alex+chisaki; killing

[socarnivorously]

Who: Alexander & Chisaki
When: Wednesday, 6/29, mid morning
Where: Stonecaster, Safta
Before/After: --
Warnings: Swearing, violence.


The instructions that Alexander left were mercifully clear.

She took the warp to Stonecaster. It required some hopping, to get to the Nenakret, and then to Stonecaster's warp platform. She descended it, but she stayed there, near the woods, rather than go into the city. She moved slightly off to the side, though, to not be too close to the platform. She stayed away from the road to the town, leaning back up against at tree.

She had her hunter's garb on. Leather armor, with the hint of the Earth clothes she wore still underneath it, and her well-worn sneakers with the slight touch of enchantments. Her pistol and bow were both on hand, as well as a hand axe. She was not sure which weapon to bring for this. She wondered over each.

She was undeniably, unquestionably nervous. Frightened, even. There was a slight shake to her hand when she pulled it away from her leather belt -- and she planted it there again.

Repressing these thoughts came with a heavy price. She had never considered what it meant to kill a person before. It was important to avoid that, when she had seen it happen before. Contending with the questions her mind raised meant ignoring them. She was running towards a metaphorical cliff in her effort to escape from such thoughts.

The cliff had red hair, he was tall, and he could not die so easily. She wanted him to get here quickly as much as she wanted him to never come.

After Reilanin had warped out to visit Ravindra in Omghan, Alex had puttered around for several minutes on the off chance that she might return, having forgotten something or other. When she didn't, he left through the kitchen door and entered the woods, circling around Stonecaster to reach the warp point. He caught her scent before he reached it.

"You have the potions?" he called, coming to stop a few feet away from her tree.

There he was. Chisaki turned to face him when he approached. She stood up straighter against the tree and nodded. She motioned to one of the bags mounted on her belt, which had several healing potions inside of it. She opened the flap up so he could see them.

"Yeah," she said. "I bought them in the Nenakret, from a good alchemist."

Despite the fact that he was, in essence, putting his life in Chisaki's hands, he did not seem very interested in the potions, giving them a slight glance before looking at Chisaki.

"Weapon of choice?"

"The bow," Chisaki said. She reached a couple fingers over her shoulder and touched them to the oaken weapon. "I'm better with it than a gun. A lot more practice."

The pistol was when they got closer. She could pick people off faster that way.

"We'll do it here, then." The house would have been a safer place for him, but it was cramped for archery. He wouldn't have to worry about blood getting on everything, either.

"Where shall I stand?"

"Right there," Chisaki said. "I'll move back."

She sucked a breath in. Part of this was cowardice, but she had the option of starting small and striking from a distance. It was a way to make it incremental, to grow used to to the idea, and then let it expand in her mind. She told herself that, at least. She had no idea if it was true. She moved a distance away, until she had a good three hundred feet between them. She pulled an arrow out and nocked it.

She faced Alexander. The distance made her expression hard to read, as she pulled back her bowstring. She drew it back the whole way, both eyes narrowing, as she took her aim.

And hesitated, still failing to loose the arrow.

He was mildly surprised at the distance. Why go so far if the matter was embracing the act of killing? Wouldn't it be faster to do it when she was close, when she saw and heard and felt someone die in front of her?

But she was from Earth. The people from Paris, they were soft.

He stood patiently, wondering if she would get the potion to him before he was 'too dead' to swallow. He'd eaten, eaten a lot of meat, to the point of near sickness, but he wanted to minimize the amount of time he was out while his body healed itself. With the potions, he wouldn't take so long, depending on how Chisaki went about 'killing' him...

Too long. She was hesitating. He remained quiet, anyway. Learning to kill another person was an intimate process.

Chisaki berated herself. She was being weak and soft. She was being the same girl who hid up in a tree, watching a man be eaten alive. Her hand shook, until the mental scolding cut through those doubts. She drew a breath in, the arrow pulled back its full length.

She loosed it, with a twang. It flew, the arrow vibrating slightly with the release of the string, in a graceful and shallow arc, that was directed right for Alex's neck.

She started bolting towards him only a few heartbeats after.

He jerked back with the impact, immediately hunching forward as his hands grasped his neck below the arrow's entrance. Suffocating-- He couldn't breathe. The arrow had pierced his trachea, pinning it to his spinal cord, its tip wedged between his vertebrae. In all of his-- (her)-- years, he had never been shot in the throat with an arrow. Experience told him not to remove it, but fuck it hurt. His fingers clawed his collarbone, up his neck, itching to tear the arrow out.

He fell to his knees, one hand darting out to steady himself on instinct. Instead, his mouth gaped open in a futile attempt to intake air; his hand went limp, and he fell onto his side, curling in on himself.

The way he jerked, Chisaki thought, was the most frightening part. She had seen blood before, both her own and monsters'. The way his body lurched, though, and how he clawed at himself was decidedly not natural. It caused her to slow in her running, a cold feeling welling up inside of her gut, before she remembered that he would be dead soon if she did not hurry. That made her pick up speed.

She knew enough about treating arrow wounds, at least. The arrowhead was a long, slender sort; she deliberately went with a javelin-tipped arrow rather than a broadhead, to not rip out part of him when she removed it. She went to work quickly; the arrow would have to come out, she knew upon inspection, but the potion had to be applied immediately after. She prepared one of the cloths she brought with her to staunch the bleeding as much as possible.

"Sorry. It's gonna hurt, but I'll put the potion there right away." The arrow came out with a quick, careful motion. She was pouring some of the healing potion directly into the wound after that, while keeping her increasingly bloodied cloth pressed against his skin. Both of her hands were shaking, now.

His hands immediately shot up to the wound. He gasped for air, only to cough blood. Chisaki had to pry his hands away from his neck in order to gain access to it. Luckily, conscious of what she was doing, he dug his fingers into the floor of the wood instead.

The trauma done to his spinal cord was the first to heal, comparatively suffering the least of the wound. That took a few minutes. The connective tissues were next, followed by the sealing of his trachea, and then his carotid artery. Once that healed, most of the bleeding stopped.

By the time the outer layer of skin stitched itself together, ten or so minutes had passed. He was no longer gripping twigs and fallen leaves like death; his body had relaxed, his eyes closed, and with an arm draped across his eyes, he seemed, almost, to be resting.

"You all right?" he asked hoarsely. An arrow to the neck... He'd seen it before. It was just as unpleasant as it'd looked.

The recovery felt like it took forever. Chisaki could have sworn it was an hour; seeing the flesh knit before her eyes paradoxically made it feel as if it took longer. When he spoke, she did not quite feel relief yet.

"Yeah," she said breathlessly. "I think so. That was fucking..." She frowned. Horrible? Frightening? The word did not come to her lips. "You okay? Everything mend all right?"

Alex lifted himself into a sitting position with a groan, arm falling into his lap with a groan. He rubbed his neck lightly; the area was still tender.

Though he hadn't any expectations going into this, Alex couldn't help but feel disappointed, as if something more was supposed to happen- as if he were supposed to feel something more.

"We'll do it again," he said, forgetting to answer Chisaki's questions. He dropped his hand into his lap. "Closer this time."

Alex had answered her question, if indirectly.

She still did not relish the thought. The point of this exercise was to make her familiar with killing, though, and one time that left her deeply unnerved hardly helped. She looked him up and down -- as if she could somehow find a reason they shouldn't -- and then she nodded her head. She slung her bow back over her shoulder and drew her pistol from the holster on its side. "The gun, then?"

"Whatever you want," he said, with the tone expecting a shrug to accompany it. But there wasn't one.

Whatever you want. The white flag of the defeated. Resignation. Surrender. He didn't want to surrender, but he did. No matter what he did, there was no victory for him. There was no defeating the influence of his player. Would he give up, like Nova? Like everyone else so far? S comfortable in their roles they never think to question it. Was he the only one bothered by this? Wasn't it just like the world, and how he wanted to wipe it clean?

He wasn't seeking death. He'd simply stopped running from it.

"I'd prefer to not kill people, but it's not a choice I get," Chisaki said, with some resignation of her own in her voice.

She lifted the pistol up, lining the sight of the gun up with his chest. She looked at him down the length of the barrel and wondered for a moment. Was this wise? Could he really let her shoot him, without resenting her? If he could, what did that say about him? They were troubling questions and, somehow, the feeling of the cold steel of her nine millimeter in her hand cut through the usual repressive processes she put through her thoughts.

Bullets had a way of making a person honest with themselves. She did not like that. Her finger tensed around the trigger, slightly. "Sorry," she said. She pulled the trigger and the pistol fired, a small flash from the muzzle. The bullet flew free for Alex's chest.

No time to appreciate the ringing in his ears. He fell backwards with the momentum of the bullet, his body going into shock.

There was still some brain activity, but for all intents and purposes, Alex was dead.

"Alex!"

She shouted his name and got no discernable response. That proved less frightening than the arrow, in a sense; she could see Alex dying before, his body twitching and the wound far more significant and obvious. She rushed forward; she came prepared for this, too, with a pair of cleaned tweezers to pull the bullet out with. She did so hurriedly, this time.

She uncorked the next potion and began applying it to the wound directly again. The thought occurred to her, though, that this might not work alone. If his heart was stopped or he ceased breathing, she doubted that a potion would make Alex come to.

Though it appeared as if his heart had stopped, the cells that made up that organ were not actually dead. Neither were his brain cells or nerve cells, or any of the others save those that were directly impacted by the gunshot and therefore blown beyond repair. They slowed, but never truly died. Roused by the potion, the cells of his heart picked up speed first, dividing like they'd a concept of the Dark and felt it nipping at their metaphorical heels.

This recovery took longer than the first. If Chisaki watched, she'd see his heart begin to beat, first out of sync, stilling, then falling into the familiar rhythm of lub-dub, lub-dub, albeit sluggishly. It would remain exposed until the first layer of tissue regenerated itself.

By the time he actually moved, more than half an hour had passed.

Chisaki knew the potion would take time. She learned that from the last time. She supposed that she should have found it fascinating; it was something that could not happen on Earth, whether because of his nature as molavvas or the potion. It was just frightening, though; she saw what it looked like if someone died and had the better part of an hour to appreciate it. It was a reminder of what was wrong with her: nothing ever seemed to impress her or even deeply scare her. She was horrified, but on a more visceral level.

The stunning differences between Zenderael and Earth, seen so clearly in their healing here, were lost in the baser, brutal similarities. It seemed like some sort of joke played on her by God. Or maybe the gods, to hear Alex tell it.

When he finally moved, she sat up straighter. Her eyes went wide, as she pushed herself up to stop slouching against a nearby tree. She asked, voice hesitant, "Alex?"

He answered her with a low groan that never quite made it out of his throat. Lifting his hands to his face, he smashed his palms against his eyes, then dragged them around the side of his temple, where they snagged some of his hair before losing contact.

With the voice of one who's just awoken, he asked, "How many potions do you have left?"

"Three," she answered, more than a hint of nervousness in her voice.

"Three," he repeated, for no real reason. Three more decisive deaths, one killing blow, supplemented with potions-- he could take three more. "How do you feel? You can't put it into words yet, can you?"

Her expression flickered between a forced resolve and an honest look of doubt. "No, not really," she admitted. Her tone grew quieter. He had killed before; his nature meant that he had to. "Can you?"

"I can, now." He gave a short, silent laugh at that. Supposedly he had killed for decades, but was that even the truth? "I suppose. Regardless, it's something you get used to. I suppose," he continued, lurching up suddenly to a sitting position, "it depends on how much you love people. How much you differentiate the life of a person from the life of an animal."

"I feel like that's one of those questions you're supposed to say an answer to automatically," she murmured. She stopped crouching near the tree and rose up to her feet, looking down at him. She extended a hand down, if he needed it to stand back up.

"I don't know," she confessed. There was a hint of shame there. "I feel like the idea should bother me more. Like I should ponder some deeper question or some shit about it. But it seems like if it's them or me--fuck that, you know? Me."

He was perfectly all right sitting on the ground, but another stance for her to kill him in, eh? "That's what survival is," he said, taking her hand and rising. "There's no shame in that."

"This religious guy I met insists otherwise," she said. She grabbed her axe handle and lifted the weapon from the loop it dangled from on her belt.

He eyed the axe with some concern. She was small. She couldn't deal a killing blow with that. "Have you used that before?"

"On monsters," she said.

"How many blows does it take?"

Her expression fell slightly. "Depends." She added, realizing it was necessary, "Usually three or four. I try to get them with a quick chop at the neck or head." She demonstrated, though not yet on him, by chopping it with a fast, snapping motion.

The smile on his lips was humorless. "Pass. You're a hunter. Stick to hunter methods."

Hunters carried knives. She could slit his throat. At the thought, his hand snaked up to rub his neck. So soon. Didn't matter. He knew what it felt like. Anticipation made it worse.

"Should I try to attack you? I didn't, because it's harder to kill someone who isn't retaliating... If you can do that, then you can certainly kill someone who's trying to kill you."

"I got a knife," she said. She motioned to the knife at her side; it was the same combat knife she used in the tournament. He knew what was inside the knife's handle, now. The slight curve of the trigger, hidden against the guard, was plainly visible. She slid the axe back into the loop.

"Probably not a bad idea," she said. "Your logic makes sense, but you know how it is. Make sure my skills are sharp, right? Besides."

She pulled the knife from its sheath and brought it up, the blade held out to the side, perpendicular to her body. "Chances are, I'm not gonna be slitting throats of people by surprise. Shooting 'em, maybe, if they don't see me."

Alex pulled out his own knife meant for hunting, not combat. He stared down at her, not once thinking to kill her, but how easy it would be to do it. Was that comfort simply another one of Jordan's touches? It was, and he couldn't escape from it.

Only in death.

He advanced, knife held out, and slashed at her. He wasn't interested in death. At least, he didn't think so. That left only endurance. He wasn't interested in enduring, either.

Chisaki stepped aside from the slash of Alex's knife. She had some practice at this; a disagreeable personality, going to lower class bars, and being small made her learn to hold her own weight in a bar fight. Those lessons were magnified considerably once she arrived in Zenderael. It did not make it easy, though. The slash still came close to scoring a hit on her ribs.

She might need one of those healing potions if she wasn't careful.

She punched her knife towards Alex with one hand, trying to stab the blade between his ribs. It was not the throat-slitting movement she planned on, but the one that came to her naturally and almost instinctively with this sort of positioning.

He drew his arm back and, planting one foot forward, thrust it upward, intercepting her punch and forcing her arm up instead of straight. There was room to continue, to abduct his arm, thus forcing her knife farther away from his center.

"Gh," she hissed softly as her arm went up. She pulled her arm back, after that, yanking it away from his block before the knife could move too far away from him. She turned it around, so the blade faced him, and then made a quick slashing motion across the front of his body. It was meant to alarm and force movement as much as risk harming him.

It was a split second decision that went against instinct, as if this entire bout was a trial in the opposition of instinct-- Alex took a half step backwards, catching the tail end of the slash on his chest. He completed the retreat by falling into a crouch and slicing at Chisaki's legs.

She took a slash across the front of her legs. Chisaki hissed sharply; a few droplets of blood sprayed out across the ground, into the grass nearby. She fought instincts of her own, to double back and get away from Alex and prevent another blow. Instead, she moved forward while he was still crouching. She put the palm of her free hand against his forehead, fingers digging into his head of hair, and tried to pull his head back for just a moment.

She slashed before she was certain she had a firm grip; she only had the barest seconds, after all. She cut the combat knife at Alexander's throat -- or maybe his face or maybe nothing. It was hard to tell, with how quick she moved the knife and how strands of hair slid between his fingers.

Realizing what she was aiming for, Alex jerked his head downward, hair pulling be damned, and thrust his knife into Chisaki's gut as her knife sliced open the side of his face. He made a noise and let go of the knife, leaving it in her as he covered the wound, pressing his palms against it to slow the blood.

He could have let her slit his throat. That's not what he chose to do. No, he chose to show her how ugly a fight could get, how much damage a person could be dealt in the process of trying to kill them.

"Hrrk--"

The knife stabbed into her stomach. The pain was immediate and burning, radiating sharply outward, threatening to send a wave of weakness through her legs and knees. Her entire body quaked sharply; she dropped the knife to the ground, mentally cursing herself for doing that. She stumbled back against a nearby tree, hitting it hard enough to shake some older pieces of bark off it. She had to remember to breathe.

It came out as a shaking gasp. Her eyes screwed up, before she got her focus back, and looked down at Alex. She hurt too much to properly feel the wave of anger hitting her. "Fuck," she groaned, "that fucking hurt."

"Drink a potion." It came out smothered, hands still pressing the side of his face. Having a history of violence didn't exempt him from pain now-- his face still hurt like a mother fucker, and it was immediate enough that the slash across his chest took second priority. An unfortunate aspect of a molavvas' healing capabilities, one might suppose, was the inability for their nerves to dull over constant exposure.

She did not bother verbally affirming that. She pulled a potion out and uncorked it. Then, counting down in her head, she yanked the knife out. Blood began flowing from the wound more profusely, but she chugged the potion down quickly. Her neck muscles tightened at the poor flavor, but she felt the effects going to work. She slumped down onto her rear, before she pulled out the last of the three potions. She did not particularly want to move her still mending midsection, so she rolled it across the grass to Alex.

"Think I got the jitters a little under control, now," she managed. "I should have been expecting that stab, though. Fuck. You okay?"

He barked out a laugh and felt regret before it'd even passed. "Yes, of course," he said, after he had reached out to grab the bottle. Gingerly, he removed his hand from his face, though it did little good in avoiding additional pain; some of the coagulating blood stuck to his palm and 'ripped' the slice open again. Hissing in a breath, he set his teeth, minimizing facial movement, and uncorked the potion, tipping it to his lips to drink in small amounts.

He only drank half. Once that was done, he dangled it between his legs, having readjusted himself into a crouch, and smashed his palm against his face again just to numb the sensation. "Druids," he said, "they're nasty to fight against. Terrain, you know?"

She grimaced when he pulled his hand away. That looked painful, she thought, which was an absurd notion. She had just been stabbed in the stomach. She nodded to what he said, though. "Yeah," she said. "Gonna try to get them from a distance. Got a few grenades, too. Break up shit they do to the environment, if it comes to that."

She frowned as she made a connection about druids. "I hope Val doesn't go work with the Vohu," she said. "She was all right. Hope we're not on opposite sides."

Grenades, hmm. That wouldn't please the druids or the hunters, but, well, everything was fair game when it came to war.

"She's a wild card. I wouldn't put it past her to hurt both sides just to spite them."

"Kinda noticed that when she lit my fireworks," she said. She sighed at the memory of it. "Still fun in the end."

Maybe Val would stay out of it. Maybe not. She put off the question of what she would have to do if Val showed up with forces fighting against the hunters. She shook her head. "Thanks," she said, finally. "I didn't think--this was a pretty, uh, heavy thing to do. I appreciate it." Her tone was awkward; it was a strange thing to express gratitude for. When she continued speaking, she sounded nervous. "You okay?"

Is it, he wanted to ask aloud, to hear her answer, but he knew that it was, and he didn't want to pursue a conversation that might lead towards why he offered.

"No," he said, staring her straight in the eye, "I'm very itchy."

She wanted to ask why he agreed. That made her feel guilty, questioning why someone would help her with this sort of thing, like he could not have done it out of a genuine desire to help. His answer seemed clear to her: if there was more to it than that, he did not want to share. She frowned at that.

"Yeah, my stomach, too," she said. She hesitated a moment longer. Wasn't she supposed to say something more? Not just shrug, thank him for letting her shoot him in the chest, and hope he had a good rest of his day. "When did you first kill a guy?"

Ah... She'd taken him seriously. Well.

"When did I first kill a guy, or when was it said that I first killed a guy?"

"First, fuck your player," Chisaki said, realizing. "Seriously. Never met him--" She made an assumption, there, that was more wrong than she knew. "--but still. What do you think counts? The first time you did or the first time you were made to think you did? Tell me about that one."

He thought about that for a moment. There were several kills-- kills for Upas, kills for the greycloaks, kills for himself--

His eyes narrowed. "The first time I killed someone, they didn't stay dead." Realizing that needed an explanation, he added, "Because she were being used by... my former player to kill me. Something about how the worlds were connected at the time, I don't know," he made a vaguely annoyed motion with his other hand, "made it impossible for me to kill her."

"That's fucked up."

Chisaki seemed content to leave it there for the few seconds it took to realize that she should say more about it than that. "Your player tried to kill you? I figured they were all--" She frowned, trying to think of how to put it. She decided on the same terminology she used with Nova. "--chronic masturbators and basement trolls. I didn't think they'd be capable of..."

She grunted. "Shit. That's really fucked up."

Taking the comment of 'trolls' quite literally, Alex made a face. Lera wasn't a troll. None of the people in the Jackson's family photo were trolls. "What makes you think not?" he asked, brow lifted. "Controlling another to kill is the same as controlling me to kill, and I've killed a lot before 'waking up.' "

"It depends if your player still thought you were fake," she said, with a frown. "Both are fucked up, don't get me wrong. In one case, he's playing god." Was it a confused accident? They likely had no idea that such a thing could happen. She frowned.

The notion that they did not know it was real offended her. People died here; lives were irrevocably changed here. Making herself sympathize with players was proving impossible: they sat in an impossibly advantageous situation, while others, Zenderean and Earther, suffered around them. Ignorance was a hollow excuse.

"In another case, he's trying to murder someone he knows to be a thinking, feeling person." Chisaki pulled her legs up against herself. "Both are pretty shitty."

"She," he finally corrected, smiling mirthlessly at her. "Maybe there's a good reason to murder me. She knows me better than anyone ever could."

Chisaki looked surprised, but she shook her head. "That's bullshit," she said. "People aren't supposed to understand someone that well. Know how their brain works like that closely. You look close enough, everyone's got something bad about them. It's not natural, her having that kind of information to make that judgment."

He scoffed and dropped his hand. The blood was drying, but the wound beneath it was already nearly healed. "Of course not," he said, somewhat dismissively. "Who ever said it's natural to create other people?"

She thought of Nova and the things he told her about it. She nodded.

"It's fucked up," she said. "How'd you make sense of it? The only other person I talked to was Nova and I don't think he really, totally made sense of it."

Of course, that did not mean Alex did. She just thought it more likely.

He frowned. Sense of it?

"Could you?" he asked instead. "If you found out you were created, designed, and controlled by another human being-- could you make sense of it?"

She had thought about this before. It made the answer come quickly.

"It'd bother the hell out of me," she concluded. "If I knew where the break was, I'd be trying to separate what was mine and what was theirs. Shit from my past bothers me." She shook her head. "But the idea it's not mine--that's hard to imagine."

His shoulders rolled with a silent laugh, and then he chuckled, audibly. "That's- That's exactly it. That's what I'm-" He tilted his head back, eyes closed as another wave of laughter overtook him. "Ah, that. Yes. Separating the two." He opened his eyes and peered up at the light filtering through the trees. "That's the plan."

She felt a stab of embarrassment, when maybe she should have felt pride. She guessed at his exact situation, and felt bad for it, instead of some sense of being closer to him or like him. Something was wrong with her, she thought again.

"It seems hard," she finally ventured. "I can't--I can't imagine how you start. Where you start."

"There was a period, a transition period, when I was not fully my own," he said, leaning further back, palms planted behind him on the ground. "She could still take over whenever she wanted to. When she did that, I would lose that time-- it was lost time. I wouldn't remember a thing. When that started to happening-- that's where I'll start."

He opened his mouth, but said nothing more. After a moment, he shut it, then hunched forward, looking at her. "How's your stomach?"

"Yeah... that makes sense. As clear a point as there can be." She rubbed her chin, thoughtfully, and thought about that for a moment longer. It seemed like it would still be hard, but he was determined. She looked at him for a moment, then, and her lips curved up into a smile.

"Itchy," she said. She was half-joking. "But it'll recover." She skipped a beat. "Thanks, for this, Alex. If you need help, when you're reclaiming your life--or, uh, if you want to talk." She could do that, couldn't she? "I'll try to help. Or listen."

He grinned lopsidedly. "That's sweet of you, love."

Yes, he'd specifically added the pet name to garner a reaction.

"Love!" she stammered. "Man, I'm the furthest thing from a love there is! I'm, like, a marginal like or some shit!"

"Oh, don't break my heart!" he cried, pushing himself up and pressing his hand to his chest. "You've shot me with Ambirch's bullet. Don't leave me now."

She smirked. "Sorry, man, I'm just depressing like a Johnny Cash song--" She realized Alex had no idea who that is.

For once, Chisaki realized, she really thought Zenderael was missing out. "Uh, he's a singer from Earth, like from a hundred years ago. I need new reference points."

He narrowed his eyes down at her. A hundred years ago? How could she know the songs of a man from a hundred years ag-- "Ahh," he said, dropping his hand. "The Internet, isn't it? That's what allows you to listen to songs from the past."

"Yeah," she said. "Well, sorta. They made recordings of his stuff, too, and kept that around. So before the internet, we had that. My grandparents told me about some of those."

She paused, thoughtful for a moment, dropping her hand from her chin to her lap. "I'd say you'd probably like his stuff, but I don't know for sure. Earth might not be a positive association for you."

"I'll keep it in mind." Maybe. It wasn't a sincere comment, not really. "Up for traveling?"

"I can travel," she said. "Where are we traveling to?"

He lifted a brow at her. "You're going back to your guild. I'm going home. Or did you have something else in mind?"

"Wha--oh. Right. Reporting for duty," Chisaki said. "Yeah, that's important, isn't it."

She sighed. "I'm bad at this soldier thing." She stood up to her feet and shook her limbs out. She still had to look up at him, though, even if they were both standing. It felt vaguely unfair.

"No one really thinks they'll have to fight a war when they join a guild. We're complacent like that. Come on," he said, motioning with his hand, walking, "I'll walk you back to the warp mage."

"Yeah. You're right about that," Chisaki said. Though the Mano -- this new Mano -- had offered her more than the power to survive. There was perhaps not a sense of camaraderie, but a hope there might be some day.

Something to think on. She walked with him, taking a few longer steps to catch up. "Thanks."