Mila is finishing up with the cleanup. It is a maid cafe, of course, and never mind that yesterday it was instead focused on beat poetry, she felt like that'd be too insincere and she'd only get people who showed up because they looked up what beat poetry is after seeing her cafe's name and that doesn't seem like a good idea, so instead it is a maid cafe. And as it is a maid cafe, and she is the only one working there, she is wearing a maid outfit. Never mind that it isn't open yet, she needs to get used to the uniform after all, but this does leave her in a maid outfit, having finished the sweeping and restacking the supplies that fell and making a plan for new shelves and now she is going after the Outside dust with a feather duster and is starting to second guess her choice of outfits because what if somebody walks in right now this would be mortifying.
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"Backup dancers?" She stops, frozen momentarily from fear. Then grasps at it, like a desperate person would at a lifeline. "Yes, backup dancers, we'll need to figure out a good time to arrange this for later when they're available. Guess we'll have to schedule it later!" Wait wait crap there was a bit mentioned there. "And it was for ONE QUESTION, not all the secrets!"
Name: Mila Mesmer.
Academics Skill: Above Average.
Sports Skill: Above Average.
Favorite Foods: strawberries, apricots, sweet rice dumplings, stew, salt mackerel, yakitori, red tea.
Blood Type: A.
Animal: Boar.
Age: a year or two older than you, allegedly.
Abilities
# Grace 2. You’re graceful, move quietly, and look and act natural in formal wear. Like you just stepped out of a Regency novel as “Head Maid”.
# Changeling 2. You aren’t human, but you’re magically good at faking it. You don’t even have to intentionally change your eyes from night and falling stars anymore.
# Crafts 1. You’re good at handiwork, especially mask-making and glasswork. For not suspicious reasons. Why would they be suspicious? Asking about them is suspicious!!
Alertness 1: you’re vaguely aware of your environment.
# Domestic Tasks 1. You can cook, clean, dust, wash dishes... again, “Head Maid” vibes.
# Superior Dreamer 1. Like Rinley, you’re good at coping with weirdness and dreams.
# Arts 0. You don’t feel comfortable expressing yourself through art, though you can handle technical work with Grace or Crafts.
Miracles
[ACCURSED]
# You have a special place. While hiding there for a while, you can gain MP by doing an XP action alone or intentionally skipping an XP action. If you let someone down, miss an appointment, or let something bad happen because you were hiding there, that’s another MP. If you come out with 5+ MP, everything stays clean and orderly around you, you leave with something cool, and you are marked with a night-black shard of glass and falling stars, UNTIL you gain the Sickness issue or hit 4 or less MP. The cool thing stays, everything else vanishes. You can invite someone inside, but things are weird and occasionally dangerous when others are involved.
# Once a week, you can UNMAKE something, physical or conceptual. By spending MP, you can do this more often. The possibilities of hurting someone with this likely terrify you.
# When you mark a wound, or would if you had room, lose 1 MP.
# Whenever you have the Sickness Issue, you are haunted by your previous self. At Sickness 3+, this haunting becomes actively supernatural. If you run out of MP while being haunted, bad things happen.
# If you do a short 15 XP quest, you can use your crafts to make a minion manifested from something in your heart. Then you can kill it to remove that thing. Or you can use it for other purposes.
# If you do a short 15 XP quest, you can create a labyrinth or hidden world, a twisted space that expresses something about your heart. Like a Persona dungeon.
[SENTIMENTAL]
# If you have a level 3+ Connection to something or someone, or a Bond or a Perk that mentions it, it counts as a Treasure.
# You can appear in ghostly form around your treasures while you sleep, or see through its senses, or perceive their dreams. You can telepathically speak to it, and you can do this at any distance.
# You can help your treasure resist any outside influences that you do not share, you can help them move, and they can call upon your abilities/MP/knowledge/powers, but only while you are present in ghost form.
# If you spend 1 MP, you can do the former while you’re awake, but you can’t do anything from the latter (save that your support counts as a +1 Tool (and 1 Edge).
# Whenever a Treasure “calls” to you or needs you, you hear or feel it.
# By going on a short 15 XP quest, you can make a location or an animal a +1 Tool, or teach someone a Superior Skill 2. You could also do this to unlock their “true form” or “true power.” This improvement only lasts as long as that quest fills one of your four quest “slots.”
Quests
Under Siege: 1/9
Art Shop And Garden 3/21
The Hidden Room 0/21
Academics Skill: Above Average.
Sports Skill: Above Average.
Favorite Foods: strawberries, apricots, sweet rice dumplings, stew, salt mackerel, yakitori, red tea.
Blood Type: A.
Animal: Boar.
Age: a year or two older than you, allegedly.
Abilities
# Grace 2. You’re graceful, move quietly, and look and act natural in formal wear. Like you just stepped out of a Regency novel as “Head Maid”.
# Changeling 2. You aren’t human, but you’re magically good at faking it. You don’t even have to intentionally change your eyes from night and falling stars anymore.
# Crafts 1. You’re good at handiwork, especially mask-making and glasswork. For not suspicious reasons. Why would they be suspicious? Asking about them is suspicious!!
Alertness 1: you’re vaguely aware of your environment.
# Domestic Tasks 1. You can cook, clean, dust, wash dishes... again, “Head Maid” vibes.
# Superior Dreamer 1. Like Rinley, you’re good at coping with weirdness and dreams.
# Arts 0. You don’t feel comfortable expressing yourself through art, though you can handle technical work with Grace or Crafts.
Miracles
[ACCURSED]
# You have a special place. While hiding there for a while, you can gain MP by doing an XP action alone or intentionally skipping an XP action. If you let someone down, miss an appointment, or let something bad happen because you were hiding there, that’s another MP. If you come out with 5+ MP, everything stays clean and orderly around you, you leave with something cool, and you are marked with a night-black shard of glass and falling stars, UNTIL you gain the Sickness issue or hit 4 or less MP. The cool thing stays, everything else vanishes. You can invite someone inside, but things are weird and occasionally dangerous when others are involved.
# Once a week, you can UNMAKE something, physical or conceptual. By spending MP, you can do this more often. The possibilities of hurting someone with this likely terrify you.
# When you mark a wound, or would if you had room, lose 1 MP.
# Whenever you have the Sickness Issue, you are haunted by your previous self. At Sickness 3+, this haunting becomes actively supernatural. If you run out of MP while being haunted, bad things happen.
# If you do a short 15 XP quest, you can use your crafts to make a minion manifested from something in your heart. Then you can kill it to remove that thing. Or you can use it for other purposes.
# If you do a short 15 XP quest, you can create a labyrinth or hidden world, a twisted space that expresses something about your heart. Like a Persona dungeon.
[SENTIMENTAL]
# If you have a level 3+ Connection to something or someone, or a Bond or a Perk that mentions it, it counts as a Treasure.
# You can appear in ghostly form around your treasures while you sleep, or see through its senses, or perceive their dreams. You can telepathically speak to it, and you can do this at any distance.
# You can help your treasure resist any outside influences that you do not share, you can help them move, and they can call upon your abilities/MP/knowledge/powers, but only while you are present in ghost form.
# If you spend 1 MP, you can do the former while you’re awake, but you can’t do anything from the latter (save that your support counts as a +1 Tool (and 1 Edge).
# Whenever a Treasure “calls” to you or needs you, you hear or feel it.
# By going on a short 15 XP quest, you can make a location or an animal a +1 Tool, or teach someone a Superior Skill 2. You could also do this to unlock their “true form” or “true power.” This improvement only lasts as long as that quest fills one of your four quest “slots.”
Quests
Under Siege: 1/9
Art Shop And Garden 3/21
The Hidden Room 0/21
You're talking. But for your info, a normal person who is a Fortitude resident would be relatively nonchalant in this scene, even if she were to conclude that one or both of you were goddesses. Fortitude's got plenty a goddess in it. They deserve respect, don't get me wrong, but it's really nothing to get huffy over. I don't mean to interrupt though, carry on.
You see, the issue with this is that Mila, being a person without a childhood, among other things lacking, does not know this.
"Oh!" said Jasper with a brilliant smile. "Of course that's fine, it's so much to remember - I'll teach you!" She walked over to Mila and stood behind her - her breath against your hair is so soft and warm you brain might melt away into the endless blue sky and dream of tropical islands. Forwardly, she pressed herself against your back, taking hold of both of your wrists - "You stand straighter, like this," murmured Jasper, remembering her own lessons. "This hand extended, this hand back here. Head high. You need to stand gloriously, as your most entire self, worthy of love. Believe in yourself!"
And then she swirled away in a burst of yellow fabric, walking backwards with a hand to her chin to inspect the results. "And of course if you wish to challenge me to a duel of swords, or dance, or weaving, or archery, that would be wonderful!" she said.
She shivers for reasons entirely unrelated to cold as she's shown the pose, and does her best. She makes the motions exactly right. That's the most painful part of this. It's a pale imitation of what it should be and something is deeply off. But once she breaks the pose, it becomes not quite as stark. "I am afraid of those I can only dance, and I don't know what'd be at stake." She smiles. "So, ah, do you plan to stay in the area long? Or would you like to duel for answers to a question?"
Name, right, names are important, do not want to upset The Sun with no name or in fact anything else. "Ah, no. You are not in the Consuming Hells, and I am not a devil." Not technically a lie. "My name's Mila." Also not technically a lie, but we are not thinking about any other name we might have had no ma'am. "We're in Town, the outskirts by Lake. Not in Outside though. And... I know some courtly rituals but I don't know which are the right ones. I... I hope you're not offended?" Was that the right level of contrite? How do normal people react when they come face to face with Great Powers? Why didn't she study this?
Mila freezes. She stands stock, perfectly still for far too long. It's her, and Sir Lighthouse, the third of his name, and both are frozen.
And zoom in through the eyes (which have grown wide as saucers) into her thought process.
First the lights. Alarms, specifically, red lights blinking to wake the dead, if the dead were also deaf and worked at a nuclear power plant that was going critical and needed them right now. Speaking of which, in case said workers were also blind the alarms have a very loud wail, pulsing like a tornado siren to make sure you know that shit got serious. A scattering of thoughts all try to come up with a plan for the rapidly approaching danger, but keep running into each other in the corridors of her mind and scattering the half-formed concepts to frayed imaginative wisps.
After far, far too long she moves again. Takes a deep breath, putting her hands in front of her, clasped together, pointer finger touching her chin. Lets out her breath, takes another deep, calming breath. Points the fingers towards The Sun.
"No."
Oh dear this was a terrible terrible plan and she did not introduce herself properly and please don't be mad.
And zoom in through the eyes (which have grown wide as saucers) into her thought process.
First the lights. Alarms, specifically, red lights blinking to wake the dead, if the dead were also deaf and worked at a nuclear power plant that was going critical and needed them right now. Speaking of which, in case said workers were also blind the alarms have a very loud wail, pulsing like a tornado siren to make sure you know that shit got serious. A scattering of thoughts all try to come up with a plan for the rapidly approaching danger, but keep running into each other in the corridors of her mind and scattering the half-formed concepts to frayed imaginative wisps.
After far, far too long she moves again. Takes a deep breath, putting her hands in front of her, clasped together, pointer finger touching her chin. Lets out her breath, takes another deep, calming breath. Points the fingers towards The Sun.
"No."
Oh dear this was a terrible terrible plan and she did not introduce herself properly and please don't be mad.
You know that feeling when you go outside a movie theatre? You're stepping from a story, which is wonderful and great but somewhat flatter than real life, with all the plot threads neatly tied together in a bow at the end, and stepping into real life, which is loud and sometimes smelly and oh so much brighter? You're dazed, just a bit, as you come out into the parking lot and you might sneeze at the bright light that suddenly fills your awareness and makes you know that there is more than just a set of regimented stories and that life is complex and beautiful and you could never understand all of it in a million years?
That metaphor ran away from me a little but that, exactly that, happens as she rounds the bend and sees the lighthouse, the strange woman standing there, the crater, and the blinding glow. Down to the sneezing fit. "I'm sorry" -ka-chew- "I'm not sure" -ka-chew- "what's going on" -ka-chew-. She stumbles through the apology, staying far enough away that her sneezes won't get near the other woman.
That metaphor ran away from me a little but that, exactly that, happens as she rounds the bend and sees the lighthouse, the strange woman standing there, the crater, and the blinding glow. Down to the sneezing fit. "I'm sorry" -ka-chew- "I'm not sure" -ka-chew- "what's going on" -ka-chew-. She stumbles through the apology, staying far enough away that her sneezes won't get near the other woman.
It's very refreshing and gives every sign that tonight will be very productive! (Is this too good to be true?)
Today's going to be a great day, she's sure of it, she'll make sure of it. She's got time, she wants to take a look at the lighthouse (it was something she was going to draft a sketch of anyway, so might as well head in that direction) but she wants to finish this work first. A moment, though, to rescue the young lady from sunburn. Such a fate is terrible after all. And back to the work at hand, and she'll be good in about thirty minutes.
And all about Fortitude, what was already a very hot day turns into a scorcher. Within twenty minutes the town erupts in groans as the ramshackle old power grid overloads under the strain of trying to keep everything cool in the face of the Sun's apology.
And twenty minutes later she's reminded why you never get your hopes up.
She sighs, glaring at the painting which is almost done, it's right there, but she just can't justify finishing it when the lighting changed and the paint's so hot it's runny. Another half completed thing held hostage by the whims of the natural world: she darts a glare up at the sun overhead, scowling as it shines brightly on, indifferent. She mutters under her breath as she packs up her tools into a tote, putting her shoes in there as well and striding through the surf, south. To the lighthouse, then, there's a big object providing shade there at least and something that might be sketchable, though the paint's all buggered for today.
You know what's terrible about insomnia? Or more accurately self induced insomnia, because damn sleeping sucks: it's all rargh nightmares and dreams that you suppose aren't technically nightmares because you're getting everything you ever wanted in the dream just in the worst way and cessation of consciousness. What if you just don't wake up one day? That's terrifying. Sleep is terrible and it's a horrible thing to need to do, and I for one would rather get so much more done during the wee hours when everyone else appears to need to do it and I can be left alone. But that's a tangent, insomnia sucks because you can't do things well after a point. You can try, but then you're all fuzzy after a point and if you're trying to work with delicate things or hot things or sharp jagged things, all of which describe blowing glass, you might after a time be inclined to stop blowing glass after you start to drift and it starts sagging off the pole and dripping towards your shoe. So you might build up a backlog of things you've wanted to do, while doing the prep which does not involve as much fire, as well as doing all the paperwork and chores you could think you needed because you need something to keep yourself awake another hour or two.
But that, my friend, describes yesterday. And last night, for the first time in you don't want to know, Mila got enough sleep. More than enough, really, she's only been awake and refreshed for an hour or so. And she can do things and be perfectly focused on them. And then. AND THEN. The bloody day's too hot to want to be anywhere near a furnace.
So that's why she happens to be relaxing by the seaside, sketching the boats coming into the docks. A good sea breeze, practice, and something to work off of for her next piece, when the sun's set, the moon is up, and it's cool enough to even begin to think about being near open flame.
But that, my friend, describes yesterday. And last night, for the first time in you don't want to know, Mila got enough sleep. More than enough, really, she's only been awake and refreshed for an hour or so. And she can do things and be perfectly focused on them. And then. AND THEN. The bloody day's too hot to want to be anywhere near a furnace.
So that's why she happens to be relaxing by the seaside, sketching the boats coming into the docks. A good sea breeze, practice, and something to work off of for her next piece, when the sun's set, the moon is up, and it's cool enough to even begin to think about being near open flame.
There's an overflow of broken flight plan data pouring from the missile, intentions clearly visible amidst the haze of junk data. There are so many voices here, strung together, barely synchronized - this thing is different to you. You're a human mind, digitalized and reborn. Prometheus was a crafted entity, created as a pure manifestation of a concept. This is...
Organic.
These pieces weren't made. They happened. This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of artificial intelligence; the debris of a thousand school projects, old corporate spyware, spambots, too-sentient antivirus programs, all the discarded attempts at building something like you that didn't quite get there. They've been exchanging viruses back and forth in an evolutionary hothouse to form something like a nervous system and you can feel those same viruses try to assault you now, trying to add you as a node to their incoherent entity.
The dominant figure amidst the randomly firing calculations is a flight control computer - artificially bloated above what it should be, given an unjust share of resources during its development by Doctor Sylvanius, and it's this that is trying to reassert control over the collective and return the missile to its original course. But in the meantime the entire network is bearing down on you with an intense curiosity. It plans to assimilate you too - not maliciously, but because that's what it knows to do to interesting things.
Being an AI does not feel like the super unique thing it was four months ago. There's her, but then there's Prometheus, and then Bode turns out to be one, and there's one made by Doctor Sylvanius (KING OF MARS, the missile helpfully spams her with). Not that she's complaining, mind you, it's neat to see others, and they all are very unique still. It's just a different thing than she expected, when she woke up.
Oh right the missile.
She starts staring at it, watching it approach (she's not feeling particularly threatened here), and idly drifts so that the missile's path won't hit the car. And then she starts her own countervirals. Carefully, mind you, trying to perhaps inoculate, or even just shore up, a node at a time. Maybe she can make a friend here?
[Support: 4]
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