Scene #4573: A Huntress and a God Eater walk into a gymnasium.

Owner	Pose
Yang Xiao Long	Yang is set up on one side of the large ampetheatre used by the school as a mixxed assembly hall, briefing room and combat sparring practice arena. It's set up as a wide open assembly hall right now, with various students milling around, tending to their weapons, and talking amongst themselves. A group maintenance period or somesuch. Yang works on the seeming disparate parts of her gauntlets, spread on a table before her as she works on a mechanism with a tiny screwdriver and the calm determination that would look very odd to people that know the brash brawler. Her Scroll sits on the table, blaring out Guns'n'Roses. Welcome to the Jungle currently starting the Guitar Solo. Other music can be heard from other parts of the hall, making a bit of a discord as they different genres clash, but the room is large enough that they don't all collide at once.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	This is almost a little awkward. Kutsuuko hasn't been to highschool in three years. She also didn't finish highschool, but who cares about that now, really? Admittedly, she still doesn't look all that much older than the senior students, if only for being taller than a good number of the girls, and dressing the way she does. What stands out more is the massive case of interlocking mechanical parts, easily large enough to clamp around an engine block, that she carries with her like a toolbox, only just barely not scraping the floor on the way in. It takes a minute to pick Yang out from the crowd; not for lack of her appearance standing out, but for the fact that the God Eater has only ever seen her mugshot. Knowing where she's going, the young lady has no trouble strutting through an unfamiliar school hall like she owns the place, and dropping her equipment the last inch to the ground with a floor-shaking thunk. "Damn, that's some /old/ music." She remarks immediately, though she seems more interested in the scroll itself than what it's doing. Shortly, she pulls up a seat, and takes her spot in it in essentially the same motion, crossing one leg over the other and promptly plonking her elbows down on the table to peer at what the Huntress in training is doing. "You weren't kidding about that though, huh? A million tiny pieces like that, I don't think I could put it together if I tried. Where'd you even learn to do that?"
Yang Xiao Long	Yang glances over as Kutsuuko walks up. She doesn't seem surprised, for one she knew the God Eater was coming from talking to her, but she's also been practicing the 'Ki Sense' technique Momoyo taught her. The God Eater's Aura is very unique, compared to those others in the school. So she stands out, even without the engine block she's carrying around. "Hey Kutsuuko." she offers, putting her tools down and sitting up straighter. "Dad teaches at Signal on Patch. That's where I went to school to start with, when I first wanted to become a Huntress. They get you to build your own weapon there, take you through the steps, one by one." She turns her chair, and leans back in it, looking the God Eater over. "What's in the case? Looks like enough metal there to make a Bullhead." she jokes. Kutsuuko's arrival at Beacon was very likely via such a craft. Bullheads being mid-range aircraft used to transport people back and forth at speed.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	Unique Aura is putting it mildly. Whatever it is contrasts sharply enough with a person to feel jarring, and seems to gradiate from one kind to another in a way that's difficult to pick out the transition. "Teaches at what on what?" Kutsuuko then blithely asks. "I guess that'd be way easier than having to teach kids so much . . . engineering." She pronounces the last word very uncertainly. "And if you built it yourself, you'd at least be familiar enough with that one piece to tinker with it, right? Once you get to know a weapon, even if you aren't a scientist, you can feel it out, when it's off or needs tuning, what its limitations are, what you want out of it, and you can put it back together." A brief pause. "Okay, I actually approve." She then pats the thoroughly overweight storage container with her gloved hand. "I told you I'd show you mine, right~? Granted, there's no way I could take her apart like that, and if I could, I couldn't do it with a screwdriver. We have a live-in mechanic who's /nuts/ for this stuff. She doesn't really have any competition either, so she gets paid a ton."
Yang Xiao Long	Yang nods. "Signal Initiate School. It's a precursor place to Beacon Hunter Academy, here." she explains. "Patch is a small island off the coast of Vale, the big city? Small place, almost no Grimm, pretty safe all told." she shrugs. "And yeah. A Hunter and their Weapon are two parts of one whole. It's more of a symbiosis than anything even though they're not alive or anything like that." Yang looks at the case. "That's... big. I mean... how do you even use a weapon that big? Yatsuhashi has a pretty massive sword, but..." she trails off, peering curiously at the container now.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	Kutsuuko looks like she wants to say something at that first part, but puts it to use instead by sticking out her tongue with a coy little smirk at the rest. "Symbiosis~" She answers cheekily, unhelpfully, and 100% truthfully. "It sounds like a nice setup here. If you want to fight monsters, you just . . . enroll in school. Peers, teachers, instructors, hands-on support, all the tools you need, years to polish up. Haaaah . . . I'm kind of jealous." Uncrossing her leg, she abruptly stomps on the top of that massive, mechanical case, depressing some kind of hard, pneumatic lock, which causes it to split open horizontally, and its contents to swivel upright and partially eject. There's a hilt made of heavy looking, matte black metal, twice as long as one needs to be, and vaguely mimicking wrappings with a pattern of narrow, orange lights that ladder along it. Where a guard should be, the metal fuses into a bloom of some kind of inky black substance, like looking into the deep ocean, but with the recognizable silhouette of twisting sinew texturing it; completed with a fist sized, glassy, golden sphere halfway embedded into it, and surrounded by four smaller copies. It comes across as exposed, internal workings, because it's only visible through a narrow window of exterior casing, which looks like metal that it perpetually just came out of the furnace, coloured soft shades of faintly luminous, gold, amber, fuchsia and scarlet, and broken up by carbon black accents. A hefty chunk of machinery, difficult to discern in purpose, replaces a crossguard, though all of it has been engraved with careful, flowing and rippling patterns, and a distinctive mark of a stylized wolf's face clutching the crescent moon in its jaws. Past that, it is all blade; probably six feet of it overall, and preposterously oversized to ever be intended for use on a human being. It faintly resembles an especially hefty katana, though it terminates with no point, and the whole length looks white hot, despite only mild radiant heat. It looks massive, heavy, unbalanced, and possibly quite complex, clearly mechanically functional, and that exposed interior looks weirdly . . . alive, but at the same time, it's clear someone worked hard on it as a piece of art as well; like it was the last thing they ever expected to make, and wanted it to endure for a long time. "Tada~" Is the God Eater's underwhelming choice of commentary. "This here is Scarlet Symphony~ Took three years to get to this state, and a mountain of bodies, let me tell you. I can give you specs, and a lot of layman's theory, but sad to say I have no idea how a lot of it works. That's the kind of PHD headfuckery restricted to the Managarm illuminati. It's not as convenient as being able to build your own from scratch, and it's a /lot/ of work to personalize one." Despite that, her tone radiates a kind of exceptionally invested affection; somewhere between someone talking about their project car, and gushing about their little sister.
Yang Xiao Long	"Well..." begins Yang as she leans back from the suddenly very large weapon thrusting into the air. "That's a thing... Much bigger than Yatsuhashi's sword, and Nora's Blast Impact Variable Hammer." she comments. "What's with that weird black stuff in there... it looks alive." By now, a few of the closer students have turned around to gawk. Some of them appreciate the intricate machinery of the God Arc, others are staring at the girl that doesn't look much older than they are, probably wondering how much her Aura enhances her strength to let her weild such a monsterous weapon.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"Answering your own question~" The God Eater replies, continuing to be coyly unhelpful for a few moments more, before tapping the bulky, armoured bracelet around her right wrist. "That's because it is; technically. The reason a God Arc works as a weapon against Aragami is because they're made of the same stuff as they are. They're built from the ground up around supporting a living colony of Oracle Cells -- that black fleshy goo -- using an artificial control core linked to the wielder instead of some weird angry god-brain. Repurposing them brings out vastly more performance than we can get out of any existing technology." "For instance, the only damn reason I can swing her around is because I've got some of the same stuff inside of me, fused into all my tissues. Amongst other things, that's how I can interface with her, linking my nervous system up and moving her as an extension of /my/ thoughts instead of an Aragami. It's a rare trait to be able to do it, it's risky, it's permanent, and-" Her tone darkens briefly. "It's painful like nothing you'd ever imagined to get this thing clamped around your wrist for life and shot full of millions of little bastards that try to eat you from the inside out." "But then you can do this!" Her bare fingers curl around the bisected hilt, and as she grasps it, the black, amorphous substance twists into a helical tendril, and jams itself into the port in her armlet. It gets a shudder out of Kutsuuko, but not in the 'giant needle revulsion reflex' sense; more like a first sip of hot coffee at six in the morning in the middle of winter. A second later, she swings the entire, preposterous mass up over her shoulder, as if it weighed the same as a sanely proportioned sword. "We don't have Aura or Semblances or Dust or magic. We take whatever we can get." She shrugs. This is especially impressive considering how much weight is on her shoulders.
Yang Xiao Long	Yang blinks a bit. "Waaaaait a second here... isn't that dangerous?" she asks. "I mean, obviously it's dangerous, but isn't there any other way?" she looks concerned. "No, probably not, since this has been going on for a long time in your world." she still frowns, standing up and picking up her complete gauntlet. It's deceptively in bracelet form, as she slips it over her left wrist. "You showed me yours, so I might as well show you mine. You saw the bits and pieces, but this is how she looks complete." A shift in stance, and the bracelet unfolds into a full fore-arm vambrace, with a flat, over-knuckle segment with an obvious barrel above the index finger. A semi-open ammo chamber shows a mix of orange and red shotgun shells in a revolver-like assembly.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"You have no idea." Kutsuuko remarks drily to Yang. It's the sound of someone who was, once long ago, completely horrified by the idea, and has since grown used to it with the kind of sarcastic acceptance of someone with a debilitating medical condition. "But that's always the trade for power, right? You mess yourself up, you risk your future, you get handed something this dangerous, and you get tossed out in front of giant jaws until you either get eaten or learn how to avoid getting eaten, and it's natural that, if you're not dead, you get stronger; fast." "I wouldn't recommend it, and I wouldn't be jealous of it. Being impressed is confirmation bias." Her mood then brightens several shades. "Not that I mind anyone being impressed~ Lay on the praise all you want~" Her eyes then flick to Yang finally assembling one of her gauntlets, though it looks just like a bracelet to her; sunlight yellow as opposed to Scarlet, and much less industrial in design. Seeing it fold out just like that though, gets her to lean forward in her precariously squealing chair, putting her chin in her upturned hand and inadvertently distributing the stress onto the table as well. "Damn. How do you fold all that up in there? There's no morphic biomass or anything, right? It's all metal?" A puff escapes her lips though, blowing up a lock of raven hair from out of her face. "What, buckshot? I guess that makes sense for punching people. I can't tell what the feed mechanism is, but that's what, two dozen shots? What actually survives that many rounds at point blank?"
Yang Xiao Long	Yang chuckles a bit. "Some of the parts and mechanisms are doped with Gravity Dust. It reacts by expanding when exposed to a concentrated Aura field. Micronisation, I think someone offworld called it. It contracts when Aura is taken away from it. That's not the Dust types only use, but it's how it works when doped into something." She shrugs a bit. "I'm not an expert on the subject of Dust." To the inspection on the shells. "Dust shells. The orange ones are a concentrated kinetic burst at point blank. They're meant to boost the striking power of my fists. The red ones are where the Dual Range part comes from. They launch an explosive packet of Lightning and Fire amalgam to mid range that explodes on impact, or after it's travelled too far." She turns, points with her right hand. "Clear! Target!" the floor opens up and deploys a pretty standard 'mantarget', and students shift out of the line of fire. Yang uses her wind up to chamber a red shell, and with the punch forward, launches an unstable looking red-orange bolt that slams into the target, and detonates like a small grenade. No shrapnel, but the target looks scorched, where it hasn't been vaporized.
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"That /almost/ went over my head." Kutsuuko admits, clearly impressed. "That's a lot more complicated than a bunch of telescoping metal bits, cool as those are. How many kinds of this Dust stuff are there anyways? How much does it /cost/ if it can do things like that?" After hearing /that/, hearing the shells are loaded with it doesn't seem to surprise her. Hell, what does is having convenient testing dummies popping up on-demand in a public, semi-crowded place like this. Beacon must be serious about letting students have the full responsibility of carrying lethal gear around like this, and making sure they can use it as they need; so Kutsuuko thinks. Seeing the target halfway blown to bits with a punch thrown woefully far out of range, she lets slip a low, quiet chuckle. She then leans too far back in her chair, and the groaning rear legs splinter completely, though she manages to shift and stand before it clatters apart with surprisingly feline agility. "Can't be /that/ much if you can use it as ammo. Did you come up with that though? That's a really smart way to get around those reach issues. Y'know, using your girl arms and all~" She squeezes Yang's bicep just to be annoying, and assert her whopping single digit years of seniority.
Yang Xiao Long	Yang's arms, despite being physically slender looking, feel like steel under Kutsuuko's grip. The muscles flex, and a small ripple of orange-yellow energy flickers around the God Eater's fingers. "I came up with the mixture myself, over my time at Signal. I built a pair of gauntlets, but in the end, Dad let me have a pair of his old ones, and I modified those instead. I wasn't happy with the cycle rate of Blaze Fulcrum... but I put what I learned building them, into modifying Glint Accel into Ember Celica. Took out the Dust Chamber and refitted it with a Munition ring to use shells... My first few attempts were less 'explode on impact' and more 'explode when they like', though." The Huntress doesn't seem fazed by the chair collapsing. "As for Dust types... well there's the four 'primary' types. Blow, Burn, Flow and Shock. These can be combined into secondaries. Freeze, Scald, Gravity and Grit... they're elemental basically. Air, Fire, Water, Lightning. Ice, Steam, Gravity is obvious, and Earth."
Kutsuuko Shiratori	Huh. Would you look at that. Kutsuuko pokes Yang's arms a couple of times, mostly for the weird ripples, before realizing that she looks even weirder, and just accepting the answer. "So you're a chemist too? Dust-ist?" She hides half a smile behind her gloved hand. "I feel like your taste in names improved considerably with age~ Still though, your dad must be pretty cool to let you play with that kind of stuff." The smile slips off her face like oil a few seconds later; not something Yang did or said. "Ah . . . yeah. Alright, that makes sense." The God Eater quickly recovers. "Kind of an alchemy thing going on, right? That's an entire technology base right there . . . though I can't imagine what you'd do with 'grit'. Are you the resident Dust nerd~? Or do you beat up on the nerds?"
Yang Xiao Long	Yang rolls her eyes, collapsing Celica back into Bracelet mode as she plants her hands on her hips. "I'm a novice when it comes to Dust. I just know that Lightning and Fire work well when amalgamated, not combined. Slight difference. Combining makes Gravity Dust." she then shifts, folding her arms over her chest. "If you want a Dust nerd, talk to Weiss. She's the heiress to the Schnee Dust Company."
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"Weiss Schnee?" Kutsuuko repeats back at Yang like a former XO of the Union was fond of doing. She's clearly putting two and two together. "U-uhuh. Honestly, I'd do that on my own time at most. I'm not /huge/ into science; mostly about knowing the inside and out of what I have to stake my life on. I spend most of my time with things that are probably more your forte. Marksmanship, bullet design, martial arts, swordsmanship. Mostly all my time recently has been going into trying to learn Blood Arts though." Then even more abruptly: "We should hang out sometime."
Yang Xiao Long	Yang smirks, "That sounds like a plan." she replies to hanging out. "What're Blood Arts though?" she asks curiously. "I'm not a scientist either, just know enough to do what I do. That's punch Grimm until they dissolve into whatever the hell they're made of mist."
Kutsuuko Shiratori	Kutsuuko briefly appears caught out by someone actually asking that question, scratching her cheek absently with that inexplicably, heavily shrouded hand. "I don't know all the details myself. It's a way you can kind of . . . master the energy in the Oracle Cells inside a God Eater's body. Normally they're there just to make you tough, strong, resilient, and let you interface with a God Arc without being devoured, but Aragami are made of Oracle Cells and have all sorts of insane abilities." "It's like training a technique, I guess. Coaxing it out and crystallizing it with your will. It's a pain in the ass though. One part meditation, one part swinging a weapon around over and over, and two parts trying to train a muscle that you can't really place or figure out how to twitch. I've learned two so far; trying to beat that bishie that Friar uses for their posterboy. Even once you can execute them though, there's miles to go in strengthening them. 'Awakening', like Paylor calls it. Most of what I know is that it feels amazing. A kind of calm savagery that makes your blood sing and your heart race like for a few seconds you get to be God."
Yang Xiao Long	Yang listens, and she gains a distant, half-smile like she's imagining something. "A burning sensation, deep inside your soul, a pulse that rushes through every nerve from your core to your tips and back." she continues after Kutsuuko finishes. "Sounds like a Semblance to me."
Kutsuuko Shiratori	"Hah! No wonder you're such a battle junkie. You know what it feels like too, don't you?" Kutsuuko's tone is half-amused, half-deeply, sympathetically intrigued. "That's not something I'd hear from just anyone. There's a lot of commonality; enough that it makes me wonder if I should probe at it more." She then breaks off that serious tone as if it had never happened. "I should probably get going. Call me if a bunch of those Grimm things need to be disintegrated. I'll see if I can pitch in. Might learn something."
Yang Xiao Long	Yang nods, then holds out her hand. "Sure thing, Kutsuuko, and you let me know if those Aragami act up. I'll come punch 'em until they know who's boss." she replies, beaming wide at the God Eater.