kaisou | the girl from the spaceship

WHO: Five and anyone!
WHERE: The network
WHEN: Now-ish I guess?
WHAT: Introduction and a question about socks
WARNINGS: None expected

[A video feed of a green-haired girl, short even for her age of 16 years, sitting on the floor of her Libra apartment, in a pile of mismatched socks.

But she'll get to that in a second, first:]

So, I guess this is where I'm staying for now since I can't find a way to get back to the Raza or contact my friends from there. Hi? I'm Five. [Yeah there's a story behind a name that weird.

She gives a little wave to the camera.]

This pile of socks showed up in my apartment and I currently live alone so I really don't know where they came from and I'm wondering if anyone is missing any socks? There are some pretty cool ones here. Like this one looks like a black cat and is pretty cute, [She holds it up with a small smile.] I think I'd be sad if I were the one who lost it. Oh there's some holidays ones as well...? But none of them match!

[She pauses, wondering how to end this, and gives a shrug before picking up her phone from the floor so now only her face is shown.]

Yeah, so just let me know if you want your sock back?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's not a bad idea, honestly. Better to be as informed as we can be, huh?

[Shame he doesn't put that into practice in researching his portal, though.]

That makes sense. I mean, I'm imagining spaceships have to be pretty big themselves to get up into the stratosphere. Stands to reason where they dock has to be pretty big, too.

We have some smaller ones too, the Marauder for example is just for taking some passengers and not a whole lot of cargo down to land. It's easier to land and dock than the Raza because of its size, and it fits inside the Raza when we're not using it. But yeah the Raza has to at least be in orbit for the Marauder to reach it from the ground.

[She explains all this while still sorting through the socks, apparently also now making a pile that she's silently labelled as "ones I would wear."]

Oh, that makes sense. So it's the equivalent of a small horse and cart as opposed to a couple of horses pulling a huge caravan. You adapt your spaceships for what they use it.

[She is so welcome to that pile, Varian will take the mismatched oddities honestly, he's a weird kid, he can live with being weirder.]

That sounds pretty fascinating. The most I've ever been in the air is in an airship held up with hot air balloons. [A beat.] And this one time I was in a tower, like, two hundred feet in the air but that wasn't in a vehicle.

[Oh wow. That's a really old-timey comparison, huh? They did figure out they're a substantial amount of time apart, but she doesn't know a whole lot of history so it was hard to gauge from that exactly what the technology gap was.]

I think that's a pretty apt comparison, yeah.

I've never seen a hot air balloon! That seems pretty cool because you'd really get to feel the wind. And that's a really tall tower, was it part of a castle?

[He's so very old-timey, Five. He's the most old-timey. It's tragic.]

You do! It feels like you're a bird, it's pretty amazing!!! [Hot air balloons are SO COOL okay?] I managed to upgrade one so it doubled the speed! It was pretty neat.

[He pauses, considering how to explain the Black Rock Tower without implicating Cass.]

A lot of them are attached to castles, but this one was free-standing. It was the uh... stronghold of someone who wanted to harm the Kingdom.

[It's cute that he gets so excited about the hot air balloon. She definitely gets it. They seem super cool!]

I don't even know what the regular speed of a hot air balloon is, let alone double speed!

[She laughs, trying to imagine it. It's gotta be slower than the Marauder, right? But faster than an actual bird, maybe? Who knows?!]

Oh... That's kind of scary. The harming the kingdom thing, I mean. How do you get up and down a freestanding tower in your time period? Did you have elevators?

[He's SUCH a nerd, and now she's clearly given him an opening for MATH so:]

Oh well, a normal hot air balloon travels at five or ten miles an hour. They're pretty slow, it's more about...floating along, really. But mine went much faster.

[He's so proud of the damn thing and it shows!]

It was...complicated. [SO complicated.] Hah, no elevators. Just lots and lots of stairs. It...took a really long time to get up there.

So, a regular hot air balloon is more dependent on air currents? And yours had a power source of some sort?

[Look, she can be a nerd too, she's interested in this and is engaging with the conversation!

She wrinkles her nose a bit at "lots of stairs." Not that she has a hard time with physical activity, but a huge tower's worth of stairs? Sounded tedious.]

No kidding. Android had to do that once, climb a huge building using just a bunch of stairs because she had to be stealthy. And she was losing power the whole time too so it took her even longer.

Pretty much, though it's boosted by fire to make the air currents more...controllable. Mine just had more powerful fire boosters.

[It was so cool!! Maybe he'll make one HERE one day. They can all pile in and get the hell out of this city. ]

Oh wow, so...legitimate android then. It took us a while to get up, but I guess she had time to kill, she was waiting for people to come after us.

[As she's imagining what he's telling her, understanding and realization spreads over her features. She can see the whole picture of how the hot air balloons system works.]

Ohhh. Hot air balloon! Okay, yeah, that makes sense. That's so cool, like the system is kinda simplistic compared to what I'm used to but I like that? Because sometimes you just have less to work with, so knowing how to do that is good.

Oh, yeah. Android is the android that came with our ship, she helps control and interface with its systems. But she's so much more than that too. It's funny though, because she's never seemed to want to go by any other name?

[Her smile drops. She got distracted for a minute there, but--] People to come after you?

[He'd be so pleased he helped with the visualisation.]

Oh yeah, compared to a spacecraft it's extremely simplistic. But pretty state-of-the-art for the time period I'm from.

[God, he hates being so far behind everyone.]

I guess she was comfortable with who she was? But she knew she was important to you guys, right? Did you tell her?

[He makes a soft 'eeeeeh' sound.]

Yeah I was kinda of kidnapped at the time. It's...fine now.

I bet! And again, you know, you do what you can with what you have to work with. And you even made it better than it was. That's super impressive.

[She's not even being patronizing, she genuinely thinks that. A lot of what she does is figuring out how to make or fix things with whatever tools are at her disposal. It's not always straightforward.]

I often told her. She was probably my best friend on the Raza. Some of the others weren't really ones to talk about their feelings so much, but they let her know through their actions. We've risked ourselves to save her just like she's risked herself to save us. It's mutual.

[She winces in sympathy when he mentions the kidnapping.]

Yeah... I've been there a few times. If you ever need to talk about it, you've got an understanding ear, okay?

Hah, thanks. I really appreciate that.

[Genuinely, he does. Give him that sweet, sweet validation!]

That's really good to hear! That she knew she was loved and wanted for who she was. That's so important.

[He smiles.]

I know, thanks. It happened a while ago now, and the person who did it is trying to make up for what she did. I can at least understand making a big mistake like that.

the girl from the spaceship

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