[text] your blue walls get in the way of these facts

[interstices]

Who: Asuka Shikinami Langley
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Handholding planet, if you want it.
When: 7/27

[It's not like her to post much, and it's not like her to post with text at all, unless it's as a response to someone else. But if there's one thing Asuka's confident in, it's that people tend to own up to a hell of a lot more on the network than they ever do in person, especially when they're typing it up. Something about the distance. Even Katsuragi always sounded far more imposing over email than in person, except for the last couple years.]

[Plus, she's curious. All those pilgrimages that it seemed as if the whole Fleet had made had to have earned some useful tidbits. Asuka's poor at cloaking her motivations in the best of times, so she barely bothers.]

If we stay here much longer, I'm learning to swim.

What did you get from the tree? Even if it's something crappy like the promo stuff we get sometimes, I still want to know.

Comments

[interstices]

No more piers.

Nothing yet.

[theboogieman]

also good.

are you going to try it?

[interstices]

Did you?

[theboogieman]

I got the paint out front.

["out front" is kind of vague, but there has been kind of a mess of glow-in-the-dark paint out in the cargo bay, and in front of the ship, and there's a big skull painted on the nose of a shuttle now... hell, he probably painted a skull on the door to his room, too.]

[interstices]

Wait, that was you?

[Granted, she should have put two and two together the last time she wandered back to the ship, but...]

I thought the paint was sponsored.nnnn

[theboogieman]

like they'd do something that badass.

[suffice to say, live with him long enough and it becomes safe to assume that any and all skulls in the area are somehow his fault.]

[interstices]

What's with you and skulls, anyway?

[theboogieman]

it scares monsters.

[and he thinks they look really cool, but that's kind of secondary.]

[interstices]

Vampires?

[Coil had been under the impression that she might be one, when they'd first met up. It still strikes her as patently ridiculous.]

They're already dead. Why would a skull bother them?

[theboogieman]

because they see a person coming at them with a skull painted on their face and think "that guy is crazy enough to paint a skull on his face, he's trouble".

+ a lot of them are superstitious. some of them think i'm really a boogieman. when they're nervous, they make stupid mistakes. does my work for me.

[interstices]

So it's like a costume to scare them.

Except no one's going to suck your blood here.

[theboogieman]

you don't know that.

[interstices]

It's not likely and you know it.

Your face doesn't look that bad.

[theboogieman]

[he does know it, but he doesn't like thinking or talking about the other reasons. so he bluntly changes the subject.]

there's something else people get from the tree.

[interstices]

[She could press, and she just might at some point, but it'd be too damn easy for him to point out her eyepatch as tit for tat. Asuka doesn't know if he would, given Coil, but...]

What? Don't be cryptic.

[theboogieman]

there's a song, too. something old from home that only you can hear after it gives you something.

doesn't seem like a big deal to most people, but mine was. be careful.

[interstices]

[Zhas is actually warning her. Asuka wonders how she merited that much notice. It had seemed like they weren't even going to be on speaking terms when they first met. Maybe falling off that pier wasn't such a lousy thing.]

[But she can't think of any song that's significant to her, not really. All that comes to mind are the pop songs Mari used to sing during the heat of battle, the most inappropriate cadence she'd ever heard.]

With my luck, I'd get some '70's crap.

[theboogieman]

serene.

[playful sarcasm? well, imagining hearing some awful 70's music instead of what he got did almost make him experience an emotion adjacent to humor. for better or for worse, he now sees her as a member of his pack--even if she's one of the louder, less-trained ones out of the lot.]

if you paint, use some of it. glows in the dark.

[interstices]

Gross. [And a pause, then a hasty clarification.] This idiot I used to pilot with was always singing those songs.

I might take some.

[theboogieman]

[now, see, that's interesting.]

what did you used to pilot?

[interstices]

Evangelion. It's a machine that can destroy Angels.

[theboogieman]

[it takes him a couple of minutes to respond, on account of trying to figure out whether she means "angels" in the "God and his angels" sense, or if it's something that just got classified that way. she used a capital letter, so maybe it's the proper name of a creature or something? but then again, they capitalize it in some bible iterations, so...

...there's no way around him having to ask a stupid question. damn it. he gives up:]

what are Angels?

[interstices]

[Really, she's just grateful he didn't ask for more specifics on Evangelion, not that that keeps her from being much less terse. The whole thing, she's come to realize, is irritatingly difficult to explain to anyone else.]

They're aliens. We finally got rid of them.

[Well. That had been the idea.]

[theboogieman]

[...actually, compared to all the other weird stuff he hears about around here, that doesn't sound so bad. if he can kill vampires, she can kill aliens.]

THAT sounds badass.

[and speaks volumes about her character, but he'll keep that to himself for now.]

[interstices]

[Once upon a time, she'd thought so, too. She's still not ashamed or regretful over anything she did. A part of her still misses Eva, the direction it gave her life, the five-minute freedom of a sortie. Even one that left her bloody and battered. Even one that left her contaminated. Real victory is still more thrilling than peace.]

I wouldn't want to go back, but piloting the ship isn't the same.