
"Can we go back now?"
no subject
She helped him up from where he'd been squatting over the picture and squeezed his hand before letting it go. She had to remember that Municipal Darwinism was new to him and the cruelty of it was probably just now starting to sink in to him. The Stalkers led the way back up and out.
no subject
Kensuke tucked the photo into his bag, and then reached out for her hand. He didn't really need a hand, and if he tried to pull against, he was pretty such she would just topple. But it was reassuring, and warm, a motion his subconscious remembered, and he felt a bit nostalgic for a memory he couldn't recall. Just an echo of a feeling.
Once outside again the wind had picked up, and bit of paper and cloth where blowing about in the rubble.
It was chill, cold wind blew across the wounds on his back, but some how exhilarating. This day had been unexpected, and he felt something deeper than words had been found in his heart. He felt... alive. Perhaps more than he had ever felt before. All in stark contract to this place...
no subject
"Let's go back, then." She said, having the Stalkers turn towards the Chalice's signal. In the far distance, scavenger towns were approaching, the wreck from the opposite side, but none of them would mess with two Stalkers, for fear of what the mechanical men were capable of once they'd boarded.
She walked silently but with a smile, enjoying the clean air and the fact that maybe Kensuke had learned something from this.