3013/Plus, Advantages

Plus, Advantages
Date of Scene:	13 September 2015
Location:	Tomoeda-865
Synopsis:	Ren sits down for lunch with Sakura Kinomoto, and the two of them catch up on various things. It's the shotgun approach to a busy life.
Cast of Characters:	165, 172

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Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
    It's some time after that bout of fighting training in Tomoeda.

    Not exactly at Tomoyo's place of residence, but elsewhere in the city, Ren is sitting around at a bench. It's not penguin park, it's not the university or the shrine- it's just a random bench in a random part of town off the beaten path, which presumably makes the fact that these two are going to run into one another even more appropriate.

    Ren has a notepad with him- it's filled with notes that he's been busy writing on various things like the PRT and the parahumans. In fact, the pages are filled with nothing else, and it's fairly new, so he's clearly bought it just for this purpose.

    Also, he's eating a cruller.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    "...So do you just, like, live in Tomoeda now?" comes a voice from above. It's Sakura! Sitting astride her wand like it's a broom and she's a witch. The wand has a large pair of pink wings near the tip, where it usually has a tiny pair of white (and immobile) wings... aah, magic.

    "...I don't really know what to make of you, to be honest," she admits. Is she -suspicious-? ... Well, yes. "I mean, it's hardly weird that someone would like Tomoyo, but..."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
Ren Tanaka looks up.

    And offers her a second cruller in a paper bag, wordlessly. In truth, he got it for himself because they just looked so good, but then again, maybe he didn't. He did, in some way, want to speak to Sakura at some point, so perhaps he figured buying two was a win-win situation for him.

    "That's a good question," he says, whether or not she takes it. "I've been meaning to lace up my boots and wander Kaiba's world for a while with these," pulling two random duel monster cards (Madolche Chickolate and Artifact Cadeucus) out of his pocket. "But, ah... not just yet."

    He puts them back again. "Not just yet."

"Should have forseen that you might have forseen me, really, shouldn't I?" Ren muses, then sipping at some ramune.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura reaches down for the pastry - then ends up slipping off her 'broom'! ... But she ends up hanging from it with her legs hooked around it, so it was probably on purpose. Nom.

    She can't help but grin a bit. "I might have followed you. Or possibly it's just that your aura isn't particularly subtle right now." She clambers back up into a seated position on the wand. "It's my job to keep an eye on magical things, especially things that aren't native to this world.." Shrug.]

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
    "Ah ha, or did I perhaps leave my blinders off so that you'd come and find me?"" Ren replies with a smile, happy to just let Sakura dangle there apparently.

    For a moment as he looks at her, something flickers behind his eyes. He looks a lot older than he obviously is, and he swallows a little harder than he was meaning to.

    But it passes. "So, how did the old martial arts training go?" he asks.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura just makes a face. "Can we give the whole 'maybe I meant you to find me/maybe I just ran into you by accident/maybe fate has something to do with it' thing a rest? It's pretty silly." She crosses her arms... then noms at the cruller again. Nom nom.

    "It, uh... it went fine. Stuff happened. Tomoyo's getting better! I dunno if she's ready to fight someone like that knife guy, but..."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
"Heh heeh, alright."

He puts the rest of the pastry aside for a minute, back in its paper bag. "You'll forgive me if I make you keep wondering. I'm a transient traveller; perhaps just a little bit more so than usual right now. Enough about me, though."

    Because we've got things to talk about. "Ye~es. That's what I'm worried about. Have been worried about, really. That's why I'm here." He's not hiding the contents of that notepad from her, particularly- there's a spidery brainstorming diagram on the left page, filled with notes cribbed from Alexandria's computers. Some of the larger bubbles read 'case 63s', 'nerfed' < shards > 'can harm entity?', and 'scion and eden', for example.

    "She needs to get much better as fast as possible, except I've never really raised a hand against another person in that exact way. So that's not something I can help her with."

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura shrugs her shoulders. "It's something I can help her with. Honestly, if she doesn't get good enough in three weeks - and, to be fair, she probably won't - we can just... cheat. Why play fair against someone threatening to kill a hundred people for no reason?"

    She flicks her hand, and produces one of those cards of hers. This one is named 'The Fight'. "My current plan is to use this on Tomoyo and hope none of the bad guys can sense magic..."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
    "Cheating is what I helped her at a little while ago, as did a couple of other people. That's not exactly why I'm still around right now, but..."

    Ren and Tomoyo have been on a couple of interesting weekends out in the last couple of months, Sakura should know. One rather maudlin, the other... less so. There's some meaning to them.

    "You're fortunate in that none of them can. All of the slaughterhouse nine, good god that's a beastly name, other than him are dead."

    He takes another drink. "That brings me to what I was thinking about. Cheating, plus... advantages... Sakura, you've got that whole prophetic dreams thing, yes? And a slew of other things to your name."

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura rubs the back of her head. "Um... yes? I can't really control the dreams and they haven't been showing me anything about Tomoyo lately... Even when I use the Dream card I just get visions related to the Purple Pentacle..." She makes a face.

    "But... yeah. I have, um. A lot of other cards."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
Ren Tanaka ... rumbles. "I'd forgotten about them. Reiji and I did a fair amount of work on them for you, but somewhere along the line it slipped through the cracks. I'll have to do something about that." There's an investigation to be done- the sea levels around this Japan aren't getting any higher, after all. Unless they are.

    "Well, that... that answers one thing, I guess. Sit down for a minute, won't you? I don't want you falling," he asks, pointing obliquely from her wand to the bench.

    This feels like a 'you'd better sit down for this' unspoken statement.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura tilts her head to one side, then nods her head. She hops off her perch, one hand 'plucking' the wand out of the air as she falls to the bench, then hops up into a seated position.

    "Okay. What's up?"

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
"I've been doing things very... shotgun approach, I suppose is the best way of putting it," Ren says once Sakura's on solid ground. He begins to nervously tap his bottle with his pen as he talks. "Trying to find out a little bit about everything, trying to find out how as many of the moving parts work as possible. Defiant's world, parahumans, endbringers, as many little bits and pieces as possible. One of the things I found out is that the Nine have... well, they haven't always /just/ been the Nine. I don't even think Jack has always been one. Over the years the law's been dealing with a lot of them. Members come and go, of course until now when an awful /lot/ of them went at once."

"I can't discount the possibility," he says, "That he wants to rebuild, and I have a completely unfounded assumption as to the first person he would want to recruit to do that rebuilding. If she impresses him enough."

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    "...In the... passenger seat...?" Sakura attempts. That's the only 'shotgun approach' she can think of! Before he starts to explain himself anyway, in which case realisation dawns and she flushes a bit.

    After he reveals his worries, she gives him a bemused expression, then looks down and forces herself to resume a neutral expression before looking back. "...Okay. And what do you want to do about it?"

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
"An awfully large spread of concepts at once. Very broad," he clarifies.

    "That's the golden question," he replies. "I can't do anything about it. I don't have any capability to inferfere in this fight when it happens. At any point, he could drop what he's doing, grab Tomoyo and abscond with that teleporter tinkertech he has, and considering the last time he did we haven't seen him since I dread to think of what happens next."

    He breathes in. "I was hoping you could use that prophetic ability of yours to figure out if I'm completely unfounded or not. Some method of tracking him..."

He's clearly quite agitated by talking about this, as now he's both jangling his pen against the bottle and tinkling the little glass ball inside it around. "In close quarters, if he wanted to take her, there's precious little we could do to stop him, so we need the contingency of how to /find/ him afterwards if it happens."

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura frowns a bit. "Well... mmh. If she has one of my Cards on her I should be able to track it down... Like I said, I can't really control my dreams, and I can't really do any other divination reliably. But I -can- sense my Cards pretty well. She also has that mirror, so I might be able to use the Mirror card to find her... maybe."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
Ren Tanaka finishes the rest of the lemonade in the bottle.

    "That's the best option I suppose we'll have," he says grimly.

    The atmosphere has sort of soured, hasn't it? Mostly by his own action. He in fact pauses when he's finished, looking at the bottle suspiciously, possibly aware of how much he looks like a vagabond hard-drinking scotch in broad daylight.

    "The two of you," he says, slowly letting his arm swing back down, "Really shouldn't have ended up involved in these sorts of things. Really shouldn't have." He stammers this part out, those duel monsters cards suddenly feeling as if they're burning in his pocket.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura leans back and looks at the sky. "You can't change the past, and what will happen will happen. It's useless to talk about what -should- have happened. You just have to do your best to make the future as bright as possible." She gives a little smile. "Anyway, Tomoyo chose this. I... didn't, I guess, but there's no way I can just squander all my power and not use it to -help- people."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
    Ren rolls the glass ball around the inside of the bottle again. "Well said."

    And so, he sits back from where he was leaning forward. Moves his hand back over to the- oh, at some point he seems to have eaten all of that cruller without really noticing, apparently. Just a paper bag with some crumbs in it, now.

He shrugs, and folds the paper bag up then puts his pen and notebook back in one of the pouch pockets around his waist, in some sideways-facing bumbag apparently. "That's a good way to think about it. Making the future as bright as possible," he says, getting ready, it seems, to leave as he puts the bottle into a recycling bin. "We'll have to have a game some time when I've got the measure of this deck. Maybe get a dual disk myself, or something. Maybe pull you along on a weekend adventure."

'Making the future brighter', after all, is a much more positive way of describing these things than 'giving Tomoyo some enjoyable things to fill her life with in case Jack Slash kills her'.

Sakura Kinomoto (172) has posed:
    Sakura gives Ren a thumbsup. "Sure, if I find myself with some -free time-. Having two jobs AND school is pretty great at making sure you're either working or asleep~" So why is she out here wasting time?

    She twirls her wand between her fingers, then sets it into the air and hops up onto it. "...Thanks for the pastry. It was delicious."

Ren Tanaka (165) has posed:
"Got to spend my union salary on something," Ren replies. "And I do enough walking that I don't have to worry about exercise to burn it off, right? Anyway, I'm sure I'll see you again later. Ta!"

    And just like that, he's off again.