Week 62: Return from Japan.

Early in week 62, Silvia's phone bleeps to let her know there was a message.

hey, I'm back, and I'm hungry! Wanna meet up? There's a nice place in the Interchange.

Tansai.

Very shortly after sending the message, Tansai gets a reply.

That would be great. I...could do with talking with you, if that's okay. Lots of stuff has been...happening. Where should I go?

Silvia

Silvia was sent directions to a small resturant in, just about, the gardens of the interchange named "The Chariot", which very much wanted to be a posh resturant, but never managed the funds to achieve this. The tables were kept spotless, the wait staff were immecuately dressed, and the food was tailored towards the richest in society; high calorie foods for those full of cybernetics. However, it's placing, too far outside the interchange to be trendy but not far enough to be popular, and the number of similar establishments in the area, prevented it being truly successful.

This made it great for Tansai, who had wandered in and ordered pretty much everything she could, leaving nearly double the asking price as an up front payment, and was promtly given a private booth and the best service possible, even if the servers did find her way of eating while keeping her mask on disturbing.

As Silvia arrived, the greeter waved her to the back, having been told she'd arrive by Tansai. The booth was small, private, and currently had a waiter clearing away a large pile of dirty dishes as Tansai patted her mask with a napkin and reached for the desert menu. "Hey up." she said, sounding tired but obviously better for the food inside her. "How have you been?"

Silvia looked...well, terrible might be overstating it, but not exactly great either. She didn't look like she had slept much recently (far more noticeably than when she'd been in Japan, in fact), her clothes were rumpled and she kept glancing around, nervously.

"I've...been better," she said, sitting down opposite her friend and giving her what might have been the ghost of a smile. "Things have been...um...complicated."

Tansai tilted her head to the side, wondering how Silvia looked worse than when they were in the Underspire together. "What happened? You look like you've been wrestling a cultist." she said, not unkindly, and she pushed a very sweet fruit drink across the table to Silvia. "Something happen on the mission?"

"No, nothing happened on the mission," Silvia replied with a shake of her head before pausing momentarily. "Well...um, nothing that out of the ordinary. I mean, I got shot by a plasma turret. A lot. But that's...not important." She lowered her gaze, obviously embarrassed. "A group of us...went out. To celebrate Fenris moving in. And...there was a lot of drinking, and drugs, and...I think I did some things I might regret. And that's not even the only thing I'm having to cope with at the moment." She took the drink that Tansai had given her and took a long drink. "There's...family stuff going on, too."

Tansai nodded, before pushing the menu towards Silvia. "Well, take your time getting it off your chest, I'm not going anywhere." she said, kindly. "Are you hungry? Might as well sort that out before we start."

She shuffled around a bit so that she was as close as the booth allowed to Silvia, and patted her on the hand. Her mask slipped a bit, and what Silvia could see of her face was kindly, in a "been here before" way.

Silvia nodded and began browsing the menu, giving Tansai a quick and rather small grateful smile. After a couple of moments, she ordered her food and turned to Tansai.

"I...I think part of the problem is I don't remember it," she said, her voice low. "I mean, not at all. Some of the early stuff, but after that...nothing. I've got it on Eternity recorder, but that...it feels so weird. Seeing myself like that." She shook her head. "I mean, I...I made out with Coraline, and me and her and Hugo were all...dancing. Really intimately. And then Hugo and I went back home and...well, we didn't quite have sex, but we did pretty much everything else." Her voice was low and cheerless, but also reasonably level. As though she'd spent a long time thinking about it.

One of Tansai's eyebrows raised. "Yeah, drugs can do that to you." she said, in the weary tone of someone who trained in EI. "Can be pretty scary not remembering what happened." She paused, and leaned forward across the table. "What bit in particular is getting to you? You acting like that, what...you and Hugo did? Or just...everything?"

"I...all of it, I guess," Silvia replied, glancing downwards at the table. "I mean, the whole thing with Coraline...apparently she...likes me and I...I really don't think that's going to work out at all, but I've got no idea what to say to her...and then it's really quite scary to see me like that...and as for me and Hugo..." She tailed off and shrugged, her expression one of helplessness.

"I mean...it's not that I mind what we did, I mean, I've done stuff like that before. It's that...he did while I was...not myself. I mean, I know he didn't mean anything by it, but...it kind of feels like he tricked me into it. And I know he didn't, because he kept asking if I was okay with it, and I kept saying yes, but it...wasn't me saying that. And waking up the next morning was...not fun."

Tansai steppled her fingers in thought across the table as she looked at Silvia. "I'm not say you're wrong for feeling like that." she said, after the other agent finished. "It was a bad experience that you weren't used to, and nothing I say is going to change that." She paused, and looked at Silvia. "Would it help if you thought of it as a mission that went badly? You were with a group of other Oracle agents, and it might help you...process or deal with it?"

"I...I don't know," came the reply, Silvia shaking her head in what might have been frustration. "I mean...it's not really what happened that's the problem so much as what that means now. The...aftermath. It's kind of a thing of...I don't know what to do now. And...I don't think he does either." She laid her hands flat on the table and sighed. "I just...where do we go now? Do we just...pretend it never happened? Or what?"

"Don't pretend that it never happened, but...perhaps use it to create some rules as to what to do in that situation? Make sure you have someone in the group who isn't high and who can stop you from doing stuff like that?" She took a sip of her thick, sugary drink.

"Either way, given that he was asking you if you wanted to do it, I think you can trust Hugo, and like I said, I don't think you should just forget about it, but accept that it happened, it was shit, and what you can do to prevent it." She said, shrugging. "That's what I ended up doing first time this happened to me, anyway."

It was about this time that Silvia's food arrived, and the conversation paused for a moment while large quantities of food were unloaded in front of her. Eventually, the waiter disappeared and she turned back to Tansai.

"The...uh...the first time it happened to you? What...what happened then, exactly?" She was leaning forward now and her voice was quiet, but quite intense.

Tansai pinched the bridge of her nose. "So, it was just after basic training at EI, and a bunch of us decided to go out to celebrate." she began, in a rather odd tone, like anger which had cooled to annoyance over time. "And one asshole, Fredrick, decided to give us all some drugs, which he swore were totally legal. Some of it turned out to be that stuff that makes you forget. We didn't get a full dose, but we got enough to not really remember what happened the rest of the night. Me and another girl woke up back at our flat, don't think anything happened, although I still don't know where we got that huge bra. Never actually found out why he did it either. He and another one of us went joy riding, got caught by the UIG, and there was a bit in the news about him being sentenced from possession of class A drugs. So yeah, not exactly like yours, but we made a whole bunch of rules then about stuff like that."

Silvia was listening intently to Tansai's story, though also shovelling food into her mouth at a rate that would look horrifying to a non-Agent. At the end of it, she nodded and swallowed her mouthful before replying. "That...sounds like it was kind of bad, yeah. But at least it...wasn't your fault. But yeah, rules for this kind of thing definitely seem like a good idea. I just...don't know what to do about it now." She shook her head firmly and took a deep breath, moving the conversation on.

"But, anyway, like I said, the stuff with Hugo...isn't the only thing that's been going on. There's been...I've been finding out stuff about my family, too and it's...I'm not sure what it is."

Tansai's hands moved and a slice of cake disappeared behind the mask. Mouth full, she gestured for Silvia to continue, as she moved onto the next in a steady stream of deserts.

"Well...um...you know how I said my family died in the tsunami?" Silvia's nervousness was continuing - this seemed to be an issue she felt almost as strongly about as she did about the night with Hugo. "It...it turns out that wasn't actually true. It was just...what they told me. It...it turns out that..." She paused, unable to really continue for a moment and then took a deep breath and ploughed on.

"Turns out that my parents were involved with this secret anti-SY society, and then the SY sent assassination squads after them. Before the tsunami. And Yuki...my brother...nobody seems to know what happened to him." By now her expression was definitely worried. "And...I don't know how to track him down. But you're good at this kind of thing and...do you think you could help?"

Tansai reached up and adjusted her mask, behind which her mouth split into a grin. "Of course I'll do it, Silvia. What do you know so far?"

There was no hesitation in her voice, just eagerness.

Silvia paused, and looked up with a grateful smile. "Thanks, Tansai. Really, this...it means a lot. But...um...there's not really a lot more. I'll...I'll tell you what I can, though." She pushed her food away, placed her hands on the table and closed her eyes for a moment, thinking through the information she had.

"My parents were called Kazuo and Haruka Tsukuda," she began. "They were...nothing special, at least they weren't ten years ago. That I knew of. Just...residents of Yokohama, with boring jobs, boring lives. Which isn't to say I didn't love them or anything," she clarified, hastily, "but they...I guess we weren't as close as we might have been. And the same goes for my brother, Yuki. He was a couple of years younger than me and we got on pretty good most of the time, but we weren't the closest siblings ever. And they all seemed...fine with my decision to go and be an Agent. That I noticed, anyway."

"And then, apparently, not long before the tsunami hit, the Shi Yukiro sent an assassination squad to kill my parents." Her voice wavered slightly at that. "I...don't know why. But they don't just do that for minor things. Not whole squads. It...they must have been involved in something. Maybe something big. And...they didn't get my brother. Apparently nobody knows where he is." Her voice went a little odd at that, as though she couldn't decide whether she should be showing hope or fear. "It...this might never have come out, except that...my parents had friends in a secret society. Called the Genyōsha [Dark Ocean Society]. Apparently they have links all over the place - SY management, smugglers, even the Ai-Jinn..." She trailed off for a moment, unsure what to say next. "But...I don't know who they are or what their agenda is. But I'm guessing they're not exactly pro-Shi Yukiro. That...I'm afraid that's all I know. I've been...trying to find out more about them, but...I don't have the right skills. And I think you do."

With that, she leaned back again and sighed. "That...that's all I know. Do you...do you think you can help?"

"So what you're telling me is that you want me to track down an organisation that even the Corporation of ninjas seem to have trouble dealing with?" Tansai laughed. "I can't promise any results, but it sounds like I might be able to do something with this."

"Um...basically, yeah," Silvia replied, with a slightly embarrassed smile. "Um...sorry. I mean...if it helps, you can always mention me and my parents. Maybe that might help you get in?" She sounded more hopeful than expectant, but she figured it was worth a shot. "And...thanks," she added, starting to eat again. "It...like I say, it means a lot that you're helping out."