Scene #9243: A Short Scene With A Lot of Running In It

Owner	Pose
Rufus Shinra	Previously, Lobotomy Corporation had its worst ~~day~~ week, which was also its last week. < Rita! You're right. I know everyone here is against you... But, I think you're really cool. And I hope, when all this is done, I can try to help get things back to how they were. > Save the whole City and I'll forgive you. Bring back the dead Agents and I'll forgive you. Otherwise, it's not my place. I can't turn my back on those who aren't here. < It's not forgivable. And we can't bring them back. I'm not asking you to forgive me. Or to forgive anyone else here. I'm not asking you to do anything. Just - that you know that. That you know I'm going to try to get - get things better. Afterwards. Rufus Shinra is a lot of things. He'll freely admit to being a lot of them, even. But one thing he does not want to be, is someone who goes back on his word. UNION BUSAN, APPLE TREE ISLAND "Rita! Miss Ma!" Rufus starts looking around for her as soon as he's through the warpgate. "Hey! Are you home? this is your home, right?" He's dressed down from his usual chic fashion, down to something more smart casual - though still touristy, with a caribbean print polo and sandals on. Perhaps more notably, he doesn't seem to be armed. "Miss Ma? Hey?" He calls again as he pokes around the Union Busan. "Here to talk!" "... I should probably have let her know I was coming," he adds to himself, a few seconds later. He's used to people having static addresses, with doorbells that can be rung. Or like, Angela, who's literally in the same place all the time.
Rita Ma	The Union Busan is a slightly-rusting, nearly-deserted hulk that lists at about a ten degree angle. Strange calcified tentacles pervade it, flowing over and worming through its hull, but they seem safely inanimate. The power's on, but most of the lights aren't. The room with an artificial Warpgate- a cheap but reliable portable version, hooked up to a distant reactor with thick cables- opens onto the amalgamated aircraft carrier's deck, where there's that enormous apple tree bursting from what used to be a garden-dome; from there it overlooks the crescent-shaped caldera island it's beached on. ... There's a whole town down there, scrap-metal buildings and dirt roads. Probably a few thousand people. His work's cut out for him. He's got about twenty minutes to figure out how he's going to get down the hundred feet from the carrier's top to the island's ground level. But while he wanders the twisty, tilted, rusty halls-- Clunk. Tzzt. Hey, was that the Warpgate? A few moments later, briskly tapping footsteps catch up with him. "I thought I recognized your blood. You're really brave coming here, Mr. Rufus." It's that familiar girl behind him in the dark, dark veins somewhat receded, wearing a casual windbreaker. Her tentacles aren't out, which is a good sign. She's holding the Warpgate's unplugged extension cable in her hand, which is a bad one.
Rufus Shinra	How is Rufus going to get down? Shotgun boosting his way down is probably off the table, since most inhabited communities don't take kindly to random gunfire even in the name of navigation. Also Rufus doesn't have his shotgun on him, anyway. So wandering the halls it is. Urban exploration isn't a terrible way to pass the time, at least. The sound of the warpgate going out doesn't immediately concern him. He's unarmed, but he's not phoneless. A few hours chilling by the seaside while waiting for someone to come pick him up is inconvenient, but does not seem like the worst fate. And there's even a town, with, presumably, food and lodging that they will trade for Concord credits. ... He also assumes it's just normal equipment failure, not someone unplugging it. Someone coming up is a little more alarming, but - they're making themselves known, not trying to sneak up on him. So Rufus goes a little further, finding a decently wide open space with at least two exits if he can, and turns towards the sound, waiting for the footsteps to catch up to him. Oh, it's her. "Ah, the... blood." That's not comforting at all. Then again, he realizes, maybe it's not meant to be. Still, he endeavors to look as relaxes as he can. "Not brave, just trying to make good," he says, playing it off. "Nice place. The town, I mean. The ship's kinda out of the water, which is usually not where you expect to find ships, right?" He tries a single finger-gun, to see how well it goes over. "Also - we never really got introduced, right?" He approaches, more cautiously than his forced casual manner would warrant. "Name's Rufus, you know that. I'm a bit of, you could say, a merchant." He tries for a handshake.
Rita Ma	Rita's expression stays neutral when Rufus offers his hand. It's not even her tautly polite neutrality. It's more like a tiger eyeing someone through the cage's bars. No bars for him here, though. "I know how you taste," she says, with a little averse tilt of her head. Disgust at him, or herself. "I think we're past being introduced." Swsh-sllrrrrk. A tentacle stops pretending to be the sleeve of her jacket, and corkscrew-unravels twelve feet of length. Flat like a ribbon. Flat like a blade. It curves around towards Rufus as a crescent- and then behind him- like it might be about to pat his shoulder, or cut his head off, or dash him against the wall. Then, slowwwwly, it winds around him. If he doesn't squirm free, it's like that one time a zookeeper put a python around your shoulders as a kid. It's also like that one time something brushed your ankle in murky water and freaked you out. "I'm not sure I believe you. You said that stuff, back then, but you might be here to hurt my family." Little tighter. It doesn't quite hurt. "You know, if there's a one-in-a-billion chance you do anything like the City again, I think I ought to kill you. It'd send a message to the others too." She entertains the idea like she's drained by it. A tired 'oh, well'.
Rufus Shinra	Play it cool. Play it very, very, very cool. That's what Rufus's mind says. Play it cool. His icy, chill as a cucumber brain says play it cool. However, his heart, his greasy, slippery, oil spill of a heart, has its own say, and it can't help itself when it sees the opportunity to be heard. "You know how I taste. Well that's definitely well past introductions, in fact forget introductions, usually you have to get past the third date for that. Sorry. Sorry sorry. That just slipped out." "Uh." He does resist the urge to turn his head and watch the tentacle move. His eyes dart to the side briefly every so often, but he tries to focus on Rita. "Okay, well..." As the tentacle tightens around him, he loses the 'don't look to the side' game, after all. "Well, ah, it does appear, Miss Ma, that that decision is entirely in your hands right now." "I'm here unarmed. I'm not here to hurt your family. I don't even know who your family is, Miss Ma." "And you don't want to send that message, Miss Ma. And if you really do want to send that message, there's a lot better ways to send it than using the first person who's come to talk to you, the person who's already admitted it was wrong. I think, if you want my advice, that wouldn't be taken as the message you hope to send." "... And you protected me during the last part. If you really wanted me dead, you could have just - let the bullet hit me." Deep breath. "Look. What you said. It'd be nicer if I was unrepentantly awful. I'm afraid I'm not." He tries a smile. It comes out a bit more greasy than he intends. "I'm repentantly awful. Can you work with that? And can we talk? And can you maybe not squeeze?"
Rita Ma	"If you really wanted me dead, you could have just..." "I wasn't thinking clearly then." Slipping back towards the tense-polite posture. "I am now." It's a threat. At least a little bit. But as far as half-arguing-and-half-pleading-for-your-life performances go, the judge gives Rufus a solid 7 out of 10 (penalties for the grease). Rita makes up her mind. Kllrsh. The tentacle turns invisible, then unwinds from around him- 'nothing there' trailing clammily over skin- and reweaves into Rita's disguise, completing her jacket again. She turns away with a lingering over-the-shoulder look. "Okay. Talk." At least provisionally. It isn't clear whether that's 'declaring a choice', or 'a command', but after a moment of retracing her steps through the twisty corridors she speaks up again herself. "It's just 'Rita', Mr. Rufus." Sunlight ahead. "... How'd you know you were the first to talk to me? Now that you mention it, I don't like that nobody else has." Beat. "Most people don't bite each other on a third date, either. Don't listen to Petra."
Rufus Shinra	Even if he's no longer being (visibly) threatened, Rufus does wait till Rita's taken a few steps forward before he follows, and keeps a healthy distance between him and her. "Why'd I guess I was the first one to talk to you? Because nobody else was ready to admit we screwed up." > "Most people don't bite each other on a third date, either. Don't listen to Petra." "Ayy." Finger-guns. "So that's why I'm here, though. We all just spent a week going at each other, over very high stakes. We've done a lot of things to each other. We all had a really awful time. And it ended in a loss on one side and a neutral outcome on the other." "All of that, and the Seed of Light's spent, and Angela is still stuck." "Sougo's sounding unusually chipper. Woz is unusually quiet. Sarracenia's being more of a - troublemaker than usual." Rufus pronounces troublemaker like it rhymes with itch. "Petra's dealing with things in her usual way, and Lilian - I don't know her well enough to say but it doesn't fully sound like she's herself." Admittedly he's stretching his assumptions on some of those. "Kinda like, some parts of us are still in there. And I don't mean just literally." The joke is automatic, without his heart behind it this time. "And you, nobody's even reached out to you yet. That's... not fun, right?" "And I was thinking about all this back then, back when I was talking to you on the final day. That... there wasn't really a path forward from this. Not unless we consciously make one." "So that's why I'm here. I want to start - I don't know. Not forgiveness. But, making things right, maybe. Trying to make things a little less miserable. For everyone."
Rita Ma	Finger-guns are a perplexing gesture. Rita's face twitches. She thinks about reciprocating, but coming from Rufus, she's not certain it isn't obscene. Through a door, she leads him back up to the slightly-slanted top deck. Seagulls scatter from their perch on an edge. Grass and neat white-and-black flowers are spilling out from the garden dome's glittering remains. The grand apple tree's branches sway in the cool breeze- it's starting to have a few fruits, now. Somewhere a long way below, kids run and scream and play. You can just hear it, if you strain. "I'd hate seeing most of them, I think. They're the people I need to talk to least. I've been talking to Ms. Rook, and Ms. Grier, and-- my family," she isn't so unguarded as to give him their names for free, "and everyone else, and that's what I've needed." "But they don't know that. So... yeah. It is a little awful." Walking through the glass-strewn top-deck meadow, Rita hops up onto one of the apple tree's smaller roots- which is to say, about car-diameter- and sits primly legs-crossed. Her fingers awkwardly twiddle atop the coiled Warpgate cable, still held hostage. Taking the tension out of things so effectively has thrown her off her script. Her face pinches with sudden annoyance about something, but she pulls back from it. "If you want to make things better for 'everyone', you should start with the Agents. The whole City, but the Agents first. 'Everyone' isn't just..." Carefully picking words as she looks down from her root-throne. "You can't start thinking of Elites as 'us', and not-Elites as 'them', you know. Lots of people do that. It's a poison."
Rufus Shinra	"Mmmh." Rufus, remaining on the ship's deck, looks out over the town. He looks up at the grand apple tree. Then he looks over at Rita. "The thing is, though, that taking care of 'everyone' everyone isn't..." "... Well, I mean, if you don't use 'us' and 'them', and you start grouping everyone into one big pile, you start bringing the average down pretty quickly, don't you?" "Because the average person on the street isn't going to do anything particularly interesting with their life. They're going to go earn enough money to live off of, maybe have a few kids and maybe or maybe not do a good job raising them, maybe do a few hobbies moderately well, maybe excel at one or two things, and that's it." "If there's a disaster happening, they aren't going to go out to prevent it. If there's a revolution happening, they aren't going to go take part. If there's an opportunity to be a hero, they aren't going to be a hero, they're just going to go home. They may say they'd stand up for justice or freedom or their beliefs, and they may even make a token effort, but when push comes to shove they are just going to let the opposing force roll over them." "That sort of person should still be protected and taken care of, sure. They still deserve a good life. But they aren't..." Rufus finds a bit of railing to lean against, coincidentally putting his back towards the settlement. "... Worthwhile. In the grand scheme of things." "I don't think it's a poison. I think it's common sense. You need to take care of the elites first, they're the big movers and shakers that'll make life better for everyone else. It all just sort of trickles down from them."
Rita Ma	'those people aren't really worthwhile' Rita turns that over with slightly pursed lips. She looks mostly neutral. You'd have to know Rita's little expressions personally to tell she's really thinking about kicking in Rufus's ribs again. She scoots her butt off the big root, and shifts the Warpgate cable to one hand while strutting to the carrier's edge near Rufus, and then- -pitches back- and flings it over the railing, sailing through the air for hundreds of feet. You can just barely hear it clatter against someone's tin roof, not much more than a speck. "I hope somebody's nice enough to bring that back up for you," she says perkily, while swaying back from the edge. Great. Now he'll be stuck here all evening. Worse, he might have to go down there and convince those folks to give it back. "You know, Mr. Rufus, someone might say people are made by their environment. Someone might say the powerful make that environment. Every person down there in that town saved my life, twice. They're incredible. What's wrong with people where you're from? Who made them that way?" There's an uncomfortable peppiness to her now; a brightness to her eyes. Instead of being resigned that she might have to kill him, now it feels a little nice to toy with the idea of breaking a few bones. "I don't think you get why you were wrong at all. If you're going to care about me just because I'm strong, I think I'd rather you jumped off the edge."
Rufus Shinra	"Wait-" says Rufus as Rita pitches back. > "What's wrong with people where you're from? Who made them that way?" "Good question," he mutters. > "I don't think you get why you were wrong at all. If you're going to care about me just because I'm strong, I think I'd rather you jumped off the edge." "Well good news, I care about you a lot less now," says Rufus, staring down at the cable, mentally running through his options for rescue or retrieval. "I'm regretting coming to talk to you at all, if what I get back is threats and childish pranks. You know, I thought you were using White Night out of necessity, like I was, but now I'm not sure you weren't actually using that awful thing because you enjoyed it." With that, Rufus turns to go stalk off and try to find a way down and out to the ground level.
Rita Ma	Rita... looks a tiny bit uncomfortable, really. It can't be because Rufus dislikes her- she wouldn't have done that if she weren't comfortable with that outcome. Then why? Was there any point to doing that? Even if he's coming from a bad place, shouldn't I encourage improved behavior? The dead can't forgive him. But I'm not killing him, so what does he deserve? Why'd I think that would feel good? Did it? Her eyes slide away, to the cable-speck. Muted: "Sorry. Maybe some of me is still back there, too." She starts walking briskly, and squeezes past his skulking pace, presumably headed to the ground floor too. In passing: "It's fine if you don't like me, but while I get this fixed, at least go down to the village. There's a fish kebab place, Mao's. ... You can start by liking them."