trans_9 | [closed; bendy-timed to after the show and tell of Cybil's Last Stand] meetings with another man's l

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[closed; bendy-timed to after the show and tell of Cybil's Last Stand] meetings with another man's l

The Teahouse. Sakura had "officially" moved out a while back, and had maintained that outward appearance. Her personal belongings, such as most were aware, sat in a room in the crew quarters proper. What she kept here these days were necessities and strategic supplies, along with the journal she didn't want people reading casually. If they could slog through the code, it said more about what she did and thought about this place than she was comfortable having people know.

Not that it mattered. She frowned, staring off at no particular point of the house, feeling Sta'c as a suffocating presence all around her. The sensation hadn't been this bad for weeks, but in the wake of Marco's repodding, and the events happening right before it (the events leading into it), it'd been coming back strongly in waves.

She wanted to tear something down to work the frustration out. Instead she systematically familiarized herself with the aresonal available to the crew. Anything as distraction. Anything in addition to the rest of what she did.

Showing the rest of the crew what she and Barbara had seen felt like progress, if she didn't know exactly to where. It made her think, and thinking had both upsides and downsides. Right now she was exploring an avenue that might be both. Talking to Jake, who admittedly, she mostly knew through Marco and a handful of casual direct conversations of their own, was a step outside her ordinary.

Sakura breathed in deeply, eyes closing for a brief moment. The door was unlocked, the room lit by the soft artificial light of whatever time of day the city was generating. Her eyes opened. She expected he'd be here any time now.

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Now, actually. He knew Sakura (sort of) through Marco. A girlfriend, different from some of the ones he remembered Marco having back home. They'd bickered a lot, but hey. When you were close with Marco, you had to get used to the bickering. So, maybe it wasn't really a surprise that she wanted to talk. The whole repodding thing always sucked. Did suck.

Besides, he'd been lost in his own thoughts far too often these days. He needed to talk to someone every so often or he'd go crazy. Especially here, where he always felt like he was being watching. He slipped into the tea house quietly, moving with a cautious tread. He wasn't a ninja, but he'd picked up some ability to move quietly during the War.

"Sakura?"

"Hey, Jake." Sakura looked up, lips curling up into a decently sincere smile. "Thanks for coming. Can I get you anything to drink? We've got black tea and luke-warm water."

She shifted away from the frame leading into the kitchen, eyebrow quirking up as she waited for an answer. Politeness and general hospitality (she'd learned to generally ignore questions about removing shoes before entering a home, or of finding something to pass as house slippers for everyone a long time back) won out over something as rude as diving right into a point Sakura wasn't particularly fond of, herself.

"Tea is fine," Jake replied with a wan smile of his own. He'd started drinking coffee at home, but tea worked too. He paused for a moment and then stepped further into the house.

"What's on your mind?"

He tended to get right to the point, anyway.

"Marco." Sakura was turning toward the kitchen interior, answering Jake as she did so. "And our other mutual acquaintance, Sta'c K'ltrrb'txft."

The kettle was already full, and the mysterious means that kept the electric oven working meant the range-top worked as well. She pulled down two mugs. The muffled thump as she sat them on the counter made her start, and she frowned.

It was incredibly disorientating to realise yet again how little power you could have in even the most minor of things. As long as someone, or something, thought they knew what was best for you.

And had the power to act on that presumption.

Jake probably should have guessed. Jake trailed her into the kitchen, feeling that sense of awkwardness that tended to follow him around when he was dealing with unfamiliar people. Even if she'd been Marco's girlfriend - was Marco's girlfriend, he couldn't say he knew her all that well beyond the few words they'd exchanged.

"Need a hand with anything?" He asked. Reflex. Something to keep his hands and mind busy for a few minutes. Then he pushed on.

"Well, he's been repodded. What did you want to know? Or talk about?"

"Sure. Think you can get the tin off the top shelf in those cupboards?" She gestures to the left, lips quirking up into a different kind of grin. She forces herself to let go of some of her tension. "Height rule. Tall people get to do the top shelf reaching."

While she waited, looking around for the small supply of honey she'd stashed away, Sakura reviewed how there could be any great way to get into what it was she specifically wanted to talk about. There really wasn't, yet she pushed through the rest of her concerns first. "I'd say how Eva's handling it, but I think she's running mazes." It was an honest concern. Other people's families meant something to Sakura, where her own was -- now buried out in Hydroponics.

She didn't want to think about that either. "How are you holding up?"

"Sure. But I don't think I'm that tall," Jake replied with a wry chuckle. He had grown a lot over the years, though, so he simply snagged the tin off of the shelf and brought it back over to the counter.

"Marco's mom..." He ran a hand through his hair, "...I guess I'll talk to her when she shows up again. He was my friend, so..."

Jake trailed off with a shrug. Then she was asking about him. Fantastic. So he answered.

"I'm doing fine," That was his usual answer. Fine. Even if 'fine' meant he was bottling everything up and not letting it out. Ever.

"He'll be OK - I know he will."

"Tall enough!" A spoon close to manifested with the brief opening and closing of a drawer.

"I worry about Eva. I'm not worried about Marco. Well... I am, but that's about the usual level of worry I have for anyone sleeping in pods." SHODAN had brought that fear screaming to the forefront, and Sakura was never going to stop having the nightmares tinged with her own failure and sense of the inevitable.

His fine has her staring, with an expression he might have recognized on Cassie's face. Calling a bluff, but being who she was, doing so without words. No. Screw that. Talking what what she had asked him over for. "You're about as honest as I am." The statement made her laugh, a lighter sound than she was expecting. She looked away, pulling the honey out with a spartan motion. "How familiar are you with the stated logic behind repoddings?"

Jake returned the look with one of his own - welll, to be more accurate, his typical poker-face. But there was always something distant in his eyes, a weight, a sadness, an age that made him look too old. He couldn't hide that, even if he could smile and nod politely and lie through his teeth and still act like he was telling God's honest truth.

"I try to be," was his only response to her little word on honesty. Then, on to business. He gave another shrug, brow furrowed just slightly.

"As far as I know, it's supposedly to help keep our souls or energy or whatever from degrading and making us go crazy. Or some other dire consequence."

"Supposedly. Like our running with GLaDOS." Sakura watched the kettle, falling silent.

"Marco wasn't repodded for any reason related to his Avia, if you run with that theory."

The kettle started to hiss, a prelude to its later shrieking wail.

"Marco was repodded because of me."

"Because of you?" Jake blinked. He hadn't expected that.

"What makes you say that?

"Sta'c K'ltrrb'txft informed me as such. After taking the time to crawl through my brain and locate memories to justify her actions, done," Sakura said, tone of voice dead calm, "For 'my own good.'"

There was a moment where Jake's expression twisted into something like disgust and hate. Just like a Yeerk. Just like them to crawl into someone's head and use their own memories and sense of self against them. And then he managed to get himself back under control and he shook his head slowly.

"...that's such bull. Why would she do that? What was she trying to prove?"

"Its absolute control. Its immense wisdom in micromanaging our lives. It had the--" Sakura smiled, nothing close to humor in it, "--nerve to tell me it was disappointed in me. Disappointed that its best course of action was taking Marco out of the equation entirely."

The hissing was louder.

"The biggest joke being why him, and why not me." She had her own theories, if she didn't offer them up front. They were just theories. That's all they'd ever be. "For a ship that swears to want to preserve what groups and important people we have, I'm the weak link. Not Marco."

On a resource level... it depended on one's definition of resource, and exploit-ability.

Jake ignored the hissing. He hadn't thought he'd ever feel this angry again. Not since the war, not since his brother, not since he'd had to fight and scrape and sacrifice just to make sure his family stayed together, let alone his species. He couldn't stop his hands from tembling slightly.

"To Hell with that. To hell with this ship. We're finding the plug and we're turning her off."

"Yes. We are."

If that was inclusive or not, she gave no outward indication. Instead, she turned and caught the loop of the kettle's handle, lifting it up and off the on burner to set down on the one next to it. Sakura picked up the tea tin, measuring out some of the leaves into the seeper. She had the first mug of tea going a moment later.

"And for all it's probably used to hearing people say that, at least it can only guess while we're down here." Much like it was at Cassie's house -- if more limited.

"I don't like having people sift through my mind. But you can't avoid that all the time."

He leaned against the kitchen counter, lost in thought for a long moment. His eyes had gone hard.

"What are you thinking?"

Watching the dark coil of the tea leaves leeching into the hot water, Sakura was silent. There were many, many things going through her mind, a fact Marco had been too well introduced to on a first-hand basis.

"That's a big question. Sure you want to hear all of it?" The question was rheotrical. "This ship is an organic hybrid, or outright organic. For all the fact programming and the inner workings of machinery is outside of my sphere of influence, organic systems are where I excel."

She tapped her fingers on the counter top, falling quiet as she thought. Calculated. "The AI system on a basic level is necessary for what? Functionality? Yet we're given two personality interfaces, both which communicate back to the Daligig. One's quick to take militant control, where the other operates on more subtle manipulation."

She was thinking out loud, stirring the tea as she stopped herself.

"Apparently, we used to be a prison ship," Jake snorted at the 'used to be'. Sure, this wasn't a prison. A decent prison, but still a prison.

"The Warden was probably for dealing directly with prisoners who were trouble. Or just playing bad cop. Stacy? Probably to interface directly with the command crew and play good cup. She's the user interface, the friendly smile that hides all the nasty stuff. Or to convince people she's on their side. Plus there's the other AIs, right? But they're new, so to speak - loaded up from our multiverses. So it's probably we could run this place without Stacy or the Warden. The Daligig would be idiots not to have a manual backup system."

"A prison ship built by a species other than the Daligig." Another detail that bothered Sakura. "Repurposed as they argue Transmigration Nine to be, it's supposedly not even Daligig in origin."

She took the infuser out of the tea mug, placing it into the other. Sakura gestured for Jake to measure out any sugar he wanted, if he was so inclined, while she took her own mug in hand and swirled the infuser around.

"Which means whoever first built this ship would have had a manual back-up system, or anything else to run basic life support systems in case of AI malfunction or downtime. If it does run the risk of another AI hijacking the system while it's offline, like we ran into with SHODAN."

Something Sakura wasn't about to forget anytime soon. Nor, she suspected, something Jake would.

"Reused? Well, that makes me feel a lot safer..."

Who knew how long Transmigration Nine had been in existence? Or what it had been used for before? Had the Daligig been like the pirates, pulling it free from flotsam and jetsam and trying to reuse it? Or had they taken it by force? Jake's lips pressed into a thin line and he shook his head.

"We need to figure out how to get actual control here. Not the illusion of it. I don't like not having it... More people are going to die if we don't.

"I agree." She stirred her tea, more slowly now. "We do, and it's not the only thing we don't have to like about. Let alone what you might not like about it."

Sakura focused her attention on Jake, letting her hands still. She was focused, and serious. As the straight man of a team that hadn't existed for far too long, as an outsider and forcible integrator with the crew due to her own innate need for connection overriding paranoia and fear and the uncertainty and distrust of anything new and significantly foreign, she'd come to a point of not caring to hold back and be as self-contained and permitting anymore.

"You're the leader of your group. You, and the Animorphs, in a war you fought against an alien empire while another alien empire wasn't exactly set on helping you out. I know. I get that, and I respect the fact you were a big enough idiot to take on the responsibility that got you all through. Five kids who were planning on growing up as civilians being tossed into fight or die circumstances is extreme, even on my world."

It was an allowance she was trying to make before continuing on. "The paranoia you suffer as a group and use to keep you isolated from the rest of the crew is screwing you over. We need to do something. We is a bigger idea than you, or me, our the handful of people you trust. We need you. We need all of you. You have my respect for being able to do what you did in surviving and coming out on top, and it's about time you, and your people, do what Marco was terrified of doing. Grow up."

Jake listened. The only reaction he gave for the first few moments was a crossing of his arms. Sakura's words stung slightly. Getting told you were being too paranoid wasn't exactly something you liked to hear, especially when paranoia was a part of your life. But he knew that she was right, in a way. The Animorphs (or what was left of them) wouldn't get anything done by hiding from everyone else. Even if Jake didn't trust them all that much. They were still better than the Daligig and their real enemy was the ship.

He just wasn't sure he knew how to "grow up". He knew how to lead and how to work with people and how to fight, but growing up? He missed that boat and he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to do it. After a few more moments of contemplative silence, he nodded slowly.

"I'm willing to work with the rest of the crew. Marco... he didn't trust them and I'm not sure who I can trust, but the rest of the crew aren't our enemies here. I know that. I want to find out what we can do. Some of what I've heard hasn't been flattering... but if we stand alone, we die alone."

"I don't know why Marco had a harder time letting go at nineteen than he did at fifteen, but the way he acted didn't help the image of your group on the ship that much. Not that most people awake right now will care, if part of his anger was with Kang. I don't know if there was more behind that then his telling the crew at large about morphing, or how he felt betrayed when he couldn't remember if Eva was... a Controller or not, but it's pointless to wonder about it now." She took the infuser out of her tea, setting it down on the edge of the sink.

"You don't need to trust everyone. I wouldn't. I won't even tell you to trust me. You can use your own judgement for that, and decide however you want." She sipped at her tea, quiet for a moment. "Marco didn't. Not enough to see that telling the truth would have served him better than perpetuating the lies... but I can understand that. I'm a woman."

It was simple as that. Men were more inclined to keep women in the dark as a rule. She didn't expect differently, let alone across worlds. She suspected an unhealthy part of that was the paranoia Marco let define his relationship to the world at large, related to his group, his team, but part was just as likely due to the fact she was a woman.

"You're only as limited in what you can do as you let yourselves be. Even if we all were living under permanent nulls, that remains true."

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[closed; bendy-timed to after the show and tell of Cybil's Last Stand] meetings with another man's l

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