World Tree MUSH

    "Dinner's here~."

    The one nice thing about rooming with someone who's lived in Tokyo for almost a decade is she knows a lot of the little secrets the city holds that most visitors would never notice. That extends to all the best little food carts, the kinds of food you can't really get except by hauling your backside down to wherever the owner sets up. There's a particular ramen cart Hyouka's fond of, and to be fair, they do make very good ramen. And tonight, she had a bit of a craving, so takeout ramen it is.

    Alty and Leene are handling whatever it is they might need to handle, so Hyouka just brings the large bag in and sets it on the counter, immediately going for a pair of chopsticks from her silverware drawer. "I ought to take you to meet old Genzo some time. His ramen got me through a lot of late office nights."

    Serrah is looking ... as well as could be expected, sleep-wise; not too sleepy, not fully energized. Her tendency to sleep whenever has led to ups and downs, to say nothing of her tendency to stay away for days at a time.

    ... Which she did, recently. She's been slightly tense the past few days, but the takeout meal is a welcome relief now.

    She walks into the dining area and bows. "Thanks, Hyouka-san," she says in Japanese -- she's not a native speaker by any stretch of the imagination, but living in (a version of) Tokyo has certainly helped her get practice, even with the World Tree's translation-convention to fall back on. "I'll have to take you up on that." She sniffs the air, and ... twitches slightly. "You got one without garlic, didn't you," she says, sitting down. "I am smelling ... half as much as I expected from two ..."

    Her voice trails off, and she lets out a loud, lengthy exhalation as she settles down and leans onto the table. "Yare yare da waaaaa ..."

    Hyouka finishes combining the broth and noodles from her order, and shoots Serrah an amused smile. "You're starting to sound like an office lady." She slides into her own seat at the table and starts in without ceremony (beyond a soft, "Itadaki~"), but somehow manages around the first mouthful, "So, how was your trip offworld? I've been a little busy wrangling my own business, so I haven't had time to ask."

    Serrah laughs. "Office lady?" she says in English. "Okay, that's, uh ... I'm gonna have to skip that one."

    At the question, she hesitates for a moment, and eats several bites of ramen. "I have getting involved in ... sort of inter-factional politics in a Blossom I've gotten caught up in before," she says, switching back to Japanese. "There's a bit of a cold war between different factions of ... transforming magic-users called 'maho'." She pronounces it differently from 'mahou', without the doubled vowel sound. "And intra-factional politics, when two different groups tried to have a fight where there could have been a fight. Crazy business."

    She blinks. "Wait, did I say that right?" she says hesitantly. "Or, no. One of those 'fights' was supposed to be 'collateral damage.'"

    Then she glances in the direction of Alty and Leene's charging cradles, and leans slightly closer to Hyouka. "There was a ... crime-fighting shinki in Alty's world," she says in a low voice. "One of the ones from Leene's city. It's ..." She sighs, and runs a hand through her hair. "... I don't know how much details I want to go into there, but then she got picked up by someone with the title of ..." She hesitates. "... I don't know the Japanese word," she says in English. "But her title was, uh, it was a cognate of 'assassin'."

    Ever adept in the art of listening and eating, Hyouka works through her ramen at the steady pace of a longtime office worker intending to make the most of scant free time. It's an old habit she's never really broken; the only meal she really takes her time on is yakiniku, and that's pretty much mandatory by the nature of yakiniku itself. She really is listening, though, the occasional faint bob of her head and glance up at Serrah showing where her attention really lies.

    'Maho' in particular draws her attention, but she has to file that question away for later when the topic wheels around to shinki. Pretty much her entire thought process wheels to a halt, and even her meal slows down in its trip from bowl to mouth. Scowl. Slurp. "...someone taught a shinki to kill? Or was it already killing, and she just took it in?"

    There's a brief pause.

    "'Ansatsujin', by the way. Or maybe 'koroshiya', but that's closer to a mob triggerman. 'Ansatsujin' is more like a ninja or a sniper for hire or... well, you get the idea. Gunned down in the street versus poisoning or sniping or the like."

    Serrah frowns, eating her meal for another moment. "Killed one unrepentant murderer," she says finally in English. "And then after we rescued Leene, she was just scaring muggers away until she met the Assassin." She shrugs, and considers the brief linguistics lesson. "'Ansatsujin' sounds like the more accurate one, yes," she says, switching back to Japanese again. "I didn't stick around after the Shinki told her story."

    She shakes her head and eats another few bites. "I've just been feeling kind of ... weird, I guess," she says. "Dunno what else to say."

    She looks up at Hyouka. "What about you?" she says. "How've you been?"

    The story of the shinki troubles Hyouka deeply, but there's little to do about it right now, and it's a muddy problem besides. The pseudo-elf goes back to wolfing down her food, only to stop again when Serrah turns the question around towards her. "Mm?" Slurp. "Ah, I've been..." She pauses, trying to decide how best to phrase it. "It's been a mixed bag. I was working with a bounty hunter to help protect a child he's been looking after. I think I told you about him in passing, he goes by 'Mandalorian'? Well, the man that's after the child, turns out to have been a real nasty piece of work."

    There's a softer, more worried frown. "You remember a couple weeks back I came back with my clothes all shredded around the sleeves, pant legs, and back? And my repair station spent a few weeks fabricating a new part nonstop?" She gestures absently at the large machine, currently idle. "...well, he knows where we live, and he made a threat against Alty and Leene. And that's when I found out my body has a black-box dragon mode that DARGN never told me about."

    The silence hangs for a second or two.

    "In my defense, it was questionable whether you would ever be capable of activating it," DARGN says.

    Serrah frowns, and spends a moment eating as Hyouka speaks. "Yeah, I remember," she says between bites. "I forget why I didn't ask you about that at the time." (It was because she wandered off for a few days again.)

    And then ... there's a particularly nasty piece of work who knows where they live, and Serrah tenses up.

    Which gets blown out of the water by the rest of that sentence."

    When DARGN makes that interjection, her body twitches into an ever-so-slightly different configuration, as a video skipping ahead, her face is carefully blank -- clearly, she just stopped time to compose herself. "I see," she says. "A dragon-mode, huh."

    She shakes her head and throws her hands into the air. "I 'unno, DARGN, that just doesn't sound like a good excuse to me," she says, in a confrontational and audibly-exasperated tone of someone addressing, say, an idiotic self-centered vampire duke who's placed an obedience-curse on her. "There needs to be, like, full-disclosure on things like that. Y'know what I'm saying?"

    "In my defense," DARGN speaks up again, "My thought patterns are modeled on the consciousness of an actual dragon. We are not known for our forthcoming nature."

    Hyouka grunts. "Trust me, I've given DARGN an earful and a half about this. There are no more unwelcome surprises lying dormant in my body." This time, DARGN speaks up with her usual dry tone. "I seem to recall that surprise being quite welcome in the moment." Hyouka grumbles, taking the opportunity to stuff more ramen in her mouth, before adding in a muffled, "Explain it for her."

    At least DARGN does what she's told, really. "Very well. Because the DraCor Engine functions on the same mana generation principles as a dragon's heart, it was theorized that if being employed as an actual 'heart', it might resonate with emotions from its owner which were particularly... draconic, for lack of a better word. Desire. Pride. Greed. These are not necessarily negative traits," the AI adds. "Desire to protect. Greed that refuses to let one's loved ones be taken away. When Hyouka's body was built, its designer incorporated a number of additional systems and enchantments which would draw more mana than the DraCor engine could produce in its base state."

    Finally finishing her ramen, Hyouka adds, "...When Moff Gideon gave me the 'I know where you live, and I know about Alty and Leene', I got mad enough to push it over the threshold for running the extras, apparently."

    Serrah nods, and spends several minutes alternating between thinking about this and eating. At one point, she stops time again, and is suddenly leaning back. However, Hyouka doesn't seem to think that there's anything left unresolved, nor is she in any discernible distress beyond her usual annoyance with DARGN which she's had the entire time Serrah has known her.

    So Serrah sighs softly. "Yeah," she says. "Sorry, DARGN. I just ..." She shakes her head. "Couldn't help but remember the sixteen or so months of, of my situation."

    And thus, her anger is neatly redirected to the one who caused Hyouka's reaction.

    "But anyway," Serrah continues, "yeah. I'm ... kind of worried about this 'Moff Gideon' guy now." She thinks about this a moment. "Way to get us paranoid, I guess, right? Like, am I gonna have to ..." Her voice trails off. "Hang on, he only mentioned Alty and Leene? Not me?"

    "That's right," Hyouka confirms. "Only the two of them. His information might not be entirely up to date. But the fact he had it is worrying." She gestures around vaguely with her chopsticks. "I'm probably going to install some additional security measures. An escape hatch of some kind for you and the shinki, if nothing else. It'll be expensive, but less expensive than relocating entirely, and I think the trust fund that covers my rent and repair expenses will be willing to finance it." DARGN says, "It will be a difficult sell. I cannot give odds of success, as imp and goblin financiers can be difficult to predict."

    Hyouka shrugs, and then finishes her ramen in one last slurp. "I could eat myself up worrying about it, but that'd just ruin my day without anything to show for it. So I'm gonna take steps that will ensure that if he does attack, it fails long enough for you three to escape. Not much more than that I can do, if it happens while I'm offworld."

    Serrah nods, frowning. "An escape hatch sounds good," she says. "Vincent had several. Not that I could've used 'em, since he had me on lockdown every time I ended up in Hartford." She chortles. "Oh good grief, DARGN. Those sound even worse than vampire financiers. But, uh ..."

    She looks like she's about to object -- Hyouka's her friend, she's not just going to run away -- but relaxes the minute Hyouka says 'if I'm offworld'. "Okay, that's more sensible than I thought you were about to say," she says. "I mean. I do think of this as my home, and I can fight for myself. But ..." She shrugs. "Yeah."

    Hyouka listens to Serra while she's drinking down the last of her broth, and when she's done, she sets the bowl down, then leans back in her chair a bit - and gestures with her chopsticks. "I put a lot higher value on you and the girls than I do this apartment. It's not even the second or third apartment I've ever lived in, and even the repair unit could be replaced if need be. The three of you can't, though. I'd much rather you take them and run to safety."

    DARGN speaks up, "While I would not recommend doing so repeatedly, the trust fund which finances Hyouka's repairs could feasibly rebuild the unit entirely at least a couple of times over. Hyouka would not even be without repairs in the interim; she could simply visit her body's manufacturers. The repairs would be much slower, however."

    Serrah nods. "Okay, cool," she says. "Glad we've got that cleared up." She gestures vaguely. "I mean, I've lived here for, what, a few months now? It's nice not having to crash wherever. But, basically, point taken."

    She regards her empty bowl for a moment. "Although, as far as that goes," she says. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in visiting my home? The Hartford Blossom, I mean. It's been ... what, six whole months since ..." She grimaces. "... my friends and I killed a Duke of the Empire ... a Duke who was very unpopular, and with the Emperor's 'unofficial' blessing while disguised as a Major ..." (It's actually been five months.)

    "But, uh ..." She shakes her head. "I kinda feel like it's high time I checked up on the people I left behind. Y'know?"

    "I get you," Hyouka replies, with a little nod of her head. "And I'd be glad to go. I've never really been out to your neck of the woods, have I?" She slides out of her chair and holds out a hand towards Serrah's chopsticks, a silent offer to take them with her. "I've got a good bit of money tucked away from working recently, so I won't have any trouble for a while. Might be a good time for a vacation."

    Serrah chuckles, handing Hyouka her chopsticks. "You and me both," she says. "It's not like I've spent much of my mercenary work, myself." She shrugs. "Still, I mean, the Hartford Empire in particular might not be the best vacation spot. It is an empire run by literal blood-suckers."

    Hyouka takes the chopsticks and steps over to the kitchen area, immediately going about the process of washing both sets. "Well, that's not a big concern, I don't have blood," she replies, with an amused tone. More casually, she asks, "What's it like, though? I don't think I've ever actually sat down and asked you about it. Technology level, magic level, what kind of society it is..."

    Serrah considers this. "I think it's the beginning of the ... twentieth century? Or, no, twenty-first. Our calendar has it as year 721 of the Fourth Age." She's ironically having difficulty, simply because even after nearly two years mostly away, it's all too ordinary for her.

    "It's ... technology and society are a lot like other worlds called 'Earth' in that time period, really," she says. "Magic is ... ordinary. To the point that I'm just completely weirded out by the fact that there's no magic in a lot of worlds in the World Tree. Or that there's obviously-non-technological stuff that 'isn't magic'. Or that even in worlds that do have magic ..." She gestures vaguely. "We have, like ... even in New York City, you can look up in the sky and see ripples of rainbow light. Every few blocks, there'll be a skyscraper that's one solid tree, grown by dryads or elves or ..."

    She sighs softly. She's ... really looking homesick now, actually. And somewhat pensive.

    Hyouka doesn't take long to clean her chopsticks, and on finishing that, she just sets them out to dry, and then leans against the counter, listening. "Mm. Like here, where we've got a successful construction firm run by oni, a yuki-onna politician, and one of our most famous figures is a woman and her magic-powered robot tiger famous for slaying a dragon?" She chuckles softly, shaking her head.

    "When my parents were born, 'magic' was still the stuff of fairy tales. They got to watch it go public live on TV. I got to watch a girl and her techno-magical tiger armor save the world from a dragon when I was a child. Technology and magic was just about a pipe dream before that. Now, look at me. You never know what your new 'normal' will be, really. And even in a fantastical world with technology, magic, vampires, wizards, cyborgs..."

    She makes a vague hand gesture.

    "Someone's still got to file the paperwork and ship the goods. Someone's got to sling the burgers, or cook the inn stew, or... you get the idea. I think if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that worlds aren't all that different as they seem at times, and sometimes even the same world can be a different place one week to the next."

    Serrah manages a weak smile. "Yeah," she says. "That's ... you put it better than I could've, for sure." She shrugs. "Of course, every politician from Count on up is a vampire where I'm from, and so're most of the ones below that, but ..."

    She shrugs again, and manages a slightly larger smile. "I honestly can't wait to show you Hartford's New York."