trans_9 | Open, Bathhouse, 2 years younger

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Open, Bathhouse, 2 years younger

Cagalli in the bathhouse isn't an odd sight at all. It's pretty much her favorite place to relax alone, even if the 'alone' part ends up not working out for all that long, depending on the day.

If you don't really look closely, there's nothing out of the usual here, but beyond that... she's a bit smaller, her face just a little more youthful. She also looks like she's ready to slip into the water, just that little bit, and take a nice deep breath. Not that she's considering it, but she really wears her emotions out in the open.

"Father..."

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"Wet," she responded with a shrug. "And warm." It was hard to make herself worry too much about whether or not the water was how she liked it at the moment.

"Aah," Sakura said, nodding to herself. "How very like water." She went over to test out the waters, amused to note they qualified as being a great deal more than warm. As they really should, she thought, slowly sliding into the water herself.

"Warm and wet indeed!" She sighed, enjoying the temporary sensation that reminded her of home. "It's not quite like the hot springs back home, but it's pretty amazing of Billy and Celena to have made all of this functional and open to the rest of the crew."

"I'm from a volcanic island chain. Imagine what I'm used to." She always went to the hotter springs here for a reason, even if they lacked the dissolved minerals of the natural springs in Orb. Nostalgia and relaxation were probably good for her health as well. "I oughta thank them some time, in person."

Sakura tilted her head to the side, regarding the other woman. "Higher mineral content," she said, grinning. "Maybe sulfur, depending."

She rolled her shoulders, sinking down a littler further into the water. Heat penetrating into her core was delicious, given it was her first attempt at relaxing in a while. "So should I. Things mean that much more when it's face to face." OmniComms were useful, incredibly so, but not a stand in for sharing gratitude face to face.

"Among other things." Orb was fairly mineral rich as well. "I bet they'd appreciate it, it can't have been easy." She was about as relaxed as she was gonna get for now. At least, she was physically relaxed, even if her thoughts were still a whirlwind.

"Nothing on ship really is," she said, eyes half closing. "Though I guess the situation kind of underlines that fact."

She was content to lapse into quiet, her own thoughts milling around and doubling back on each other. The developing situation in medical, worries about the Ohm, worries about what to do and how to be part of a disconnected group of people. "Makes places like these all the more valuable."

Cagalli's thoughts weren't so topical, wandering back to troubles at home, before coming here. All she has here is training, getting better at piloting. "Every little comfort helps."

"Mmm." Sakura wasn't sure how much she agreed. Comfort was nice, but a luxury. In the scheme of things, comfort wasn't what helped her most... if the little comforts did make the larger reality more bearable. "You're right," she said, slowly reopening her eyes. "I guess they do more than I realized. Like toothbrushes."

She snorted, a soft exhalation, shaking her head. "Decent ones, at least."

"Ha. It'd be nice, wouldn't it? If things were at all like home..." At least someone's solving the food problem, such as it is.

"Yes, it would... but then again, whose home?" She stretched her arms out in front of her, poking the tips of her fingers up out of the water. "A little bit of everyones?"

"How about the ones with toothbrushes and showers and beaches..." Which was probably most of them, especially in the case of beaches.

"Ocean, lake, or river beaches?" Sakura looked over at her, curious.

"For me? The ocean... Orb's an island nation, so the beaches are just... part of living there." She leaned back, sighing and reminiscing.

Sakura thought back to the beaches she's seen over the years. The most recent one had been in the sensorium, a beach unrelated to her world in any sense. "We had small ones, sandy banks by the river near town. I didn't see oceans until I was in my teens. Never spent any time on one, even then."

Funny that the closest she'd ever come to enjoying an ocean beach had been racing Marco and then faceplanting into the water in a place where everything only existed based on mutual agreement. "It'd be nice to see one again."

"You should see what I'm used to. The beaches are beautiful, there's surfing, scuba diving... we're taking some tourism away from Hawaii." Maybe Sakura doesn't know what surfing or Hawaii are, but... whatever. "If we ever get to spend a few days somewhere like that, I'm heading straight for it."

"Surfing? Scuba diving?" Sakura sat up, bringing her hands back under the water. "Can't say I've any idea what you're talking about. Does Orb rely on tourism, or is that more of a benefit your country's been experiencing recently?"

Hawaii. A person, a place, or what? Maybe a place, based on context.

She could explain that later. "Actually, Orb's focus is on technology. Selling the products, selling how to make them... we're too small to have a lot of industry, so we've had to focus on that."

She nodded. It made sense for a country to capitalize on what it could; the hidden villages did much the same, if they were service oriented rather than technology oriented. Sakura wondered if Orb followed the other familiar standard, bringing in in trade what they couldn't make for themselves. "Is Orb self-sufficient otherwise?"

"Not entirely. I mean, we have to import certain foods and a lot of raw materials, but we produce almost all of our energy with geothermal power." It's something she's proud of, both from an economical and environmental stand point.

Geothermal power? Sakura nodded, pulling up other country names in her mind, some of which capitalized on a similar energy source. "You mentioned being part of an active island chain? It'd make sense that you could capitalize on geothermal power like that." If only it'd been more popular back home.

"There's enough of it for all civilian use, and all but the most energy-intensive science and industry." They HAD been using a variety of backups, but the nuclear reactors that had been their main fall-back had been rendered moot by the N-Jammers.

Even if she couldn't really blame anyone for putting them down...

"That's pretty amazing, from what I understand. Technology seems to require a lot of power to get running, let alone keep running." She pushed back, sitting up in the water. "Being a smaller country and able to provide all of your own energy is powerful in and of itself. I don't know if many places back home could make the same claim."

"It's one of the things that's kept Orb afloat... even with how chaotic things have been." Which brings her back to why she was moping in the first place.

"Things had been difficult?" She looked up, curious. Sakura wasn't being as careful with her wording as she should have been, if she didn't notice in that moment.

"There's been a... a war. It reached Orb recently." Cagalli is happy to dance around the biggest thing weighing on her mind for now though.

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