2010-04-02 - Communication Must Become Total and Conscious

Life on the LHM-BB01 Minerva, once ZAFT's newest experimental battleship, has changed a lot since the A-LAWS taskforce was formed; no longer the sole province of a crew of Coordinator militia volunteers, the ship is slowly being transformed more and more into the 'ideal' A-LAWS battleship, particularly with the assignment of Aber Lindt as co-captain alongisde Talia Gladys, and the formation of 'Minerva's Lance', a squad comprised predominantly of pilots who are both new to the Minerva, and also most definitely /not/ Coordinators. With Rey Za Burrel and Lunamaria Hawke reassigned to a different group focusing on the defense of Minerva, Shinn alone of the original Minerva Team has joined the attack squad, and while it's conferred a bit more prestige than usual to the Orb-born Coordinator, /he doesn't like it/. Not at all. Right now, Shinn is sitting in the Minerva's mess hall, along with two other young men; one dark of skin and hair, the other caucasian, but with an orange streak in the fringe of his brown hair. Both of these others wear engineering uniforms, while Shinn himself wears his A-LAWS uniform, albeit slightly customised; he threw the white gloves in the trash almost immediately, ane leaves the coat's collar and sleeves casually undone, while the 'skirt' part of the coat closes more tightly in front than the usual ones. It reminds him a bit more of his Red uniform. He misses that uniform. He earned it. "So anyway," the engineer with the orange streak in his hair - one Vino Dupre, by name - continues exciteably from a conversation joined in media res. "I don't get what's up with all these freak machines they keep bringing in. I mean, how are we even supposed to /fix/ these things, right?" The dark-skinned engineer, Yolan Kent, shrugs in a more laid back manner. "You're worrying too much, Vino. They brought in their own techs, we can just learn from them, or let them do the work. Keeping Impulse running is our main job anyway, huh, Shinn?" At this, both the young men look towards Shinn. Shinn Asuka, meanwhile, stares sullenly into his mashed potatoes, stirring them about boredly with his fork. "What?" the red-eyed Coordinator wonders, as he realises he's being spoken to, and indeed watched expectantly by the other two. "Oh... Yeah, sure," he agrees, because that seems to be the thing to do.

Speaking of freak machines:

The mess hall is rather full at the moment. There are a few open seats here and there. Rei Ayanami has opted to take lunch from the vending machines, rather than the chow line, like she always does, and the casual observer could certainly make an observation that it's certainly appropriate that she'd choose the option with no human interaction.

Still, she can either float back to her quarters, or she can sit down and eat, and the latter is a more efficient and socially acceptable model. Rei Ayanami doesn't know why 'socially acceptable' matters to her. It never used to. But things are weird in general now, and being around people, even if it's only at arm's length, is something she's started trying to do more.

Which is why she's suddenly at the table housing Shinn, Yolan, Vino, and one empty seat. Rei just sort of appears, as if she crept out of the peripheral vision of all involved, and had been lurking there all along but no one thought to look. She stands there, clutching her space-flask of water and her space-pod of noodles, and is silent for a few long seconds.

Rei Ayanami, Lance-3, pilot of the GN Evangelion Unit 00X, then asks quietly: "May I sit here?" Her voice is flat and dead, but at the same time light and girlish, like a flower that's been pressed between encyclopedias.

"And what about those new /pilots/?" Vino continues, exciteable as ever even though they've been on the ship for weeks, now; he's literally had this exact same conversation dozens of times since then, and it shows when Yolan rolls his dark eyes expressively. Vino doesn't notice, though. Vino just keeps going. "Like, that Zabiarov, she's pretty hot. I mean, not as hot as Lunamaria, but she's pretty hot." Shinn, still poking at his food, 'mns' noncommittally. "But can you believe that they're all EFA? And here, on the Minerva! It's like some kind of weird dream..." Vino trails off, tugging at his orange forelock thoughtfully. "The weirdest one is that Ayanami girl!" Yolan sighs, shrugging helplessly. "Oh, here we go," he says, as Shinn looks up curiously. Vino leans over the table, tone conspiratorial, expression suggesting he was about to reveal something of great interest. "Louis told me that Lisa in gunnery told /him/ that one of the nurses told /her/ that Ayanami doesn't even sleep! She's like some kind of a zombie or somethin--" Naturally, this is exactly when Rei speaks up, her quiet voice somehow nevertheless cutting through the exuberant Vino Dupre's hurtful gossip; in that moment, Shinn and his two buddies turn to look right at Rei, and there is a heartbeat of complete, absolute stillness. Which is broken when Vino suddenly stands up. "Oh, god, look at the time! I'm late for my shift!" he says, too loudly and too awkwardly, before bolting from the table. A moment later, Yolan joins him, with an apologetic shrug; Shinn watches the two go with a bewildered expression, before he turns back to Rei. "Sure, yeah," the Coordinator offers, gesturing towards the seat that /doesn't/ have a half-finished meal left in front of it. "Make yourself comfortable, Ayanami." Ayanammi, not Rei. She can't be Rei, because Rey is Rey. Shinn Asuka draws lines and borders, categorises and segregates things like it was an Olympic event.

There's not much noise as Rei Ayanami sits down. She doesn't say anything in response to Shinn, nor really react to his gesture. It's like dealing with a robot -- Shinn has permitted, the strange blue-haired creature has complied. Rei sets down her water and her container of soup, roughly equidistant from herself in a vague triangular shape. It doesn't seem like she's put much thought into doing so -- but still effortlessly precise.

Then, with diligent, single-track focus, Rei removes the spork from the soup pod, unfolding it into its full usable shape, and uses the back end of the utensil to break the container's seal. She doesn't look at Shinn throughout, or at the other men as they disappear. In fact, if she heard Vino's story at all, she gives no indication. She seems entirely focused on procuring soup from its little space-age plastic home.

Then, Rei eats. Sporkfuls of noodles, slowly brought up, held pensively as if she can't decide whether or not it's too hot to eat, then placed in her mouth, lips closing around spork, removing utensil, chewing noodles, swallowing--

It's a mechanical process if anything ever was.

After a minute or so, though, Rei's dull red gaze does flick up toward Shinn. Her shaggy, sloppy haircut is getting a bit long -- electric blue hair hangs in her eyes and generally could use a bit of a trim. She maintains eye contact for an awkwardly long moment, before saying, just as softly and flatly as before: "I do sleep."

As Rei sits silently and goes through her preparations to eat, Shinn watches her, bemused, as if he were seeing some strange ritual for the first time, performed by some bewildering creature he did not understand, and could not fathom the meaning of any of it. This is mostly accurate. It's not until Rei actually looks up at him that the spell is broken, the young Coordinator's face transitioning into a more neutral expression, red eyes meeting red; in Shinn's cause though, the red is sharp and lurid, a red of blood and rage. That they're set in such a gentle, normal face, well... That might be telling. Or maybe the universe just has a sense of humour. "What?" Shinn says, not really catching the significance of the statement, having put the earlier conversation out of his mind. Slowly, then, it catches up with him. "Oh! Uh, well, you can't listen to Vino, he's one of those people who believes everything he hears." Though, it doesn't escape his notice that Rei /did not/ deny being a zombie. Dun duuuuun. There's a moment of awkward silence from Shinn, before he speaks again. "So... How do you like the Minerva so far, Ayanami?" It's a harmless conversational gambit, and he's already been told that he's supposed to 'make nice' with his squadmates. That, of course, doesn't mean that he has to like it.

Rei stares at Shinn Asuka in response to his question. It's as if he just asked her if she's ever seen someone train a dog how to play horseshoes. There's no outright bewilderment on her face, but the lack of comprehension is evident. Or -- maybe it is. Maybe it's just the awkward dead air of the pause she initiates offering a light to consider her face in. Because when it comes down to it, Rei's expression is really and truly neutral, so much so that it's not even an expression at all.

The more she stares, though, the more it becomes obvious that maybe there /was/ something to whatever Vino heard, after all. Rei's own eyes -- red, but not with any kind of fire to them, more the dull crimson of blood -- have gentle smears of purple under them, standing out even more thanks to her corpse-like pallor. They're not bruises, but rather proof positive of at least some kind of sleeplessness. Rei doesn't wear make-up, or that sort of thing would be hidden -- but she almost doesn't seem to need to. Her skin really is perfect, with no teenage awkwardness of any sort, not even a hair out of sorts in her blue eyebrows.

Her haircut is still pretty lazy, though.

Finally, Rei responds, continuing to meet Shinn dead-on, eye-to-eye. "I am slowly getting used to outer space," Rei says, in the sort of tone that indicates that she might be reciting this from memory, as if there was an exam on it. There's no shakiness, though, just a sort of... tone, like the timbre of her voice is wrong, in a way that can't be attributed to the Japanese accent that plays with her vowels and consonants. "It is not unlike my previous accommodation, though. No one has been unfriendly. I feel that I am well taken care of, by the crew here and by Master Paptimus."

Oh.

She's one of /those/.

It's kind of unsettling, you know. Whatever else can be said about Shinn Asuka - and a lot of things can be said about him, let's face facts here - he remains a highly empathetic person. Not by dint of any unusual abilities, or any quirk of genetics... He's just an 'intuitive' kind of person, processing things by emotion, not logic, and that includes other people. Rei... In a lot of ways, the girl sitting across from him might as well just be a blank, empty space. A slight frown pulls at the boy's mouth as he /finally/, after like twenty minutes, eats a mouthful of mashed potatoes, which a) were probably the instant kind to begin with, hooray freeze-drying, and b) have been mixed up so much by his absent stirring that it's more of a potato slurry, but his eyes remain locked on Rei's, like some sort of surreal staring contest. He might be a Coordinator, and probably not have to blink as much as a normal human, but the money's on Rei to win that. "Uh huh," says Shinn, the young Gundam pilot's brows slowly furrowing slightly. "Paptimus? I don't know much about that guy, but if Chairman Durandal is willing to work with him..." Shinn shakes his head, a little. "What's with all this 'master' stuff, though? He's just some guy, I guess he's an Admiral or whatever."

Again, Rei meets Shinn's question with a sort of non-response so fundamentally blank that it's as if they were speaking in two entirely different languages. She'd make a killing playing poker -- the lack of even the slightest tell would make her millions. If they didn't find a reason to kick her out for being so clearly inhuman, mind.

Rei doesn't seem to have a set pattern to the way in which she disrupts conversations with silence. Though she takes her sweet time answering -- well, anything, there doesn't seem to be any set length of 'stare at Shinn without blinking' that she has to meet before she replies. Indeed, this time it's only a few seconds, but those few seconds last however long they feel like. "It is his title," Rei replies, as if this were not only a complete answer but also an excessively obvious one. Or maybe -- maybe not -- again, her complete lack of emotional tint in any of her words leaves them open to any interpretation.

Rei then turns her gaze downward, breaking contact. It's not a gesture of defeat, or submission -- or maybe it is -- but either way, her eyes return to her soup, and she eats some more of it before it gets lukewarm. Thus, the conversation stalls out again, and Rei Ayanami... doesn't seem to care. She just chews silently. She doesn't make any noise when she eats, although she's clearly chewing from the subtle movement of her cheeks, clearly swallowing from the way her throat tenses afterward. Without looking up:

"Are you afraid of dying?"

Just out of nowhere.

Very probably, only Shinn can perceive the awkwardness of the silences that pepper the conversation, and combining that with the way Rei manages to completely pass under the radar of his natural empathy means that the red-eyed Coordinator is getting increasingly uncomfortable as this continues, shifting slightly on his seat across from the strange girl. The explanation of why she calls Scirocco 'Master Paptimus' isn't so much enlightening as it is further confusing, Shinn's posture curving a little as his expression twists into one of consternation. Whether it's the Admiral's title or not, he's never going to call anybody 'Master' anything. That's just /weird/. People are /weird/. Shinn goes for another mouthful of mashed potato, which is approximately when Rei's strange question is asked, those quiet words coming out of nowhere. The Coordinator's surprised reaction is to almost choke - somehow - on the potato slurry, hitting himself in the chest as he coughs and ends up swallowing the rest. "Wh-what kind of question is that?!" he demands, disbelievingly. In his mind's eye, of course, Shinn sees it. Death, arrayed in slow motion for his persual. The bloody, mangled remains of his parents, rendered unrecogniseable by the cruel vagaries of beam weaponry, explosions and shrapnel. His dismembered sister, when he found her after the explosion, her arm sticking out from under a pile of debris, but it was /just/ her arm, nothing else, and how he only survived by pure luck... Fallen enemies, fallen comrades... The shuttle escorting the Eternal as it left the PLANTs, carrying the heads of the Clyne Faction, until Shinn's blade cleaved the ship in half... "Of course I'm afraid of dying!" Shinn admits, his voice harsh. "What sort of person wants to die? Once you die, that's it! Who wants to stop existing?!" He actually gets louder as he goes along, voice creeping up to nearly a shout. Most of the Minerva's crew studiously avoids looking at that table.

Shinn's response is the first one of the conversation to elicit an immediate reaction from Rei. Pausing in the middle of lifting a sporkful of soup -- looks like it's all noodles and vegetables -- Rei's head turns back up to face her fellow pilot, once again looking him right in the eyes. It's not a sudden motion, though, but a very slow and deliberate straightening of her neck, simultaneous with the roll of her eyes toward his -- in short, like something an android would do before it started trying to unexpectedly choke out Neo Will Smith.

Rei's lips part gently, such that if Shin were to look, he could almost see a bit of her white teeth. Just a bit. This is the most expressive Rei has gotten in the entire discussion. But then, the empathy that the young soldier carries around -- it's as if that motion of Rei's lips is a crack in a wall that no one really realized was a floodgate.

Suddenly, it's worse to be around Rei than if she had just kept her feelings walled off. That unease and discomfort -- subsumed by the feelings that not only seem to come /out/ of Rei, but /surround/ her, as if she were alone and drowning in a personal ocean. Rei's world, in short, is one where tomorrow is the worst thing that could happen, followed closely by yesterday and today -- a road that leads to nowhere, but doesn't go on forever by any means.

"If you had to..."

Rei starts to ask another question, but then stops. Rei doesn't deal in abrupt crashes -- instead, it's as if someone simply turned her volume dial down until no more sound came out. It's a sentence that gave up.

And so too does Rei, for her next move is to stand, take her meal, and begin walking away without another word, and without another look toward Shinn.

What a strange situation this has turned out to be. Shinn isn't sure what to make of it, the sudden typhoon of actual human emotion from the strange girl. It would probably be worse, if he was one of those people with some means of 'sensing' others' emotions; for the red-eyed Coordinator, it's a natural awareness, simply a very acute one. A lot of people would probably be surprised how keenly Shinn feels for other people, given some of the things he's done... But it's that overwhelming emotion, that attunement, that so often /drives/ him to act in ways that he probably wouldn't if he had more control. The young man's brow furrows more deeply than it already had, his mouth pulling into a definite frown, as Rei's question dies on the vine. What the hell was that? He can't even conceive of what might be going on, but he's probably done a really poor job of finding ways to get along with his new teammates, so: Good work, Shinn Asuka. "Wait!" the Gundam pilot says, standing up and taking a few steps after the deparing Evangelion pilot. "If I had to what?"

When Shinn cries out to "Wait!", Rei Ayanami perhaps does the unexpected.

That is, the First Child stops and waits. She doesn't turn around, though, or convey any sense that the plea actually moved her in any sense. She just... halts, as if conditioned. Like a dog.

If Rei immediately hears the question put to her, it's not obvious. Still staring straight ahead -- does she ever blink? -- the girl clutches her water in one hand, her by-now tepid soup in the other, holding them out with her elbows bent at right angles as if she were some sort of machine programmed to carry drinks. She wasn't even walking very fast. It's as if she exists somewhere else, and the rest of the world just happens to overlap significantly.

"It's not important to you," Rei replies, her tone... well, no more or less frigid than it ever is, but with maybe a bit more of her natural numbness shining through. "I apologize for disturbing you."

At some point though, Shinn is just going to reach some maximum weird shit saturation level, where he simply cannot react to anything else being weird. At that point, he might flip out and shoot some people, it's difficult to say. Difficult to say. Consternation vanishes into bewilderment as Rei stops on command, and a heartbeat or two later, Shinn himself stumbles to an awkward halt despite his superior Coordinator, uh, coordination, so out of sorts is the young ace at this point. The fact that Rei doesn't turn around to answer him has pretty much passed Shinn's interpersonal weirdness saturation threshold, so that, at least, just sort of washes over him like it weren't nothing. When, of course, it is. Shinn can't put it into words, he couldn't really articulate it to another human being, but he can tell that there's something very not right about this girl. What it is, well, that he has no idea whatsoever about. "What's that supposed to mean?" Shinn says, and then something odd happens. Odd for him, anyway. Despite the fact that he's placed the other A-LAWS pilots firmly on the 'them' side of his latest 'us and them' equation, drawing a border around the ZAFT personnel originally assigned to the Minerva, putting them in a box that kept them separate in his mental calculations from the 'new guys' who showed up after Jachin Due, Shinn says the following: "We're supposed to be teammates."

Rei still doesn't turn around. She speaks to Shinn, but her voice doesn't carry toward him -- it goes out into the mess hall ether, toward wherever she's looking, off to that distant star of the exit. She sounds even, calm, controlled -- totally unflustered, totally unhurried. There's no need to complicate a simple discussion about the termination of a conversation with things like emotion and sentiment and...

...and camaraderie, but still. Rei may talk to people more now... but she's not sure she wants to. She's not sure if it's a good thing. Or maybe she's just taking what she can get while she can get it.

Maybe it's like an agonizingly prolonged last meal, one bite at a time.

Rei turns her head, now. Just her head. It's a slow but graceful pivot, executed as smoothly as a well-oiled machine. The bangs of her pageboy obscure her gaze, refusing Shinn a good look at her eyes, but vice versa, too.

"We are teammates," Rei says, dipping her head in the barest imitation of a nod. "I am sixteen years old. I am within four years of my projected life expectancy at current rate of deployment and with the assumed perpetuation of multi-factional armed conflict."

Rei again sounds like she's just reading from cue cards, like this is being broadcast from space and just coming out of her mouth. "There is no guarantee we will be teammates for long."

In all honesty, Shinn isn't sure exactly what he was expecting Rei's response to be... But it probably wasn't that, detailing the probability of her own death. Teenager that he is, even if he is one who's been assigned to pilot a powerful mobile weapon, even if he is one who's come face to face with the consequences of that power, but not completely internalised those lessons yet, he's taken aback by the matter-of-fact way she discusses her own death. For a long moment, Shinn is silent. It's not a simple silence, nor is it an awkward silence like the previous ones. This is a troubled silence, the sort of silence that hangs around a person as they try to find a way to parse what was just said, a way to put it in their own context in a way they can understand and react to. It's the sort of silence that happens when somebody tells you something disquieting, but in a language you only understand peripherally, and have to think about it to make the translation. "So what?!" is what Shinn says, finally. He's thought about it before, the possibility of losing his teammates. The thought of Lunamaria or Rey Za Burrel dying, and the uncontrolled fury that accompanies the fear that comes with those thoughts has in the past been enough to stir young Shinn Asuka into terrifying acts of destruction. So maybe if thse new people are part of his 'team', he's going to have to protect them, too. "Who cares about probabilities or life expectancies or whatever?!" Shinn continues, anger radiating from him like a physical force. Not like heat rising off of pavement; like heat rising off of a BURNING BUILDING. "I'm not going to let any of my teammates die!" Not even if they were forced on him. Not even if, in the grand scheme of things, they are 'them', not 'us'. Because there is a 'them' beyond that, to Shinn. Lines and borders within lines and borders. Layers upon layers of distinctions.

Rei endures Shinn's proclamation, which seems to be a more apt description of her response than 'listens to,' all things considered. Her head remains locked in that same position, eyes still somewhat concealed by her hair. As Shinn speaks, she doesn't take in his words -- or, rather, she does, but it's the generalities, the jist.

Rei Ayanami is instead thinking about how she wishes she couldn't feel the weight of pushing everyone away. She wishes she was back in Tokyo-03, in her little apartment, where no one visits, where no one cares. It would make all of this so much easier, especially with Leo having...

When Shinn finishes, Rei's attention phases back in, and she has to take... nearly fifteen seconds before any kind of actual reaction manifests. Her pause isn't like Shinn's. It's not a troubled one, nor an analytical one. It's just the absence of everything that commonly defines human behavior -- feeling, motion, all of it. She stands still and stares and if she weren't breathing she'd look like a pale little blue-haired wax dummy.

Rei hates that she has to be so cruel. But it's better this way. In the long run, anyway. "Lance-2," she says, quietly, "you won't always have the power to make that decision." It's not a threat.

It's just a statement of fact.

And then Rei turns her head and keeps walking.

For all of his angry, passionate arguments, the fact of the matter is that Shinn doesn't have anything to say to Rei's quiet words, even if she hadn't started walking after delivering them. He recoils as if slapped, red eyes widening and his lips pulling back from his teeth in a grimace, looking for a moment as if he were going to lash out - though at what, or who, or /how/ isn't clear. Instead, the pilot of the ZGMF-X56S Impulse Gundam watches his teammate go, glowering at nothing. "That's what you think," Shinn says, under his breath. If there's anything he hates, more than he hates the Athhas or whoever's managed to piss him off or offend his sensibilities recently, it's the idea of powerlessness, the very /concept/. Power is the only thing that keeps other people from running roughshod over you, from taking what they want and leaving you nothing, or maybe a knife in the gut. The power he's been granted, first by ZAFT and now, ostensibly, by A-LAWS, is something the red-eyed young man holds precious, maybe even sacred. He's not going to let what happened at Onogoro happen to him again. Not /ever/. No matter what. Casting a brief glance over his shoulder at the table in the mess hall, Shinn decides he really isn't very hungry anymore, and that somebody else can clean it up. Instead, he stalks off down the opposite corridor from Rei, with the ironclad intent of going 'anywhere that isn't here'.