Scene #9000: Death Game Sorta Feeling

Owner	Pose
BB	After the mission, Jinako had pulled her buckles from driver to return to DGP-jacket normal, emotionally worn thin and sweating across her cheeks while damp brown hair clung to the sides of her face. The scorecard had brought a little color back to her cheeks, while the screen reflected dimly against her glasses-lenses. "I'm not the bottom," A puff of relief. Even though she had fed Geats all those points chasing after Na-Go, her score wasn't in danger. "And..." She doesn't vocalize the other half: that she hadn't lost her 'bet' with Mary. Rattled, after being at a full stampede earlier, and remaining out of breath Jinako had composed herself from mess to managing and sent Neon a message on her civilian phone. > Neon, let's catch up later after you've had a chance to clean up. And a cartoon happy_elephant_trumpet emoji. It was easier to talk across a screen, easier to put the feelings off for a moment, easier to give Neon space and a note of support at the same time. Player versus Player was difficult for Jinako. As a gamer, she could employ any tactic to win if necessary. As a woman, and,... ... It was difficult to care about someone enough to jump in the way of monsters for them, and also wish them to fail at attaining their dreams. It wasn't about the selfish destruction of monsters for her at all. --- At the Toei Beach (the one really good for filming at!), down by the rocks and wave-break stone structures, Jinako waits for Neon, resting. She lays inside the span of the crossed stones jacks, hands resting together on her belly with her phone clasped in her fist. She is dressed for light beachwear, trading her jeans out for loose blue pants belted with a bright red sash striped with red-brown and splashes of gold that she slightly overflows, ending in golden anklets and white sandals. Over top she wears her pink elephant hoodie zipped up with the hood-and-ears up, her chaotic tufts and bangs stuffed into and rolling out from the hood over her shoulders and front.
Desire Stars	> Sure! I'd love to. Plus the cat_with_heart_eyes emoji. > I'll let you know when I'm on the way. It'll take some time to sneak out. --- Eventually, that 'on the way' text does come. Neon arrives dressed for the beach in a loose white open-sleeve blouse, tucked into a matching pair of white palazzo pants with a red rose print. "Hey," she says sunnily. "Sorry I took so long. I thought I'd never give her the slip." Neon takes a seat beside the reclining Jinako. "I wasn't sure if I'd get to enjoy this ever again." She looks radiant--the perfect kind of expression for someone enjoying the gentle rush of surf against rocky shore and the smell of salty sea air. "I really don't know how I can thank you for that. Let alone all the help and support you gave me before..."
BB	"Hey." Jinako returns to the sunny demeanor the same words in gentle, groggy reply. The mix of aware and still waking up someone who had definitely dozed off waiting hits, a pot heated but before bubbling. Swallowing and clearing her throat, Jinako shifts to sit up, and sees Neon falling to a seat besides her. This vibes with Jinako's mood entirely, and so she reverses her shift, to try and scooch her shoulders into a better alignment with the surf-flat stone. "You could have taken a day or two, Neon, I'd have disappeared for a week to recharge if it was me. I was stressed out enough just..." Her voice drips. "... imagining what could happen." Drumming her fingers against the back of her phone, Jinako purses her lips and wiggles, sniffing at the praise. "You did a lot of that saving yourself." Cheeks flushed, Jinako looks away and out across the stone caltrop pile. "But for the... extra stuff, you're welcome. These kinds of games are the worst on first timers, and you definitely deserved a chance at a wish." Even directed away, there's a personal passion to her insistence, her knowing. "And everyone promised." Jinako continues, lamer with the 'staple' lines. An air of borrowing them, or doing an impression. "So, I couldn't just run away from a promise."
Desire Stars	"Who says this isn't me taking a day?" she asks. "Home is... less work than the DGP, but it's still work to be there." She frowns a little, admitting it, but her expression is only dimmed for as long as it takes the waves to crash and retreat in the silence that follows. "I was scared, too. The most scared I've been since I was a kid. But," she echoes, "Everyone promised. So I did the saving I could do, and I left the saving I couldn't do to you and Clover and everyone else." She smiles. "I got my life back. And I also got to see all of you at your best. Well... almost all of you." A soft shrug. "I meant what I said. I'm glad things turned out the way they did, but I would have taken that chance every time, even if it cost me everything. I don't want to be the kind of person that retreats from the world out of fear for what might happen." "Especially not with what I'm wishing for."
BB	"I guess that'd be me." Jinako murmurs, humbled on the topic of taking a day. "Sorry, Neon." Fingerbeats tapping a soft pra-ta-ta across the back of her phone, Jinako ends with a clench to phonecase and a puff of her cheeks. Then, rotating a leg off of the stone structure, Jinako lifts and rolls and slides to a seat besides Neon, plopping down in the sand and falling cross-legged and leaned-over lap. "Home's work. I guess that's the difference. Home was always my retreat, but, if your streamed escapes are less work than just being at home that explains your schedule." Looking over, past bangs and around the frameside of her glasses, Jinako peeks at Neon. "I've seen you go at skeletons and vengeful ghosts and zombies too. On a scale of ghouls and the undead being a ten, what's home at?"
Desire Stars	"Some days it's okay," says Neon, before outlining just how not-okay it is, "Maybe a 5 or a 6." As with a hospital pain-chart, the correct number to be at is '0.' "Ben and John do what they can, but there's only so much they can do. They're... It's almost like they're my big brothers, at this point. My mother trusts them, but she can also hurt them in ways she can't hurt me. All it would take is one false step from them, and she could replace them. Then the two of them would be out of a job in a foreign country." She sighs mistily, fidgeting. "And I'd have two strangers in my house." "...Other times, it's a 7 or an 8, and these days it's leaning towards the 8. So I'm..." An airy, exasperated huff, as she realizes she's putting words to something previously only felt as an inarticulate tangle held desperately at the back of her mind. "The zombies, and skeletons, and soldiers and whatever else, yeah, they're scary. But the difference with them is that I know there's something at the end of it besides 'more of the same,' if I can just pull through."
BB	Jinako had lived a life of her own, mundane and fantastical, but didn't have the vast context of the lazy spirit with which she had been bound together with. She was, mostly, a plumb creature that hid in the darkness of a room behind digital screens even in an overflowing paradise should she just open up the door, the curtains, the window a crack and see. She had to have it upended to leave, driven by force. Neon lived up to her name, in Jinako's sliver of a gaze, for being a bright glow. 'Maybe a 5 or a 6' when a ten is a death game where you're in active pain of dying while fighting the aggressive clawing dead? "An eight?!" Jinako hisses, and as Neon paints a portrait of herself in tones of red the wider woman sits agog as she realizes Neon paints it and the smile on her face in her own blood. "It..." Sounds like her guards are being held hostage against her. Sounds like she needs more than one wish, and why the desperation was so palpable. Neon had to. "... what's a one, then? Just to..." Weakly striking from the fields of borrowed heroic stoicisms, Jinako falls back on instinct. "... set the chart."
Desire Stars	"To set the chart..." Neon leans back on her palms and looks into the summer sky. "You asked for a 'one.' Mm... My parents are away on business and it's just me, John and Ben. We're still in the house, still living in the context of my parents, but... my mother isn't there to treat me like one of her dolls and my father isn't a shadow on the wall. I can almost forget that I'm living there, and none of us have to walk on eggshells." "A zero would be something like this," she says, looking over at Jinako with a warm, gentle fondness in her eyes which belies the reality of her circumstances. "Something where I can see the world stretched out in front of me, where I can reach out and touch it, and not feel my hand stop..." For the presence of bars. "And look beside me, and see someone else taking it all in, too. Being here by myself would be nice, sure, but... good things are better when you have someone to share them with. Don't you think?" She sighs pleasantly, looking back out over the waves. "Why did you ask, anyway?"
BB	Jinako, only afterwards, wishes to have asked for a zero. A one - still a little pain... "... Okay. That does remind me of home." Jinako admits back, looking down at the stone and dark grit and sand. "I didn't have a John and Ben, but I didn't have... sixes and sevens and eights, either. It was just... me, for a while. So I got to do what I wanted, with nobody pushing me at all." There's plenty of people like that in Japan. Living at a one, or a two, or a four. "I meant..." Jinako begins, lamely. 'A zero would be something like this,' "... oh." She finishes, looking up and catching the glance. "That's true, it is better if someone else is around. And not just the same people, even. That's why, even if this moment could go-on forever, it couldn't last." Jinako is asked back why she wanted to ask. "Everyone that was chosen to be a Kamen Rider doesn't just have the ability to put on a suit and do a kick or a special attack. They're chosen for, um, a reason. Not many people can push past death to win for 'love' unless..." Unless...
Desire Stars	"Unless they want it more than life itself?" That's her guess as to what Jinako was going to say. "I think life needs to be worth living," Neon says. "Different people need different things for that. I need to feel what genuine love is like; the kind that isn't restrained out of fear or aimed at someone like me, but not." "If there were a way for me to find it without the DGP, I'd have jumped at it. The stream... it's a way for me to express myself, to play it up and make a production out of it so that there's one more thing in my life I have control of. There aren't many things like that, and I have to fight to keep the ones I have, and..." She chews her lip. "That's on purpose." "So... of course, if someone came by offering me a way out, a life where I wouldn't have to fight to keep those things, where my life was my own, I'd take it. It's not that I'm not scared, you know. It's just..." she pushes out a sigh. "Yeah."
BB	Jinako begins, instinctive, with a 'nnn' leading to the negative and then stops short and reconsiders. A wince of a look, following a series of sorry nods, paints the effort into her, "...Well, yeah. I think you've even said that before. When we talked about your wish, and, how you pulled through the extra-hard part of the training." Jinako recites with a low but present admiration. "But that's not what I thought." Shifting to sit facing Neon and lean her elephant ear hooded head against the stone wavebreak's rise, Jinako takes a moment to bring her attention most fully to the real reason she was at the beach: "Because they can't get their wish any other way. I'm not from your world," Easier said, now, then trying to pass herself off as some sort of local ~~witch~~ magical girl. "-but, somewhere adjacent with a somewhat adjacent system. I can't get my wish from one, so, I'm trying to get my wish from the other. We've heard others, but, yours..." Jinako, after setting her phone aside into her hoodie pocket, gently moves her right hand forward to rest her palm on Neon's shoulder. "... It's because you want to know 'for sure', right? To scale a zero? To..." Emotion builds to crescendo before her words do, and Jinako bites her bottom lip and mumbles a quiet 'it'snotmyplacetosay'.
Desire Stars	"Whether it's this DGP, some other in the future, or... some other game entirely, I hope you get it. It sounds to me like maybe he helped you find 'zero' when everything suddenly ratcheted up." Neon reaches up and squeezes Jinako's hand when it rests on her shoulder. "That's right," she says, after a noticeable pause. "Because any 'zero' I've ever had has been in bits and pieces--something put together 'in spite of.'" An impish smile takes residence on her soft, round features, as Jinako trails off. "To say what, exactly? You helped save my life, you know," she says. "If that doesn't give you 'saying' privileges, I don't know what would."
BB	"Ah, if it's through the DGP I'll have to get a better way of earning points than jumping in front of danger and wailing. I'm just... seriously, mostly an obstacle." Jinako doubts with an amused scoff, having kept up on the leaderboards if only to keep away from the bottom. "I want something 'impossible', even to me, so I'm trying something dangerous, despite myself." Jinako re-explains, echoes what she thinks the motion is, and looks from the hand on hers, back to Neon's color-bright smile even if it curls impishly. On Jinako's hands, though it was hard to notice when she was just waving them around, are body-warm rings. Each finger, thumb to pinky, has a band snug to it, and while her hand rolls over to clasp Neon's her fingers have a moment of metal-glide and contact about the small woman's hand. "I don't think true love is being explained at. I've been on enough forums to know. And I can't reach in and pull out what's true to you by just listening, and..." A flushed-faced moment of stumbling as she gets glowed down by Neon's smile. "I can't tell you if it gets better than this moment." Jinako, still holding Neon's hand, shifts back a scooch and starts to stand, the sky hue shifting orange like a dense cloud or object behind her in degrees by motion. When she hangs, halfway, to pull Neon up with her, the summer sun is barely visible off-screen in a partial eclipse. "We can enjoy it for a while, though." Jinako offers with some particular meaning, fingers squeezing, eyes seeking, and then, away-- To look up towards the solar eclipse. "For as long as you want. Then, when you're rested, we can get crepes?" Behind Jinako, the sea expands almost infinitely. Behind Jinako, it is still and silent, as the solar eclipse hangs. Looking back, worry-in-performance takes Jinako and she stops still while gazing at Neon for confirmation. Then, a little meekly. "We could just... get crepes, too."