trans_9 | Catching up on reading

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Catching up on reading

Fuu hadn't gone down to the planet yet and hadn't decided whether or not she was going to. It seemed a bit unusual to go on shore leave when she still didn't have any official duties on the ship... and where in the multiverse had Stacy found a planet called Happy Happy Fun World? She might go eventually, but there was still so much on the ship that she had to get acquainted with.

Right now, Fuu could be found in the media library, studying everything she could: the battles with the Ohm, the various struggles the crew had gone through, and most of all, the Daligig, GIA, and Ohm. It was might be an unusual priority for someone who was supposed to be a chosen warrior, but Fuu had been a chosen warrior before. She did not want to follow that path again. Windam would not fight for an unknown reason, either.

...Another major but comparatively frivolous preoccupation was that, well. She kept seeing Gundams and X-Wings in the space battles. There were also names in the crew manifest that up until now Fuu had thought were made up. In fact, the first Gundam she had seen was that--that incredibly--well that one from the very strange children's series with the different countries and anyway once you saw a Gundam in a sailor fuku you didn't forget in a hurry, even though Fuu wasn't really a Gundam fan.

Really, it was giving the poor girl far too much to think about.

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Soren was in the library, too, scrolling through a series of reference materials on a nearby datapad. He gave a brief nod to Fuu (who at least at the decency to keep it quiet in here, unlike the other library patrons), then took a seat in a nearby fleshy chair.

He had a wide variety of materials out and available to him: history volumes on various wars, texts on space travel, tactical references.

Fuu smiled as the man nodded at her, quietly taking in observations about his appearance and what she could see of his reading choices. Wars, tactics, history, and space... was he new as well, or was he continuing a line of learning he'd already started.

"Hello," she said, and turned back to her console--if he was open to conversation right now, she would talk. If not, she would wait.

After a time, he looked up from his datapad. "And why is it that you're not down on the planet, enjoying yourself with all the rest?" he asked dryly. After all, the others certainly hadn't wasted any time galloping off and amusing themselves with frivolities.

"Well, I'm quite new here. It would feel strange to go on vacation when I don't even have a job on the ship yet." There was something to the man's tone that said he disapproved of the shore leave, but Fuu was going to be polite. "I'm still learning about what's going on."

Soren disapproved of everything. Everything.

He made a noncommittal noise that sounded more like a "hmmmmph" than anything else, then went back to his reading for a bit.

~~o rly~~

All right, well, Fuu wasn't sure what to make of that reaction. Was he making a comment on her remaining aboard, on the shore leave, or was it a general 'hmmmmph' to the multiverse at large?

She would have liked to try and continue the conversation with him, but it looked like he had gone back to his reading and it would be rude to interrupt.

Edited 2011-10-16 04:40 (UTC)

After a long pause, Soren looked back up again. "And what is it that you've come here to learn?"

Fuu's smile was a big self-conscious. "Everything, I suppose." She glanced down at the datapad she was studying, paused in the midst of the crew's first contact with the Daligig. "But what I'm most concerned about is the reason we're fighting."

"Hmm." Another pause, but briefer this time. "The reason we're fighting is for our own benefit. Our own survival. Though I suppose it can be useful to know your enemy's motivations. It makes it easier to exploit their weaknesses."

Ah... so he was approaching it as a soldier, seeing enemies as enemies and focused on their defeat. Maybe he had been a professional soldier before being brought aboard Stacy.

"Perhaps. But to me, it seems like there's very little information on our enemies' motivation, or who our allies are." Fuu didn't want to do something terrible because of hasty assumptions.

"And what of that?" Soren asked. "What does it matter? We should wring as much use out of our 'allies' as we can and crush as many of our enemies as we can get away with."

They weren't even getting paid for this, so the name of the game was survival, plain and simple.

We are not going to agree on anything, are we. Fuu had to take a moment to construct a polite response to such--no, she shouldn't dismiss it only as callousness. He had emphasized the point of survival; probably that was the position he was used to working from.

Then again, 'as many enemies as we can get away with' had a rather cruel ring to it. "I don't want to hurt any more people than I have to. It's clear that the Ohm need to be stopped, but I don't want to be manipulated or misled."

"Which is why we should be the ones doing the manipulating," Soren scoffed. "Instead, here we sit, blindly groping at any information our allies choose to toss in our direction. It's almost laughable."

For what it was worth, Soren did agree with the part about not hurting more than he had to. It's just that he perceived the number of necessary casualties as far higher. After all, you had to be sure to cripple your enemies to make sure they couldn't cause trouble again in three or four years.

An interesting point of view... although it was still too harsh for Fuu to say that she agreed with it, being in this weak position was not what she wanted. The question was how to change the situation....

"May I ask you how long you've been here, ah--" She smiled sheepishly. "Forgive me, I never introduced myself. My name is Hououji Fuu."

"Soren. I came in the release before this one. Unfortunately." He came, he saw, he was crabby.

"Mm..." Fuu paused a moment, working out how to best interpret the unfortunately. "It's a terrible situation. I think I'm glad that I'm aware of it now, in a way."

Clef's study habits could best be described as nomadic. His most well-guarded secret was that his office at home had actually been a disaster area of disorganized paperwork; had he been of a more artistic bent he might have come to regard his desk as a modern sculpture decrying the expansion of government or the plight of the working man, because it certainly didn't serve any kind of purpose as a work area. Books read at his desk ran a high risk of being buried under the latest shipment of dead trees, and he didn't want to contemplate what Pharle Presea would think if he told her he had lost the book she'd lent him in all the paperwork on his desk. Besides, other people knew where his office was and could easily interrupt him at any time - clearly, the best way to actually get things done was not to do them there.

But here he had no office (and no Presea) and there were datapads and terminals instead of bookshelves and books. And text wasn't even the only option, because this was a media library. It was a little overwhelming, but he did his best not to look actually overwhelmed as he poked at the terminal and tried to figure out what all the readers did. No, really, he worked with hyper-advanced alien technology all the time. Totally. Meanwhile, he missed wandering among aisles of books, stopping every once in a while to settle and read for a while before packing up his caravan of words and moving on. It seemed like a much more tactile way of absorbing information.

He nodded to Fuu when he saw her; she seemed busy and he didn't have anything in particular to say, so 'hello' seemed like a questionable use of vocal power. Still, it was nice not to be alone, so he smiled.

When Fuu caught sight of Clef through her peripheral vision, she looked up quickly. This place had to be so unusual to him... Cephiro had been a land ruled by magic, with wells and swords rather than sinks and guns. There had been no mechanical technology like she'd known on Earth... and even if this place and situation were overwhelming, Fuu could at least see the ways it was similar to science fiction. Clef didn't have that.

It was so strange to see him wearing the plantsuit, rather than the heavy robes of the Guru. Still, she smiled back. "Hello, Clef-san. Are you here to study as well?" Absorbed in words as she was, she was happy to take a break to talk to him.

Although he didn't have his robes, some of his jewelery and his staff had been in the possessions locker; his earrings went tink very quietly as he nodded again. "... Although I have to admit that I don't have a particular subject in mind."

Right at the moment, he seemed to be studying the process of studying. It wasn't that the concept of highly-advanced technology was wholly alien to him - Cephiro didn't have it, but Autozam did and they weren't too far away. This was nothing like Autozam, though; where their machines were hard, metal, and soulless, this technology was organic and just slightly creepy. It was like magic, technology, and nature seamlessly combined - sleek and intuitive while still being just out of grasp.

"Reading anything interesting, Fuu?"

"It can be fun to pick a random shelf in the library and start reading," Fuu said with a smile; she'd done that at school often enough. Some people might think that strange, but she did love to learn. "Although the 'books' here take some getting used to."

She looked back at the screen, paused on one of the strange-looking Daligig, and her expression sobered. "Actually, I'm studying the records of the crew's first contact with the GIA--the moment that they found out why we've all been brought aboard Stacy."

Clef made that little 'heh' noise that passed as laughter for him. So, she did that kind of thing, too? Of course, so had Presea-- so did Presea, rather, because we were going to use the proper tense for people we hoped were still alive - but they were unusually indiscriminate in their choices of reading material. On a world where printing presses were still relatively uncommon, it was surprising how picky some people could be about what they read.

"Ah?" he uttered when she mentioned what she was studying, as he tried to direct the terminal towards a similar line of query. Realizing that he had allowed his conversation to become monosyllabic, he elaborated, "You... think it seems suspicious?"

It was like asking if water seemed maybe wet. The pamphlet they were given after awakening practically screamed, "WE DON'T TRUST THESE PEOPLE!" yet never came out and said one way or the other. It was unclear how much dissenting talk would be tolerated, and how much was really wise - after all, did it matter how suspicious the Dalgig were if fighting the Ohm was the only way to get their worlds back?

Fuu nodded. She had thought the same thing about the survival guide, and some of the conversations she'd had with more experienced crew members since reading hid had only reinforced the impression. "One of the security officers said that the Daligig don't like to give us very much information. I don't think the crew trusts them much, if at all."

She sighed. "Yet it seems we're compelled to follow the missions and directives that Stacy sets for us. I don't want to follow blindly, but I'm not sure what to do about it yet." Kanoe-san hadn't hesitated to talk to her about it, though, which was promising.

"You're farther along than I am, in that case," Clef admitted. He hadn't given the question much thought. Granted, he did think that the whole situation sounded awfully familiar, what with being sent into battle on little more than someone else's word. Perhaps that was part of why Fuu was so quick to question and investigate it - she had been through something strikingly similar not too long ago.

For Clef, part of his desire to believe the Dalgig lay in the fact that admitting that they were lying was tantamount to saying that no one really knew how to restore the crew's destroyed homeworlds. Which, in turn, was the same as saying that there might not even be a way to do so. In order to go against the Dalgig, then, he'd have to essentially write Cephiro off as a lost cause. He wasn't anywhere near ready to do that, yet - not even for a world that was dying anyway.

Even if he wasn't sure where he stood, however, Fuu's problem was still important. At the moment there was little difference between dissent and obedience other than attitude - and that was essentially no difference, when attitude could only hurt one and one's immediate teammates and Stacy had tens of thousands of crew members sleeping in pods who could be woken at any time.

"That said I believe you're making more progress than you think," he added finally. "If you surround yourself with enough like-minded people, a path will present itself."

Fuu nodded. From these recordings, the Ohm certainly seemed to be as dangerous and malicious as they had been told, clearly bent on attacking the planet and the crew defending it. She hadn't found any evidence yet to doubt that. But the lack of communication between the crew and the Daligig couldn't fail to make her uncomfortable.

Still, it was true that she couldn't rely on only one person's opinion of the situation to form her own. Kanoe-san had been informative and wiling to speak freely, but he might have some personal motivation for mistrust. She would have to speak to more people about it. Of course, the guide itself had been noticeably wary of the Daligig too.

"That's true... I still don't know very many people. I just hope that the path I find is the correct one."

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Catching up on reading

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