Week 60: Conversation in Yokohama

"I think it's clear," Silvia murmured, turning away from the spyhole out onto the street. She and Tansai were currently holed up in an abandoned building of some kind - a rarity in the cramped Underspire that Yokohama had become. The reason for its abandonment was clear, though - the construction was clearly substandard, with the walls sagging and creaking. Even the Shi Yukiro thought it was unsafe to house people there - probably because it was imminently slated for demolition. Still, they hadn't come for it yet, and an actual roof was a luxury that was hard to come by for intruders in SY territory.

"Everything okay?" she asked, her voice steady. "Had a couple of close calls back there."

Tansai's new face was red, and she was breathing quietly in the corner, but she still smiled as she caught Silvia's eye. "Yeah, fine." she mouthed. "Just like a mission, huh?"

Her tone was jovial, if quiet, but Silvia could see she was shaken. This was not Tansai's forte, and she had been driving her stealth chip to it's limits just to stay alive, while the lack of support mechanisms that she had come to rely upon, like food, along with the living conditions in the underswell, meant that she wasn't nearly as confident as Silvia at this. "I guess they wanted to make Old Cities look good?" she whispered.

"Looks like it, doesn't it?" Silvia replied, just as quietly. While her feelings inside were...complicated, to say the least, considering where they were, her face and voice were a lot more a lot calmer than Tansai's. Those feelings could wait until the danger was past. Which might be a while, admittedly, but still, they could wait. She was used to this kind of thing, though admittedly, usually in different terrain.

"Should be clear for a bit. They seem to wait a bit between sweeps." Despite her words, Silvia had her thermal (or sometimes her X-ray) vision on, and was constantly looking around. She knew all too well that just because things appeared to be safe didn't mean they were. They'd nearly been caught out that way once already. "Anyway, take a drink. Some of the food, too. Maybe grab a quick nap if you can. While we've got the chance."

Tansai nodded, slipping a pair of nearly crushed nutribars from her pocket and sliding over so she was closer to Silvia. She held one out for the other agent to take, while her other hand reached in and pulled out a bottle of water, which she took a careful swig from. "I bet there's someone in here who'd help us." she said, still at the same volume, looking at the half empty bottle in some distaste. "There always is."

Silvia shook her head, taking the offered nutribar without looking and carefully taking an end of the wrapper off. "Not really. Or not that I could find, anyway. When I was last here I tried to talk to a few people...you know, people I knew from...before. Nobody wanted anything to do with me. The SY has them properly cowed. Anyone who wanted to resist is already gone - fled with the ronin." Her voice was still low and matter-of-fact, only a hint of her disappointment in her fellow Japanese coming through. "I guess someone like might be able to find someone, though. Wouldn't be easy, but that's what you're best at, right?" She offered the other Agent a small encouraging smile, then bit into the nutribar, taking only a couple of mouthfuls before folding the wrapper back over and secreting it in a pocket.

"Something like that, yeah." Tansai said, taking a bite from her bar. She brought it up at a weird angle; the lack of a face mask made her normal eating motions seem even stranger in comparison. She looked around the crumbling shack, and out into the dark corridors of the underspire, and frowned.

After a few moments, she spoke again. "You ok, seeing stuff like this?" she asked, looking up at Silvia. "It's pissing me off, and I'm not from here..."

"It's...not exactly easy," Silvia said, continuing to glance around through the walls of their shelter. "But I have been here before. And I've had...some time to get used to the idea. So it's not as bad as it used to be. Besides," she added with a shrug. "I can't afford to let it get to me now. Too dangerous. So I'm just...thinking of it like it was the wilds. A...different part of the wilds, but I'm still having to deal with the same sort of things. I can deal with all the...with what all this really is when I get back to Seoul." For a moment, her voice sounded even wearier. "Until then...I can't dwell on it too much. Might take my edge off."

Tansai nodded slightly, and whispered to herself, even more quietly than the usual volume of this conversation. "Opposite to me then."

She looked up and around. "Fair, I guess." She took a final swig of water before replacing the bottle, and crouching with her arms around her legs, a pensive look on her face. "You ok with taking first watch?" she asked, staring at a point about a foot behind Silvia's knee.

"Sure," Silvia replied, nodding. "I was going to volunteer anyway - you look like you need a rest. Um...no offence intended or anything. But I'm...probably a bit more used to this than you." She took a couple of steps back and forth, more to keep herself active than anything else, and then looked at Tansai with an expression that managed to be both curious and apprehensive.

"If you...don't mind me asking...what do you mean? About being opposite to you. Are you...okay?"

"I'm fine. Just thinking that I usually do best when I pissed off. Stuff like this, or the meatdolls. I mean, breaking into stuff like the Savoy is fun, you know? But this stuff..." her voice went slightly monotone, and her smile became slightly too wide to be trustworthy. "The guys who think they can play with people, in the name of Shi Yukioh, or Ai Jinn, or whatever bullshit...I just want to drag them down here and let them rot, you know?"

Her face softened again, and she scratched the back of her head. "Sorry. Got a bit...too pissed off there."

"It's okay," Silvia replied with a shrug. "I've met plenty of Agents who get...passionate. Just...not normally about that. I mean, Ken'ichi was...um...one of my best friends," she continued, with just a moment of hesitation, "and he would talk for the longest time about the SY way, and how other people just hadn't got honour right, and how the SY needed to stand up for proper honour. He was...he was very much into that kind of thing." She shrugged, awkwardly. "He was...he very much bought the SY line. Kyoto Spire, born and raised. But he...he was a nice guy, really." She didn't seem to notice how she had slipped into defending him, rather than talking about Tansai. "He just wanted to do what was best for everyone, really, and that was the way to do it," she concluded, her voice melancholy.

Tansai blinked. "Don't know about honor. That seems to be one of those words that gets redefined so often I don't know what it means...but I guess it means something to them."

"Does it mean anything to you?" she asked, looking up at Silvia.

"I...don't know." Silvia seemed caught off-guard by the question, looking away and her brow furrowing in thought. "It...it used to. I mean, not nearly so much to me as to some of the others...I was never really into that kind of thing. But I believed that...what the SY did was justified and that we somehow had a...a better system of morals, if that's what you mean. But really, I always just wanted to do what I enjoyed, go and explore places. Being an Agent was just a...a means to an end. I never did it out of some sort of higher calling of honour, the way Ken'ichi did." She shrugged, helplessly.

"And...since I came back, the SY seem to have done everything they can to stop being honourable. I mean...just look at all this." She gestured to the city around them with a sharp arm movement. "But I...I know that if Ken'ichi were still here, he'd be telling me that this was all necessary. That their honour demanded that they had to take such extreme measures. And...maybe he'd be right, I really don't know. Certainly, I...I can't bring myself to sympathise - properly sympathise, I mean - with the ronin. I could never have just...got up and left like that. But at the same time, this place...it reminds me of some of the worst things I saw in the wilds. And I don't know if there's any excuse for that." She sighed, and leaned against one of the walls, leaning her head on her arm. "I just...I don't want to have to think about that kind of stuff. I just want to live my life, that's all."

Tansai looked up at the slightly younger agent, and patted her on the leg. "It's a problem with being in Oracle I guess. We have to think about what things mean, even if it's just to work out how much money they'd pay us."

She gave a slight pause. "You know, if you wanted to, you could. Just head back over there. You got enough money to set up a nice base somewhere. Do you...want to go back there?" it was a geniunely curious question. "I love working here, but you sound like you'd be happier...well, nowhere."

"Back to...to the wilds?" Silvia hesitated, the idea starting to work its way into her mind. "I...I suppose I could. It's...tempting, actually. Now that...now that I have the resources." Her voice was thoughtful as she mentally ran through the prospect, turning it over in her mind. Then, after a moment of thought, she sighed and shook her head.

"No, I...I don't think I could. I mean, maybe sometime...later. In the future. But...not now. I spent so long...alone. It...I don't think it was healthy for me." She was having some difficulty getting the words out "It wouldn't be good to start that again. Just...run back and hide again. It's good to be around people again. Friends. Fenris and Shinobu and you and...and Hugo." She hesitated slightly at the ex-Fed's name, unsure whether to quite classify him as just a friend. "I know Oracle is high-risk and all, but...you all help me. It's good to be around you." She fell silent for a moment, scanning the area around their shelter again. Then she sighed and spoke again.

"I considered running back to the wilds. After...after I found out about the tsunami. I was on my way there when Oracle made their offer. I don't...now I don't just want to run away. And that's what going back would be."

Tansai grinned, a rare sight to see without her mask in the way, although it wasn't her normal face. "Well, I'm glad you didn't run away. We make a pretty good team." She patted Silvia's hand. "Right, I'm going to get some sleep. Wake me up in a few hours if we're not spotted and I'll take over." she closed her eyes, and let the darkness behind her lids wash over her, leaving her in dark dreams.

Silvia nodded as Tansai settled down, although she had no intention of letting the other woman take over. Tansai was obviously tired, and she was used to this kind of thing. It would be another couple of days yet before much by way of rest was vital for her. So instead, she simply watched and waited, letting her mind turn over what her fellow gent had said. She quickly fell into the routine, and all those nights spent watching for BIOs on her track, or Liberty Black Agents searching for the rogue explorer, meant that by comparison the night seemed almost peaceful (Endurance+Observation is a pass by 8 ).

After about five hours, Tansai's eyes suddenly snapped open as her internal clock began letting off alarms in her brain. She blinked twice as she used her internal interface to switch off the alarm, before carefully stretching out, avoiding raising her hands above the level of the wall, and looking around for Silvia.

Silvia was nearby, flattened into a crevice in the stonework, though still visible from where Tansai was lying, keeping her enhanced vision on the surroundings. She nodded to the other Agent as she saw Tansai stirring, and whispered a greeting.

"Morning. All quiet so far. Thought I'd let you get some sleep."

"Tank you" mumbled Tansai as she instinctively raised her hands to her face, as if expecting to find a mask there, before realising that she had left it behind and slumping back into the wall. "You want me to take over?" she asked, waking up as various cybernetics poke and prodded her systems into alertness.

"Really, it's fine," Silvia replied, unfolding herself from the crevice. "I've done this often enough before. There'll be time for me to sleep when I get back. We should probably be moving hideout anyway. We've been here too long as it is, really. Just wait until this patrol gets past us and then we can move." Her tone was clear and level - if there was any strain from her vigil, it wasn't showing.

The two agents fell silent as the patrol passed them by, laser rifles held tightly against the member's uniformed chests, and waited until their footfalls fell away before darting out of their hiding place, through the corridors of the underspire. They were cramped, and dirty, like an Ai Jinn apartment building that's lost its charm, and several times they had to dodge around checkpoints asking for papers. The rest of the day was a flurry of activity to examine the optics factory they had come to find, Silvia's map making cybernetic scanning the area at all times and Tansai inspecting guard postings and change over times, so there wasn't much time to talk.

Eventually the two found themselves in a small alcove, next to an out of order sewage sorter, from which they could hide from patrols, and took a moment to catch their breathes and compare notes. Tansai looked less tired than she did the previous night, but she was obviously rather jumpy and had taken up careful position in the corner, cougar in hand.

Silvia didn't have a weapon out, but her spines were fully extended and she was scanning the area as thoroughly as she could with thermal vision. Once she was satisfied they were safe for the moment, she sighed, let her spines settle back into place and turned to Tansai.

"How are you holding up?" she asked, her voice so quiet that the other Agent almost couldn't hear. "We've got a couple of moments to relax. Shouldn't be another patrol for a while."

"Fine. Just...bit nervous. Saw a guy with what I think might have been an ion katana in there. Probably pretty well defended by agents inside." said Tansai, in a fairly business like tone, obviously trying to disguse her nervousness. "I'm not really great at fighting hand to hand, so those weapons kind of scare me."

She scanned the ceiling above them for a moment, before turning back to Silvia. "How about you, things go ok?"

"Yeah, I think so," Silvia replied, cautiously. "This...isn't quite what I'm used to, too many people, but it's close enough that I can cope. And an ion katana isn't actually all that bad, compared to some of the stuff that the South American BIOs have." She didn't sound like she was boasting, simply mentally comparing the two in her head and sharing her thoughts. "And I made it through that in one piece, so we should be able to manage this. I mean, we can always run and hide. We could probably manage that."