World Tree MUSH

Today, Misaki's been spending most of her time at home. She's still trying to grasp recent events. Now, just after dinner, she's decided to go for a walk to explore her new neighborhood, not really sure where's she's going. The skies threaten rain, so she's brought an umbrella with her.

    Somewhere nearby, piano music begins playing. The instrumental intro to Mad World by Gary Jules, to be precise.

    The source appears to be a lavender-skinned demoness with six glowing purple eyes in two vertical rows, with hair so black it seems like a hole in space or a graphical glitch. She's wearing a pink crop top with the text "I'll Stop Wearing Pink When They Invent A Darker Color", red booty shorts, and running shoes.

    She happens to be walking up the street in Misaki's general direction, and does not appear to be paying attention to where she's going as she sings, "All around me are familiar Nyxes, worn out ... plyxes, worn out Nyxes ..."

As soon as Misaki notices Emily, she tenses up and transforms. She doesn't point the guns at Emily, but she's holding them, and she moves to block Emily's path. "If you're here to cause trouble, don't." She makes her eyes glow a faint red, to try to look more intimidating.

    "Bright and early for the -- Whoop!" Emily glides backward slightly as the magical girl suddenly appears. For a brief instant, she looks absolutely surprised and startled ... but then her expression is an amused and faintly smug smile. "You shouldn't always jump straight to battle-preparations, young lady," she says. "I'm not a troublemaker, I'm just a weirdo with too much time on her hands."

    She looks Misaki up and down. "Nice trick with the eyes, though," she adds. "I do that kind of thing all the time. Anywho, my name's Emily. Nyx-model Emily, sometimes known as Emily Nyx."

"One of my seniors told me there's lots of dangerous things that come from offworld, and you look dangerous." Misaki justifies herself, though she makes the red light fade. "My name's Misaki Sakai. Nice to meet you." She bows formally with the introduction. "Sorry for jumping to conclusions."

    Emily nods. "I suppose that's fair!" she says. "Although I suppose I am dangerous, it's just that I'm usually just a danger to other dangers." In a swirl of what appears to be silvery glitter, she transforms into a red-eyed woman with white hair in a pixie cut, wearing a pinstripe suit, a red necktie. Massive holographic twintails appear, spiraling inward and clipping through the ground. "I suppose that for me, shapeshifting is a kind of ... like ... fashion, if that makes sense."

"Fancy." Misaki puts her guns away, but doesn't drop transformation. "Well, I'm dangerous too. Those guns are not just for show." She giggles, "So what brings you here? Just exploring, or something more specific?"

    Emily grins. "My guns aren't for show either!" She flexes, and then hesitates. "Wait, that joke doesn't translate well into Japanese, does it. Or ... wait, does the World Tree's translation thing account for that?"

    She shakes her head. "Uh, anyway," she says hurriedly, "it's less 'exploring' and more 'wandering'. The world I'm from was practically destroyed two thirds of a millennium ago, so I've spent the past few years since it Blossomed out and about."

Misaki facepalms at the joke. "That sounds like an unfortunate place to be from." She goes and finds a nearby bench to sit on, "You come across a lot of interesting worlds? I haven't left mine yet, though I might soon. I'm not sure. I've had some help from offworlders in the past, maybe I can return the favor in some way by helping people in other worlds."

    Emily floats off the ground and weightlessly perches on the back of the seat. "Nobody knows how it happened," she says, and actually sounds somewhat serious. "All I know is, there was a vortexy tornadoy thing or something, and I was activated for the first time after the dust settled and all the Masters went extinct. That's, uh, the humans," she adds.

    She smiles at the question. "Pretty much everywhere I've been has been interesting," she proclaims. "I've seen a world where alchemy follows scientific principles and follows the law of equivalent exchange, a world like Earth except it's a century and a half ago and populated by elves, a world ruined by a war between androids made by humans and Machine Lifeforms created by aliens ..." Her expression falters for a second at that last part.

    Though that last comment gets a smile. "Sounds like you're gonna be quite the hero!" she says. "How long have you been doing the hero stuff in this world?"

Misaki listens attentively. "Those all sound like interesting places." There's a bit of a shy giggle when she's asked how long she's been doing the hero stuff for, "Uh... how do the Americans say it?" She thinks for a moment, "I plead the fifth?"

    Emily nods. "Really, I spend more time out of the halcyon remnant of my world than I do in it, these days," she says. "A supermajority, probably. There's people trying to fix things for us Eudaemons, but." She shrugs. "It probably won't qualify as 'back to life' in your lifetime."

    At the comment on the length of time, Emily actually laughs out loud. "That recently, huh?" she says, grinning cheekily. "Well, looks like you've got some experiences ahead o' you!" Her expression goes back to amused-and-faintly-smug. "Who's the senior you mentioned, by the way?"

Misaki blushes when Emily finds her inexperience amusing, "Tachibana-san." She answers, "I don't know if I can trust her, though. She's been trying to play up the 'you can trust me, I won't hide important things from you' and the next time we met it became really clear she'd been hiding something important from me."

    Emily tilts her head. "Tachibana Yumi, you mean?" she says. "I know her, we fought a fire god together. Or at least ... I thought I knew her." She frowns. "She's ... perceptive. Better at bigger-picture thinking than I am ..." An attempt to sound flippant which fails, and her voice trails off.

    She shrugs, and leans back against nothing in particular, her holographic twintails moving in a completely unnatural manner. "What kind of 'hiding something important' are we talking about here?" she asks, her tone serious. "Like ... details about your power? Or ... or what do you mean?'

"Yeah, her." Misaki opens up her umbrella as the rain begins to fall, "Like the fact that someone was going to try to kill me."

    Emily holds a hand up to catch the rain, but makes no move to try go avoid or block it. "Hmm ..." She seems completely unbothered by the rain. And, for that matter, not particularly dampened.

    She sits there silently for a moment. Then she says, "Can you play back the conv-- wait no, you're a human, not a robot. Wow I'm out of it." (Yumi isn't the only thing bothering her.) "Uh ... hmm."

    She makes a face, tilts her head back and forth for a few seconds, and shrugs. "Honestly, knowing what I do about Tachibana, I'd want to hear her side of the story first," she says, "but speaking as a professional bullshitter, if you'll pardon my language ... it ... doesn't necessarily seem to me like the only possible explanation is that she's deliberately hiding something from you. She kind of has a protective streak, and I'd wager that not telling you right away was trying to ... protect you." She shakes her head uncertainly. "Which, obviously, was a mistake on her part. Stupidity, if you want to put it that way, not malice."

Misaki doesn't know how to respond to the playback thing, and so she just doesn't beyond a slow blink. "Maybe. Probably. I want to believe you're right, but... after making such a big deal about being the one who isn't hiding anything from me, it bothers me." She raises a hand and creates a vague approximation of events with a few orbs of light, red for herself, orange for Yumi, purple for the Executioner, and various colors for the others, "She was right there when the attack happened, and she was fighting to protect me from someone scary strong. It looked like she had brought friends, too." The details of the approximation are off, as Misaki wasn't looking at events and is going off a flawed human memory.

    Emily shrugs. "Oh, I meant the conversation where she told you she wasn't hiding anything," she says awkwardly. "Her face, her tone of voice ..." She grimaces. "But I mean, yeah, that'd bother me, too! And if this is a betrayal on her part ..." She shakes her head. "Well. Let's just say I'm running out of surprises in general."

    She thinks for a moment, then shrugs. "I'll just show you my first meeting with her," she says, gesturing.

    A holographic screen appears, with a date from a year and a half ago, depicting the scene of a classic Wild West saloon, except with elves. Though there are multiple concurrent events, in particular identical twin elf-witches facing off in the background, the focus is on Yumi blocking a sword-swing from a girl with blue-gray skin who was trying to attack an unarmed elf. Yumi angrily argues with the blue-skinned girl about a negotiation between miners and the Apache tribe -- though the point of view momentarily shifts through a staticky portal and lands outside. Yumi is firm on the point that the blue-skinned girl -- apparently named Temulin, whose eyes start glowing partway through the fight -- wasn't actually interested in a solution to the vaguely-specified problem, she just wanted to "rack up a body count" and was making up whatever excuses would support this. Both Yumi and Emily-in-the-recording point out that she isn't actually addressing the problem, and though they try to persuade her to stand down peaceably, they end up knocking her out. The recording ends with Emily "reapplying all capacitor seals" (the view is briefly partly obscured by pearlescent, gold, and silver auras seeming to construct themselves around her before fading again), her and Yumi introducing themselves to each other.

    "And that," Emily concludes, "is where my first impression of Tachibana Yumi came from. Fighting for those who could not defend themselves -- intending to defend one group with words, and one group with her blade. Fighting to prevent a rather nasty slaughter, in both cases." She shrugs. "And ... making some better points with her words than I did."

Misaki watches with rapt attention. "That's interesting." She says, then thinks some more, "I think she probably meant well when she was hiding that from me." She concludes, "She did protect me when that girl came to kill me, that counts for something. I'll have to talk to her about it."

    Emily nods. "Like I said before, you gotta hear her side of the story," she says, smiling faintly. "And, I mean, I'm not telling you you should automatically believe that she has the best of intentions." Her smile falters again. "But, like ... form your own conclusions, y'know, that kind of thing." She pokes Misaki's shoulder. "And, just speaking from experience, you do need information in order to form proper conclusions."

    She grins. "Besides," she adds, "I'll go out on a limb and guess that you haven't even known me appreciably longer than you knew Yumi when she gave you the lowdown."

"I haven't. I probably know you better than I know her." Misaki admits, "And I get the impression that the information I need is hard to come by." She sighs, "But she sure knows a lot about me, and about what I care about and how that might be used to influence me."

    Emily smiles thinly. "And what do you think you know about me?" she says, raising her eyebrows.

    Though when Misaki mentions how much Yumi seems to know about her, Emily immediately frowns and furrows her brow. "Uh ... huh. So she ... scouted you out herself, or something?" She doesn't seem to know about Vulpes Ex Machina or Elizabeth.

"That you are some kind of shapeshifting robot from a post-apocalyptic world who likes to wander." Misaki smiles, "And that's more than I know about Tachibana-san." Misaki shakes her head, "No, she was clearly tagging along with the person who normally does this kind of thing. The other one seemed rather uncomfortable about how much she was telling me."

    Emily grins. "Off to a good start!" she says. "You're perceptive, I like that. I like people who have things in common with me."

    She blinks. "Oh, well, if Yumi isn't even the one calling the shots, then all bets are off," she says. "Wait ... if they were uncomfortable with how much Yumi was telling you ..." She frowns off into the distance. "... no, yeah, 'all bets are off' was right."

    She grumbles. "People who aren't what they seem to be are an annoyance," she says trying and probably not succeeding at playing this off as some sort of self-absorbed flippancy. "I would kind of like to be privy to the conversation where you ask her about this nonsense. See what the deal is with that."

    ... Oh yeah. There's clearly something about this that's personal for her.

"I think it has to be a private conversation, sorry." Misaki gets up, "And I should probably go back home. I wasn't supposed to be staying out long. It was good to meet you, miss Nyx. Do you have a phone number I could contact you on?"

    Emily nods, and stands up on the back of the bench. "Very well," she says. She furrows her brow. "... yeah, uh, 'Nyx' is my model, it feels more and more weird being addressed as just 'Nyx'." She shrugs grandiosely, and her holographic twintails momentarily stretch out. "Unfortunately, telephones and other direct forms of communication tend not to work very well between worlds in the World Tree. You kind of have to relay stuff the longer ways. But, uh, sending word to Cid Harley's settlement in the halcyon remnant is basically reliable."

"Sorry, miss Emily. I didn't mean to use the wrong form of address." Misaki gets out her phone and writes down the instructions on how to contact Emily, "Enjoy your wandering, and please don't cause any trouble when I'm not looking."

    Emily nods, and smiles her amused-and-faintly-smug smile. "Apology accepted," she says. She does a check for any nearby Vines ... darn, none within range of her sensors. "And we shall have to keep in touch. As you were then, Miss Sakai."

    And then she salutes, and opens a dark portal with static at the edges which seems to lead to a different part of the city, and then slips through and vanishes.