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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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.

War everywhere. For everyone. Sakura wondered if that was one of the underlying factors that could tie so many of them together -- or drive them apart. "War... I'm sorry to hare about that. Would you like to talk about it?"

In her limited experience, the answer was almost always a resounding no.

She shakes her head slowly. "Maybe... maybe later. I'll have to talk to someone eventually, after all." Does Sakura have to deal with war as well? Who here doesn't have some kind of conflict?

She wonders at that eventually. Back home, most folks probably never would. Who talked?

Really, who did? "Whenever you want to." Sakura felt awkward, if at the same time... "I'm more than happy to lend an ear. Two, even." She smiles, pulling at both her lobes.

She's not sure what she can do, but listening? That much she can offer.

To someone, anyways. Lacus, or Kira, or Athrun - one of the people she trusted most. It wouldn't be healthy to just stew in it forever.

Still, the offer from Sakura is kind. "Thanks. I'll keep it in mind."

She flashes another smile at the other woman, settling back into the bath. She doesn't feel relaxed, but that might have been too much to hope for. With everything going on, outside of anything she understood, she had to learn new ways of making herself relax.

After all, she knew how bad stress was for the system. "You know what else would be great around here, in my opinion?"

"What's that?" She sank down a bit, trying to get herself relaxed again. A bit of a futile effort, but she still felt better than she would in a lot of places.

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