Week 28 Thursday: Presents for Ida's birthday.

"Ida!" called Darya as she knocked on the other agent's door carrying a package. "Are you in?" she asked, looking around. Behind her on the surface was her attempt at making a chocolate cake, and in front of her the package was large and colorfully wrapped.

"Yeah! Come in," Ida replied as she pulled the door open. She was lounging on her bed, looking up at a large screen displaying a news story from a year ago to the day, about a terrorist attack on a UIG facility in the Palma Spire. Ida looked unusually thoughtful as she read. "So, what's up?", she asked as she turned to Darya and glanced at the package in her hands.

((OOC: Posting from my phone, so I can't check the official worldmap and just made up a Spire. If I have to change it for canon I'll do that in future.))

Darya smiled and thrust the package forward. "Happy Birthday." she said, quietly. Inside the package was a old style sea captain style outfit, made for Ida using Sosie's measurements, white and orange. It also included a pair of stout yet stylish boots that came up to mid thigh and a white great coat with orange trim and gold lining. Finally, at the very bottom was a short sword modified to look like a cutlass in a fancy scabbard, and a knock out pistol made to look like a flintlock. (All clothes are reinforced, galvanically grounded ect.)

Darya scratched the back of her neck. "Well, I know you have a yatch now, so I thought you might want to look the part...the coat is made to repeal lasers as well, in case you run into any pirates...and I've made you a chocolate cake too." She seemed uneasy, like there was something she wanted to say.

"Wow!" Ida's face lit up as she examined the clothes and weapons. "I'm impressed, I didn't think you were the type to come up with things like this. Thanks, Darya. This is much nicer than the last big birthday surprise I got..." Ida paused for a moment, to see if Darya was going to pick up with whatever she clearly was thinking of saying. "You've got something you want to ask, or tell me, right? I can see it on your face... Shoot." Then she noticed the precise wording she'd just used. "And of course I don't mean that like last time I told someone here to shoot," Ida added with a laugh.

Darya looked down at her shoes, feeling kind of awkard. What she wanted to say was simple, but she didn't know how Ida would react to it. "Ida...when I moved in here, I did it so that I could keep an eye on you. Sosie and Pinkie as well, but you...I felt I needed to keep an eye on you." she looked down again. "But...you've gotten better. A lot better. When you came here...I don't think you'd have reacted the way you did to upsetting Violet. And you don't kill people as much anymore, at least not that I've seen...I hope you haven't been killing people...but you've gotten better. And...I like it." she said, hugging Ida suddenly. "Keep getting better, okay?"

"You think this is a good thing, huh?" Ida asked as the smile faded from her face. "I don't know if it's desensitisation or what, but the thrill of combat has been fading for me lately... and I don't really know what there is that could replace it." She paused for a moment in thought. "Who knows, maybe I'll keep getting 'better', as you put it, and something will fall into place there. Or perhaps I'll find a way to make things more exciting again..."

Ida then returned Darya's hug, and added jokingly, "At least I know I'll still have you nagging me not to kill so many people, and it's nice to have some things you can always count on in life, right?"

"Yep. I'm going to keep on nagging you until you don't. kill. anyone. at. all." said Darya, squeezing Ida tightly. She pulled back a bit from the hug, smiling slightly. She really wasn't sure why she was friends with Ida. The other woman was the kind that usually she'd be taking down as soon as possible. But...she liked her. They were friends. And if she could change her...well, that would be best. Darya didn't want to have to take down Ida.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, looking at the large screen in Ida's room, trying to change the subject.

“Just remembering my last birthday. A year ago, I was working in a gang in Palma – getting information, subtly sabotaging their actions against EI’s interests, that sort of thing. The gang’s leader called himself Furnace, and he didn’t have any problem believing I wanted to join up with his drug-smuggling operation because stuff like that happens all the time with EI agents who care more about themselves than the corp… and it helped that I was his type. For a while, the mission went pretty well, and he didn’t really notice that it was getting much harder to sell his terrible cheap drugs.

“But then he started talking about how he wanted to show all the other gangs how great he was by doing something big. I couldn’t get much information out of him about it – turned out he was planning it all as a birthday surprise for me, so ‘we’ could be big players, and he was going to blow up an old UIG facility to show off what he could do. I figured ‘eh, it’s abandoned, trying to stop him will probably just make things worse’, so I went along with it.

“As it turned out, a squad of malenbrach were in the building at the time, and dropping it on them made them more than a little angry… I ran, lost rank, and found out how thrilling it was to be in a situation like running from the malenbrach… and a few months later, I came here and the rest is history.”

Ida flicked the screen off and laughed. “Wow, that was a long story. I guess the moral is, your present is way nicer than his was. Thanks.”