Scene #8388: Presumptuous, For-

Owner	Pose
Rita Ma	The account Ishirou uses for the cooking chat gets a curt series of DMs from someone he knows well. >I've heard about what's happened. >You did it again didn't you? >We have to talk. In person. >Come to the Stargazer Mall. The minigolf course. It's a public place. >... I'm not going to beat you up. So we're clear. The Stargazer Mall is built into an asteroid, at a convenient intersection of warpgates. Its glass 'skylights' appropriately show the starry black of outer space. Most people are here for business, and the ones here for leisure trend old enough that they don't have the energy for silly games. Which is to say, the little astroturf minigolf course set up around a pond in the middle of a mall atrium is completely deserted, despite being surrounded by the muffled chatter and bustle of dozens of people just beyond its limits. It's a nice guarantee of civility and privacy both: no eavesdroppers, and yet nobody can take a swing here without making a very big mess. But deserted, completely, as in: not even Rita seems to be there. The only evidence that anyone has visited the minigolf course all day is a club and a ball lying by the edge of the water. Maybe she's just running late?
Ishirou	>Um. > ...Okay. >Okay. Ishirou has not had a good time of things lately. Some of these things are his own fault (actually most of them if you're an impassive observer) which included both dying and then having his leg crushed off. /Thankfully/ he was repaired, but he hasn't transferred to a new body yet. His face is still a screen, and his chassis is still a temporary form. It's crude, but it does the job until the other can be done. Arriving at the astroturf minigolf, he takes a brief look around. Secluded..? Well, that's fine. It means they can talk, and the subject matter is going to be heavy. He sighs, not looking forward to it because he isn't sure if he's ready to tackle everything. In reality, he rather /not/ think about things. He gets to the club and ball at the edge of the water. Huh. He looks around, and Rita still isn't there. Well, she'll be here eventually, right?
Rita Ma	The waterfall burbles. People chatter, their voices echoing under the high ceiling and blending into a chorus. A baby wails, like babies do for no good reason. Someone laughs. It all goes on uncomfortably long, with nothing for Ishirou to focus on but the scuffed ball and the fake grass and his reflection in the water. A tall, dark-haired woman in a peacoat approaches the minigolf course eventually. She weaves between the decorative plastic ferns that mark its border, steps over the little artificial river, and sits down next to him without a word, staring into the water. A moment later, with a blink-and-you'll-miss-it flowing-shifting of camouflage, she stops being a stranger and starts being Rita. Implictly, she had to make sure he wasn't being tailed. "You know why I'm upset with you, don't you, Mr. Ishirou?" Her hands are balled up tightly in her lap. She can't quite bear to look at him, but maybe that's just because right now he isn't much to look at.
Ishirou	The screen turns to the woman, the boredom of waiting hasn't made his senses unsharpened, but he doesn't say anything until after she transforms into Rita, and asks her question. Of course, he knows, but rather he would say is up in the air right now with him. He turns the screen head away slightly, and then down. "Because I ran off and could have gotten killed," he says, hollowly. Yeah, it was going to be about that. Which means it will likely wrap around to /her/ at some point. If he had a stomach it'd be queasy right now. He doesn't want to think about it, or her, or anything revolving around that anymore. "...I thought at the time it was something I could do to undo the harm I caused her by doing it the first time...but she was right."
Rita Ma	"Because I ran off and could have gotten killed." "Again," Rita says. She doesn't have the energy to sound harsh about it. "Killed again." Her lips press together in a tight line, and she tensely squeezes handfuls of her skirt. "I was going to scold you about all that. 'How do you think it makes the people who love you feel?' 'How do you think it makes me feel, that Ms. Petra stays gone, and you get away with being so reckless?'" "But there's no point in saying that, is there." Her posture sags. She steals a glance at his body, the wrongness of it. "You already know. You already regret it." She pauses. Again, the susurrus of the mall drags on for an uncomfortably long time. "So," Rita finally says, "I'm going to show you something different." "You got careless, and you got killed by just a girl with a gun. And then someone brought you back. And instead of learning how dangerous it is to be careless, you learned that it doesn't matter if you're careless, because someone can bring you back no matter what." She's clearly leading up to something, but whatever it is, she doesn't reveal it just yet. "That's right, isn't it?"
Ishirou	'You already know. You already regret it.' "...Yeah," Ishirou says, it's a simple statement, but there is a heaviness to it that he might have not intended. It shows on his face...well...not literally on the LCD part of the screen, but rather what's written on it. There is a diagonally-tilted smiley face complete with a loling tongue in crimson. His torso, dent mostly still there has a target in alternating colors marked. '...you learned that it doesn't matter if you're careless, because someone can bring you back no matter what.' Ishirou sags a little in his spot, he doesn't answer immediately, instead letting the mall behind them's noises hang for a time. 'Tell me to calm down when you've done something...' 'At least I'd be doing /something/...' "...It's better than doing nothing...and letting people down, or someone get away with something...or people hurt..." he just hangs his head even more. He knows he shouldn't, but if he can't really die then what? Shouldn't he just do things to try and make up for what he did? Or rather, didn't do? Or failed to do. Indus still weighs heavy on him, and with Petra he couldn't ever get justice because truth be told she was complicit...but she didn't actually /do/ it. She betrayed his trust and a vulnerable time...but it was Eggman who did it. It just festered...over and over and over again. He lets Rita continue, "...Yes, it is."
Rita Ma	A sympathetic wince spreads over Rita's face. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't think that way, too. When it feels like you can do something good by sacrificing yourself... if you're unhappy enough, that can feel like a good idea. But you have a lot to live for. And a lot of people who love you, the real you." "Yes, it is." "And that's wrong." Rita holds out her arm. The sleeve of her blue jacket slowly unravels in a spiraling strip, loses its color, and stops pretending it's not a horrible tentacle. It's all done with a deliberate slowness, so as not to seem aggressive. And it isn't cloaked. She wants him to see, for once, even if that means anxiously watching the crowd beyond the plastic plants to make sure nobody notices (but of course they don't). This is the stillest and closest he's ever seen one. All the horrid details are so clear: the way it's just translucent enough to let the light shine through it, like a gummy candy; the gradient of color from the dark base to the pale tip; the spiraling grooves that run along its length; the way its point is so perversely sharp for something otherwise soft. It squirms restlessly in the air while she musters up the strength to look at him again, eyes half-hidden by the shadow of her bangs. Maybe the fact that he looks 'wrong' now, too, makes it easier. "Remember, Mr. Ishirou, that what I'm about to do isn't a threat. It's not an attack. It's a warning, and advice. Okay?"
Ishirou	'But you have a lot to live for.' Does he? It's something that's been scratching at the back of his mind. Everything in Indus has come crashing down. He has no home after so much time and effort went into trying to rid it of the slavers. Out of /spite/. Out of malice. He tried to change that and it was ruined all by the act of one girl with a gun. 'And a lot of people who love you...' Because he trusted that girl with a gun. She used him to get at Lilian for whatever sick game she was playing. He couldn't forgive her... '...the real you.' Because he couldn't forgive himself. They all told him that it wasn't his fault, but he didn't see it this way. He was the smart one, they told him, but if he was so smart then why did Eggman win? Why did he give information to Nazca? Why did he let people take advantage of him? The veil behind Rita's real form starts to be pulled back. He does not look surprised or shocked by this. He simply watches as things are shown...for the first time in the open. She didn't know that he 'knew' they were there, but that wasn't important. He doesn't look disgusted or afraid of her...and he really /should/. He was to Lilian and all she did was raise her voice. "...I see...okay," Ishirou says in lame resignation.
Rita Ma	That resignation makes Rita flinch. She's already being tenuously brave, here- even just unraveling one sleeve in such a public space feels gut-droppingly forbidden. (Why didn't she just take him somewhere private? Because she was scared he wouldn't trust her enough?) So the feeling that she's kicking him while he's down, too, nearly brings her to a halt. But it's for his own good, she thinks, and that gives her the strength to keep going. "Okay," she says. "Please try not to yell." And the tentacle's point just barely pierces the metal of his chest, and a little trickle of glowing blue starts to flow out of him like it's drawing his blood, and- Some things are so dark you can even see them against the night sky. This is a true harm. A tiny piece of his soul, what makes him himself, is being shaved off. And then a tiny bit more. And a tiny bit more than that. This is going to kill him. It is killing him. There will be, he can feel as a self-evident fact, absolutely nothing left of Ishirou. He is experiencing something profoundly impossible: the feeling of being nothing, becoming nothing. It's hard to even say whether it hurts. This is a new kind of horrible thing which 'pain' seems insufficient to describe. It feels skin-crawlingly violatory in a blasphemous sense that it could be this easy to destroy someone's immortal soul. Like watching a spider eat a bird. This should be categorically above something so gross to desecrate and prey upon- but it's not- it really is that easy- and in just a second, he'll be- It stops. The tentacle jerks away. It only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second. Ishirou is still almost entirely alive and almost entirely himself. Rita is halfway glassy-eyed and breathing a little hard. She had something she was going to say, but now she just looks kind of sick, and dry-swallows instead.
Ishirou	Ishirou will not know at the moment how brave Rita is being for his sake, how much the last part of the paragraph he was agonizing over was /true/. She's showing the most vulnerable part of herself, the thin veil of pretending on both sides forgotten. She wanted to teach him an important lesson, that nobody was beyond death. It's pure horror that he's exposed to. The feeling of true death, the death of the ego. He can't escape it, he can't wiggle out of it, he can't play dead and pretend, he can't fight it, he can't analyze it, he can't understand it, he can't do /anything/. Its death comes to collect its due, true oblivion in the truest sense. He wants to scream but can't. Trapped in what feels like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The point is that no matter how hard he fights he'll never get anywhere. That the only point that he's falling to is the center. To that oblivion that's inescapable. Then it was gone, she breaks contact. It was only a second, but he nearly has a seizure...or the robotic equivalent of one. His senses snap back to reality without a clutch and it's all he has in him to not scream in panic. Then he's a wreck, sinking in on himself and curling. He's sobbing, shaking, trying not to scream. But at that moment one important thing was known: He didn't want to die again. He didn't want to face that again. He never wanted to see that again. If he had lungs he'd be hyperventilating. The shell of ego he had, the fragile walls he'd built to try and not deal with both the trauma and pain he's felt come crumbling down.
Rita Ma	The tentacle is already re-becoming Rita's jacket sleeve, but every other part of her is briefly frozen in guilty shock. She reaches out to lay a hand on him comfortingly, but then thinks better of it, and flinches away. "I'm- sorry. I'm really, really sorry." He wouldn't want to be touched by her again, she thinks. So instead she stands up, hands balled in front of her chest, and barely keeps both from looking at him shaking and from doing so herself. Her shoulders rise and fall in a deep, steeling breath. "I'd never do that to you, Mr. Ishirou," she manages to say, softly. "But I don't think I'm the only one who can. So don't you dare-" her voice quivers, there, a little- "throw yourself away again. And tell everyone who might think like you to be careful, too." Turning and walking away feels uncomfortably cold. But she does it anyway, because she can't think of what else to do.
Ishirou	Ishirou is completely incapable of coherent speech right now, such is the terror that he was exposed to, the lesson of how fleeting life can be when exposed to certain abilities. He can't answer her because it's all he can do to not just start screaming. He said he wouldn't, and that's the only thing he can cling to. She turns to walk away, but before she goes, POD floats in front of her for a moment to block her path. -Unit POD understands the lesson Unit Rita has given Unit Ishirou today. Unit POD will thank you in his stead and will make sure he gets back somewhere safe.- With that, it moves to the side and watches over Ishirou until he can move again. This place is private enough, at least.
Rita Ma	Rita stops mid-step in surprise, then manages a meager little smile, and gives POD a little polite bow. "Thank you, Mr. Pod. I appreciate you keeping him safe." Then she slips past it, and in a moment or two she's vanished into the crowd, in more ways than one.